* * *
“YOU’VE GOT SOME explaining to do,” the chief told him, hands planted flat on Tate’s kitchen table as he leaned over it toward Tate. “And I want the whole truth right now. No more lies. I need to know what we’re dealing with here. I need to know who we’re dealing with.”
Noise from his fellow officers reached him from a distance. The officers were in the mudroom near his back entrance, dusting around the broken window where the assailants had entered. It was where Charlie had been found, facedown in a pool of blood, his hand still clutching his cracked cell phone.
Others were upstairs, dealing with evidence near where Max had been killed and Sabrina had been taken. Evidence of a struggle both inside and outside the bathroom suggested Max had locked her in there before he’d been killed defending her. The smashed lid from his toilet suggested Sabrina had grabbed the only available weapon and tried to defend herself. The blood on his bathroom floor said she’d paid for it.
“I’m sorry,” Tate said, and his voice came out a pained whisper. “I never thought my past would catch up to me like this. If I had—”
The chief put up a hand. “We don’t have time for regrets right now. What we need is a plan to move forward. So give me what I need to make an informed decision here, Emory.”
Tate flinched at the use of his fake last name, at all of the mistakes he’d made. If it could help save Sabrina, he’d gladly give up all of his secrets, even if it landed him in jail.
“My real name is Tate Donnoly.”
The chief leaned back, as if pushed by the force of his surprise, then nodded for Tate to keep going.
“I was a police officer back in Boston before I came here. I was...able to create a fake name and start over in Alaska.” He left out mention of his family friend in Witness Protection and the role his former chief had played, but the way Chief Griffith’s eyes narrowed, he knew there was more to it.
“Back in Boston I witnessed three fellow officers taking a payoff from a crime lord. I reported it, and the whole situation was under investigation by the FBI when there was an attempt on my life.” Tate blew out a heavy breath, remembering how close he’d come to dying that day. Jim Bellows, Kevin Fricker and Paul Martin were trained to take down an opponent fast and efficiently. He’d had the same training, but all Sabrina had was two years of running and trying to stay ahead of the threat against her.
Trying to focus, he told his chief, “The crime boss and one of the officers ultimately went to prison. But I never actually saw Kevin Fricker and Paul Martin try to kill me that day, only Jim, who fired the shot that hit me. And the FBI could only find a money trail to Jim. So Kevin and Paul got off. They stayed in the department until the stain got too bad, then went on to other departments. Other officers didn’t trust them. They didn’t trust me anymore, either. I knew that I’d gotten lucky and that Kevin and Paul might try again. Kevin made a threat on his last day, and I didn’t want to risk my life or the people I loved so I took on a new name and started over here. Went through the academy again, came in as a Desparre PD rookie. I kept tabs on them over the years, but it seemed like I was safe here.”
The chief nodded slowly, his gaze still assessing, probably seeing a lot more than Tate was saying. “Then that news article went national.”
“Yeah,” Tate agreed. “And we made a big show of how I fell for Sabrina.”
Lines creased the chief’s forehead, an understanding that since the Boston officers had gone after Sabrina instead of Tate, it meant they wanted to hurt her to get to him. “So what’s their next step? Are we waiting for some kind of ransom note? A request to make a trade? You for Sabrina?”
“I sure hope so,” Tate breathed. “But I think that’s a best-case scenario. They blame me for all of it. Not just one of their closest friends going to jail and them being ousted from the Boston PD, but I cut off their second source of income—their payoff. Not to mention that I destroyed their reputations. They’ve hopped from one two-bit department to the next ever since.”
“I’m not sure that’s on you,” Chief Griffith said. “Sounds like they may be doing it to themselves.”
“But they blame me,” Tate reiterated. “I thought if they ever came after me, it would be a bullet in the head in the middle of the night or maybe out on a remote call somewhere. But this...” He stared hard at the chief. “No matter what happens, Sabrina is the priority. I take responsibility for myself. If they want me, they can have me. Just please get her out.” He glanced at Sitka, who whined and shuffled her feet, nudging him hard. His voice broke a little as he added, “And please take care of Sitka.”
The chief nodded slowly. “You know civilians are always our priority. And we look after our own. Sitka is one of us.”
From the front of the house, Officer Sam Jennings yelled, “We’ve got a delivery!”
Tate turned to run for the front yard when the chief added, “You’re one of us, too, Tate.”
He nodded his thanks, knowing how much of a show of faith that was, given how he’d lied and broken the law to get here. Then he hurried to where Sam stood, gingerly holding a manila envelope with gloved hands.
“How did it arrive?” the chief demanded from right behind Tate.
“Someone tossed it out of a van, then took off,” Sam said. “Lorenzo and Nate went after him, but we all recognized the van. It’s Old Oliver.”
“Shit,” Tate breathed. Old Oliver was Oliver Yardley, the dad of Young Oliver, who was equally eccentric. Old Oliver lived up in the mountain somewhere and periodically came into town and scared the newer locals with his long, untamed hair and beard and constantly darting eyes. He thought the government was spying on him, that anyone could be working for them, and even though the Desparre PD considered him generally harmless, half the time he didn’t make much sense.
“Open it,” the chief said.
“I got it,” Tate said, grabbing the envelope from Sam. “After Paul left the Boston PD, he got training as a bomb tech at a different department.” Ignoring the looks of confusion from his fellow officers, Tate walked far enough away that if it was a bomb, it wouldn’t take out anyone else with him. “Stay!” he warned Sitka when she tried to follow.
She plopped onto her butt, but glanced up at his chief as if waiting for him to overrule Tate.
She whined when the chief ignored her, leaning forward as Tate took a deep breath and ripped open the envelope. What fell out wasn’t a bomb but a flash drive.
Dread hit like a punch to his chest as he hurried wordlessly back inside and upstairs to his laptop. He tried not to see the huge bloodstain in his hallway, tried not to imagine Max’s prone body there, but it didn’t work.
He fit the flash drive into his computer, then braced himself as he felt the chief and several of his colleagues crowd behind him.
The audio came on first, Sabrina’s terrified voice pleading, “Please don’t!” Static covered most of her next words, but he heard his name. Then the video flashed on his screen, two men in all black partially blocking the camera as they stepped toward Sabrina. One of them laughed at her, then smashed a fist into her face.
Tate cringed, clenching his hands as she hit the floor hard and then got kicked in the ribs as she tried to roll away. They yanked her up, hit her twice more, sending blood flying before she crashed into the ground and didn’t move.
Then the shorter, bulkier guy walked toward the camera, a self-satisfied smile showing through the mouth hole in his ski mask. Tate knew that smirk. Paul Martin.
Paul’s hand reached toward the screen, showcasing bloody knuckles, before the video went dark.
A couple of the cops behind him swore, and the chief’s hand clapped on Tate’s shoulder as the camera flashed on again, this time facing the wall, where a piece of paper had been taped. Tate had to squint to read the sloppy, angry writing.
You did this to her. You want her pain t
o end? Go downtown and shoot yourself in the head. Otherwise, we’ll get her back to you eventually. In pieces.
“We’ll find her,” the chief said softly as Tate’s mind whirled and his stomach threatened to bring up the coffee he’d sipped at the cabin by the glacier.
“Old Oliver isn’t giving us much,” Lorenzo announced as he burst into the room. “He got paid to do it, says he doesn’t know the guy who asked him to drop it off. We can pick him up again, but he’s a dead end.”
“Hey, I know that place,” Nate said, pointing at the image frozen on the screen, all concrete around the single piece of paper.
Tate grabbed the young officer by his shoulders. Nate had grown up in Desparre, and he often complained that he’d run out of things to do here. “Where?”
Nate jerked slightly at the force of Tate’s desperation. “It’s an old army fort at the base of the mountain, near Luna. It’s deserted and boarded up, but when I was a teenager, you could slip through the boards at the main entrance if you were thin enough. It used to be a place to go drinking.”
“Let’s go,” Tate said, moving toward the door.
The chief stepped in his path. “We need a plan.”
Tate stared him directly in the eyes. “I know these men, Chief. They’re going to keep making tapes. They know I won’t actually shoot myself, because I know they wouldn’t let her go even if I did. But eventually, she won’t be able to take any more.” His voice broke, and he paused for a breath. “We need to hurry.”
The chief nodded. “Okay. We’ll plan on the way. Tate, you’re with me. Sam, Lorenzo, Nate, you three follow.” He turned to the final two officers present. “You two, continue securing the scene. And call the state PD or the FBI and tell them we need a bomb tech immediately. Don’t stop calling until we get someone who will meet us there now.”
Then the chief led Tate and Sitka down the stairs to his SUV, and the other officers followed on their tail. During the hour-long drive, the chief put the other officers on speaker, and they went over details.
According to Nate, there was only one entry point. “There is a maze of rooms in that fort,” Nate insisted when Tate pressed him on it, “and I think at one point, there were multiple exits. Windows, too, but those have long since been closed up solid or collapsed. The actual entrances are all blocked off now or buried against the mountain and the forest that grew into it. There’s only one way in.”
The news made dread churn in Tate’s gut. Kevin and Paul weren’t the kind of guys to trap themselves anywhere. Did they think the fort was so out of the way, old and unused, that no one would recognize where they were? Or had they banked on Tate and his fellow officers recognizing it? Had they already moved somewhere else and left the single entrance rigged?
He shared his fears with the chief, who got back on the phone and confirmed the FBI bomb tech was already en route via helicopter and would probably beat them there.
They beat her, but only by five minutes. As soon as she arrived, she donned a massive bomb suit and waddled up to the boarded-up entrance of the fort.
“We’ve got a bomb,” she confirmed grimly less than ten minutes later.
The entrance was set against the side of the mountain, hidden off an old, overgrown trail that seemed to lead nowhere now that the fort was defunct. The building was derelict, pieces of it crumbling around the entrance. The structure itself went on seemingly for miles, disappearing into the side of the mountain and within the forest that seemed to have swallowed most of it up.
“How long to defuse it?” the chief asked.
The bomb tech, a tiny Black woman with sharp eyes and sure fingers, shook her head. “Probably a couple hours.”
Tate swore. Maybe that was Kevin and Paul’s ultimate plan. Let him get here with enough time to save her but spend so long trying to get into the fort that it was too late. Because one thing he knew for sure: in a couple of hours, Sabrina would be dead.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The first thing Sabrina felt was an intense pounding in her head. It radiated down her neck and along her jaw. Even her eyes hurt.
She wanted to groan, but couldn’t summon the energy. She cracked her eyes open, and they refused to go any farther. It wasn’t exhaustion, she realized, but swelling.
Swallowing the moisture that had gathered in her mouth, she almost choked as she discovered it was blood.
The two men huddled across from her didn’t seem to notice. They were arguing, their words echoing too loudly in her ears, intensifying the agony in her head.
Sabrina gently moved her jaw, trying to figure out if it was broken. New pain jolted up to her ears and down her neck, and tears blurred her vision.
Blinking them away, she looked down at herself. There was pain along her spine, and her hands and feet still throbbed. But she was still dressed, and no one had bothered to retie her bonds.
“What if he really doesn’t care?” the bulky guy snapped.
“Relax, Paul,” the lanky one replied. “You saw them at the hotel. He couldn’t keep his hands off her. He’ll come. And if he doesn’t, we send another video.” He shrugged. “Or we do what we threatened.”
He glanced her way, and Sabrina closed her eyes, her heart thundering. But no footsteps sounded, at least not any she could hear over her pounding heartbeat and throbbing head. Finally, she eased her eyes open again. They weren’t looking at her.
Paul’s shoulders twitched, and there was discomfort on his face. “Or we just kill her. Drop her on his doorstep.”
“Cops are there, moron,” the lanky guy said.
“I didn’t mean literally,” Paul answered. “Geez, Kevin. But I’m not cutting her up. You want to do it, that’s on you.”
A shudder raced through Sabrina, violent and unstoppable, making her legs and arms twitch.
Both men glanced at her but immediately turned back to each other.
Her eyes were so swollen her captors couldn’t tell they were open. The knowledge was only mildly comforting in the sea of panic swallowing her.
Her breathing hitched, threatening to make her choke on blood again, and Sabrina tried to tune out the men and focus on staying calm, on formulating some kind of plan. But she wasn’t sure she could stand if she tried, and she certainly couldn’t outrun them, even if she knew where to go.
Tears flooded again, and this time, she couldn’t blink them away.
“You think Tate will recognize this place?” Paul asked, and Sabrina tried to focus again.
“If not, I’m sure one of the locals will. Stop second-guessing this. That local guide said the back entrance has been boarded up for a decade, and everyone knows it’s impassable. There’s no one out here to notice that we blew through those boards. We’re good. They’ll go to the main door, and they’ll get themselves blown up.”
Sabrina jerked at that, and Kevin looked her way, a slow smile on his face that told her he’d realized she was awake. Beyond enjoying her fear, he didn’t seem to care, because he turned back to Paul and said, “Just relax. It’ll all be over soon, and no one will ever know we were here.” Then he pulled out his phone and focused on that.
Paul rolled his eyes, sank to the floor and leaned his head against the wall, staring upward.
Sabrina wiggled her toes in her shoes, bent her fingers. Her toes moved okay after a minute, but her fingers felt stiff and swollen, and she realized she’d thrown her hands up to block at least one blow. She’d probably taken a hit there. Or maybe she’d smashed them when she fell to the ground. She didn’t remember falling again, but the ache across her face and chest and the way she was lying on her stomach, with her face twisted to the side, told her she had.
She needed a plan. Even if it was just to find her way to the door and blow it up herself before Tate could get there and trigger it. She didn’t want to die like this, at the brutal fists of two men with some agenda she
didn’t understand. If this was the end, she wanted to go out fighting. Or at least saving the man she’d fallen for.
Trying to shift her body even slightly, maneuver her arms and hands out from underneath her, was surprisingly hard. It made new pain flash through her body and drew a groan she couldn’t stifle.
The men barely spared her a glance, which told her she looked as bad as she felt. She kept trying, lifting her head to get a better look at her surroundings. Her neck made a terrible cracking sound, and the throbbing in her head amplified, obscuring her vision until she lowered her cheek down against the cold concrete.
Dizziness overwhelmed her, and she could feel herself being sucked under again. She tried to fight it, but the darkness claimed her.
* * *
IT HAD BEEN too long.
Tate shuffled from one foot to the other, watching the bomb tech—Njeri was her name—in her massive bomb suit meticulously working. He and the other officers were waiting at a distance.
The chief was continuously on the phone, digging up intel. He’d connected with Tate’s old chief back in Boston, who’d been shocked to learn Tate had returned to Alaska and had expressed more worry than anger over Tate’s illegal name change. Chief Griffith had also spoken with multiple police chiefs in Massachusetts who’d worked with Kevin and Paul. And he’d touched base with the officers handling the crime scene at Tate’s house.
So far, he’d uncovered that a string of problems like unwarranted aggression and some suspected dirty dealing had followed Paul and Kevin from one department to the next. He’d found a general lack of surprise that they’d come after the man they’d apparently spent a lot of time railing against to their coworkers. But from their current departments, Chief Griffith’s questions had been met with only careful statements that both men had taken personal time off. The chief had hung up those calls cursing about people covering their asses.
Tate’s colleagues were on their own phones, following up on other connections the chief had dug up on his calls. Only Tate was left out of the work, since it seemed many of the people being contacted would either know him or know of him. Depending on what they’d heard from Kevin and Paul, that might not be good.
K-9 Hideout Page 17
