by Katie Ruggle
Without looking back, Norah just held her fist behind her. Cara bumped it in researcher solidarity.
It’s good to be home. Now she just had to bring Henry home, too.
* * *
Cara’s eyes felt gummy when she looked up from her laptop screen and blinked at the black bedroom window. “When did it get dark outside?” she asked, but Norah just hummed a non-response, staring at her own screen.
“We should probably get some food.” Cara set her laptop aside and stretched, feeling the lingering aches in her muscles from the past few traumatic days. She was still exhausted, and her vision had gone fuzzy around the edges, but she couldn’t sleep while Henry was locked up for something he didn’t do. “Norah? Food?”
“In a bit,” her sister said absently from her perch on Cara’s bed as she leaned even closer to the screen.
“Why?” Cara felt her stomach jump with a flash of hope. “Did you find something?”
“There’s a woman who keeps popping up. She’s listed as a past associate of Geoffrey Abbott, and she was interviewed by the police when Kavenski killed—um…I mean, someone killed that couple and framed Kavenski. She was the one who discovered the bodies, said she was a close friend of the murdered couple.” Norah turned her laptop so Cara could see the screen. “Her name is Layla Baron.”
“Layla? The Layla?” Peering at the photo, which appeared to be a publicity shot at some sort of formal event, Cara felt an itchy sense of recognition. “That’s her. That’s the woman who met with Henry, the one I saw the night that…” She let her voice trail off right before saying the night I was almost hit by a car, since she didn’t want to freak out her sister. “Ah, I saw her at Dutch’s,” she rephrased lamely, glad that she was talking to absentminded Norah rather than one of her less distracted sisters who would’ve pounced on her verbal misstep. She’d also seen the same woman giving money surreptitiously to Henry, and her heart started to beat faster. Could Layla Baron be their link to the real killer?
“I’m surprised she’s hanging out at Dutch’s.” Norah rotated the screen back so she could frown at the woman’s picture before her fingers tapped at the keyboard again. “She looks a little too high-class for that place.”
“Geoffrey Abbott was supposedly high-class, too.”
“Funny you mention that.” Norah’s fingers paused. “Layla Baron went to Anchor Academy in Aspen with Abbott—well, until he was expelled. She graduated from Anchor the following year.”
“That’s an interesting coincidence.” Grabbing her phone, Cara tapped out a text to Molly. When there wasn’t an immediate response, she tried Charlie, and then Felicity. As she waited for her sisters to answer, she paced the short distance between the two beds.
The seconds seemed endless, and Cara knew she wouldn’t be able to stand sitting at home doing nothing to help Henry while waiting for a return text. She stopped in front of Norah and smiled.
Norah shrank back. “What?”
“How about we go out to eat? Maybe some chicken wings?” Grabbing Norah’s hand, she hauled her sister off the bed.
“Dutch’s?” It came out as a mournful but resigned sigh.
Cara smiled. “Dutch’s.”
Reaching back, Norah closed her laptop and left it on the bed. She followed—well, was towed by—Cara out of the bedroom. “I thought you were done with fieldwork.”
“This is still research, just more…active research than usual.” Cara knew her sister was smart to protest, though. “We’ll just go, have some bar food, see if we see any familiar faces, let our more adventurous sisters know if we do, and then come right home.”
Norah groaned, although she didn’t pull away from her sister’s tugging hand. “Fine, but I want it on the record that I think this is a stupid idea.”
“Noted.” Even though she knew Norah was probably right, Cara couldn’t help but feel a zing of excitement that she was actively helping to search for the person who had framed Henry for murder. Maybe her sisters weren’t so crazy. There was something to be said for fieldwork and adrenaline rushes after all.
* * *
“Okay.” Norah slid to the edge of the booth seat, looking like a spooked bird about to take flight. “We’ve eaten wings and looked around, but Layla Baron isn’t here. We should go home now.”
Although Cara sighed, she couldn’t say her sister was wrong. Even the crowd at Dutch’s seemed mellower than the other time she’d been there. It was a disappointing stakeout all around.
“Fine. Let’s go. Wait.” Her eyes narrowed as she recognized a weaselly face across the bar. “Excuse me for just a second. I have a throat to punch.”
Norah just blinked at her, wide-eyed, apparently too startled by Cara’s uncharacteristically violent urge to be anxious about being left alone.
Cara wove her way through the crowd, her gaze locked on her target. When she was just five feet away, he spotted her approaching. Face paling, he tried to dart toward the exit.
“No, you don’t.” Lunging forward, she caught him by the arm. Twisting it behind his back, she pinned his front to the end of the bar. The red-haired bartender glanced over at them and then away, looking bored, and none of the patrons seemed too concerned about a wannabe kindergarten teacher trapping a guy against the bar. Dutch’s did have its perks.
“Let me go, Cara!” Stuart wriggled in her grip so she shoved his arm a little higher, making him yelp. Her first instinct was to feel guilty for intentionally hurting someone, but then she remembered his part in everything.
“Not until you answer some questions. You helped Abbott kidnap me!” Granted, it was more of an exclamation than a question, but she was still pissed about Stuart’s role.
“No, I didn’t! I—” He cut off sharply when she yanked his arm again. “I didn’t know he was going to kidnap you! All he wanted was for me to try to get you to open the door. Ow! Stop! Fine! He wanted to know who you were, just basic stuff. Nothing he couldn’t get out of the campus directory.”
“The campus directory? My friends are listed under my name?” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm as she pressed Stuart harder against the bar. In a way, she was glad that she’d found him before Molly and John could. Making the weasel squeak was cathartic.
“No, but…I mean, it’s really on you for being friends with Kavenski. Everyone knows he’s Baron’s toy poodle.”
The name startled her into letting up the pressure, and Stuart yanked away. “Layla Baron?” she clarified.
“Yeah.” He stepped back out of reach, his face twisted in disgust. “Kavenski even went to jail for her. Loser.”
Cara reached for his arm again, new questions bubbling in her mind, but Stuart dodged her hand and almost ran for the door. After watching him go, her brain working at a hundred miles an hour, Cara made her way absently back to the booth, processing the new information. She was snapped out of her thoughts when she saw her sister’s anxious expression. “Sorry, Norah, but now I really want to talk to Layla Baron. According to Stuart, she’s who Henry took the fall for. Will you hate me if we stay just a little longer?”
Norah looked doubtful. “You know the odds of her actually showing up here while we’re waiting for her are pretty low, don’t you?”
“Yes, but at least I feel like I’m doing something to help Henry.” She gave her sister her best entreating expression, and Norah sighed audibly.
“Fine.” Norah gave her a stern look. “We’ll give it another half hour. That’s it.”
Cara nodded, happy to have gotten that concession.
“So what did Stuart say?” Norah asked, and Cara filled her in on their brief conversation as her gaze roamed the bar patrons. A half hour passed, and Cara wheedled another fifteen minutes out of Norah. Once that deadline had passed too, Cara heaved a huge sigh.
“You’re right. She’s not coming here tonight. Sorry for making you stay here so
long,” Cara said, disappointment hanging heavy in her belly. “We can go now.”
Looking relieved, Norah stood. “Do you think I’ll be knifed if I use the bathroom here?”
“Maybe?” Cara made a so-so gesture with her hand. “I’d say the odds are around seventy-thirty that you’ll survive.” She smiled to show that she was joking…sort of.
“I’ll risk it. I really have to pee.” With a determined expression, Norah headed for the narrow back hallway that contained the bathrooms.
Cara pulled out some cash for a tip and then turned, her eyes scanning the crowd for a final time. After almost three hours of disappointment, she wasn’t really expecting to see anyone else she recognized, so her gaze skipped over the woman talking to a guy in a battered trucker hat before zooming back to her striking, memorable face.
It was her. Layla Baron was actually there.
Now that she’d found the woman, Cara wasn’t sure exactly what to do. Pulling out her phone, she sent a group text to her sisters and then started the audio recording app before dropping her phone back into her jacket pocket. Taking a deep breath, she walked toward Layla.
You wanted to have an active role. You chose to come here. This is what you wanted.
When Layla spotted her approaching and narrowed her eyes, Cara had a hard time remembering why she wanted to talk to the intimidating woman. All of her questions scattered as she got closer and stopped a few feet away.
“Can I help you?” Even though she was standing in the middle of a scary dive bar, Layla’s tone was all frost and wealth.
“I hope so.” Cara forced out a tentative smile. “I wanted to talk to you about Henry Kavenski.”
There was the slightest widening of Layla’s eyes before she returned to her fake smile. “Of course, but it’s too loud in here. Let’s go outside.”
“I’d rather stay in here.” Even though the clientele was a bit sketchy, there was still safety in numbers and Cara didn’t want to lose that. Besides, Norah wouldn’t know where she’d gone, and she wasn’t about to ditch her timid sister at Dutch’s, of all places. “This won’t take long.”
Layla’s gaze shifted to a spot behind Cara for just a second before she gave another of her artificial smiles. “Of course. Let’s move over by the door, though, where it’s quieter.”
Cara gestured for Layla to go first, feeling more secure following the woman than having her at her back. They’d only gone a few steps when a loud crash behind her made Cara whirl around. The man in a trucker hat that Layla had been talking to earlier had another guy pinned against the bar. One or both of the two must’ve had friends with them, because there was a muted roar as ten more people jumped into the fight. Suddenly, it was chaos.
“This way.” Fingers closed around her upper arm and a blunt cylinder pressed into Cara’s side, right above her hip, as Layla’s cool voice spoke directly into her ear. “Come along now, unless you want your internal organs to be the new wallpaper in this dump.”
Cara froze, unable to do anything but stare at the black gun muzzle pressed against her. Layla gave her a sharp nudge from behind to get her moving. Cara’s feet stumbled into motion, moving toward the door as she resisted the urge to look around for Norah. She didn’t want her sister anywhere near Layla or her gun.
The bouncer shoved past them, heading for the fight, and they moved out the door unseen. It was eerily quiet outside without the shouting and pounding fists and blasting music. With the gun and a tight grip on her arm, Layla hauled Cara toward the side of the building.
She felt numb, and she wondered if she’d been terrified so often over the past few days that she’d started to become immune to fear. Then Layla jammed the gun into her side, and Cara realized that she could indeed feel afraid. After all the close calls she’d just been through, she couldn’t believe that she was going to die in such a stupid way. She’d walked right up to a woman she’d suspected of being a murderer. It was her own stupid fault she was in this pickle.
“You’re quite persistent, aren’t you?” Layla said in such a posh, chilly tone that Cara almost laughed at the strangeness of it all.
“I was trying to mind my own business,” Cara said, her voice quavering despite her best effort to imitate Layla’s cool confidence. Then again, the other woman was the one with the gun, and it was easy to be self-assured when she held all the lethal cards. “Did you have me kidnapped?”
“Of course not.” Layla hauled her closer to the back of the bar, and Cara tried to put on the brakes. Nothing good could come of anything in a grubby alley behind Dutch’s. “That was all that moron Abbott’s idea.”
Although she knew it wasn’t a good sign that Layla was telling her things, Cara still wanted to know. “So he could get information out of Henry? Information about you?” She took Layla’s silence as an affirmative answer. “Like that you killed your friends?”
“They weren’t my friends.” Layla almost hissed the words, and she jammed the gun so tightly against Cara’s side that she had to grit her teeth to keep from crying out. “They were my accountants—at least until they tried to blackmail me. Idiots.”
“Why would they blackmail you?” Cara’s teeth had started to chatter, and she clamped them so tightly together that it hurt her jaw.
“They were greedy and nearsighted, and Abbott pushed them into it.” Layla sounded so casually normal that the press of the gun felt surreal. They rounded the corner, fully in the alley now despite Cara’s attempt at delaying them. “He’s had an issue with me ever since he was expelled for that silly thing in high school and I was cleared. It’s not my fault that he was weak enough to fold during his police interview.”
Swallowing her protest that a boy dying was not a silly thing, Cara asked, “Did you try to run me over with a car?” If she was about to be killed in a gross alley that smelled of pee and garbage, she at least wanted her curiosity satisfied.
“No. I didn’t, and he was supposed to be aiming at Kavenski.”
Before Cara could respond, Layla slammed her face-first against the rough surface of the wall and shifted the gun so that the muzzle now rested against her temple.
“Everyone’s going to hear that go off if you shoot me.” There was nothing Cara could do to control the shake in her voice. This was it. If she was going to save herself, she had to do something now.
“That’s what suppressors are for, you stupid girl.”
Cara felt it, the intention, the tensing of Layla’s muscles that screamed that she was really about to go through with this, that she was going to shoot Cara in the head and leave her there in the alley behind Dutch’s like so much garbage.
No. Cara’s thoughts grew calm, and her shaking stopped. That’s not going to happen.
She dropped her head forward, just slightly, as if she were giving up. Then she slammed it backward, her skull connecting with something on Layla’s face that crunched under the force. The pressure against her temple dropped away, and Cara twisted in the woman’s hold, fiercely determined not to die.
“You bitch!” Layla gasped, her voice sounding nasal and choked.
A yell from behind them echoed distantly in Cara’s ears, but she was too busy fighting the grip on her arm. She fumbled for the gun, hoping frantically that she would knock it away from Layla. The gun went off, a sharp bark, surprisingly loud for what Cara had thought a silenced weapon should sound like, and she felt a sharp slice of pain along the top of her shoulder.
“FBI! Drop your weapon!” There were shouts coming from all directions, but the words didn’t make any sense to Cara’s brain. She grappled for the gun, grabbing Layla’s wrist with both hands and ignoring the pain as the other woman clawed at her arms.
Layla’s narrowed eyes went wide for a fraction of a second, and Cara saw a completely terrified Norah holding a jagged piece of concrete that she’d just crashed into Layla’s head. In that split second
of distraction, Cara lost her grip on Layla’s wrist. Looking furious, Layla aimed the gun at her again.
“Hit her again!” Cara shouted, breaking Norah out of her paralysis. She raised her chunk of concrete, but Cara knew her sister would be too late. Layla needed less than a second to pull the trigger and bury a bullet right into Cara’s chest.
Before the gun went off, an enormous shape hit Layla from the side, tackling her to the ground. As she went down, Layla’s head bounced against the pavement, and she went limp. Cara could only stare at the two figures on the ground, unable to comprehend that she was alive and Layla was unconscious and Henry had just saved her life…again.
Norah let the chunk of concrete tumble to the ground, and the heavy clunk it made when it hit seemed to release Cara’s paralysis. Suddenly, they were swarmed by people in protective vests with FBI emblazoned on them.
“Cara!” The big guy in an FBI jacket who’d just tackled Layla pushed himself to his feet, leaving the unconscious woman to the other agents. He swept Cara up in an enormous hug, moving her away from Layla’s fallen form, and she hung limply in his grip, her brain trying to process what was happening.
“Henry?” she finally managed to say, her voice breathless from how tightly he was squeezing her. “Aren’t you in jail? Why are you dressed up like an FBI agent?”
He finally set her down, although he kept a firm grip on her upper arms. Either he was shaking, or she was shaking, or they both were shaking, because she could feel her body vibrating almost violently. He moved his hands to cup her face, and she determined that they were both trembling right before he kissed her, hard.
She wouldn’t have imagined that anything could distract her from the fact that she’d almost been shot in a dirty alley, but Henry was doing a pretty good job of making her forget everything except the feel of his mouth on hers.
When they finally separated, she couldn’t look away from him. They stared at each other for what felt like a long time before she finally cleared her throat. “FBI?”
