by Cindi Myers
“What did you think when you heard Lydia Green and Angela Dupree died because of bombs you built?” Ramirez asked.
Leo bowed his head again. “I felt terrible. I panicked and called Merry and tried to get her to return the rest of the bombs. But she wouldn’t. She said I didn’t need to worry, that everything would work out and the two of us would go away together.”
“Where were you going to go?” Laura asked.
“Australia. Or maybe New Zealand.” He looked away again. “I guess you think I’m pretty dumb, but she made me believe her.”
“There are two more bombs that haven’t exploded,” Jace slid into the chair next to Leo. “We need to find them before some other innocent person gets hurt. Do you have any idea where Merry put them?”
“No.” He angled his body toward Jace. “I promise if I knew I’d tell you. I don’t want anyone else to die.”
Laura’s phone signaled an incoming text. She checked the display.
#5 safely removed from D. Stroud’s home. Nothing at P. Stroud’s
She glanced up. Jace was checking his phone also. He looked up and held her gaze. We’re getting close, he seemed to say.
“Leo, did Merry ever mention a name of any particular person she wanted to take out with the bombs?” Laura asked.
“No. We never talked about it. She knew it upset me and she said she would rather talk about me. About us.” He had the same dumbfounded look as a kid who had just learned Santa Claus wasn’t real. Part of him couldn’t believe Merry had lied about wanting to be with him.
“We need to go,” Laura said abruptly, and left the room.
Jace hurried after her. “Why the rush?” he asked, catching up to her at the end of the hall. “What set you off?”
“He’s still in love with her. She used him to kill three people so far and if she walked in that door right now and said she was ready to run away with him, he’d leave right away, if he could.”
“I agree it’s twisted, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.”
“It just struck me how often love has been used to manipulate people in this case,” she said. “Not just Leo, but Parker, too. Merry professed to love him and want to be his wife, but really all she wanted was his money. And even Donna Stroud refused to let Parker have a bigger say in running the company when he could have been a real help to her. Instead, she tried to cover up the severity of her husband’s dementia and run things on her own, probably out of love.”
“So love—or the wrong kind of love, or the wrong idea of love, can lead people to do bad things,” Jace said. “We know that. But we also know the right kind of love can lead to truly wonderful things.” He slid one arm around her waist and pulled her close.
She turned to him, fighting against the anguish building inside her. “What are we going to do after this case is over?” she asked.
To his credit, he didn’t flinch, or ask her to explain what she meant. “What do you want to do?” he asked.
“We won’t be pretending anymore to be husband and wife,” she said. “We won’t be living together, but we’ll still be working together.”
“I was getting used to seeing you when I wake up in the morning and at dinner every night,” he said. His voice had the low, seductive quality that usually made her weak at the knees, but right now it just made her want to cry. “I was even getting used to all the vegetables you keep feeding me.”
She pulled away from him, needing space to think. “Office romances are a bad idea,” she said.
“There’s nothing against them in the regulations. The Bureau has a history of accommodating married couples.”
“Who said anything about marriage?” Panic clawed at her throat. This was Jace she was talking to. Not Jace Lovejoy, her pretend husband, but wild man Jace, who was reckless and cocky and everything she was not.
“I’m not trying to rush you,” he said. “I’m just pointing out that if our supervisors don’t have a problem with relationships between agents, why should you?”
“I can’t talk about this now.”
Something flared in his eyes, and she readied herself for a verbal battle. Maybe that was what she had wanted all along, to pick a fight that would lead to them breaking up. At least then she would prove she couldn’t depend on a man like him.
“All right,” he said, his voice even. “We won’t talk now, but we need to talk later.”
She didn’t have to come up with an answer to that, because Ramirez and Rogers joined them. “We need to go through the list of Stroud employees,” Ramirez said. “We think one of them will be the most likely target of the last bomb. You have a list, don’t you?”
“It’s on my laptop at the trailer,” Laura said. “I’ll go get it.”
“I’ll come with you,” Jace said.
“No, you stay here.” She looked at the other two. If she glanced at him, she might give away all her mixed-up feelings. “You should talk to Merry. See what she has to say. Jace can help with that.”
“All right,” Ramirez said. “We were just on our way to interview her.”
Laura left before Jace could weigh in with his opinion. All she wanted was a little time alone to pull herself together. She needed to bring her focus back to the case, away from the man who had turned her life upside down.
* * *
JACE STARED AFTER LAURA. Just when he thought he had torn down the protective wall she had built around herself, she was working hard to build it back up again.
“Come on,” Ramirez said. “Let’s see if we can get anything out of Merry.”
He had expected Merry to be afraid. She had no criminal record and for most people, being handcuffed, fingerprinted and photographed, and locked in a cell was a terrifying experience.
But Merry held her head up and looked him in the eye when he and Ramirez entered the interview room. “Where’s Laura?” she asked.
“She had something else to do,” Jace said.
“She didn’t want to face me, did she?” Merry said.
“Would you prefer that Laura be here for this interview?” Ramirez asked. “I can get her.”
“No way.” Merry waved her hand in front of her face as if shooing away a fly. “I never liked her. Why would I want her here now?”
Ana sat across from Merry while Jace stood by the door. “Tell us about the bombs,” Ramirez said after she had completed the preliminaries for the recording. “Why did you decide to set them?”
“You can’t ignore a bomb, or pretend it was an accident. A little mistake. Bombs make a statement.”
“What statement do they make?”
“I’m here and you’re not going to ignore me.”
“Who was ignoring you?” Ramirez asked.
“The Strouds ignored me. They thought I wasn’t good enough for their perfect son.” She sniffed. “I wonder if Donna thinks he’s so perfect now that she knows he’s a murderer.”
“We found the fifth bomb, in Donna Stroud’s car,” Ramirez said. “We safely removed it and Donna is fine.”
Merry frowned and said nothing.
“Where is the sixth bomb?” Jace asked.
Merry shifted her gaze to him. “You really haven’t figured that out?”
“No,” he admitted.
She looked amused. “Don’t worry, you will.”
The look in her eyes froze Jace. Ramirez asked another question and Merry looked away, but the smugness in Merry’s gaze was burned on his retinas. She thought she had gotten away with something.
Revenge on someone she didn’t like.
He left the room, pulling out his phone as he walked. He texted Laura. Come back. Don’t go into the trailer. DON’T.
He punched in her number and listened to the call going through, running now. Then he remembered Laura had the truck. He grabbed a passing officer. “
I need your keys.”
The cop stared at him. “My keys?”
Laura wasn’t answering her phone. Why wasn’t she answering her phone? “Your car keys. I need your car keys.” He dug out his badge and flipped it open. “It’s an emergency.”
Something in Jace’s expression persuaded the man. He dug a bunch of keys from his pocket. “It’s a blue Nissan Rogue, in the employee lot.”
Jace found the car and started it, then fastened his seat belt with one hand while he hit Redial for Laura’s number. “Pick up the phone!” he ranted as he peeled rubber on the turn from the parking lot.
He drove like a man possessed, barreling down the road with his emergency flashers on, sounding the horn at anyone who got in his way. Laura’s phone went to voice mail. He ended the call and hit Redial again.
He was still half a mile from the trailer when she answered. “Sorry, I was on another call. What do you need?”
“Where are you?” he demanded, the car careening wildly as he took a sharp curve at speed.
“I’m just at the trailer. Give me a second.”
“Don’t go in.” His heart pounded as if it would burst from his chest. He could hardly control the car on the rough road. “The bomb. I think the bomb is in the trailer,” he said.
“The bomb?”
But he was already racing up the driveway, the car fishtailing as he braked hard and slid to a stop behind the truck.
Laura stood, halfway up the walk, gaping at him. He burst from the car, ran to her and pulled her close.
“Jace, what is going on?” she asked, her voice muffled against his chest.
“I was almost too late.” His voice broke, and he could feel the tears hot on his cheeks, but he didn’t care. He looked down at her. “I almost lost you,” he said.
“I’m right here.” She cupped his face in both hands and kissed him. A tender, comforting kiss that he never wanted to end.
The cop whose car he had borrowed arrived first, with Rogers and Ramirez, followed by a bomb squad with a German shepherd that alerted on the front door. “There’s a bomb here, all right,” a heavily helmeted man called. “Clear the area.”
Laura insisted on driving. Shaken as she was, Jace looked worse. He said nothing as she drove, not to police headquarters, where the others were headed, but to the lake, where they had spied on Leo and Parker. Was that really only ten days ago?
She parked in the lot and turned off the engine. They sat in silence for a long moment, the distant sounds of laughter and muffled conversation drifting to them on a hot breeze through the open windows.
“I guess it’s over now,” Jace said.
“Everything but the paperwork,” Laura said.
“We can go back to Knoxville and our normal lives,” he said.
Except her life would never be the same again. She unfastened her seat belt and turned toward him. “What you said before, about us. Being a couple.”
“Yes?”
“I want to try. When you came running up to me outside the trailer—no one has ever looked at me that way before—as if I was the most precious thing in the whole world.”
“That’s because to me, you are.”
He pressed the button to release his own seat belt and slid over to her. She tilted her head up for his kiss, but he merely smoothed her hair back from her forehead. “I love you, Laura Smith,” he said. “I love how you always play by the rules because you recognize how quickly things can fall apart without them. I love that you’re brave but not reckless, and you have the courage to try new things, even when it makes you uncomfortable.”
“You make me uncomfortable.” She slid her hand around the back of his neck. “In a good way.”
“I’ll keep working on that.” He started to kiss her, but she held him off. “What?” he asked.
“I love you, too. And I’ve never said that to a man before.” She swallowed. “Not even my dad. Do you think that’s strange?”
The lines around his eyes tightened. “It’s not strange,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “And I’m honored to be the first.”
Then he did kiss her, and she fell into the kiss, diving in deep into this crazy lake of emotion that frightened her and thrilled her and made her happier than she had ever thought she could be.
* * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from Chain of Custody by Carol Ericson.
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Chain of Custody
by Carol Ericson
Chapter One
Emily held her breath as the man with the gun leaned over the playpen and ran the butt of the weapon down the front of the baby’s onesie.
“Cute kid.” His lips stretched into a semblance of a smile. “He yours?”
Jaycee started forward and then stopped, licking her lips.
Emily whispered to herself, “C’mon, Jaycee. Do what you do best. Lie.”
Flicking her fingers in the air, Jaycee said, “It’s my roommate’s. I’m making her move and take the brat with her.”
The bigger, beefier man in the room, who clearly didn’t need a weapon for intimidation, strolled toward the window and out of Emily’s view. “You sure you don’t know where your boyfriend is?”
“I told you. Brett and I broke up. I don’t have a clue where that loser is.”
Emily squinted and brought the phone with the video flickering across the display closer to her face. Was Jaycee telling the truth this time?
Emily’s client, Marcus Lanier, was sure Jaycee planned to take their baby and run off with Brett Fillmore. If Brett were in trouble with these two guys, Jaycee wouldn’t be likely to hand him over.
The big man skimmed a hand over his shaved head as he stepped back into the range of the camera Emily had set up in Jaycee’s apartment—without her knowledge. Once Marcus had hired her to keep an eye on his baby, Emily’s first step had been to install some electronic surveillance in Jaycee’s apartment. She hadn’t gotten much info in the five days she’d been tracking Jaycee—until now.
Marcus Lanier, a mover and shaker in Phoenix, had suspected Jaycee of hanging out with a sketchy crowd, and these guys with their guns and veiled threats definitely qualified. Marcus had feared for his baby’s safety due to Jaycee’s relationship with Brett Fillmore, a low-level druggie, but these two were next-level serious.
What did they want with Brett? If they thought he was the father of this baby, what would they be willing to do?
“Wh-what do you want with Brett, anyway?” Jaycee crossed her arms and wedged her back against the playpen, blocking the baby from the intruders.
The man holstered his gun. “Don’t worry about it. If you hear from him, let him know he needs to call us.”
Jaycee finally asked the question Emily was dying to know. “Who’s us?”
The bigger guy, the one who hadn’t drawn the weapon tucked in his waistband, straightened the sunglasses he hadn’t bothered to remove inside. “How many people are looking for him?”
The other man snorted. “Tell him to call us—or else.”
Knots tightened in Emily’s gut. Had Jaycee noticed he glanced at the baby when he said that?
“If I happen to see him, which I doubt, I’ll let him know a couple of guys with guns are looking for him.” Jaycee tossed her dyed blond locks over her shoulder. “I’m sure he’ll get right on it.”
The man with the shaved head leveled a finger at her. “You forgot the ‘or else’ part—and no police, or we’ll be looking for you, too.”
“Me and the police don’t get along so well.” Jaycee shrugged. �
��I don’t think I’ll have any contact with Brett, but I’ll tell him if I do.”
Emily blew out a long breath when the two men finally left. She’d been worried about the baby, but Jaycee must’ve been terrified despite her nonchalant attitude.
As soon as the door closed behind the men, Jaycee sprang into action. She ran toward the hallway and stayed out of view for a good ten minutes. She reappeared, dragging a suitcase behind her with a diaper bag slung over her shoulder.
Emily’s heart rattled in her chest. Jaycee planned to leave. She’d better take the car Emily had put a tracker on, because Emily had no intention of letting that baby—or her own fat paycheck—out of her sight.
With one eye on her phone, Emily packed a bag almost as quickly as Jaycee had. She didn’t have to pack baby stuff, but she had her own bag of tricks she might need on the road. She had to be prepared for anything. Jaycee might even try to slip across the border.
When the red dot on her phone indicated Jaycee was on the move, Emily grabbed a bottle of water and a half-eaten sandwich from the fridge. Holding her cell in front of her, she tossed her bag into the trunk of her car and slid behind the wheel.
She lived near enough to Jaycee’s neighborhood in south Phoenix to wait it out on the street in front of her own place until she could determine Jaycee’s intent. When her cell phone showed Jaycee’s car heading for the 10 South, she cranked on her engine and peeled away from the curb.
Following Jaycee, Emily kept her distance—not that Jaycee would recognize her or her nondescript silver hatchback, but she might be keeping an eye out for a tail...at least she should be.
Emily checked her own rearview mirror, scanning the freeway behind her. Had the goons who’d dropped in on Jaycee believed her about the baby not being hers? Maybe they believed her about Brett. If they trusted anything that woman said, they didn’t know Jaycee Lemoin very well—at least if all of Marcus Lanier’s stories about her were true.
