A Widow's Guilty Secret (13 page)

Whatever it was that his mysterious caller was after, he’d be able to get it from the woman, despite her protests that she had no idea what he was talking about.

“Then
get
an idea,” he had ordered in no uncertain terms, seeing through her innocent act. “Or your son dies. Your choice.”

And with that, he’d hung up, confident that he had left her nerves in tatters. She’d be afraid not to comply with his order, it was as simple as that.

Satisfaction permeated all through him.

His feet were firmly back on the ladder of success and this time, he thought, shoving his hands into his pockets, he intended to climb up all the way.

About to leave the study where he’d gone to place the call, Kellerman stopped abruptly when his fingers came in contact with a folded piece of paper.

That hadn’t been there the last time he’d worn this jacket. As far as he could recall, the paper hadn’t been there when he’d
put on
the jacket.

Puzzled, he pulled the paper out. It was folded over in a square and his first name was written across the top. Who the hell had put that into his pocket?

He looked around even though the room was empty. He half expected someone to pop out from behind the drapes, but no one did.

How did the note get into his pocket?

More curious than ever, he unfolded the paper. Printed inside were four words: “I’m proud of you.”

An eerie feeling came over him. Someone was watching him.

But who? And where were they?

And exactly why were they proud of him?

He stared at the words for a very long time. The longer he stared, the less sense it all made.

Chapter 12

“R
eally, Andy and I will be fine,” Lori assured her sister for a second time. “There’s a patrolman on his way,” she reminded Suzy, nodding at Nick for backup, since he’d been the one who’d placed the call. “You don’t have to hold my hand until he gets here. Go, see what’s in that mysterious safety deposit box,” she urged. “You know I’m dying to find out myself.”

But Suzy refused to budge. She stood by the window, looking out and waiting for some sign of an approaching police car. “The safety deposit box’ll still be there if we leave fifteen minutes from now. I’m not going
anywhere
until I know you’re safe.”

“Can’t you
make
her go?” Lori asked, appealing to Nick. “She’s been overprotective and stubborn like this all her life.”

“Well, if that’s the case, nothing I say to her is going to change her mind and frankly, I’m afraid I agree with Suzy.” Suzy flashed him a smile for his support. “That’s why I called for a patrolman in the first place. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“He’s here,” Suzy announced, dropping the curtain back into place. “See,” she said to Lori. “That wasn’t so long, and now I don’t have to worry about you.”

“Ha,” Lori jeered. “That’ll be the day. You’d worry about me even if I had a ring of superheroes surrounding me.”

“Shut up and take care of my son,” Suzy said fondly, kissing her sister’s cheek before she grabbed her jacket and purse.

The patrolman came in and, after a quick introduction to Lori, was briefed on his assignment. He was to park his vehicle in the driveway and make sure no one came anywhere
near
the house until they’d been officially cleared. The FBI’s temporary satellite office had been placed on speed dial.

“Feel better?” Nick asked her as they got into
his car.

“Yes.” Suzy was not oblivious to the fact that Nick hadn’t pressured her either to give him back the safety deposit key, or leave the house before the patrolman arrived. She was grateful to him for that. “Thank you.”

He made his way to the main road. “For what?” he asked her.

These past couple of days had taught her not to take
anything
for granted. “For not trying to get me to leave before your patrolman arrived.”

Nick laughed shortly. “He’s more your patrolman than mine.” When he felt Suzy looking at him quizzically, he elaborated by making reference to the pledge each law enforcement officer took upon being sworn in. “Citizens are the ones the patrolman is supposed to ‘serve and protect.’ That’s something we in the department take pretty seriously.”

She thought of Peter and all the different ways she was discovering that he had failed to live up to that simple code.

“Too bad everyone doesn’t,” she murmured. For the sake of privacy, Nick pretended not to hear.

* * *

The bank manager at First National Bank of Vengeance appeared surprised when Suzy requested to see him. Other than when she had come in with her husband to sign the necessary papers when they had initially opened their checking and savings accounts, she hadn’t been in. If there were any transactions to be handled, it was the sheriff who came in, not his wife.

Parker Stephens looked at her a little skeptically when she’d asked to be taken to the safety deposit box. “Would you happen to have your driver’s license with you, Mrs. Burris? Protocol,” he explained, flashing a shallow smile.

Suzy refrained from asking the bank manager why he’d think she wouldn’t and instead just held it up for his examination.

He nodded, apparently satisfied, and flashed another forced smile. “Can’t take people’s word for things anymore, I’m sorry to say.”

“No, you can’t,” Nick agreed crisply. “Can we hurry things along, please? Mrs. Burris would like to open her safety deposit box before Christmas.”

The manager hesitated, seeming grossly uncomfortable about the situation.

“Something wrong, Mr. Stephens?” Nick asked him.

“Well, technically,” the man hedged, “the safety deposit box belongs to the sheriff.”

Nick’s eyes narrowed. By now, everyone in town knew what had happened to the sheriff and the two other men. Did he expect the man to come back from the dead?

“Well, ‘technically,’” Nick countered, his tone stern, his eyes steely as they pinned the bank manager in place, “the sheriff is dead. As his next of kin, not to mention his widow and cosigner on both accounts, Mrs. Burris is now entitled to have access to the safety deposit box in question.”

For a moment, the bank manager appeared likely to contest Nick’s statement, but then he seemed to visibly wilt and backed down. “Yes, of course. Come this way, please.”

With that, Stephens led the way to the vault in the rear of the bank where the safety deposit boxes were housed. The sheriff’s deposit box was Number 1094.

Although there was an entire wall devoted to safety deposit boxes, Suzy noticed that many of those doors were left wide open. Those were the boxes that were waiting for someone to put them to some use. Apparently most of First National’s patrons had nothing they wanted to store or keep safe.

Turning to face her, the bank manager said, “I trust you have the key with you, Mrs. Burris.”

She produced it and held it up before the man. “Right here.”

With a nod, Stephens took hold of the key he wore on a long chain around his neck and inserted it into the larger of the two locks guarding the safety deposit box in question.

“Now you,” he instructed. Once she inserted her key Stephens said, “Turn it, please.”

He turned the bank’s key at the same time and the lock gave. Dropping his key back to its place under his shirt, Stephens opened the door, slid the small box out and walked toward a booth off to one side that was actually three walls enclosed around a counter. He set the box on the counter and stepped back.

“Please call when you’re done.” And with that, Stephens retreated, leaving them alone in the vault.

The moment the bank manager was gone, Nick opened the safety deposit box. Inside he found a passport with the sheriff’s picture, but not his name. It was issued to an alias. The passport was sitting on top of a white envelope.

Suzy took the passport from his hand and looked at it. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together, even though she would have never thought it of him.

“I guess he was planning on a quick getaway without me,” she murmured.

Suzy was surprised that the discovery bothered her, but it was more the idea of the deception rather than the thought of being abandoned by Peter that wounded her pride, she realized. No one liked the thought of being duped by someone.

It wasn’t hard to guess what she was thinking. “The man was a fool in more ways than one,” Nick told her flatly.

The comment had her looking at him sharply. Was that a compliment, or just a casual observation about the types of people Peter had most likely been dealing with? The fake passport indicated that he thought he had to be ready to pick up and run at a moment’s notice.

Leaving her and the baby to fend for themselves. Since he had no other family, disappearing would have been easy.

Bastard,
she thought.

Again she couldn’t help wondering what was going on and just
who
Peter Burris—if that
was
his real name—actually was.

But she had no time to ponder the question any longer because Nick had just opened the envelope and taken out its contents.

The envelope was filled with photographs. A great many photographs. Most of them were rather unfocused, some were even so blurred that it was hard to make out just what or who was supposed to be in them.

But others were definitely clear enough to make out.

And clear enough for the photographer and his or her subject to have them both convicted of treason against the United States.

Suzy’s eyes narrowed as she looked at the top photograph. She recognized one of the men in it. “Is that—?”

He anticipated the name she was about to use and nodded. “Sure as hell looks like him,” he confirmed. “He is one of the top known arms dealers in the world.” To his way of thinking, it wasn’t a ranking to be proud of.

The man he’d just mentioned had recently been implicated in a weapons trade with a country that didn’t exactly make the U.S.’s top one hundred friends list. On the contrary, the country had been on the brink of war with the U.S. not once but several times.

Each time, the people in question had backed off because of a lack of sufficient firepower. But apparently the country was getting closer and closer to the point where that would no longer be a problem.

Suzy’s eyes widened as she looked at another photograph. This time, there wasn’t even a hesitation. “That’s Senator Merris,” she breathed.

“Not his best side,” Nick commented dryly. “But this one’s clearer,” he said of another photograph he produced from in the stack.

She raised her eyes from the pile and looked at Nick. “Do you think Peter took these pictures?”

There were only two possibilities. “Either he did or he stole them from someone who did,” Nick answered.

The photographs appeared to have been taken from a certain angle. Had the sheriff worn a spy cam on his person and let it roll automatically? Obviously, since the person who’d called Suzy had referred to them as “insurance,” that was the way the sheriff had viewed them. They were something to use as leverage in case things went south.

Also just as obviously, Burris had never gotten a chance to use the photographs. Or maybe they were what had gotten him killed in the first place.

Suzy looked at Nick after they’d reviewed all the photographs. Many lives would be forever changed if these photographs saw the light of day. “What do we do with them?”

“I’m going to have to figure that out,” he told her honestly. In their present situation, he wasn’t sure just whom they could trust. He needed to do a little investigating before he came to any decisions. “For now, let’s just leave them here. As long as you have the only key, they’ll be safer here than in your house—or at the police station,” he told her.

She nodded, feeling somewhat stunned at this latest discovery. Once again she couldn’t help thinking how completely in the dark she’d been for most of her relationship with Peter. She would have never dreamed that he was involved in something like this.

What other secrets were waiting for her? she wondered uneasily.

Suzy fervently hoped that this was the last of the surprises. Right now it was just shock on top of shock and she wasn’t sure just how much more she could actually take.

As they left the bank, Nick noticed how pale she appeared. All this was really rough on her. Sympathy stirred within him.

“Let’s get you back home,” he told her gently. “Give us both a chance to process this latest little development,” he said wryly.

“Nothing to process,” she told him, struggling not to sound exceedingly bitter. “I was married to a monster, a man who thought nothing of being a traitor to his own country.” She raised her eyes to Nick’s, daring him to contradict her. “Otherwise, he would have tried to stop what was going on in those photographs. At the very least, he would have sent them to a major newspaper or a national news channel, exposing the senator and those other people who’re involved in those awful dealings.” The moment the words were out, Suzy realized what her next course of action had to be. “That’s what we have to do,” she told Nick abruptly. “Get those photographs to the news media.”

He understood where she was going with this and why. But things weren’t that simple.

“Not yet,” Nick cautioned. “This is just another piece of the huge puzzle and we have to see how it all comes together first. We can’t afford to jump the gun,” he warned, then promised her, “the pictures will definitely see the light of day. But not until we find out who killed your husband and the others.”

She was convinced that it would be too late by then. With each breath she took, the feeling of impending doom continued to grow. And no matter what she did, Suzy just couldn’t shake it.

The feeling grew even stronger when she and Nick arrived at her home. She noticed that the patrol car was still parked in front of her house.

But at first glance, the police officer who was supposed to be on duty appeared to be AWOL.

Nick pulled up his vehicle right beside the squad car and looked in. The patrolman wasn’t AWOL, he was dead. One shot to the head at relatively close range. The killer was either cocky, or stupid. His money, Nick thought in frustrated anger, was on stupid.

Panic ripped through Suzy as she stifled the involuntary cry that rose to her lips. She was out of the car before Nick could stop her and she ran to the house.

The door wasn’t locked.

“Suzy, wait!” Nick called after her angrily, his gun already drawn. “Damn it, listen to me,” he shouted at her, fear getting the better of him.

He sprinted from the car to the house. Catching up to her, he grabbed Suzy by the arm and stopped her in her tracks before she could cross the threshold. There was no telling if the killer was inside, waiting for her.

“Getting yourself killed isn’t going to help anyone,” Nick snapped.

She didn’t care about her own safety. It was her baby and her sister she was worried about.

“Lori!” Suzy shouted. “Lori, are you there? Answer me!”

The only answer was the echo of silence.

It was terrifying. This meant that her baby and her sister were gone—or worse.

“Stay here!” Nick ordered. His weapon poised, he moved into the house methodically, making sure each area was clear before going on to the next one.

“The hell I will,” she retorted, shadowing his every movement.

He had no choice but to let her. There was no one to keep her back.

The scene that met them in the living room said it all.

A shattered lamp was on the floor, its pieces scattered, a side table was overturned and the playpen was glaringly empty.

Lori had obviously tried to fight off whoever had gained access to the house. Because the door hadn’t been broken down or jimmied, the killer had probably posed as the police officer he’d killed. By the time Lori realized what was going on, it was too late. The killer was already in the house.