A Widow's Guilty Secret (16 page)

The line went dead.

Have yourself a nice breakfast.

As if she could keep anything down, Suzy thought angrily. Her stomach was so knotted up, she was amazed she could still breathe.

Suzy looked at her watch. It was only ten to eight. Early. But she might as well drive over to the bank and wait in the parking lot for it to open its doors. This way, if Nick came back before nine, she wouldn’t have to come up with any excuses about where she was going or why she didn’t want him with her.

If he knew the truth, there was no way he’d let her go alone—besides, she had no doubts that the kidnapper
was
watching her every move. There had to be cameras planted in her house.

In her house
she thought angrily, feeling horribly violated. Who had done that? And when? Could Peter have put the cameras up? Why? Was it to keep them safe, or to spy on her? She’d never given him any reason for the latter, but she was beginning to think there didn’t have to be a reason for some people to do criminal things.

Her head
really
began to ache. It felt as if her skull were being cracked in two.

Running on adrenaline, she decided to make her escape from the house via the side yard. There was a gate that opened behind some garbage pails. The detectives in the van were watching for someone breaking in, not sneaking out. It was her only hope, and with a little bit of luck she could get away. From there, she could call a cab to take her to the bank.

Just as she was about to leave, the phone rang again.

It took effort to stifle the involuntary scream. Bracing herself, Suzy picked up the receiver. Was it him again? Had he changed his mind about making her pick up the envelope for some reason? It was too soon for the call naming the drop-off point. He knew she hadn’t gone to the bank yet.

Suzy could feel herself trembling inside as she said, “Hello?”

“Hi.”

Her shoulders tensed for another reason entirely when she realized it was Nick calling and not the kidnapper. Her mind scurried about, trying to come up with something she could say to make the kidnapper think she was warding Nick off while still leaving him a clue.

Nothing was coming to her.

“I know I left rather abruptly,” Nick said, “but one of the men on the joint task force found some evidence that might have implicated one of the late senator’s aides and we brought them all in for questioning.” He paused as if to let all this sink in. “I’m not sure when I can be there, but the minute I wrap this up, I’ll be over and—”

“Don’t bother,” she snapped. “I don’t need you coming over.” Her voice rose with each word she uttered. “I don’t need you hounding me every minute. Why don’t you do something productive, like find my husband’s killer and put him in jail?”

This sounded nothing like the woman he’d been with last night. Had the kidnapper called her? If he had, wouldn’t she have told him that immediately? Why was she responding like that?

“Suzy, is something wrong?”

“Wrong?” she jeered. “What could possibly be wrong? Everything’s just ginger-peachy—as long as you leave me alone,” she added, adding a nasty edge to her tone. “Go do your job, and I’ll do mine, understand? Go do your job!” she shouted and with that, she banged down the receiver, terminating the call and praying that Nick would realize what she was really trying to tell him instead of just think that she had gone off the deep end. That, she hoped, was the way she meant for the kidnapper to interpret what had just gone down.

Hopefully, Nick was smarter than the kidnapper.

* * *

“Wow, I could hear her yelling all the way over here,” Juarez commented, looking at his partner as he came forward. “You really must have done something to tick her off.”

Nick didn’t answer Juarez. He felt like a man who had just been handed the ultimate puzzle. He stared at the phone thoughtfully, trying to make sense out of what had just happened. He had an uneasy feeling that if he was slow in figuring it out, it would be too late.

His cell beeped. Flipping it open, he saw the text. The man he had following Kellerman just alerted him that the senator’s right-hand man was on the move.

Nick frowned. He knew what he had to do. For the time being, no matter how much he wanted to go see her and find out what was going on, Suzy’s puzzle would have to wait.

* * *

Nick had gotten into his car and had just turned the ignition when his cell phone beeped again.

Now what? he wondered impatiently.

Pausing, he took his phone out again and looked at the text message. One of the detectives he’d instructed to keep an eye out on Suzy had sent his own message. Suzy had just been seen sneaking out of the side yard and getting into a cab down the block.

Chapter 15

J
anice Maxwell was considered by one and all to be the perfect administrative assistant. She came in early, left late and in between handled both daily routines and emergencies with the same aplomb and maximum efficiency. No one at Darby College could remember ever seeing the stately, fortysomething woman acting as if she was even the least bit ruffled or upset.

She was the eye of the storm, the one everyone, including her employer, Dean Abramowitz, turned to when they needed the opinion of someone who was calm and levelheaded.

Which was why, when Janice Maxwell suddenly burst into the dean’s office, looking white as a sheet and clearly seven degrees beyond upset, the dean fully expected that, at the very least, the devil himself was on her heels.

But she was alone, as well as breathless and apparently speechless.

“Ms. Maxwell, what is it? What happened?” he demanded. Never in their long history together had the woman
ever
burst into his office without first knocking, and then waiting for permission to enter.

His nerves were already fairly shot, what with Melinda Grayson’s undeclared kidnapping and then those grad students finding the three murder victims just outside of the school grounds.

Dean Abramowitz was afraid even to hazard a guess as to what had brought on Ms. Maxwell’s highly unusual break with decorum.

“Answer me!” he instructed. “What the devil is going on here?”

Rather than say a word, the tall, thin woman who appeared to be all angles, quickly came around to the dean’s side of the computer and proceeded to elbow him out of the way despite his protests. The moment she did, she took control of his keyboard, her fingers flying over the keys.

“What the hell’s gotten into you, woman?” Abramowitz indignantly shouted. He was strongly debating calling Campus Security and having her taken away.

“Look!” She choked out the single word, turning the monitor so that he could get a better view of the video she’d just pulled up. A video that, according to the number of hits indicated in the corner, had gone insanely viral.

The dean didn’t have to ask her, “At what?” The video Janice Maxwell had just pulled up commanded his complete, undivided and utterly horrified attention.

Abramowitz stared, openmouthed, as a terrified Melinda Grayson, her hands and feet tied securely to a chair, pleaded with someone just off camera not to kill her. She was sobbing almost uncontrollably.

The dean’s body was as tense as a fireplace poker as he watched someone’s hand suddenly dart out to strike the professor across the face.

Just as contact was about to be made, the screen went black.

The whole video lasted a total of thirty seconds.

It felt as if time had stopped while he watched.

His eyes huge, Abramowitz looked at his administrative assistant. The woman who ordinarily brought order to chaos had succeeded in doing just the opposite to his life.

“Where’s the rest of it?” he asked, waiting for the video to start up where it had left off.

Ms. Maxwell shook her head. Her voice, when she spoke, was hardly above a choked whisper. “That’s all there is, Dean.”

His hands shaking, Abramowitz took a card out of his jacket pocket and began to dial Detective Nick Jeffries’s number.

* * *

Nick looked at the caller’s name on his cellphone screen as it rang.

It was Dean Abramowitz.

Again.

Undoubtedly calling to find out if he’d discovered anything new. The dean had been calling him on the average of four, five times a day since he’d questioned him about both the professor’s disappearance and the three murder victims. As per his habit, he’d left his card with the educator, asking him to call if he happened to remember something else about either case. Instead, the dean would call to quiz
him,
wanting to know if any progress had been made in the investigation into the professor’s disappearance.

After the first few calls, Nick had told Abramowitz that he would be able to spend his time more wisely
investigating
the case rather than updating him on it. For a dean, the man was rather thick. He hadn’t taken the hint.

Right now, Nick didn’t have time to hold the dean’s hand or reassure him that they’d find the professor as well as whoever had killed those three men. In his book, actions spoke louder than words.

He let the call go to voice mail.

* * *

Please let them be all right, please let them be all right.

The single sentence kept repeating itself in Suzy’s head over and over like an endless loop as she drove, first to the bank to retrieve the envelope in the safety deposit box, then to the address she’d been given. The metallic voice on the phone had called with the drop location approximately five minutes after she had gotten the envelope with its photographs out of the safety deposit box.

Was he watching her somehow? Had he planted a camera in her car? Suzy wondered uneasily, looking around the interior of her vehicle. The thought that this man was spying on her sent chills down her spine and all but cut off her air supply.

She forced herself to get her mind back on the only thing that mattered: saving Andy and Lori. She’d find a way to deal with the man who was torturing her this way later.

The address she’d been given turned out to belong to an abandoned storefront in the more rundown section of town. It had once served as a satellite campaign office when Senator Merris was aggressively running for reelection. An old campaign poster, faded from the sun and hanging at half-mast, the tape in the upper corners no longer able to support it, was still in the window, forgotten by whoever had been charged with cleaning up that particular go-round.

Getting out of the car, Suzy approached the empty looking storefront and tried the door. She expected it to be locked, but it easily gave beneath her hand.

Suzy took a deep breath to at least
partially
steady her nerves. She pulled the door open, braced herself and then walked in.

The smell of dust and mold assaulted her nose the second she walked in. She let the door close behind her as she looked around.

“Hello? Is anyone here?” Suzy called out.

Only the echo of her own voice as it bounced off the emptiness answered her.

Had she gotten the address wrong? Was the kidnapper jerking her around, sending her to the wrong place to show her that he was holding all the cards and that she had none?

But she
did
hold a card, Suzy silently insisted. She had the photographs. The ones he apparently was so desperate to get his hands on. That had to be worth something.

She dug in, holding her ground and giving it one more try.

“Look, I came here just like you told me to. I have the photographs. Now stop playing games and show yourself, damn it!” she demanded.

There was still no answer, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. What was this creep’s game?

“Okay, have it your way,” she declared, retracing her steps to the door. “I’m taking these photographs straight to the newspaper office. I’m sure they can find a place for some of them somewhere on their front page.”

She willed herself to turn around and start to go out the front door.

“Stay where you are!”

But rather than freeze, the way the man clearly wanted her to, Suzy swung around to face whoever had called out the order.

She didn’t recognize the man standing there.

He was the kind of man, Suzy realized, who easily faded into the woodwork and could, just as easily, fade from memory five minutes after he left a room. It didn’t seem possible that someone so nondescript could have taken her sister and her child, but then, she was discovering as more things about Peter’s dual life came to the surface, that
anything
was possible.

Especially that which seemed to be impossible.

With quick, angry steps, the man crossed to her. “Give me the photographs!” he demanded.

She’d stuffed the whole thing into her oversize shoulder bag just before she’d left the bank and now angled her purse so that it hung behind her, out of his initial reach.

“First let me see my sister and my baby,” she countered.

“You’re in no position to dictate terms,” he growled malevolently at her.

Rather than shrink away, Suzy raised her chin defiantly and retorted, “We’ve got a difference of opinion here, because I think I am. Now, you’re not getting your hands on
anything
until I see my son and my sister with my own eyes.”

Agitated—this was
not
going according to plan—Frank Kellerman cursed at her, and then grudgingly said, “All right, they’re in the back room.”

Tying Lori up like a Thanksgiving turkey, he’d left her and the baby in what had once been the senator’s office whenever the man had swung by his smaller campaign headquarters.

Kellerman meant for her to follow him, but Suzy remained exactly where she was. She was not about to allow this man to get behind her for any reason. If she did, she thought, she’d deserve just what she got. The man had
psychotic
written all over him.

“Bring them out,” Suzy told him. “I’ll be right here. Waiting.”

Kellerman’s eyes narrowed, all but shooting lightning bolts. “Don’t dictate terms to me,” he shouted.

“Take it as a request, then,” she retorted. There wasn’t even so much as a hint of friendliness in her voice. She placed her cards on the table. “When I see with my own eyes that they’re all right,
then
I’ll let you have the photographs,” she promised.

He said nothing for a moment, his eyes raking up and down her body. “You’ve got guts,” he told her with what amounted to the thinnest trace of admiration.

She supposed that in his world, he was flattering her. Maybe even flirting with her. But in her world, he was a stomach-turning lowlife who couldn’t be trusted and she wasn’t about to let her guard down.

The man was a psychopath, she thought.

“I’ve got the photographs,” she pointed out, knowing that to him, that was all that mattered.

“Stay here,” he ordered.

She’d gotten her way. But there was no time to savor the victory. It was on to the next battle, the next confrontation. But for now, she promised, “I won’t move a muscle.”

“Yeah, you will,” he smirked as he whirled around, a gun in his hand. He raised it quickly, his intention clear. He would kill her and take the photographs.

And then, just like that, he was aiming his gun at her. There was no place to run, no place to hide. This crazy person was going to kill her.

The thought that she had less than a minute to live galloped through her head.

But just as she braced to be killed, she heard the kidnapper scream. It was a pain-riddled cry, not a triumphant battle charge.

The man who would be her killer crumpled to the floor right in front of her, the blood flowing from his shoulder hitting the floor at the same time that he did. When his knees made contact with the floor, they immediately began to absorb the blood, discoloring his very expensive suit.

Stunned, not knowing what to think, Suzy turned around to see where the life-saving shot had originated. It seemed to be from directly behind her, but there was no one there, only the empty storefront window and the curling poster.

That was when she saw him.

Nick, sprinting toward her, a rifle held tightly in his hand. Throwing the door open so hard it banged on the opposite wall, he demanded, “Are you all right?” in a tough, no-nonsense voice.

“I’ll let you know when I stop shaking inside,” she answered. A hundred different questions popped up in her mind, all simultaneously piling on top of one another. “Did you just shoot him?” she asked, amazed at the accuracy of the shot he’d taken.

When Nick nodded in response, she still couldn’t make sense of it. That seemed like an impossible shot.

“But how?” she demanded. “There was no one out there when I walked in.” She scrutinized him, completely stunned by what he’d just managed to do. “Just what kind of superpowers do you have, anyway?” As far as she was concerned, it would have taken someone with exceptional vision to nail that shot. Why hadn’t he mentioned being a sharpshooter to her?

Because the man doesn’t like to call attention to himself, that’s why. Don’t you know anything about the man?
Apparently not, but she was willing to learn.

The aide was conscious and groaning pitifully, in between emitting squeals, complaining of almost being killed. He let loose a string of profanity, declaring that he was at death’s door.

“You killed me,” he sobbed angrily. “I’m thirty years old and you killed me!”

Jerking the man up to his feet none too gently, Nick answered Suzy’s question simply, “I was a sniper in the marines.”

She had more questions for him, a lot more, such as how he knew she was there, but they could all wait until she got the answer to one question out of the man Nick had taken prisoner.

“Where are they?” she demanded angrily. “Where’re my baby and my sister?”

Kellerman countered by demanding, “Get me to a hospital. I’m bleeding to death here.”

Nick grabbed Kellerman by his shoulder, sending a fresh wave of pain shooting right through the man down to his very core.

“Haven’t you heard?” Nick asked sarcastically. “Only the good die young. Which means you’re not going anywhere but to jail.”

“I need a doctor!” Kellerman sobbed, his knees buckling.

Nick was unmoved, his eyes ominous as he regarded the babbling aide. “Tell us where her sister and baby are, and I’ll see what I can do about that hospital.”

It was obvious that under different circumstances, Kellerman would have loved nothing better than to keep that piece of information from either of them, but he was growing weaker and he could see the blood oozing from his wound. He was afraid that the detective would just leave him handcuffed here to die.

“All right, all right, I already told you where they are,” he grumbled, jerking one thumb toward the rear of the building. “They’re in the back room.”