Did You Miss Me? (9 page)

‘Tell me about your agency. I knew you did PI work, but didn’t know about the personal security side. I’ll need the number of your employees, your areas of expertise, anyone who’d want to take you down.’

Clay laughed bitterly. ‘Who’d want to take me down? That’s a ripe question. How much time do we have?’

‘Not enough to for me to be asking idle questions.’

Again the Fed was right. ‘I do personal and corporate security which includes investigating custody fights, cheating spouses, employers checking up on clients after money goes missing. We’re sometimes hired by the defense and we’re often hired by businessmen to secure their homes and businesses. Occasionally we travel internationally with a client who is going into a known danger zone. Why?’

‘Number one,
I
need to know. Daphne trusts you and my brother trusts you and that takes me about ninety percent of the way. But
I
don’t know you and we’ve all been fooled by liars over the course of our careers.’

‘True.’ That the Fed hadn’t claimed it was routine satisfied him. ‘Number two?’

‘You probably have complete confidence in your people, but they can betray us. I need to know who knows about your business.’

Clay thought of his last partner, the one before Paige. Nicki had fucked up, big time, paying the ultimate price. Unfortunately she dragged good people into the crossfire.

‘I have a few full-time employees. Paige, of course. My office assistant, Alyssa, who I’ve known since she was a kid. On the security side I have Alec Vaughn, a network geek I hired about six months ago. I’ve known Alec since he was twelve years old and his godfather is my best friend. Alec’s solid.’

‘Who else?’

‘That’s it. I bring in contract help as needed. Old pals, usually. Some I served with on the force in DC.’
Like Tuzak
. ‘Some I served with in the Corps.’

‘Marines?’

‘Sure as hell wasn’t the Peace Corps. I’ll have Alyssa print you out a list.’

‘That would be great. I need to take this,’ Carter said when his cell rang. ‘What do you have, Bo?’ A minute later his expression changed. ‘Oh my God. Fatalities?’

Clay straightened in his seat. ‘What?’ he demanded.

Carter ignored him, abruptly swinging across traffic to the left lane. He flipped a switch and the blue lights on his dash began to strobe and flash. ‘Tell them we’ll be there in less than five.’ He hung up and, barely slowing down, did a hard U-turn at the next light. ‘Hold on,’ he told Clay grimly.

‘Where are we going? What’s happened?’

‘My CO’s sending another agent to notify Mrs Zacharias. We’re going to the courthouse. The jury returned a guilty verdict and all hell broke loose. Defendant’s mother slipped him a knife and he stabbed a deputy. Not fatally, thank goodness.’

‘Daphne?’ Clay asked, his heart in his throat.

‘Defendant’s mother attacked her. She’s not injured. The mother’s attack was a diversion. Millhouse was trying to break free.’

‘Does Daphne know about Ford?’

‘Not yet. The priority was subduing Millhouse and his mother, then transporting the injured. My CO says he’s contacted BPD about Ford. They’re sending word to the cops on duty at the justice center. Daphne and Grayson are about to talk to the press.’

‘Standing in front of a crowd that hasn’t gone through security.’ Clay was imagining all the ways this could go wrong and from the look on Carter’s face, so was he. ‘But why would the Millhouses take Ford now? The jury’s reached their decision. Daphne couldn’t meet their demands if she wanted to.’

‘I don’t know. But they’ll have to go through me to get to her. Hang on.’

Tuesday, December 3, 11.00
A.M.

Mitch turned onto the drive that led to his home.
My home
. It had always been
home
. But it hadn’t been
his
until last year. It was the first time anything had been
his
.

It was a great old house, built by his mother’s grandfather in 1915 on what had at the time been a fifty-acre dairy farm. Douglases had always lived here. Although his last name was Roberts on paper, Mitch was a Douglas.
And now this belongs to me
.

Betty Douglas, Mitch’s mother’s aunt, had been the last to bear the Douglas name. Great-aunt Betty had been born here. His mother, orphaned as an infant, had grown up here, too. Aunt Betty had given her a home until she was old enough to live on her own. When his mother found herself widowed with an infant son, Betty welcomed them back.

It had been a hell of a place for Mitch to grow up. They’d still had a few cows then. They were geriatric cows, true, but he’d liked them. But by the time his mother had remarried, moved them to Virginia, and birthed two more sons, the herd was all gone.

When her second husband cheated on her, his mother brought Mitch’s youngest brother Cole back to this place. She’d come home to lick her wounds, find herself again.

Mitch, at eighteen, had just joined the US Army when his mother came home. Mitch’s middle brother Mutt stayed with his father, too wrapped up in his high school friends and the learning of his father’s trade to take care of their mother.

Cole had been only three, too young to give their mother any solace.

Aunt Betty had been her support once again and Mitch knew his old aunt had done the best that she could. But in the end, there had been no solace for his mother. Two years after she’d come home here, to this place, she had left again.

But permanently. She’d taken her own life. That had been eight years ago and it still made Mitch’s chest so damn tight . . .

Mitch drew a breath, then another, until he could breathe normally once again.

Time had passed. His grief had dimmed and he’d gone on, taking care of Cole.

But Mitch had made some mistakes. Some worse than others. For those he’d paid. Dearly. And when things had become more than he could bear, he’d followed in his mother’s footsteps. He’d brought Cole back here.
I came home
.

There’d been changes, of course. The property had been whittled away over the years, Aunt Betty having sold it to pay her bills, but they were still surrounded by five acres. Lots of privacy.

After sharing a mega-tent in Iraq with forty guys for most of his army deployment, Mitch had developed a real appreciation for privacy. Later, after sharing a six-by-eight for three years with another convicted drug dealer, Mitch had come to crave it.

Betty had understood that, which was why she’d left the old house solely to Mitch in her will. Not to share with his brothers Mutt or Cole.
Just to me
.
Mine
.

Pulling the van into his garage alongside his old Jeep, he shut off the engine. He got out of the van and stretched his neck, grimacing.
He wasn’t even thirty yet – too young to feel this damn old
.

But revenge had a revitalizing side-effect. His back might be killing him and his neck might be stiff, but his heart was beating fast and strong, his mind still crystal clear. A painkiller chased by a quick nap would take care of the aches.

But first, he had a job to do. He pulled at the shelves on the far wall of his garage, smiling when the entire unit swung out effortlessly. Perfectly balanced, the false wall could still be moved with the strength in his pinkie, almost sixty years after it was built.

Mitch’s great-grandfather Myron Douglas had been one hell of an artisan.

This garage was a later addition to the property, built by his great-grandfather in the 1950s. Back when Aunt Betty and her friends were taught to hide under their desks in the event of a nuclear bomb. And back when a man built a bomb shelter for his family, but didn’t want the neighbors to know. Only so much room down there. So much air.

So his great-grandfather had built the shelter, then slapped a garage on top of it, hid the doorway behind the swinging bookshelf, and swore his daughters to silence.

Betty had told Mitch about the shelter and given him the entry combinations on his sixteenth birthday. It had been her gift to him, indicating he was now man of the house.

His middle brother Mutt knew nothing about the shelter and that always made Mitch feel good. Cole knew about the place, but Mitch didn’t worry about his brother coming down here. Cole’s first and last visit to the shelter had been a horrific one. Even if his little brother did remember the combination, he wasn’t coming down here anytime soon.

Mitch twisted the dial on the lock that secured the latch and climbed into the access tube, hopped off the bottom of the ladder and went in. About eight by eight, it contained a desk and chair and three vintage army cots circa 1957. Shelves covered three of the walls, laden with canned goods. Two of the shelves were hinged, replicas of the one in the garage. Both hid doors that led to tunnels.

One escaped to the outside, ending fifty yards from the house. The other tunnel led to the existing basement, specifically to a room that had been originally used for storage when the house was built. His great-grandfather had hidden the basement access by yet another swinging bookshelf.

If an idea worked, his great-granddad had run with it. Not a bad approach, all in all.

The shelter was how Betty had left it, which was how Mitch’s mother had left it.

Minus the blood and brains, of course
. Mitch had done the cleanup and it had not been pleasant. He remembered it every time he came down here. Given the room wasn’t much bigger than his prison cell had been, that wasn’t all that often. But each time his hate was renewed.

His mother had killed herself in this room. He still had the gun she used, eventually returned by the police. He’d hidden it where his younger brother couldn’t find it. Cole had enough bad memories of that time, because, at only five years old, Cole had found her.

Mitch had been twenty-one, stationed in Iraq. It had taken him a week to get home for her funeral. A week that the mess his mother left behind had remained, putrefying. The cops took the gun and the ME took the body, but nobody had cleaned.

Aunt Betty didn’t. To hire a company to clean the mess hadn’t occurred to her because she was in shock. Even if she hadn’t been, there’d been no money to pay anyone else. And she couldn’t have cleaned it herself – she was too old by then to climb down the ladder. Which was why she’d given Cole the lock combinations in the first place – their mother had been missing for four days and her fits of alcoholic depression down in the shelter had never lasted so long before.

So the cleanup had fallen to Mitch and the memory of that day was never far from his mind. For a long, long time Mitch hated his mother for being a drunk, for taking the easy way out, for leaving her body for her little boy to find.
For me to clean
.

He’d hated his stepfather for breaking her heart and driving her to suicide, for refusing to acknowledge Cole as his son. After having cheated on her for
years
, his mother’s husband had accused
her
of cheating.

It wasn’t true. Mitch knew his mother would never have done such a thing. But even if it were true, Cole was a child, undeserving of the cruelties heaped on him by the man Mitch’s mother had loved to distraction long after he’d cast her aside.

But Mitch had picked up, moved on. He’d had to – there was a small boy who’d needed him. He’d finished the last few months of his army tour and had come home to care for Cole, getting him counseling, trying to be both mother and father to the boy.

And through those horrible years, Mitch had learned a lot of things the hard way.

Like what he thought was hate for his mother was really grief and that time did heal. Eventually the grief of losing his mother had dulled, the hate softening to anger, then to sad disgust for a woman who’d loved a man who never wanted her.

He’d learned that sometimes people aren’t as bad as they seem – they could be worse. This was definitely true of his stepfather.

Mitch had returned home from Iraq to a horrible economy. In desperation, he’d accepted what was to have been a temp job from his stepfather. Mistake number one.

Mistake number two was learning the true nature of the family business and not running like hell the other way.
Drugs are bad, Mitch
, Aunt Betty would say with a wag of her finger.
Just say no
. Man, did he ever wish he had.

Because mistake number three had been the biggest one. Lured by the promise of a fast buck, Mitch had actually believed his stepfather would allow him to make a place for himself in the family drug empire. Mitch had considered the temp job a foot in the door. Then once he had a toehold, he’d find a way to take it all, leaving the bastard crying and alone.

He’d had time to reflect on the colossal stupidity of that third mistake. Three years, to be exact, as he’d served his sentence for distribution.

A delivery had gone bad and Mitch had been caught. He hadn’t been worried at the beginning. Employees – even ones without family connections – got the company’s legal support. But no attorney showed up for Mitch. Just the public defender.
And me
.

Mitch’s revenge had taken root the day he cleaned his mother’s blood and brain from this very room. It had taken form and substance as he’d listened to the jury declare him guilty of possession with intent to sell. It had become a fully fleshed out plan during the years he’d been incarcerated. His endgame – to see his stepfather suffer, excruciatingly. And to see him dead.

To jumpstart his plan he’d needed a little spending money. Fortunately prison was chock full of guys with connections. Mitch had landed a highly illegal, but highly lucrative job on the outside before he’d walked through the prison gates, a free man once again. But first he’d come home, to this house. He loved this house.

What had greeted his eye only served to harden him further. Betty had grown too old to properly care for a growing boy and Cole was thin, hungry, and dirty. Mitch had arranged for a neighbor to check on her and then taken the boy with him, settling in Florida to implement the first phase of his revenge. Building his nest egg.