Love Inspired Suspense June 2015 - Box Set 2 of 2: Exit Strategy\Payback\Covert Justice (51 page)

He'd been great. Kicking the gun away had saved her life. She needed to thank him but she'd been avoiding eye contact. She needed to grow up and get over herself. Yes, half of her body had been burned to a crisp, but she still lived and she could still fight. She didn't need people to think of her as beautiful or desirable to do what she needed to do.

But waiting for the look in Blake's eyes to change from appreciation, maybe even infatuation, to the inevitable pity, was going to drive her insane.

He came beside her as she knelt by a shoe blown thirty feet from the blast site. “I want to ask you some things, but I'm afraid you'll take them the wrong way.”

This should be interesting. “Go ahead.”

“I have two questions. First, is your skin more sensitive where it was burned?”

Not the question she'd been expecting. “What do you mean?”

“I'm wondering about nerve endings. Do you feel heat, cold, touch, more or less?”

Oh. “I do get cold easier. I also overheat easier because my skin doesn't sweat the way it should. As for touch, I honestly don't remember.”

She remembered his hand running down the side of her arm. The tingling sensation spreading through her whole body at his touch. Maybe the correct answer was she felt more when he was the one touching her?

“Why?”

He shrugged. Poor guy. He looked miserable. And why wouldn't he be? He'd had his morning solitude destroyed by a maniac trying to kill him. And then he'd seen a man blow himself up. Not what he'd had in mind for this day.

“Because I wanted to tell you I thought your skin is very soft, and I also wanted to ask you if you'd like my sweatshirt because I'm afraid you're cold, but I'm worried you'll have this bizarre notion that I want you to cover up. If you want to wear tank tops year-round, you'll get no objection from me. Although it might be hard for me to get any work done because I'll be distracted.”

Heidi had no idea what to make of that. It had come out of the blue and left her abnormally speechless. She managed a strangled “What?”

Blake knelt down and forced her to look him in the eyes. “Are you cold?”

She could say no. If anyone else had asked, she'd say no, but she'd run all the way to the waterfall and had been sweating before having to take off her sweatshirt. Not only did the tank top provide minimal coverage to her skin, it was also damp. She'd been avoiding asking anyone for a sweater because she didn't want to be seen as weak. Blake held her gaze, waiting for her to answer. And he'd already proven how good he was at knowing when she was shading the truth.

She sighed. “Yes. I am.”

He pulled off his jacket and dropped it to the ground. His T-shirt lifted as he pulled the sweatshirt over his head and gave Heidi a view of an impressive set of abs. “Here,” he said. He tugged his T-shirt down and handed her the sweatshirt. “It will swallow you whole, but it should keep you warm.”

“You'll be cold now.” His sweatshirt was a nice thick fleece. His jacket wasn't much more than a windbreaker.

“I'll be fine.” He shrugged into his coat.

She hesitated.

“Do you need some help putting it on?” He grinned.

“No. Thanks.” She slid the fleece over her head and relaxed into the warmth. Her body had tensed from the chill in the air and now it wanted to go limp. The scent of him was everywhere. In her hair, wafting into her face every time she moved.

She liked it.

Maybe too much.

She might need to find a different sweater.

Blake stood close. “Better?”

“Much. Thank you.”

Blake stuck his hands in his jacket pocket and looked around the scene. “Now what?”

“Things are about to get messy.”

“About to?”

Good point. “I have to call Uncle Frank and tell him Kovac blew himself to bits. Which means we have nothing to go on in terms of figuring out what he was after. We will try to take his wife in for questioning, but she'll lawyer up.”

“There's nothing you can do to keep her?”

“Unless we find proof of something in the home, or find some way to connect her to his activities...and let's not forget we have no proof of any illegal activity on his part...then we won't be able to charge her. The Kovacs don't do jail time.”

She turned and studied the scene. Something flitted through her brain, begging for attention, but she couldn't quite grasp it. She closed her eyes and perched on a fallen log. She'd learned if she took the time to replay an event, clues popped up that her subconscious had recorded, but she hadn't noticed in the moment.

Max asked Blake what was going on.

“I don't know. She's in the middle of a conversation and just drops. Is she okay?”

Max chuckled. “Watch and learn. Knowing Heidi, she'll have solved the case by the time she stands up.”

Heidi tuned them out again. Replayed what she'd seen, heard, felt, smelled. She dismissed everything personal, her fear of being too late and her relief when she wasn't, and focused on what she'd seen.

Markos had waited a long time to make his move. He'd been in one spot for at least fifteen minutes. His delay had given her time to arrive and warn Blake.

Markos hadn't shot Blake. It would have been the one sure way to kill him. Making it look like an accident wasn't a bad idea, but if you needed him dead, why not choose the option that would guarantee it?

She focused in on Markos's face. He'd shot at her, but either he was a lousy shot or— “He didn't want to kill me.”

“What?” Blake and Max spoke in unison and when Heidi opened her eyes she found them hovering over her.

She held up a hand and closed her eyes again. His face. The delay in killing Blake. After Blake had kicked his gun away, he'd lain there, looking at the two of them, and then he'd said he was sorry. Sorry for what? For all the trouble? For what he'd already done? For trying to kill them?

A mobster who's sorry for his actions? That did not fit the profile unless—

“Z?” Max's worried voice broke her out of her contemplation. “Throw us a bone.”

“I don't have it yet.”

“Make it snappy. We're dying here.”

“Okay, but I'm thinking out loud.” She sat on the ground and crossed her legs. Blake and Max joined her.

“We don't know why Kovac came here, but we know there has to be a reason. A criminal reason. He moves south with no one but his wife, and gets a job? No way a Kovac would do that without an ulterior motive. We've got no idea what his plan is, but we know whatever it is, he—or maybe the senior Kovacs—decided the Harrisons were a liability. So they start trying to pick them off.”

“I'd agree with all of that,” Max said.

“But I think we have to acknowledge the attempts on Blake's life have been pretty pitiful.”

Blake huffed. “To you, maybe. I'm the one about to get a frequent-patient card for the ER.”

She had to smile. Leave it to Blake to bring some levity into the situation. “I mean, they've all been halfhearted. Running you off the road, the Mountain Dew, the pallets—they seem like the kind of attempts someone would choose if they wanted to be able to say they'd tried to kill you, but hadn't succeeded. Those attempts gave you a solid chance of surviving.”

Max and Blake didn't look convinced.

“That peanut move he made on Caroline wasn't halfhearted.” Max shook his head.

“Wasn't it? He could have assumed she would eat it in the presence of others, people who could help her—likely at work, a place where there are multiple EpiPens on hand.”

“I don't know, Z.”

“I'm not saying the attempts weren't legit, but they don't fit the way the Kovacs operate. If they want you dead, you die. You don't get your Mountain Dew poisoned. You get an injection of something that does the job. You don't have pallets fall on you. You get jumped in an alley and it looks like a robbery gone bad.”

She pointed to the waterfall. “Even this morning. He waited. Do you see? He watched Blake for fifteen minutes. Anytime in that fifteen minutes, he could have shot him, or rushed him and knocked him over, and there would have been nothing we could do about it.”

“Are you saying he waited for you to get there? Because that's bad. That means he knows you're not a quality consultant.” Max shifted on the ground. “What if he knows who you really are, and your history with the Kovac family?”

“There is no way he could know who I am, remember?”

She looked at Blake. “After the Thompsons died, the person I was died, too. Uncle Frank worked up a brand-new identity. The public record for Heidi Zimmerman barely exists until I entered Virginia Tech. There's no way the Kovacs could have made the connection.”

She turned back to Max. “But that's not where I was going with this. Hear me out.” She hopped up and walked over to where she'd first seen Markos.

“Markos stood here, watching. He had a gun and a baseball bat. He kept shaking his head and there was no bloodlust. There was nothing but sadness on his face. I had a perfect view. This was a man doing what he had to do, not what he wanted to do.”

She shifted her position again. “Then, after I'd shot him, he lay here, watching us. He took his time.” She tried to move her hand at the same pace Markos did in her memory. “He showed me his hand. If he'd acted quickly, he could have blown all three of us to bits before we had a chance to run, but he didn't. It's like he wanted us to have time to get out of the way.”

She could tell Blake and Max were following her logic now.

“Guys,” she said, “I'm not saying Kovac wasn't up to his neck in all of this, but I am saying there is no way he was calling the shots. He hasn't been in charge. He's been the foot soldier. And whoever is running this show is still out there. And they aren't done.”

FIFTEEN

B
lake didn't see why this was a shock. “I thought we knew he wasn't in charge. You said the Kovac family was behind it.”

“Big picture, yes. But the day in, day out operation should have been his all the way. Like a test. The younger family members try their hands at all sorts of criminal activities as a way to prove themselves, but it's compartmentalized. The family wouldn't risk being exposed,” Max said.

“And if any of the other Kovacs had been calling the shots, you'd be dead.” Heidi said the words with such matter-of-fact certainty it chilled Blake to his core. With what he now knew about Heidi's history, he couldn't doubt she knew what she was talking about.

“How much danger is my family in?”

Max and Heidi shared a long look. He'd seen it before. They'd been partners so long, they had a way of communicating without words. He didn't like it. If he wanted to be fair, he'd admit that he didn't like it because it made him jealous. Because he wanted to know her that well. And he didn't want anyone else to.

He was in no mood to be fair. “Would you two stop talking without talking and tell me what you're thinking?”

Max sighed. “We'll increase security. The Kovacs don't play fair. Any member of your family—pretty much anyone you care about—could be a target. Your entire family will need to stay close and cooperate with our agents fully. We wouldn't want anyone wandering off into the woods and making themselves a prime target, now, would we?”

Blake raised his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, I didn't realize it would be dangerous. I needed to think and...” He caught Heidi's eye, caught the lift of her eyebrow, caught the flicker of understanding. Maybe they'd starting talking without talking, too.

He liked that.

Max didn't seem to notice. “I get it. But you know what's going on and you still didn't think this would be a problem.”

“I've been coming up here on Saturday mornings for years.” Since Lana left. When Maggie was a baby his trips to the rock had helped him hold on to his sanity.

Heidi and Max looked at each other.

And there they went again. “What did I say?”

Heidi's face wrinkled in confusion. She was so cute when she was puzzling over something. “You come up here every Saturday?”

“Usually.”

“How did I not know this?” Heidi frowned at him. Interesting. Was she upset about not knowing because of a professional concern, or a personal one?

“What do you do with Maggie?” Max asked.

“Maggie goes to one set of grandparents or the other most Friday nights. I get up around five and come up here for an hour, then I go back and start my day.”

“I still don't understand...”

“What?”

“Why didn't I know?”

“I didn't realize I needed to run my daily schedule past you.”

“You don't.”

Ha. Her expression said something different.

Max placed a hand on Heidi's arm. “What we're trying to figure out is why we didn't know and Markos did.”

Heidi leaned toward him. “Have you mentioned this routine to friends, coworkers? Is it reasonable to think Markos would have known you make this a habit?”

“It's not a secret. In fact, we talked about it the other day. One of the guys said he never goes anywhere without his phone and I said I always come up here on Saturday without mine. This is where I unplug, unwind. Mark could have overheard.”

“You come up here without your phone?” He could hear fear in Heidi's words.

“I did before you came along. Since I met you, I keep my phone with me at all times.”

Heidi let out a sigh. “Good. Please don't go anywhere without your phone. Ever.”

“Worried you might lose me?”

He meant the words as a joke, but the worry in Heidi's face told him she hadn't taken it that way.

“Hey.” He reached for her arm and she let him pull her toward him. He didn't wrap his arms around her, although he wanted to. Instead, he rubbed her arms from shoulder to elbow. “You are stuck with me for life. Get used to it.”

“Whoa, dude.” Max stepped away with a laugh. “Might not be the best time to propose.” He walked off chuckling. Heidi laughed, but her eyes narrowed as she looked into his.

“We've discussed this before. The more you get to know me, the more you'll wish you could get away. When this case is over, you'll be so relieved to be rid of me you won't know how to handle it.”

He squeezed her biceps and pulled her closer. “I will never want to be rid of you, so quit trying to scare me off. It hasn't worked yet and it's not going to.”

She stood a foot away, eyes wide and vulnerable, mouth so kissable. All he'd have to do is take one step to close the distance—

“Z, get over here!”

One of the agents who'd descended on his mountain called to her. “Look at this.”

Blake followed. At some point, he assumed they would make him leave, but as long as he could stay close to Heidi, he would.

“What do you make of this?” The agent pointed to a melted and scorched piece of plastic.

Heidi knelt beside it. “Got some clean gloves?”

The agent pulled a pair from his jacket. She put one on, and used the other to pick up the plastic. A few wires protruded. The look on her face told him she did not like what she was seeing.

“Looks like a cell-phone trigger to me,” Heidi said.

“Me, too, but I can't figure out how it would have worked. He would have had to have the number open and be ready to hit the send button, but you said he touched his jacket and blew up.”

“That's what happened.”

“So—”

“He didn't trigger the bomb. Someone else did.”

* * *

Three hours later, Heidi sat on a mossy log several hundred yards from the scene. She would have preferred to sun herself like the lizard she'd seen earlier on Blake's rock. Cute little thing, soaking up the rays. Oblivious to the tragedy unfolding all around him.

She dropped her head into her trembling hands. She'd almost lost him. The Kovacs had tried to take someone she loved. Again. And there was no denying that Blake was someone she loved. She couldn't take back her feelings, even if she could never act on them. Blake Harrison had captured her heart and now the Kovacs had a new weapon in their arsenal.

Because she would do anything to keep Blake Harrison alive.

Even if she couldn't have him, she would need to know he was alive and happy. She needed to know places like HPI existed, where good people got up and went to work and made quality products and paid their employees an honest living and delivered what they promised to their customers.

If the Kovacs thought she was going to sit back and watch them destroy another family, they'd messed with the wrong girl.

Again.

She'd get those—

“Hey.”

She started at the voice. “Uncle Frank? What are you doing here?”

“Heard you got in a shoot-out, threw in a little hand-to-hand combat, a suicide bombing and then caught on fire. Seemed like it might be worth a personal visit.” He gave her a grim smile. “How you holding up?”

“I'm going to catch them.”

“Not what I asked you.”

“That's my answer.”

He shook his head. “You are the most stubborn woman alive.”

“I've already had my freak-out, if that's what you want to know. My clothes caught on fire, and I think my hair is singed. I smell like smoke and flesh. I'm starving, and the more I think about it, the more I think I just watched a man get killed.”

“You don't think he detonated the bomb himself?”

“I think he knew what would happen and I think he was buying us time to get away from him, but I think someone else detonated it.”

“Then why didn't they act sooner and finish you off?”

“I'm guessing they had a cell-phone trigger and they had ears but no eyes.”

Uncle Frank leaned against a nearby tree. “I'm worried about you.”

He should have been, but she couldn't tell him that. She focused on keeping her face and eyes clear of any of the telltale emotions roiling inside. Her anger at the Kovacs. Her frustration at Markos. And especially the troubling and intense emotions surging through her with every thought of Blake. Emotions she'd have to put aside until this was over.

Uncle Frank pulled out his phone. “TacOps says the Kovac residence remains still. I've already ordered a team to go in and figure out what he was up to.”

“There's no telling what they'll find.”

“I agree. If the wife is alive, she'll be taken into protective custody, regardless of whether or not she wants to be. We have to question Mrs. Kovac, and I want you to do it.”

“Me?” Heidi had run her share of interrogations, but she'd expected Uncle Frank would want to talk to Katarina Kovac himself. Or at least to keep Heidi from talking to her.

“I know you have a lot riding on this.” He threw a look in Blake's direction and Heidi pretended not to notice the implication. “But you're the best one for it. You aren't needed up here anymore. Get down the mountain, clean up and prepare to talk to her. I'll let you know when the team enters their home.”

“Thanks.”

“And, Heidi?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'm glad you're okay.”

* * *

Heidi stood in her bathroom and pulled her hair over her shoulder. Yep. Singed. As bad as this day had been, at least her hair hadn't burned off this time.

Although it had been close enough.

“Z!”

Max's yell came from downstairs. Blake must have let him in. Or maybe he'd let himself in.

“One second.” So much for cleaning up. She'd have to settle for fresh clothes. She ducked into the bedroom and pulled a clean tank top over her head, then grabbed a sweater out of her dresser before dashing down the stairs.

She noted the surprised look on Max's face, and the appreciative uptick of Blake's brows. She kept giving him opportunities to be disgusted by the sight of her, but he kept refusing to be disgusted. If anything, he seemed more interested than ever.

“Katarina Kovac is in the wind.” Max's words yanked her thoughts back to the case.

“What?”

“Either she's dead or she's been in on it from the beginning. If she's bolted, she'll be in the Caribbean or Europe by tomorrow.”

Heidi looked at Max. “Or?”

Max grimaced. “I don't think it's safe to rule anything out right now.”

“Rule out what?” Blake's eyes darted between her face and Max's.

“That maybe she plans to finish the job,” Max said.

“Or that she's been in charge from the beginning.” Heidi's brain spun with the implications. “We need to rethink everything.”

“I'm going back up the mountain to check on the forensics guys,” Max said. “Let me know if you find anything.”

Heidi pulled the sofa back from the coffee table and pried two floorboards loose, revealing a safe.

“When did you install that?” Blake pointed to the floor.

“I didn't.” She opened the safe. “I found it my second day here when I dropped a pen under the sofa. Noticed the loose boards and found this little hidey-hole.” She pulled out a stack of files. “You didn't know about it?”

“No.”

“When this is over, we'll have to get the TacOps guys to come scan the floors and walls. Who knows what your grandparents stashed around here?” She pulled out the last file and Blake slid the sofa back over the opening. “For now, let's figure out what the Kovacs were up to.”

Five hours and a large meat-lovers' pizza later, Heidi tossed a stack of invoices on the sofa. “These can go in the ‘appear to be harmless' column.”

The “appear to be harmless” column was long.

The “might be something” column included two shipments lost in a trucking accident a week before Heidi's arrival at HPI and one order from a client who had paid but never provided delivery information.

That one had to mean something—they just weren't sure what. Blake had been poring over the file for the past fifteen minutes while finishing off another slice of pizza and the last of a two-liter Coke. Heidi couldn't resist watching him. He had an array of papers on his left and held a spreadsheet in his right hand.

Father, help me.

She loved him.

She shouldn't. He deserved someone who didn't have her memories. Someone who worried more about fashion trends than political climates. Someone who lived here and wanted to live here forever.

Well, the last part applied, but it didn't matter. She had a job to do that would take her away from here. Did he realize it was all ending? That the days of Saturday tea parties and Sunday church and Monday mornings in the office were already over?

He glanced up and caught her staring. A slow smile tinged with sadness spread across his face. He knew.

He put the papers down and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands. “You're distracting me.”

She should be sorry.

She wasn't.

His Adam's apple bobbed and his thumbs made small circles around each other. Was he going to acknowledge what they both knew? What would she do if he did?

His mouth twisted into a grimace and he picked up the spreadsheet again. “I think there's something here.” He pointed to a line he'd highlighted in yellow. “What if this order was never real? What if the company that ordered it didn't exist? What if the Kovacs ordered these bottles?”

“Wouldn't you have noticed?”

“Not necessarily.”

“No way. You know everything going on.”

He acknowledged the truth of her remark with a wink and a shrug before he handed her the spreadsheet. “Look at the order date.”

“October 4?”