Reluctant Witness (48 page)

The man who appeared before me looked the
same, right down to the smooth smile and twinkle in his eyes, but
this time I wasn’t fooled. I knew I was seeing the devil
incarnate.

“Jared!” I gasped.

“Here she is at last!” he grinned. “Not a
moment too soon. How long I have waited for our reunion, Margot.
Please come in, my darling.”

I froze, suddenly terrified at the thought of
entering this condo, never to emerge alive. How would Terry and
Nancy come to my rescue if they didn’t know where I was? Resisting,
I tried to back away, but a hand on my back shoved me through the
open door.

“In you go,” said the phony heart attack
victim. There was -- that phrase again. It was the wrong thing to
say to me, especially after all those self-defense lessons.

“Hell, no!”

The first thing I did was punch Jared in the
throat. The second thing I did was elbow the man behind me in the
solar plexus. I didn’t bother to stick around to check on their
injuries. I ran as fast as I could, taking the stairs down. My plan
was to run back to the pool, where the lunch crowd was hanging out.
I had seen a couple of burly men lounging around there.

Jared caught me by the hair as I ran out of
the building, entangling the long strands in his angry grasp.

“Not so fast, Margot!” he growled. My right
arm was shoved up behind my back while he yanked at the watch on my
left. “Give that to me!”

I pushed myself away, not caring that the
Citizen Chronograph was no longer attached to my arm, and as I did,
the other man caught up with us.

“Now, boss?” he asked, out of breath. He held
onto me as Jared examined the back of the watch.

“Son of a....Where’s my damn watch,
Margot?”

“Your watch?” I replied, confused.

“The one I gave you? Where the hell is
it?”

“That’s it!”

“No, it’s not. See?” He held out the back of
the watch for me to see. “Not my engraving! How am I supposed to
collect my money from the bank without the account number? What did
you and your friends do with the real watch?”

“I...I don’t know what you’re talking about,”
I cried, as the second man began to apply pressure. There was a
bone-searing pain as he lifted my arm in an effort to dislocate my
shoulder.

“Where is it?” Jared hissed, his face just
inches from mine.

“I swear to you I don’t know!”

“Shall I kill her now?” asked the man holding
me.

“No, you bloody idiot. I need that watch!
We’ll take her back to your place and she can make a phone call.
We’ll see whether your friends really care about you, Margot. It’s
time to trade your life for the watch.”

My feet were heavy on the stairs as I
reluctantly climbed to the second floor. With my hands restrained
behind my back, I realized those self-defense lessons weren’t
enough to save me from two assailants. Would Jeff return the watch
or let me die? What if Jared double-crossed him and killed me
anyway?

“You have your knife with you,
Kornbloom?”

“Always, boss. Why?”

“We’re going to put her on the phone to her
friends, and when she’s talking to them, I want you to use it, so
they know we mean business.”

“My pleasure.” Kornbloom leaned over my
shoulder, his menacing lips close to my ear. “And I do mean
pleasure.”

Once inside the foyer, the door closed again
and I stood quaking. My wrists, no longer restrained, hurt like
crazy. I could see the telltale signs of bruises emerging my
damaged skin. The azure blue ocean, visible through the open
sliding glass doors of the living room, shimmered in the noonday
sun, as if it were another perfect day in paradise, but I knew
better. I was in serious trouble.

“What’s your boyfriend’s number?” Jared
demanded. I started to answer just as an unexpected movement
captured my attention. We weren’t alone in the condo. There was a
furtive figure in the kitchen, hiding below the counter. What’s
more, I didn’t think my kidnappers knew that.

“I’m only going to ask you one more time,
Margot. What’s the freaking number?” Jared’s voice was high-pitched
and edgy, suggesting he was close to his breaking point. Had he so
counted on recovering that money that he was now desperate enough
to do just about anything to get his hands on it?

I could see Kornbloom’s knife in his hand.
But I could also see what the men did not. Silent figures moved
into place behind them; I saw a hand waving frantically in my
direction, motioning me to drop to the floor. I was more than happy
to oblige.

I struck the tile floor hard as I landed, but
I managed to roll at the last second and avoided hitting my
head.

“Hands in the air! Hands in the air!”

“FBI!”

“Lock your thumbs and put your hands on your
heads! Do it now!”

With so many people in such a small, confined
space, the shouts reverberated with a deafening cacophony,
especially when all those shod feet rushed in. I lay there, afraid
to move, as federal agents stepped around me and over me. Minutes
later, I felt myself being gently lifted to my feet in time to see
Jared led out of the front door by a team of five federal agents.
Kornbloom followed, accompanied by another four.

“It’s all over,” announced a cheerful voice.
I didn’t recognize the stranger, but he wore an FBI vest. “How are
you...in one piece?”

I nodded, still terrified. Nancy and Terry
came through the door, satisfied smiles on their faces as they
greeted me.

“What do you think, kid? Are we going to
celebrate tonight?” Nancy wanted to know. She threw her arms around
me and gave me a big hug as I burst into tears. “You were great,
just great!”

“We’re proud of you,” Terry announced,
leaning in, patting me on the back. “You did everything right.”

More people poured into the foyer, including
a familiar face.

“Jeff!”

“Are you okay? Did they hurt you?” I felt
those strong arms wrap around me, tasted those warm, inviting lips
on mine. “You were absolutely amazing!”

“You were here the whole time?” I sobbed,
disbelieving. “You never left?”

“I promised you a great life, Marigold. I
intend to make good on that promise.”

“After that, you’d better!” I told him.
“Don’t ever do that to me again, Jefferson Cornwall!”

Hours later, after a very long meeting in
Jacksonville to brief the agents on the details of the case, Jeff
and the others took me back to the condo. There was one very
important question I had for the group.

“You all knew Jared was alive and you didn’t
tell me?”

Chapter Forty
Three

As I gazed around at the concerned faces, I
saw the barely visible flinch of guilt pass through the crowd. One
by one, they shifted in their seats, shuffling their limbs, as if
to shrug it off. “When Jared and Kornbloom grabbed me, I thought
you had no idea where I was. I was scared to death that was going
to be the end of me!”

“I can explain,” Jeff told me. “We weren’t
keeping secrets from you, love. We were keeping them from the bad
guys.”

“I don’t understand. Why couldn’t you just
tell me Jared was still alive?”

“Remember the other night, when you thought
you had a bad dream about Jared being angry that you kissed me? And
you later found your computer had been remotely turned on?”

“I really did hear him talking to me?” I
wondered.

“Oh, yeah!” Rocky nodded. “You heard him
alright. He was video chatting with you while you slept.”

“No wonder it felt so real. I thought I was
losing my mind,” I sighed. Nancy sat down at the table and shook
her head, as if she didn’t believe it herself.

“Of all the cases I’ve ever worked, this one
takes the cake for sheer chutzpah,” she told me. “You have to
remember, Marigold, he was supposed to be your dead fiancé. He
wanted everyone to believe it was your fault someone murdered him.
He needed you to feel guilty you were falling in love with Jeff and
he needed Jeff to suspect you were up to no good. You had to get
the blame for what happened to your WitSec handlers, so no one
would figure out he was still alive and go looking for him. It was
such a convoluted plot, the United States Marshals Service fell for
it hook, line, and sinker.”

“We almost did, too,” Terry admitted. “That
bastard might have succeeded if Nance and I hadn’t spent all this
time with you. We were able to vouch for you.”

“Jared spied on you every chance he got; he
dug through your computer to check on everything you did,” Tom told
me. “You have to remember that he was in hiding, and that meant he
had plenty of time on his hands.”

“I don’t understand. Why didn’t you stop him?
Why didn’t you just turn him over to the FBI?”

“We needed him to believe he was safe,” Tom
reminded me, “so he would come out of hiding and we could catch
him. And we couldn’t afford to tip him off, in case he hired more
help. As long as Spears thought that everyone believed he was dead,
he could remain a ghost in the shadows and haunt you. That way, he
was comfortable, thinking he had all the bases covered.”

“Remember when the hit woman demanded your
phone at the Gilded Nest?” Jeff asked me.

“Yes. She tossed it into the bushes. It had
all my information on it.”

“Philomena arranged for a couple of New York
state troopers to retrieve it. It was your saving grace, Marigold,
when you were under suspicion. They checked your phone records,
your emails, even your Internet activity. That’s how the FBI found
out Jared had cloned that phone of yours and was using it to set
you up.”

“It’s also partly why you came under
suspicion briefly, because people wondered if you two were in
cahoots,” Rocky added. “Once you stopped using the phone after it
was stolen by his hired hit lady, Jared figured you’d be given a
new phone with a new number, but he’d have all your information on
your old phone, and if you were like most people, you’d stick to
familiar passwords. He bided his time until you got the new
laptop.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this was
happening?”

“Two reasons. The FBI needed time to
investigate Jared’s financial dealings, most of which were outside
the United State, and we had to be absolutely sure you were
innocent, because if you were, it was the mother of all set-ups,
and that meant you were in grave danger. It took time to understand
what Jared did to you, love,” Jeff explained, reaching out to me. I
felt the warmth of his hand on mine.

“In other words, I was under surveillance the
whole time?”

“We call it protective surveillance,” Nancy
told me. “We needed to be able to vouch for you, to show people you
were the victim of the crime. Don’t forget, Jared was determined to
implicate, especially once he knew you were in the witness
protection program. He was sure it was his ‘get out of jail free’
card.”

“Holy cow....”

“But the best piece of evidence we had was
that watch of yours. You had no idea Jared had engraved coded
information onto the watch, so you didn’t think twice about handing
it over to us. Better still, you didn’t even know that he put
millions of dollars of real estate in your name all over the world
when he was laundering money,” Tom informed me.

“I own property?” I laughed. “You’ve got to
be kidding! I’ve barely got two nickels to rub together!”

“It turns out that Jared had a girlfriend
named Leesa at the time he met you. He decided you were close
enough in looks that he could use that to his advantage.”

“Yeah,” Rocky agreed, “and that was even
before he knew you were in witness protection. Those trips to
Curaçao? Leesa was holed up in their condo while you were at the
hotel of choice. People in Willemstad got to know her as Marigold
Flowers. She’s been all over the place, pretending to be you.
Cyprus, Isle of Man, even Grand Cayman Island....”

“She did it in a way that made it seemed
credible that you were behind all these things. She and Jared
needed to get the money and run, but they wanted to leave you
holding the bag,” Tom added. “The people they ripped off would hunt
them down if they figured out Jared didn’t really die in
Newport.”

“But, I don’t understand. How could she pose
as me?”

Jeff took over the telling of the story,
detailing the plot. “You got a passport for those trips you took
with Jared. The marshals approved it, using your WitSec alias. Once
that identity was established, Jared stole your passport and had a
duplicate made for Leesa by a very talented forger. She’s been
traveling for the last year as Marigold Flowers. That’s what
confused the marshals. They thought you had lied to them about your
activities.”

“But how could she get in and out of the
United States on my passport?”

“She didn’t have to, because she has her own.
She only used yours for identification purposes in other countries,
in banks, at hotels, and so on. That meant there was never an
official record of you entering or leaving, which made it look like
someone smuggled you in and out of these countries.”

“Shut the front door!” I exclaimed in
disbelief as I sat there stunned, thinking about all the terrible
things that had happened to me ever since I met Jared. “Boy, do I
feel stupid.”

“Well, you’ve got a lot of company in that
club, Marigold.” Nancy shook her head. “That bastard even fooled
federal agents trained to handle cases like this.”

“I still don’t understand what happened in
Newport,” I confessed. “If Jared’s alive, who was murdered in my
condo?”

“Some poor drunk he picked up in Providence.
He promised him a big pay-off. First he asked the victim to
impersonate him for a complete physical. That’s so the new doctor
would be able to verify that he treated Jared Spears. Then, after
breaking the guy’s arm in two places, he shipped him off to the
emergency room for treatment. He needed his corpse to have
verifiable injuries. Who’s going to bother reconstructing a face
destroyed by a shotgun blast if the victim has a broken arm that
was x-rayed by the local hospital and medical records from a
respected physician?”