Unleashed (9 page)

The young blond receptionist smiled and nodded at Caroline. “I’ll let Ms. Weller know you’re here,” she said. As she murmured into the phone, Danny caught her sidelong look of interest. Professional to the core, she quickly hid it as soon as Danny caught her staring.

Within a minute, a small, whip thin woman charged into the lobby. Radiating with energy, Rachael Weller was a blond whirlwind in a designer suit. “Caroline,” she said, in a tone that had earned her the nickname “the terrier” in the press. “Good to see you. Keep your coat on,” she said when Caroline started to remove her trench. “We’re going out today to celebrate. Don’t know if you heard, but I won a big one this week.” Rachael smirked at her own joke. Caroline would have had to be under a rock not to have heard about the big win.

Rachael waved her hand and the receptionist jumped up to retrieve a black winter coat from a coat closet.

“Congratulations,” Caroline said. “I would love to help you celebrate, but I want to make sure we—”

Rachael cut her off, raising her hand as she shrugged into her own coat. “We have plenty of time. I cleared my afternoon for you. And don’t worry, lunch is off the clock.” She straightened her lapels and took her purse back from the receptionist. She looked up at Danny as though she’d just noticed him.

“Who are you?” she demanded, a faint frown line showing between her eyebrows, the only mark on her otherwise unnaturally smooth face.

“Dan Taggart, Gemini Securities,” he said, offering his hand.

“Danny’s a private investigator,” Caroline added.

Rachael’s gaze snapped back to Caroline. “I hire my own investigators.”

“I know, but Danny’s an old friend,” Caroline said carefully.

Hm. Not exactly the way he would have characterized their relationship.

She continued, “If I’m going to have to air all my dirty secrets, I thought it would be better to work with someone I know.”

What kind of dirty secrets was she referring to, Danny wondered.

“Taggart, Taggart, now why does that name sound familiar?” Rachael said as she nodded for him to punch the down button for the elevator.

The bell dinged and they stepped into the elevator. Danny stayed silent, waiting for Rachael to figure it out as Caroline shifted uncomfortably.

“Your mother,” Rachael said bluntly. “That was her body up in the mudslide, wasn’t it?”

Danny nodded.

“Big case. Lots of media coverage when she first went missing. I’m sorry for your loss,” Rachael said, barking out the condolences without a hint of emotion. “I imagine you must be working closely with the police to find out what happened to her. Must be quite a distraction.” Danny didn’t miss the look she shot Caroline. Rachael was used to being in charge of her client’s cases in every aspect. She didn’t like that Caroline had hired him on her own.

They stepped into the building’s main lobby, heavy on marble and chrome. Rachael’s heels snapped along the floor as she greeted the security guard with a nod. “You were involved in the Van Weldt scandal too, weren’t you?” Rachael said as they stepped onto the sidewalk.

A couple of months ago, Harold Van Weldt, the Chairman of Van Weldt jewelers, had hired Gemini to keep an eye on his black sheep niece, Alyssa Miles. Alyssa just happened to be one of the most popular tabloid targets of the last decade, so when Derek, who had been assigned to the job, discovered a plot to kill Alyssa and a blood diamond scandal that brought down the company, Gemini’s name had ended up all over the news.

Danny nodded. “That was mostly my brother Derek though.”

“And you were involved in the Kramer kidnapping case weren’t you?” Again, Danny nodded.

“I would have killed to get Jerry Kramer as a client, but he went with Morton and Foster,” Rachael sighed. “I know I could have gotten him a better deal.”

The way Danny saw it, Jerry got off pretty fuckin’ easy with the plea bargain he’d struck. Instead of spending the rest of his life in prison without parole, he would most likely be out in ten, maybe sooner with good behavior.

“We’re going to Postrio,” Rachael said as she turned right and headed up the block. “They serve a delightful steamed halibut. Quite a body count you’ve amassed in your latest cases,” she said, arching an eyebrow at Danny as he and Caroline followed her up the block.

Danny was getting whiplash from the rapid changes in subject. “Nothing like when I was in the Special Forces, ma’am,” he deadpanned.

Rachael gave a little sniff. “You better watch it with him, Caroline. This one’s dangerous.”

“You have no idea,” Caroline muttered.

Danny didn’t know what it was that made the hairs stiffen on the back of his neck and raise every sense to high alert. All he knew was that one second he was striding down the street to keep up with Rachael’s fast clip, and the next the air was charged with a current, everything in him screaming that something bad was about to go down.

The last time he’d had this feeling was in his last tour in Iraq, when he’d narrowly avoided getting blown in half with an IED. Paying attention then had saved his life. He wasn’t about to ignore it now.

The roar of an engine. Screaming pedestrians as a mammoth black SUV blew through the crosswalk.

He grabbed Caroline, ignoring her startled cry. “Get down, now!”

Heavy bass music boomed. Danny pushed Caroline into an open doorway, shoved her to the floor and covered her body with his own. Screams, gunshots, shattering glass. The squeal of tires followed by the engine’s fading roar.

Danny was aware of gasps, cries, panicked calls of “are you all right?” But they were drowned out by his keen focus on the woman under him. He could feel Caroline shaking, every sinew vibrating with fear. He pushed away and gripped her by the shoulders, frantic to make sure she was okay. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” he murmured over and over, running his hands over her, lifting her arms, straightening out her legs as he reassured himself that was true.

Her face was a mask of fear, her skin leached of color, lips blue and shaking. The only spot of color on her face was a bead of blood on her cheekbone. A shard of glass had hit her when the front window was shot out. He reached out to brush it away with his thumb and noticed his hand was shaking.

That single drop of blood shook him to his core and nausea rose in his throat, his reaction as bad as when he’d seen his friends shot in front of him.

Still acting on instinct, he pulled her to him, trying to infuse her with his warmth. She wound her arms around him and buried her face against his chest. He cupped the back of her head and buried his face against her hair, trying to slow his heartbeat as he felt hers pounding against his chest. He pulled her to her feet, his sole focus on getting her out of there, getting her someplace safe.

He shoved the emotion back. He needed to keep a clear head, keep his focus on the mission at hand.

“Call 911,” someone shouted. “People have been shot!”

Sirens were already sounding in the distance. Caroline pulled slightly away. “Where’s Rachael?” she asked, then uttered a sharp cry when she spotted the small blond figure crumpled on the sidewalk, lying in a rapidly growing pool of blood.

Danny uttered a curse and kept his arm tightly around Caroline’s shoulder as they hurried to where Rachael lay.

Caroline fell to her knees and called her name. Danny stayed her hand when she went to touch her. “Don’t.” Rachael had taken several shots to the chest. Her eyes were wide in shock, her face chalk white as a trickle of blood flowed from the corner of her mouth. He reached out, felt the faint flutter of a pulse. She was alive, but barely. He’d be surprised if she made it to the hospital.

“Oh my God,” Caroline looked up at him, her dark eyes frantic. “This was for me. I know it.”

Rachael Weller had made a lot of enemies in her career, defending everyone from mob types to drug dealers with close ties to international crime syndicates. The rapper she’d gotten off the day before was known to have gang ties, and his alleged victim was part of a rival group.

Still, he couldn’t brush off Caroline’s fears. James had been murdered and she’d received a threatening note just two days ago. Maybe someone was trying to silence Caroline before she found out the truth. An ambulance careened to a stop next to the curb, followed almost immediately by two police cars.

Danny’s arm tightened around Caroline. Any lingering indecision he had about helping her disappeared in an instant. If someone was out to get Caroline, Danny wasn’t stopping until he found out who. And why.

Kaylee flinched as the needle sank into the vein in the crook of her elbow. After spending a third day locked in the bedroom with her roommate, early this morning she was pulled out of bed by a short Mexican woman and led downstairs to a room off the kitchen. It looked like it used to be a pantry, but it was set up with a desk and chairs, and a metal filing cabinet. On the floor was a big blue cooler.

Kaylee was shoved into a chair, her arm pulled out to lay across the desk in front of her. Another woman held her arm down while the Mexican woman plunged the needle into her arm.

“What the fuck?” Kaylee yelled as two, then three vials were filled with crimson liquid.

“Hold still,” the first woman snapped in heavily accented English, “or we drug you again.”

Kaylee sat still for the moment, not wanting to risk being knocked out again. She needed all of her wits if she was going to find a way out of there.

“Okay you answer some questions now, okay?” The second woman said as she capped the vials of Kaylee’s blood and labeled them, just like you would if you were sending them off to a lab.

“What are you doing with those?” Kaylee asked, the creep factor ratcheting up another hundred notches as she watched the woman stash the vials in a cooler already filled with similar looking tubes.

The woman scowled, didn’t answer, and pulled out a clipboard. “When you have your last period?”

Kaylee wasn’t sure she heard right. “My what?”

“Period!” the woman shouted. “When you bleed last?”

Kaylee’s face flooded with heat. “A week ago.”

“You regular?” the woman asked.

Kaylee frowned in confusion.

The woman muttered and shook her head impatiently. “You bleed same time all the time. Regular?”

“Yeah.”

The woman marked something down on her clipboard and conversed with the other in rapid Spanish. Kaylee had only taken a couple years in high school, but she recognized at least one phrase.
Una semana
. One week.

One week till what?

“You ever be pregnant? Have abortion?”

“No.” She didn’t think her scare last spring, when she’d sweated her period a full two weeks before it came, really mattered. “Why do you care?”

No answer. The first woman slipped her paper off the clipboard and filed it in a big metal cabinet in the corner of the room, while the other motioned for Kaylee to get up. She stood from the table and did a quick look around, wondering if there was a way she could get past them. They were older, heavyset, probably couldn’t move very fast. If Kaylee made a run for it she doubted they could catch her.

She was just about to make a break for it when the creepy yellow eyed guy who’d paid Ericka for her appeared in the doorway, flanked by two guys.

He gripped a short brunette girl by the arm. Around the same age as Kaylee, the girl would have been cute if she hadn’t looked like she was about to shit her pants in fear. He said something to one of the nurses, the Spanish too rapid for Kaylee to understand.

“
Si
, Senor Gates,” the woman replied, and went to retrieve another syringe.

“What’s going on?” the girl cried, her dark eyes beseeching Kaylee, as though she could help her. “What did they do to you? Do you—” her words cut off with a cry, the sharp smack of a hand on flesh filling the small room.

“You shut the fuck up,” the yellow eyed man said through clenched teeth. “You talk when I tell you to talk. Otherwise keep your mouth shut. That goes for you too,” he said, turning to Kaylee. She took an instinctive step back, her arms folding in front of her as he raked her with a cold, snakelike stare. He spoke to the women again in Spanish.

Una Semana, the women said again. One week.

Kaylee swallowed back the nausea bubbling in her throat. Something was going down in a week. But Kaylee didn’t plan to be there when it happened.

There were many ways to make money off a woman’s body, and in the course of his career, Gates had found every one.

His real name was Esteban Lucero, but he’d earned the nickname Gates because he was the gatekeeper to the West Coast. Drugs, girls, weapons—in the course of his career he’d risen in power until he controlled some aspect of the distribution channels. He kept his base in California’s capital city of Sacramento, where he’d emigrated from Venezuela when he was eight. From that central point he controlled access as far east as Vegas, as far south as San Diego, as far north as Seattle, and every major city in between.

The blonde was perfect for their purposes, he reflected as he watched a guard drag her back down the hall. Lately they’d been coming up short on the Caucasian girls. Too many girls in varying shades of brown and yellow coming over the borders and into the ports. The best were the Eastern European girls, as beautiful as they were desperate to escape their countries in hopes of a better situation in the states. But his last shipment had gotten fucked when that fucking Serb in Chicago had double-crossed him.

Gates would take care of him soon enough, but in the meantime they needed more white girls to fill the backlog of interest they already had. Taking American runaways wasn’t his favorite thing. They were more likely to have people looking for them, and there was always the risk of them spilling out their sob story to a John once they were turned out. Luckily most men who visited Gates’s girls in their various locations weren’t likely to risk their own necks going to the police on behalf of some whore. But just in case, Gates had those girls watched extra closely.

The blonde was a little young, with her long skinny legs and narrow hips, but she looked healthy enough to survive pregnancy and childbirth. Then once she’d crapped out a couple of babies, Gates would turn her out with the others. He’d get another five years out of her, easy.