You Can't Escape

A KILLER’S PLAYGROUND

Jordanna walked to the side of the plot. With the toe of her sneaker, she pressed into the deeper brown dirt. Was something there? Carefully, she leaned closer. Reluctantly, wishing she had gloves, she reached a hand forward and lightly scraped at the edge of the soil.

Shoulders tense, she made a hole about six inches deep and started widening it. There was no marker here. No grave. No casket. But somebody had disturbed the earth and then raked over it, trying to make it appear like the rest. At least that’s what she thought.

When the hole was about a foot deep and the size and shape of a large book, she stopped. There was nothing here and it was someone’s property. Maybe she was disturbing seeds of some kind, flowers planted for the dead.

Sitting back on her haunches, she dusted her hands. It was then she saw the tiny, pearlescent oval. A fingernail. Horror-struck, she nevertheless reached forward and plucked at the nail. Her hand felt a finger and she jerked back on instinct.

The hand that came free was a young woman’s, the painted white fingernails, broken.

A scream bubbled up inside her . . .

Books by Nancy Bush

CANDY APPLE RED

ELECTRIC BLUE

ULTRAVIOLET

WICKED GAME

WICKED LIES

SOMETHING WICKED

WICKED WAYS

UNSEEN

BLIND SPOT

HUSH

NOWHERE TO RUN

NOWHERE TO HIDE

NOWHERE SAFE

SINISTER

I’LL FIND YOU

YOU CAN’T ESCAPE

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

You Can’t Escape

NANCY BUSH

ZEBRA BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

A KILLER’S PLAYGROUND
Books by Nancy Bush
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epilogue
Copyright Page

Prologue

The sleeping girl lay on her back, her hands folded over her chest. She was in her late teens; young to be displaying the affliction, but old enough. She would die soon enough. Peacefully, from the overdose he’d given her. He’d stripped her of her clothes and her unblemished skin shone dove gray in the moonlight filtering through the open barn door.

Glancing outside, he considered how many hours there were till daylight. Not many. He jumped down from the tractor bed and went to the brazier, pulling out the branding iron from white hot coals. The glowing tip drew a bright ribbon of orange through the air as he hurried back and clambered onto the truck bed. Standing above her, he raised up her left hip with the toe of his boot. He wasn’t supposed to touch her more than he had to, even though her flesh called to him. As soon as her buttock was exposed, he pressed the searing metal to her skin and smelled the scent of charred flesh.

Had to make sure she had the devil’s mark.

Jumping back down, he slammed the back of the truck closed, put the branding iron back in the brazier, then doused the coals with a bucket of water. Steam rose in a hiss, clouding his vision for a moment. Of their own volition, his eyes moved to the door at the back of the barn, the one he’d locked with the wooden bar. For a moment he imagined movement behind it, but he knew that was a lie. The devil, teasing him again. He reminded himself not to think about what he’d had to do, but the enormity of everything overcame him and suddenly he was openly crying. Angrily, he swiped at the tears. Sometimes the hard choices had to be made.

Quickly, he returned to the truck’s cab. Firing the engine, he threw the vehicle into gear and it lurched forward. Once outside the barn, he slammed the truck into park, leapt out, then hurried back to pull the barn doors tightly shut before returning to the cab and pressing a toe to the accelerator. The cab jostled and swayed as he bumped over the open field, guided by a path of moonlight that would take her to her final resting place.

Rest in peace
, he thought darkly, knowing there was no hope for those Satan had chosen.

Chapter One

The man in the hospital bed came back to consciousness slowly, aware that he’d been cocooned from sensation for some reason, yet also aware that he could feel a heavy weight of worry bearing down on him.
Where is Maxwell? Where am I?
The question had plagued him, circling his brain and disturbing his sleep, though without any meaning he could understand.

There were voices around him. They rose and fell sporadically. People coming and going, he realized at the same moment he understood he was in a hospital. Nurses, doctors, friends . . . ?

Where is Maxwell?

The explosion
, he remembered suddenly, then realized at the same moment that he’d lost hearing for a while. His ears still rang a little, but at least the problem had apparently been temporary because he could make out words.

He was injured. Numb and dull-feeling. Painkillers, most likely. He’d gone to find . . .
Maxwell
. . . but his brother-in-law hadn’t been there.

The explosion was meant to kill Maxwell
, he thought dully, sorting through the flotsam and jetsam left in his shaken brain. Maxwell, his confidant and informant. His friend. Except Max
wasn’t there.

“Mr. Danziger?” A woman’s voice. One of the nursing staff?

And then another woman, loudly, “Can you hear me?”

Maxwell hadn’t been there because he’d known about the bomb, or whatever it was, and stayed away. It hadn’t been meant for Maxwell, he thought with a jolt. It had been meant for
him
.

And Maxwell had known and had purposely been gone.

“You’re sure he was waking up?” the first woman asked skeptically.

“Yes. His wife wants to see him.”

“Took her long enough to get here.”

Wife?
Carmen?
They’d been emotionally separated for years . . . divorced for months . . . though they’d kept the same residence, mainly so that people—people like
Maxwell
—wouldn’t know that their marriage had crumbled. Carmen’s idea, not his, but he’d been happy to play the charade—anything she wanted—because he just wanted out.

“Mr. Danziger?” the second nurse asked, a bit more urgently. “Your wife’s here to see you.”

“He’s not waking up,” the first said in a superior tone.

Jay Danziger felt himself start to fade away again. Good. He didn’t want to think too much.
Where’s Max?
his mind asked again, but this time he answered himself:
Far away from the accident that was meant to kill you.

When he resurfaced again—opening his eyes before he was awake enough to remind himself he should keep them closed—he didn’t know how much time had passed. A while, for sure. Hazily, he realized a woman was seated beside him, holding his hand. Her palm was sweating.

“Mr. Danziger,” a man’s voice greeted him. With effort, he zeroed in on the voice, moving his eyes carefully, as there was a dull ache in his head, to take in a man in a white lab coat who stood at the foot of the bed, holding a manila file. “We wondered when you would return.”

The man’s name tag read D
R
. W
ILLIAM
C
OCHRAN
. Again, carefully, he swiveled his eyes from the doctor back to the woman seated beside his bed. She was somewhere in her late twenties, he thought, with dark brown hair in a loose bun and tendrils escaping to curl slightly at her temples. It was the same style Carmen wore hers in, most times. No wonder they thought she was his wife. He was pretty sure he’d never laid eyes on her until this moment.

She murmured, “So glad you’re okay, Jay. You had us all worried.”

He thought about saying something, calling her out as a fraud, but held his tongue. Worry was exactly the emotion filling her hazel eyes just now. She was petrified of something, most likely that he would blow her cover because she sure as hell wasn’t Carmen. He didn’t know her from Adam, and the fact that she was impersonating his ex-wife was disturbing, though not full-out alarming, which said something about his confused mental state, he supposed. He should have been thoroughly concerned, especially with the new and ugly realization that Max had meant for him to die. Or had he been warned away? Was that why he wasn’t there? No . . . it didn’t feel like it. Dance sensed he knew something in the deep recesses of his mind, some hidden nugget of truth that escaped him now yet made him question Maxwell’s motives. And if the bomb, or whatever had caused the explosion, hadn’t been meant for him . . . if it had just been some kind of terrible accident that had gone off and sliced up his leg—

Immediately, he glanced down to his left leg. It was wrapped from hip to below his knee. A thigh injury. He had no sensation of pain, though; the meds must be good.

“Max has been asking about you,” the woman holding his hand said, a current of urgency running beneath the words.

Maxwell Saldano. She knows about Max.

Jay “Dance” Danziger had trusted his instincts on numerous occasions and that trust had saved him from all kinds of trauma during the last ten years that he’d worked as an investigative journalist. He trusted them now, so he looked “Carmen” straight in the eye and croaked out, “Take me home.”

Her lips parted. Before she could answer, the doctor inserted, “We need to check some tests. Make sure you’re all right. Surgery went well. A lot of muscle damage that was repaired. As long as there’s nothing unexpected on your MRI, you could get out of here as early as tomorrow.”

“Today,” Dance muttered.

“Well . . . maybe . . .”

“I’m leaving today,” he said positively.

“I’ll check the tests.” The doctor left them, and as soon as Dance was alone with his hand holder, he slid her a silent look.

“Home might not be the safest place,” she said carefully.

She was warning him, in her way, that it wasn’t safe to speak freely. Though they were alone in the room, her gaze shifted toward the open doorway. Maybe there were listening ears just outside the door.

“Where should I go?” he forced out with an effort.

She glanced at him, then down at their still-clasped hands, and shot a quick, darting look back at his eyes before letting her gaze wander away. “I know a place . . .”

“Where?”

“Just somewhere I know.”

“What do I call you?”

She flicked another look toward the outer hallway. “What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.

The meds were fading a little, he thought. He could feel pain knocking at the door, eager to remind him that his leg was in bad shape and his head could hurt a lot more, too. “Well . . . not . . . Carmen . . .”

He sensed, then, too, that he was fading out himself. Blessed twilight was coming to take him into oblivion for a while longer. So softly he almost missed it, she said, “Jordanna.”

“Jordanna,” he repeated, unaware that his voice was inaudible as he succumbed to unconsciousness.

Jordanna Winters had always had a healthy disrespect for the police.

At age fourteen, she shot her father with a .22 rifle when he was attempting to have sex with her older sister and learned the hard way that the law enforcement types in Rock Springs, Oregon, were chauvinistic, repellant, and inclined to believe an upstanding citizen like Dr. Dayton Winters over his unstable middle daughter, who, let’s face it, was half-wild from growing up on a farm with a mother whose own mental state had always been in question. There was a rogue gene lying in wait in Gayle Treadwell Winters’s family that popped up randomly and had brought dubious behavior, suicides, horrific accidents, and even murder over the years to the unlucky Treadwells—or so the people of Rock Springs were wont to believe. Jordanna, they collectively decided after the shooting that grazed her father’s shoulder, was clearly an unhappy recipient of that gene, which was undoubtedly the reason for her erratic behavior. The good Dr. Winters was above reproach, so Jordanna’s behavior had to be from something else . . . something vile and difficult, maybe impossible, to control . . . the Treadwell Curse.