Chapter Eighteen
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SO THEY THOUGHT they could keep him at bay? They were all so self-righteous, so sure of themselves. He was going to teach them.
The man shook with indignation, his hands tight on the steering wheel of his car. They had no idea who they were dealing with.
Classic serial killer psychosis. He laughed at the irony.
Him, a serial killer. Who would believe it?
But he didn’t get off on the killings. Not in the way most serial killers did. They were only part of seeing justice carried out.
He’d set that bomb, tried to kill them all. It had been the safest way, regardless of his desire to make Colton Bells suffer slowly. When he’d walked in to Shelby’s house to plant the cell phone, they all should have been dead or close enough.
Yet, they’d been alive.
Every one of them.
He’d failed.
But not for long.
They still had no idea who he was or what he was capable of. He needed a new plan. Luckily for him, having grown up in a military family, he was no stranger to changing plans on a dime.
Refine, reorder, rework. He’d gotten where he was by knowing how to play the game. To make people believe he was a good guy.
Instead of taking them out all at once, he’d have to do things in a more controlled way. More detailed.
He was good at details.
Like sniping three men and getting away with it.
Right now, Shelby had too many people around her. Bells was in surgery. How could he get to them without getting caught?
Patience. He couldn’t blow this when he was so close to finally getting revenge for Peter.
If Shelby had only realized what a loser Bells was. If she had accepted that her ex-husband was guilty of murder—regardless of whose—and had let the cops arrest Bells, he could have let her live.
But she was as stubborn now as ever. Probably felt like she owed Bells after what he’d done for her, covering for her, taking the blame for that night.
Bells had played the hero, hiding her little secret, but he was still a murderer. How could she defend him?
The idea of letting her report resurface to the powers that be tickled the back of his mind. It would show everyone that she and Bells had covered up what happened.
It would also make Bells that much more of a hero in some people’s eyes.
The man couldn’t let that happen.
Bells should have died in Baghdad. Should have died in this latest bomb explosion at Shelby’s house.
Instead, the bastard still walked the earth while dozens of men who deserved to live were buried six feet under.
No more. If Bells survived the surgery, he still wasn’t long for this earth.
The man pulled a .300 Winchester Magnum from his pocket, turning the cool metal bullet over and over in his fingers.
This one had Bells’ name on it.
Another in his pocket had Shelby’s.
The only thing he had to do now was get them both out of the hospital. McKenzie too, if possible.
Patience.
Refine, reorder, rework.
A new idea struck. Maybe killing Shelby would be enough. Bells still loved her. He’d run back to her not once, but twice. It was obvious he would do anything for her.
Killing Shelby would leave Bells on his own. Tortured. He’d die a long, slow, miserable death blaming himself.
True happiness made the man smile. He’d been going at this all wrong. Leaving Bells alive to wallow in his grief would be the finest form of revenge.
Justice for all.
The new plan forming readily in his mind, the man put his car in gear.
It was a waste of a good woman, but Shelby Claiborne had to die.
COLTON’S MIND WAS soup, a pleasant fog that caressed him, lifting him up and rolling him back down like an ocean wave.
Dreams floated with him. Snatches of memories. Desert sand, moonless nights. His marriage bed.
A sweet numbness engulfed his body, but the sting of pain hummed just under it. Don’t wake up, his dull mind insisted. Let the drugs do their work.
Drugs. Yeah. This was definitely not his normal alcohol-fueled, mindless, anesthetized state. But when had he resorted to drugs to escape?
His dragon laughed.
Forget…
For long moments he let the desensitized state have him. It was so peaceful. No one criticized him. No one looked at him like he was a loser. Like he was a pain-in-the-ass.
No mother to abandon him. No father to leave him at the orphanage.
No…
Shelby.
Through the fog, he heard rhythmic beeping, the ring of a phone.
Shelby’s voice.
“Yes, ma’am, it’s nice to finally speak to you. Thank you for everything you’ve done to help me with my case. Colton is out of surgery and Megadeth says he’ll be okay.” Long pause. “Yes, I know. He’s a fighter.”
Surgery. Megadeth.
Where was he? Why was Jaxon here?
A tumble of images hit his brain. Connor, the waiting room.
The cops.
Trust me…
His face hitting the floor.
Then nothing until he’d surfaced for a moment to be blinded by bright lights overhead. Masked faces told him he was going to be okay. To close his eyes and it would be over before he knew it.
Shit. He’d ended up in surgery all right.
By all that’s holy, tell me they didn’t let Jax operate on me.
Not because Jaxon Sloan wasn’t a true rock star in every sense of the word. He was. The gifted SOB could perform surgery as easily as he shot down a plane full of terrorists. Colton had been there and seen it.
And if Colton had needed surgery, there wasn’t anyone he trusted more to take care of it, but the ribbing he would take from the other guys would be brutal and endless.
He’d owe Jax too.
Colton didn’t like owing anyone anything.
“No, ma’am,” Shelby’s no-nonsense voice brought him back to now. “I don’t know what report you’re referring to.”
Ma’am. Shelby was talking to…
Beatrice.
The thought brought him fully awake, but his eyelids did a dance. Up. Down. Up. Down. He couldn’t seem to keep them open.
Finally locking them at half-mast, he managed to get a look at his new digs. The hospital room was various shades of white and off-white. Shelby stood at the window, the setting sun splashing stripes of orange across her face through the blind slats.
Sensations in his body began to register.
And boy, did that suck. Good ol’ pain—a familiar friend—came rushing to the surface, making him grimace.
Shelby’s face screwed up. “A report can’t be filed anonymously. Even if an agent were trying to protect someone, they couldn’t file one without going through proper channels. Procedures have to be followed. Reports have to be signed and dated.”
Colton tried to move his legs, found they were tree stumps. He lifted a hand to rub his face, except he only managed to lift it an inch before it fell back beside him.
Her brows crashed down as she listened. “But once a report is filed, it can’t be deleted from the system. That would take someone high up in the chain of command to do something like that and no one I know would do such a thing. That would be a federal crime.”
Another pause, the faint sound of the voice on the other end.
“Me?” Shelby’s back straightened. “Excuse me, but what exactly does this report say and how in the hell did you get your hands on it?”
Another try at movement and Colton managed to sneak his hand up. He pulled the oxygen tube out of his nose. “Get away from the…window,” he croaked.
Shelby whirled, the consternation on her face lifting slightly at the sight of him. “Look, I don’t know what you’re implying, but we need to continue this conversation later. Colton’s awake. I’ll call you back.”
She hung up, staring at him, and again he registered a war of emotions going on inside her.
“You hung up on Beatrice.” His mouth felt like it was filled with charcoal briquettes and he sounded like he’d smoked a dozen cigars in quick succession. “No one hangs up on her.”
“I just did. She’ll get over it.” She moved toward his bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Like hell. What happened?”
She sat on the edge and brushed his hair back. “When you hit the cabinet during the bombing, the handle left a nice little impression on your back. Apparently it knocked some of the shrapnel near your spine loose and did internal damage causing your abdomen to fill with blood. You’re lucky you were here at the hospital when you passed out. The emergency surgery saved your life.”
“Tell me Jax didn’t do it.”
“Jax?”
“Megadeth.”
“Ah. He sort of…supervised, I guess you could say. The surgery took hours and they’ve kept you sedated because I told them the minute you woke up, you’d hop out of bed and undo all the repair work they’d done.”
Although she was teasing, she still looked desperately serious. “Is Sabrina…?”
“She’s stable and they’ve moved her here to intensive care. She’s just down the hall.”
Colton glanced around. “Where’s Salisbury?”
“Jaya took him home to her place.”
Poor dog.
He took Shelby’s hand. “Any new info on our bomber?”
“No.”
That was it. Just no.
Her face, her stiff body, her voice. “Are you pissed at me?”
She didn’t say anything but the set of her mouth confirmed it.
“Beatrice told you about the report.”
“You knew about it and didn’t say anything.”
Being grilled about a phantom report wasn’t exactly making him feel better. “A man who wakes up after emergency surgery to find the most beautiful woman in the world at his bedside usually expects some fussin’ over him. Maybe a kiss, a thank-God-you’re-alive. Call me crazy, but I don’t think most men get interrogated before they’re even off their heart monitor.”
She leaned over, planted a kiss on his cheek and sat back. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
There were a lot of things he hadn’t. “About what exactly?”
“You know what.” She huffed, exasperated. “About this report. Beatrice claims someone filed this anonymously through the FBI’s system—which is impossible—and then someone else deleted it. She thinks I’m involved.”
You are. “It was either you or Agent Calisto. You were the only two Feds on the rescue mission with my team, and Calisto didn’t see what happened.”
Her eyes narrowed a moment, then fell to the sheets and their intertwined hands. “Why can’t I remember what happened that night?”
As he’d suspected, her memory had more holes in it than she’d been letting on. All those holes seemed tied to him. It was time to come clean, to help her remember the ugly truth.
He struggled to sit up, the pain in his lower right back making him break out in a cold sweat. He released Shelby’s hand and gripped the rail, forcing his body to do as he commanded, regardless of the knifing pain.
“Don’t,” she said, putting her hands on his chest. “You just had major surgery.”
The room spun and his body refused to cooperate. He sunk back down, eyes closed, stomach roiling. “We fought.”
“What?” She leaned close enough for him to smell her soap under the layers of grime from the explosion and hospital odor, so prevalent on his own skin.
“That night,” he said, through gritted teeth. Damn, he needed more morphine. He blinked open his eyes. “The night we rescued Connor.”
She snagged a cup of water from the rolling table nearby and put the straw to his mouth. “Drink. What’s so unusual about us arguing?”
He took a sip, the cool water coating his tongue and throat as he swallowed. “We argued over what you were putting in your report. About who shot Quan.”
He felt her tense. She set the cup on the table and gave him a confused look. “Why would we fight over that? You—”
She straightened slightly. A frown gathered in the corners of her mouth. “What aren’t you telling me, Colton?”
He blew out a sigh. “It was your first time in the field and you’d been working on finding Quan and 12 September for over a year. Your sole mission was to bring him in for questioning.”
“That I remember.”
“You had a lot riding on the success of that mission. Beyond rescuing Connor.”
“Like what?”
“A promotion.”
“I don’t care about promotions, only about catching bad guys.”
Which was one of the reasons the Bureau had been priming her to head her own counterterrorism team. “Our taskforce was a test run for you, for the Feds to see if you could handle your own unit.”
“Yes, I remember that.” She nodded, her eyes tracking over to his monitor. “I had so many plans, so many ideas I wanted to see implemented to stop terrorism.”
“Two hours after we rescued Connor, 12 September cells hit a mall in Milan, killing twenty people, eight of them Americans, and injuring a dozen more. The next morning, they blew up three more across Europe. You blamed yourself, believing that if Quan had lived, you might have gotten the information out of him to stop those attacks.”
She slowly rose from the bed. “But he died and I never had the chance.”
Colton waited, hoping she wouldn’t make him say it, that her brain would free itself and let her remember the rest.
It didn’t and she looked over at him with a raised eyebrow. “What else?”
Why couldn’t the truth ever be simple? “Overnight, you went from setting the world on fire to wanting to quit the FBI.”
“I blamed myself for Quan’s death, even though you killed him?”
Not exactly. “I convinced you not to quit the Bureau. You had the chance to save so many more lives, especially if your bosses believed Quan’s death was my fault.”
She took a step back and he saw gears clicking into place. “Believed it was your fault…? What are you saying?”
“I’d lie a thousand times over to protect you, Shel. You know that.”
“Oh my God.”
The horror in her eyes made his guts crawl. It was all there—the realization, the understanding, the sudden guilt. She blanched and staggered slightly.
Colton reached for her, but she was too far away. “It was your first kill. You saved me. Saved the rescue mission.”
“I shot him?” It was like she had to convince herself all over again. “The man I had been hunting all that time, who had the information I needed to stop 12 September cold. I killed him?”
He had to make her understand that their secret had been in her best interest. “You believed your career was over. That it should be because you screwed up so badly, which was total bullshit. You thought all the goals you’d been working on were down the drain.”
She staggered back another step, her hand going to the rolling tray to steady herself. “So I let you take the blame?”
“You didn’t let me. I insisted. You’ve always followed the rules. You don’t lie or cover things up. The thing is, I’m pretty good at both and I convinced you that your future with the FBI as a team leader didn’t have to be over because of one stupid terrorist.”
She shook her head adamantly. “I would never do that—cover up the truth. I would never file a false report to save my career.”
“Quan deserved to die. You and I both know it. Even if he’d lived, you wouldn’t have gotten any intel out of him in time to stop those bombings. I’m as sure of that now as I was then.”
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”
It had taken hours of arguing on his part and then he’d gone over her head and made a deal with the counterterrorism director. “I’m pretty persuasive when I have to be.”
Shelby shuffled over to the chair near the wall, half-dragging her leg, but as always, determined to do what she wanted. She slumped into the chair and covered her eyes with her hands.
Colton bit his bottom lip and focused on that pain rather than the white hot poker in his back as he hauled himself up to a semi-sitting position. “You went on to prove me right, you know. You’ve stopped a dozen different killers since that night. You did the right thing, letting me take the rap.”
“The anonymous report,” she said, pulling at an invisible thread on her shirt. “I filed it, didn’t I? To try to fix things.”
“Most likely.”
“But why anonymously? And who deleted it?”
Probably the counterterrorism director since he didn’t want Shelby sidelined for that one incident, but Colton couldn’t be sure. Between the CIA, FBI, and Navy, there were a lot of players involved. They’d all wanted Quan in the worst way. The counterterrorism director had done her a solid, keeping her from shit-canning her career over one mistake.
Shelby’s quiet horror continued to envelope the room, making Colton hurt in a way that no injury or goddamn surgery could.
The counterterrorism director had jumped ship eventually, going over to the NSA. Colton had hoped the issue died with him, but now… “I take full blame for forcing your hand with the report, Shel. You wanted to go to the Director of the FBI then and come clean, but I wouldn’t let you. If you want to tell him now, I’ll go with you and explain everything.”
She sat for a long moment, staring at the ceiling. The bitter silence, broken only by the beep of monitors, ate at him. His body was a goddamn mess since his insides had seen far too much damage over the years. Yet, what he’d done on the outside, hurting so many others when he’d only been trying to look out for them, was the thing he knew would kill him in the end.
Shelby’s gaze came back to his. Tears swam behind her pretty blue eyes. Her voice was strained, barely above a whisper. “That’s why we divorced, isn’t it?”
One more truth to lay on the pyre he was building for the final bonfire of his life. “One of many. You couldn’t stand to live a lie, and I was the embodiment of that lie.”
A knock sounded on the door. Nickelback stuck his head in. “There’s a guy out here says he needs to talk to Shelby. Name’s Daniel. Says it’s important.”
Shelby waved him off. “I can’t talk to him right now.”
Nickelback started to close the door, but Daniel yelled over his shoulder. “Shelby, it’s your mom! It’s her heart. She’s asking for you.”
Shelby bolted out of the chair. “Oh, no, Momma.”
“Wait,” Colton said. He tried to swing his legs around and sit up. “You’re not going anywhere without me.”
Nickelback came all the way inside, closing Daniel out. “Stay in bed, chief. I got this.”
Shelby pointed a finger at him, looking slightly like Jack when she did. “He’s right. Stay where you are. Nickelback can take me down. Momma’s probably just having an angina attack. I tried to get her and Daddy to go home hours ago, but they wouldn’t budge.”
“The killer could be in the hospital, Shel. He could be one of them.”
“I appreciate the conspiracy theory, but honestly, Colton, this is probably the safest place for me. There are cameras everywhere and all kinds of people. Our killer isn’t that bold or stupid. Now relax, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Nickelback brought him a cell phone. “Zeb will keep an eye on you and Connor’s down the hall with Sabrina. You need anything, hit 1.”
“Take Zeb with you. You need a two-man team.”
“Not leaving you alone, bro.”
“Where’s Megadeth?”
“Had to go back to his medical conference in New Orleans.”
Nickelback helped Shelby out the door, even as Colton continued to try to order them both to stay.
Zeb came strolling in before Colton could untangle all the tubes and get his sorry ass up. “Well, aren’t you as white as my hair.”
Colton gave up and lay back in the bed, his entire system a hot mess. “I can’t talk about it, old man, so don’t even ask.”
“’Bout what?”
He could hear the grin in the man’s voice. “About the spy.”
“Ah, yeah, good ol’ Wyatt Evers, code name Nightingale. Was he a loyal operative or a double agent? Guess you know the answer to that, don’t you?”
Evers was the only reason they’d been able to find Connor.
Now he was dead.
Colton was tired of lying. Tired of pretending.
What was one more stick on his ever-growing pyre?
“He was both, actually,” he said, and for the first time since that night in Baghdad, he told the truth about the other man he’d rescued from 12 September.