EMERSON WENTWORTH Rice was in the kitchen when the back door opened and her husband came through, followed by a man holding a gun on him. Quickly, efficiently, he asked her if she could help him with a serious matter. When she didn’t answer, he shot her husband in the stomach. The screaming began then.
“He has my little girl,” Emerson said now, her explanation halting because she was still doing the half-crying half-talking thing people did when they were scared out of their minds.
She’d been allowed to call 911 for her husband of fifteen years before she and her daughter were loaded into the BMW SUV and driven away. She had no idea if he was dead or alive. What she did know was that she got to trade me for her daughter, and by God, that was what was going to happen.
“I’m really sorry about this,” she assured me as she leaned against the passenger door, both hands on the weapon, making sure that if I twitched she blew off the side of my face. “But he wants you and I want my daughter.”
“I understand.”
“I need your gun. He said you’d have one.”
“Where am I going?” I asked as I pulled the Ruger from the holster under my jacket and passed it to her.
I had to drive out to Park Ridge, and Emerson directed me to Touhy Avenue and then down Courtland. Four blocks south on the left was a large two-story house, and I was told to get out and go to the front door and ring the doorbell. Emerson would be right behind me.
Yes, I could have easily taken the gun from her, but she was terrified for her daughter and I understood that.
“As soon as I have my child, marshal, I will send the Marines back here for you, I swear to God,” she promised as we climbed the front steps.
I had no reason to doubt her sincerity.
Ringing the doorbell, I thought of my phone in the truck, under the seat where I’d dropped it when Emerson had glanced away from me to make sure we were going the right way. Hopefully, when Ian tried to call and didn’t get me, his law enforcement brain would kick in and he’d know exactly what had happened. At least the phone in my parked vehicle would alert him to my last whereabouts. From here, depending on Hartley, it was a crapshoot.
Because I didn’t want to scare Emerson any more than she already was, I was working really hard to not come unglued. I was taking shallow breaths, keeping my nerves on a tight leash, and forcing myself not to throw up, even with how knotted up my stomach was. I was terrified, plain and simple, and trying desperately not to let her see it on my face.
When the door opened a crack, I saw a scared, sniffling little girl for a second before she saw her mother.
“Mommy!” she squealed, and Emerson had to put her hand on my back to keep herself on her feet.
“Hi, lovey,” she soothed. “Just stand right there for me, okay? Freeze like a popsicle, until we find out what the man wants.”
Saxon turned her head to listen, and then her little six-year-old face lifted to me. “Are you Miro?”
“Yes, I am.”
She took a deep breath. “He wants you to come in, and if you do, I get to go out there with my mom.”
“Okay, then, lemme in,” I said, smiling openly so she’d know everything was going to be all right.
She turned again, listening, looking at her mother. “He says we can go, Mom, but we have to be superquiet and not talk to anyone until we get to the end of the street. If we’re not good girls, he’s gonna be mad.”
“Yes,” Emerson whispered. “Whatever he wants.”
Saxon listened again. “He wants you to put the gun in the mailbox in front of the house.”
“Yes,” Emerson agreed frantically.
Saxon told the psychopath what Emerson had said, repeating it for him even though he could clearly hear both mother and child perfectly. It was a control measure, and for perhaps the hundredth time in my life, I thought about how clever he was. The man was a master of manipulation; he had a singular focus and no one could doubt his follow-through. It was such a waste that his mind was broken.
“He says okay,” Saxon told me. “You can come in now.”
I moved forward as she came out, slipping easily by me, and I closed the door behind her. I heard mother and daughter scurrying down the front steps, and then everything else was gone as Craig Hartley stepped out of the shadows to face me.
I was certain my heart stopped. How was it even possible that I was with him again? Every part of me screamed for flight, but all I could do was stand there and stare. He’d kill me if I moved, and on the cast, I wouldn’t get far if I punched him and tried to get away.
“Miro,” he whispered.
I had to keep breathing for as long as I could and try to keep from trembling even though I was suddenly freezing from the inside out.
“My God, man, how many lives do you have?”
“Hopefully enough,” I replied glibly.
He moved forward until I felt the muzzle of the gun against my abdomen. “How in the world did you break your ankle? That’s awfully klutzy, don’t you think?”
“Came down on it funny,” I answered as he slipped his hand between the open lapels of my olive-green wool overcoat and pressed it over my heart.
“You’re scared.”
I shrugged, but it took effort. Modulating my voice, repressing both my fight-or-flight instincts, and appearing calm was taking all of my concentration. “Of course I am. The last time we saw each other, you took out one of my ribs.”
“Yes, I did,” he replied, sliding his hand down my abdomen to my belt and then burrowing underneath two layers, Henley and T-shirt, to my skin. “But the scar is barely there. I did a good job with the surgical glue.”
I wasn’t going to explain that my best friend had gone in through the same incision he made just to make sure he hadn’t butchered me inside.
“I tell you,” he said warmly, running his fingers over the muscles in my abdomen. “Your body is really something. I bet all the boys want to fuck you.”
There was only one boy for me, and hopefully when Hartley was done with me, I’d still be pretty enough for Ian Doyle. God, not that I would tell him that. I could only imagine the knock-down, drag-out fight we’d have about how shallow that would make him sound.
“I feel you’re not focusing on your imminent peril.”
I was so tired of being scared, of jumping at my own shadow, of thinking that the bogeyman was behind every door, even the refrigerator, in every room before I turned on the light or on my front stoop whenever I left the house. I had a reoccurring nightmare that I would open my eyes in the morning and find Hartley looming over me.
“Miro,” he said, pressing the gun hard up under my chin. “What do I have to do to get you to tremble in my presence?”
All of it, from the start—back when I was a detective—was mind games. He had always told me that one day he’d have me, would be there when I woke up in the morning, and at some point along the way I’d internalized that threat and given it life. I’d turned him from a logical threat to a supernatural one, and that knowledge coming as a blast of realization chased out the fear and replaced it with anger.
“We’re going to take a ride, you and I, and once we’re all alone, I can teach you some respect. I suspect that further instruction is needed.”
No.
Never again.
“You fuck,” I growled before I forgot caution, shoved him back hard, turned, and limped away as fast as I could.
“Miro!” he roared, and I heard the gunfire a second before my right bicep felt like it was blown off.
Running down the hall, Hartley behind me firing wildly, I skidded on the heavily waxed floor as bullets bounced off studs inside plaster walls, cracked glass in picture frames, and destroyed a vase beside the bannister I ran by on my way to the dining room.
Plates exploded in the hutch, another vase, and water splattered everywhere as I flew into the kitchen. I stood behind the door, my heartbeat pounding in my ears, panting not from exertion but fear, and when he sprinted by me, I flushed from my hiding spot and went out the same door he’d come in.
A bullet hit the wall beside my head, and I had a fleeting thought that maybe Hartley had tired of our dance and was ready to simply shoot me dead.
“Come on, Miro,” he yelled after me. “There’s more parts of you I want in my collection.”
I squelched down the urge to puke and almost went down—the rubber grip on the bottom of my cast had shitty traction and once again I was back on the wax. But I managed to scramble up the staircase, the cast making all kinds of noise as it collided with each step.
Why did I go to the second floor—why not out the front door? Outside was always better than in. But Hartley was between me and my truck—and my gun—and because going to the basement was never a good idea, I bumped up the staircase ahead of him and hopped and hobbled down the dark hallway.
It was a huge house, three stories, and as I limped through it, I opened every door I passed, finally careening through one and darting inside what looked like the master suite. I ran inside the roomy walk-in closet, closed the door to a crack behind me, and searched for anything I could use to defend myself with. I listened at the same time over my own pounding heart and then simply… stopped.
Even if I happened upon a gun safe, what was I going to do, stand there and try and figure out the combination? And how long did I have before he found me? I had to be smarter than the serial killer.
I wasn’t some virgin in a slasher flick; I was a deputy United States marshal. I needed to start acting like one. If I was protecting a witness, I would have been on the offensive from the get-go. What had taken me a moment to realize was that in this instance, I was the witness.
If I lived, I was never going anywhere without Ian again. With him by my side, I never worried about the outcome. I simply knew I’d live. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t save myself, but the autopilot of certainty was a very compelling argument for having a partner.
I started taking clothes down, suits, shirts, and stacking them in my arms, layering them thicker and thicker until my bicep with the bullet in it was screaming as I stood there, legs braced apart, close to the door, waiting.
“Miro!” he roared from out in the hall. “I won’t be able to stay here much longer. Do you really want me to go? You want me to keep haunting your life? Won’t you eventually go mad?”
It was a definite possibility. The not knowing was the worst. I would rather be dead than have Hartley able to scare me for the rest of my life. It was like those awful stories where people were missing and their families didn’t know what happened. They couldn’t grieve, and hope was so hard to hold on to year after year. In all my years in law enforcement, I’d never met anyone who ever said limbo was the preferable option. Bad news, the worst news, was still closure.
“I can hold out longer than you,” I yelled through the door, finally becoming the cat in our game, sick to death of being the mouse.
I heard him running toward the sound of my voice, and seconds later I saw a line of light under the closet door. The bathroom was beside me, and I knew he was in there, checking, realizing where I wasn’t and where I was before I heard only silence.
Later I would think, What a stupid plan! Who came up with that? and realize that there had only been me there, so the idiocy was mine alone.
From the outside, the light flipped on, the door was thrown open and he strode into the closet at the same second he fired at me from point-blank range, to the left, aiming for my heart.
The bullet should have ripped through my chest, but ridiculously, I had all those clothes in my arms, propped against my chest. A stack of layers—so many that it had to look like I was moving in the middle of the night or stealing them in a snatch-and-grab from a department store with the wheelman waiting right out front.
So instead of me going down from a gunshot wound that should have killed me instantly, the bullet hit the layers and altered course, sliding along the top of my shoulder, barely grazing me. At the same second, my adrenaline kicked in and I charged, driving over him in a play that any defensive end would have been proud of—and not because it was particularly agile, but because it got the job done.
Hartley went down hard, slammed to the floor, his head hitting with a thump. I hurled the clothes sideways, found him disoriented and winded, and before he could lift the gun, I fisted my hand in his sweater, lifted him toward me, and punched him in the face.
I hit him many times, stopping only to grab the gun and toss it out of his reach. I stood up and kicked him in the ribs to get him to fold into a fetal position and in the head to knock him out.
I waited, checking for movement, then walked out of the closet, retrieved the Heckler Koch HK45C with the suppressor he’d been using, and walked back to him and made sure he was breathing.
I had the momentary thought that, really, shooting him in the head would be the best end to my day. No one would miss him, I’d be saving the taxpayers a crap-ton of money, and no one would even question why I’d shot an unarmed man. He was Craig Hartley; of course I had to kill him.
The issue was that the more I thought about it, the less appealing it became. Hartley had done enough to me. I didn’t need his death cluttering up my psyche for the rest of my life.
Slamming the door shut, I grabbed the chair from the vanity table, wedged it under the closet’s doorknob, and staggered over to the bed. I would have gone downstairs and out to my truck to get my phone, but I didn’t want to leave Hartley alone. It was fortunate the people who owned the house had a landline—which amazed me in the age of the cell phone—and I used that to call Ian. He picked up on the first ring.
“Hello?”
“Hey, guess where I am?”
“You’re out in Park Ridge for some reason. Kohn tracked your cell phone because you didn’t pick up the fifty times I called. Where the fuck are you?”
“With Craig Hartley in a really nice house that I hope is for sale because I don’t want to think about the—”
“What?” he gasped.
“What?” I heard Kohn echo in the background before I heard him loudly exclaim, “Where the hell are you, Jones?” Ian had put me on speaker.
“I caught Hartley.”
“Oh, no,” Ian groaned. “No-no-no.”
“I’m fine,” I soothed him. “I’m gonna need to go to the hospital. Can you come here and pick up my truck?”
“Your truck?” Kohn was incredulous. “Who cares about your fuckin’ truck? Are you gonna die?”
“Jesus, Kohn,” I grumbled. He wasn’t helping in the least.
“Miro!” Ian shouted.
“No, come on, I promise it’s not like that. I’m not gonna die. I have a bullet in my arm is all, I’ll be fine.”
“You’re gonna make Ian pass out, you fuckhead,” Kohn insisted.
I wanted to use an endearment, tell him I loved him, tell him not to worry, but Kohn was there too, and then I heard Dorsey ask what was going on. “Ian, come see me.”
“I—”
“Have Kohn drive you.”
“What? Fuck no!”
“Ian,” I gentled him, suddenly a little light-headed, realizing blood was dripping down the fingers of my left hand. I was maybe bleeding a bit more than I thought. “Let Kohn drive so you get here in one piece. You’re gonna have to drive my truck, so it makes no sense to bring another car, right?”
“I—yeah—yeah, okay.”
“You need to hurry,” I said as I lay on the bed. “I want you here before the ambulance, before they move me.”
“Have you even called an ambulance yet?” Kohn asked.
“Actually, no, and I need you to call the bureau—unless Kage wants you guys to come collect Hartley. Go ask him and let me know. I’ll wait.”
“You will not wait. We’ll take care of the FBI, you hang up and call the ambulance, you stupid fuck!” Kohn flared angrily. “We’re on our way.”
The line went dead and I knew Kohn had hung up on me. Ian wouldn’t have. I called for help and stayed there, lying down and guarding the closed door as I spoke to the 911 operator. There were no windows in the closet; this wasn’t a horror movie where I’d barricade the door, leave it, and come back to find it open and the murderer escaped. The reality was, if he opened the door, I’d shoot him in the head. With all the lights on, I wouldn’t miss.