Sanctuary in Chef Voleur
Sanctuary in Chef Voleur
Mallory Kane
SHE WAS A COMPLICATION P.I. MACK GRIFFIN DIDN'T NEED–BUT A TEMPTATION HE COULDN'T RESIST. From the moment he opens his door to her, P.I. Mack Griffin knows he's inviting trouble. Not only has Hannah Martin fled to New Orleans after witnessing a brutal murder, but the killer has kidnapped her ailing mother. Nothing but trouble, so…Why does the sexy P.I. decide to help Hannah and keep her safe? Because watching her fight for justice while trying to stay alive demonstrates a bravery he finds nothing short of amazing. With criminals on their trail and everything to lose, Mack will be there for her as any professional investigator would. And yet winning this battle has suddenly turned into something much more personal.
SHE WAS A COMPLICATION P.I. MACK GRIFFIN DIDN’T NEED—BUT A TEMPTATION HE COULDN’T RESIST.
From the moment he opens his door to her, P.I. Mack Griffin knows he’s inviting trouble. Not only has Hannah Martin fled to New Orleans after witnessing a brutal murder, but the killer has kidnapped her ailing mother. Nothing but trouble, so…
Why does the sexy P.I. decide to help Hannah and keep her safe? Because watching her fight for justice while trying to stay alive demonstrates a bravery he finds nothing short of amazing. With criminals on their trail and everything to lose, Mack will be there for her as any professional investigator would. And yet winning this battle has suddenly turned into something much more personal.
“You know, Mack, I’d have made you as a player. What’s the matter? Got some kind of lawyer rule against kissing a client?”
He swallowed, unsure how to answer her. The thing was, he was a player—when the game was being played by his rules, which this game was not.
He allowed himself a small smile at her brazen challenge.
Watch out, Miss Martin, he said to himself. This game’s about to change.
“Well?” she taunted.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said softly, the smile still in place.
“What do you mean?” she asked, feigning innocence.
“Oh, it’s not your fault. You’ve only had boys to play with. It’s understandable that you don’t know what you’re getting into by flirting with a man. I’d advise you to stop now.”
“Stop?” she said as a flush rose all the way to her cheeks. “I don’t want to stop.”
Sanctuary in Chef Voleur
Mallory Kane
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
MALLORY KANE has two very good reasons for loving reading and writing. Her mother was a librarian, and taught her to love and respect books as a precious resource. Her father could hold listeners spellbound for hours with his stories. He was always her biggest fan.
She loves romantic suspense with dangerous heroes and dauntless heroines, and enjoys tossing in a bit of her medical knowledge for an extra dose of intrigue. After twenty-five books published, Mallory is still amazed and thrilled that she actually gets to make up stories for a living.
Mallory lives in Tennessee with her computer-genius husband and three exceptionally intelligent cats. She enjoys hearing from readers. You can write her at mallory@mallorykane.com (mailto:mallory@mallorykane.com).
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Hannah Martin—When Hannah witnesses the murder of her mother’s boyfriend, she runs for her life, ending up in New Orleans, where she meets private investigator Mack Griffin.
MacEllis “Mack” Griffin—Mack decides to investigate Hannah while helping her find her kidnapped mother. Despite the danger he faces to protect her, his biggest fear is falling for the stubborn young blonde who has already half captured his heart.
Billy Joe Campbell—Hannah witnesses Billy Joe’s murder by a drug lord’s henchman, and now she’s next on his list.
Hoyt—Hoyt is a hit man who knows which side of his bread is buttered. His job is enforcement, and he’s good at it. But as he chases Hannah and Mack, he’s unwittingly carving a path that will change the lives of everyone involved.
For Anna, who has been so supportive. Thanks for understanding how it can be.
Contents
Chapter One (#u67314b30-7236-54c9-9108-e1292b8c5f0c)
Chapter Two (#udeaff07d-2287-5ffa-958a-a0a3957fac29)
Chapter Three (#ua7267684-2cc2-5359-a8e6-2f2141515fa1)
Chapter Four (#u21f063ec-908d-5579-8c83-3a790b83d75b)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Hannah Martin’s heart leaped into her throat as she waved at Mr. Jones, their neighbor, whose house was a mile away from theirs. He was watering his window boxes as she drove past.
Billy Joe had told her to be friendly with the neighbors but not to talk to them. “If you say one word to anyone, you’ll never see Stephanie alive,” he’d told her more than a few times in the past twenty-four hours.
Her mom, Stephanie Clemens, had gone into liver failure from cirrhosis a couple of weeks ago and was receiving hemodialysis while waiting for a donor liver. Then two days ago, Hannah had overheard Billy Joe, her mother’s boyfriend, talking on his cell phone. He was arranging some kind of delivery to Tulsa, Oklahoma. And from his side of the conversation, it was obvious to Hannah that the goods were illegal and very valuable. It had to be drugs.
She’d confronted him and kicked him out of her mother’s house, saying if he showed back up, she’d go to the sheriff. He’d left.
Then, yesterday, when she’d returned from a short run to the drugstore, her mother was gone and Billy Joe was back. He’d abducted her mom and was holding her somewhere.
Hannah growled in frustration and desperation as she pulled into the driveway of her mother’s house. Popping the trunk lid, she grabbed one heavy case of beer, leaving the other case for a second trip.
“Billy Joe?” she called as she hooked her index finger around the handle of the screen door and then toed it open enough to catch it with her elbow. “Billy Joe? I’m back. My car’s battery died again. That’s why I took the Toyota.”
She set the beer on the kitchen counter and listened. Nothing. The house felt empty. Where was he? He was always waiting at the door to make sure she got back from the grocery store not one minute later than he’d told her to be—with his cigarettes and beer.
An ominous thought occurred to her. Had something happened to her mother? She went through the house, but as she’d known, it was empty. Billy Joe wasn’t there. Nearly panicked, she ran back outside. The setting sun reflected on the tin roof of the garage, but she thought she could see a light on inside it. Billy Joe never left a room without turning off the light, just like he never left the house without checking the locks three times. And woe to anyone who didn’t put a tool or a book or even a ballpoint pen back exactly where they got it, down to the millimeter. So if the lights were on in the garage, then Billy Joe was in there.
From the first moment her mother had let him move in a few months ago, he’d taken over the garage. He’d kept it locked and never let her or Hannah near it. His reasoning was because he was working on his prized vintage Mustang Cobra and the engine had to stay free of dust. He was as obsessive about his cars as everything else.
Hannah walked across the driveway to the garage, her shoulders stiff, her heart thudding so hard it physically hurt. Maybe her mother was in there? It wasn’t the first time she’d thought that, but she was genuinely afraid of Billy Joe. After all, he’d pushed and slapped her mother a couple of times.
She wasn’t sure what she thought—or hoped—to find when she looked through the glass panes of the side door, but she couldn’t continue to sit by and do nothing while her mother was missing. Luckily, she’d just had her dialysis and wouldn’t need it again until the end of the week. But Hannah didn’t trust Billy Joe to take care of her. So although her stomach was already churning with nausea and a painful headache was making her light-headed, she was determined to see the inside of the garage.
Then she heard Billy Joe’s voice. She nearly jumped out of her skin. In the first instant, she thought he was yelling at her. But by the time she’d heard three or four unintelligible words, she realized that his tone wasn’t angry, it was afraid. Then she heard another voice. It was low and menacing, and she didn’t recognize it.
With horrible visions swirling in her head of her mother dying while Billy Joe and some buddy of his drank beer, she approached the door cautiously. She slid sideways along the outside wall until she was close enough to see through the glass panes, her heart beating so loudly in her ears that she was positive the people inside could hear it.
When she peeked through the dusty glass panes, Billy Joe’s back was to her, so she couldn’t see his face. He was standing in front of his workbench, arms spread plaintively, talking in an oddly meek voice.
Her gaze slid to the man standing in front of him. He was twice the size of Billy Joe. Not quite as tall but much larger. He had on a dark, dull-colored T-shirt that fit his weightlifter’s torso and beefy biceps like a glove. On the back of his right wrist was a tattoo. It was red and heart-shaped with what looked like letters in the center. Hannah blinked and squinted. Did it say MOM? She thought so, although the O wasn’t exactly an O. It was a dark circle. Before she could focus on it, the man reached behind his back and pulled a gun. The fluorescent light glinted off the steel barrel. Hannah stared at it, her pulse hammering in her throat.
Billy Joe froze in place. His voice took on an edge of shrill panic and he stepped backward and turned his palms out. “Hey, man, watch out with that thing. It could go off.” He laughed nervously. “I swear! You know everything I know. I’d never cheat the boss. I ain’t that stupid.”
Hannah saw a quick smirk flash across the other man’s face and knew he was thinking the same thing she was. Billy Joe was pretty stupid.
“So what happened to the drugs and the money?” the man said, not raising his voice. “Because our customer says he was shorted, and the last payment you sent to Mr. Ficone was short, as well. Mr. Ficone depends on his distributors to pay him so he can pay his suppliers. Now his suppliers are expecting to be paid everything they’re owed when Mr. Ficone meets with them in three days. So you’ve got three days to get that money to him.”
“I don’t know what happened to them, man. I had to use a new courier because my regular guy got picked up for not paying child support. Maybe he took it. I swear it was all there when I sealed the envelope. Or, hey, it coulda been the girl. Hannah Martin. My girlfriend’s daughter. Smart-mouthed bitch.” Billy Joe was sweating, literally. “She’s always snooping around. She probably stole the money out of the envelope. That new guy coulda left it lying around.”
The man with the red tattoo looked bored and disgusted. “I don’t think Mr. Ficone’s going to be satisfied with somebody else must have done it. He doesn’t like people that can’t control their people. That delivery was short almost twenty grand.”
“Twenty? That’s im-impossible,” Billy Joe stammered.
Beneath the fear, Hannah heard something in his voice she’d heard before. Billy Joe was lying.
He took another step backward, toward the door. “I’m telling you, it had to be Hannah Martin. She’s as sneaky as a fox. She musta got into it. I wouldn’t be surprised. But I swear, when I sealed that envelope, it was all there. I counted it.”
Hannah felt a heavy dread settle onto her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. He was throwing her to the wolves. She’d known he was trouble the minute she’d first laid eyes on him, and she’d tried to tell her mother, but Stephanie had never been smart when it came to men.
The man with the red tattoo shook his head. “Money doesn’t disappear from a sealed envelope,” he said. “I’ve got better things to do than stand here and listen to you lie. Mr. Ficone needs his money and he needs the drugs that were missing from your last delivery to our customer in Tulsa.”
“But, man, I swear—”
“Shut up with your whining,” the man yelled. “Where’s the money?”
Hannah jumped at the man’s suddenly raised voice. She shrank back against the wall by the door, terrified. He was holding a very big gun and his voice told her he was sick of Billy Joe’s rambling excuses.
What if he shot him? Everything inside her screamed “no!” Billy Joe was the only person in the world who knew where her mother was. She wanted to burst into the garage and beg the man to make Billy Joe tell her where her mother was, but the man looked ruthless and he was already sick of Billy Joe’s whining. If she called attention to herself, he was liable to shoot her, too.
“All right, punk. Mr. Ficone has no use for you if you’re not going to talk about where the money and the drugs are. That’s all he wants.”
Hannah shifted until she could see through the door again. She saw the man lift the barrel of the gun slightly, aiming it at Billy Joe.
“What he doesn’t want is screwups like you working for him. He hates people who can’t control their women. He hates thieves and he sure as hell hates loose ends.”
“Listen. I’ll get the money back. I’ve got a plan,” Billy Joe said, his hands doubling into fists. “My girlfriend’s sick. Real sick. And I kidnapped her. I’ve got her hidden away.”
Hannah gasped. Where? Tell him where, she begged silently.
“I told Hannah she’ll never see her mom again if she doesn’t do what I tell her. She’ll give me back the money.”
The larger man frowned and brandished the huge gun. “You kidnapped your sick girlfriend? You’re a real piece of work.”
“Okay, listen, man.” Sweat was running down Billy Joe’s face and soaking the neck of his T-shirt. “Here’s the deal. The drugs are hidden in the Toyota. But that bitch Hannah took it to town. She’s got strict orders not to touch my damn car, but she took it anyway. Bet you can’t guess where I put ’em. The drugs.” Despite the gun pointed at him, Billy Joe’s voice took on the bragging tone he used when he was sure he’d done something brilliant. “They’re hidden in the trunk lining.”
The man rolled his eyes and raised his gun.
“No, wait,” Billy Joe begged. “I was trying something new. A better way to hide them for transport. I swear man, that’s all. As soon as I made sure it worked, I was going to ask to show it to Mr. Ficone.” Billy Joe took a nervous breath. “Or you. Maybe you’d want to see it first. You could take the credit for thinking it up if you want.”
The man with the tattoo flexed his fingers around the handle of the handgun.
“Okay, listen. Hannah will be back any minute. She’d better be.” He turned his hands palms out and continued babbling. “Wait till you see the car. It’s brilliant, the way I hid the drugs. It’s all fixed up, ready to go.”
Fear and desperation twisted Hannah’s heart. Billy Joe was off on his favorite subject. Cars. The moment when he might have revealed where her mother was had passed.
“It’s a blue Toyota. Oh, I said that already. Anyhow, I painted it and boosted the engine. Th-the passenger-side mirror is broken and there’s a crack in the windshield. It looks like any old family car on the outside, but under the hood is a screaming turbo-charged V-8. It’s perfect for transport.” Billy Joe had turned his body slightly to the right and was gesturing with his left hand to emphasize what he was saying, but Hannah saw him slowly reaching behind him to the waistband of his jeans.
“What about the money? I don’t buy that your new guy or the girl—Hannah?—stole it.”
“No, no. Listen. I swear. I’m giving you the real deal.” Billy Joe’s words tumbled over each other. “It’s Hannah. That bitch is the key.” He giggled. “The key. You’d better believe me. She’s the one you want.” He got his fingers wrapped around the handle of the gun that was stuck in his waistband and covered with his untucked shirt.
The man with the red tattoo stiffened and gripped his weapon tightly. “Don’t move, slimeball!” the big man shouted.
“Look, I swear on my mama’s life. Okay, so I kept those few drugs that are hid in the Toyota. But Hannah’s the one who took the money. Not me. Make her talk. She’s holding the key to everything,” Billy Joe stammered.
Then, as Hannah watched in horror, he pulled out the gun. No! Don’t! She covered her mouth with her hand to keep from screaming.
Billy Joe fired. The gun bucked in his hand and the bullet struck the garage wall at least three feet above the other man’s head.
Without changing his position or his expression, the big man’s finger squeezed the trigger. Billy Joe bucked once, then the back of his shirt blossomed with red, like ink in water. He made a strangled sound, then collapsed to the floor, right where he stood. The small gun he was holding dropped to the concrete with a metallic clatter.
Hannah tried to scream, but her voice was trapped behind her closed throat. The last thing she saw before she turned and ran toward Billy Joe’s car was the big man’s dark eyes on her and the gaping barrel of the gun pointed directly at her.
* * *
A LONG TIME later, Hannah wrapped her hands around the thick white mug, savoring its warmth. It was almost midnight—four hours since she’d watched a man shoot Billy Joe in the heart. In one sense it seemed as though it had happened to someone else. But then she would close her eyes and she was there, watching the blood spread across the back of his shirt like a rose blooming in fast-forward on a nature show.
He was dead. Billy Joe was dead, and the secret of where he’d taken her mother had died with him. A spasm of panic shot through her and her hand jerked, spilling the coffee. She grabbed a napkin from a chrome dispenser and laid it on top of the spilled liquid.
Ever since her mother had disappeared, Hannah had been imagining things. She knew her mother was not literally dead yet—not from her disease. But nightmarish images of where she was being held swirled continuously in Hannah’s mind.
She could be lying in a bed or on a pallet on a cold floor, her breathing labored, her paper-thin skin turning more and more sallow as the time since her last dialysis treatment grew longer. Without the life-giving procedure, the toxins that her diseased liver couldn’t metabolize would kill her within days, if Billy Joe hadn’t killed her already.
Her once-beautiful mother, still young at forty-two, was an alcoholic. She’d been as good a mother as she could be, given her addiction, while the liquor had systematically destroyed her liver. By the time Hannah was sixteen, she had become her mom’s caregiver.
Right now, sitting in the bright diner with the mug of hot coffee in her hands, she couldn’t even remember how she’d gotten into Billy Joe’s car, peeled out of the driveway or gotten on the interstate. Her only thought had been to run as if the hounds of hell were behind her. All she remembered was that desperate need to stay alive so she could find her mother.
A few minutes ago, four hours and almost two hundred miles later, she’d been forced to stop because she was about out of gas. She took a swallow of hot, strong coffee. What was she going to do? Go back to Dowdie, Texas, where Sheriff Harlan King was already suspicious of her and her mother? He’d been called twice in the past few months, once by neighbors and once by Hannah herself, complaining about her mom’s and Billy Joe’s screaming fights. Two years ago, he’d nearly busted her mom for possession of marijuana.
She thought about what he and his deputies would find this time. Her brain too easily conjured up a picture of Billy Joe, lying in a puddle of his own blood on the floor of the garage, her mother, missing with no explanation, Hannah herself gone, with brand-new tire skid marks on the concrete driveway, and who knew what kind of evidence of illegal drugs in the garage, on Billy Joe’s body, even in her mom’s house.
She couldn’t go back.
The sheriff would never believe her. He’d arrest her and send her to prison and one day they’d find her mother’s body in a ditch or a remote cabin or an abandoned car, and people in Dowdie would talk about Hannah Martin, who’d killed her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, and how quiet and friendly she’d always seemed.
It was a catch-22. If she went back, all the sheriff’s emphasis would be on her, and they probably wouldn’t find her mother until it was too late. But if she didn’t go back, then it might be days before anyone knew her mother was missing. Either way, she was terrified that her mom’s fate was sealed.
She put her palms over her eyes, blocking out the restaurant’s harsh fluorescent lights. She’d spent the past twenty-four hours begging Billy Joe to bring her mother back home. She’d sworn on her mother’s life and her own that she wouldn’t tell a soul, that she would do anything, anything he wanted her to, if he would only bring her mother back home so Hannah could take care of her.
But Billy Joe had been cold and cruel. He’d pushed her up against the wall of her bedroom and told her in explicit detail what he would do to her if she didn’t shut up.
At that moment, Hannah had begun to devise a plan to follow Billy Joe to where he was holding her mother. But now, Billy Joe was dead.
Hannah’s eyes burned and her insides felt more hollow and scorched than they’d ever felt before. Her mother was her only family, and she had no way to find her. Pressing her hand to her chest, Hannah felt the loneliness and grief like a palpable thing.
She picked up the mug and drained the last drops of coffee, then slid out of the booth and went to the cash register. A girl with straight black hair and black eye shadow that didn’t mask the purplish skin under her eyes gave Hannah a hard look along with her change. “You want a place to sleep for a couple hours?” she asked.
Hannah shook her head.
“No charge. There ain’t a lot of traffic tonight. I’ll give you the room closest to here. You don’t have to worry about anybody bothering you.”
“Thanks,” Hannah said, “but I’ve got to get to—” Where? For the first time, she realized she had no idea where she was going. Or where she was. “Where am— I mean, what town is this?”
The girl frowned. “Really? You don’t know? Girl, you need some rest. You’re about ten miles from Shreveport.”
“Louisiana?” Hannah said.
The girl angled her head. “Yeah.... You sure you don’t want to sleep awhile?” She paused for a second, studying Hannah. “You can park your car in the back. Nobody’ll see it back there.”
Hannah shook her head as she took her change. “Thanks,” she said, giving the girl a tired smile. “That’s awfully nice of you, but I’d better get going.”
“Where you headed?”
Hannah stopped at the door and looked out at the interstate that ran past the truck stop, then back at the girl. She’d driven east, but she had no idea where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there. She had to have a plan before she went back to Dowdie. Otherwise all she’d accomplish would be to get herself arrested.
Shreveport, Louisiana. She wasn’t quite sure where in the state Shreveport was, but there was one place in Louisiana she did know. Chef Voleur, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
She recalled a photo her mother had given her a long time ago. It was a picture of two young women, arm in arm, laughing. Her mother had always talked about Chef Voleur and her best friend. We loved that place, Kathleen and me. That whole area around Lake Pontchartrain, from New Orleans to the north shore, is a magical place. She stayed, and I wish I had. Living there was like living in a movie.
She made a vague gesture toward the road. “This is I-20, right?”
The girl nodded.
“I’m going to a town called Chef Voleur,” she said. “To visit a friend of my mother’s.”
“You know you’re going to get there around three o’clock in the morning, right?” the girl said dubiously.
Hannah waved a hand. “My mom’s friend won’t care.”
Hannah prayed that her mother was right about the place being magical. Maybe things would be better there. They certainly couldn’t get much worse. Could they?
As she walked back to Billy Joe’s car, Hannah scanned the nearly empty parking lot, looking for the large maroon sedan that must have belonged to the man with the red tattoo, but she didn’t see any sign of it.
Chapter Two
Just like the girl at the truck stop had predicted, Hannah wound up in Metairie at 3:00 a.m., unable to hold her eyes open any longer. She found a small, seedy motel that she figured wouldn’t push the limit of her credit card, checked in and managed to sleep a little—in fits and starts, interrupted by nightmares of finding her mother just as she was breathing her last breath, or worse, leading the killer to her.
Around eight, she got up, showered and dressed, then sat down on the bed and dumped the contents of her purse. Like her mother, Hannah carried everything essential, valuable or meaningful in her purse. And like her mother, she wasn’t sentimental, so most of the bag’s contents were practical, except for two items. One was a photo her mother had given her years ago. The second was a sealed envelope.
Hannah picked up the envelope. With the traumatic events of the past couple of days, Hannah had totally forgotten about it. Looking at the words scrawled across the front made her want to break down and cry, but she didn’t have time for that. So she carefully placed the envelope back in her purse and picked up her wallet.
She pulled the fragile, dog-eared photo out of a hidden pocket. It had to be thirty years old and was of her mother and Kathleen Griffin, her best friend. On the back it read, “Kath and me at her house.” In a different hand was written “sisters forever,” and an address in Chef Voleur, Louisiana.
Hannah looked up the address and took note of the directions. She was about to head out when her cell phone rang.
When she looked at the display, her heart skipped a beat. It was the Dowdie, Texas, sheriff’s office. Hannah’s already queasy stomach did a nauseating flip, the result of too little sleep, too much coffee and the image of Billy Joe’s blood in her head.
She stared at the display, not moving, until the phone stopped ringing, then she dropped the phone back into her purse. There was no doubt in her mind why they were calling. They’d found Billy Joe’s body. But how could she talk to them? What would she say? How would she explain to the authorities why she had run away to South Louisiana after witnessing a murder if she couldn’t explain it to herself?
It took her about half an hour to drive to the address written on the back of the photo. It was across the street from a pizza place. With the photo in her hand she walked up to the building, hope clogging her throat.
A small voice deep inside her asked why she thought that talking to her mother’s old friend would help her find and rescue her mother back in Texas.
She had no idea. Except that her only other choice was to trust Sheriff King to believe her, and she’d been taught at her mother’s knee that authorities couldn’t be trusted. Sheriffs. Police. Lawyers. They were the people who took children away from their mothers and placed them in foster care. They threatened sick people with prison for using marijuana to relieve the debilitating nausea associated with cancer and other diseases.
* * *
SHE KNOCKED ON the heavy wood door, then realized immediately that her tentative rapping probably couldn’t be heard by anyone inside. So she rapped a second time, harder.
For a long moment that probably spanned no more than eight or ten seconds, she stood there listening and heard nothing. As she lifted her hand to rap again, she heard soft thuds on the other side of the door, as if someone was walking on a hardwood floor in socks or barefoot.
Standing stiffly, not quite ready to believe that she’d actually found her mother’s best friend, Kathleen, she waited for the door to open.
When it did, it was not a pretty, dark-haired woman with even, striking features and a beautiful smile who stood there. It was a man. He was tall and lean and he had the same even, striking features but they were distorted in a scowl. And he had a cell phone to his ear.
After a brief, dismissive glance at her, he scanned the hallway behind her. Once he’d assured himself that she was the only one there, he said, “Hang on a minute,” into the phone. “I’ve got to deal with somebody at the door.” His tone was irritated and impatient.
Private investigator MacEllis Griffin kept his expression neutral as he eyed the young woman from the top of her streaked blond hair to the toes of her clunky sandals.
“What is it?” he growled. She stood there looking at him with all the apprehension of a kid called to the principal’s office. Only she was no kid and he was no schoolteacher.
She could have been a kid. Her hair was pulled back into a single messy braid that looked like she’d slept in it. The skinny jeans were slightly loose on her slender frame and the shirt looked more slept in than her hair.
“Hmm? Oh, nope. It’s pretty slow here,” Mack said into the phone as he tried to guess her age. Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Under twenty-five? Hard to tell. She had that heart-shaped face that always looked young. But faint blue circles under her eyes that matched the color of her jeans told him she was much older than her hair or clothes might indicate. She opened her mouth but he held up a finger. “Buono’s working a missing person case,” he said. “A seventeen-year-old. Probably ran away with her boyfriend.”
“Well, get to the office and do something useful,” Dawson Delancey, his boss, replied. “You could file your past three months’ expenses if you’re bored.”
Mack didn’t take his eyes off the young woman as he laughed. “I’ll never be that bored,” he said. “In fact, I might be real interested in something real soon.” He smiled when the woman’s gaze dropped from his and her cheeks turned pink.
“In what?” Dawson asked. “Was that the mailman delivering your latest issue of Playboy?”
“Right. He just got here from 2002,” Mack responded. “Nope. Looks like I’m about to be hit up for Girl Scout cookies or a donation to a religious cause. I’d better go.”
“I hope it’s the donation. You don’t need the cookies,” Dawson said.
“Bite me,” Mack said conversationally. “You’re the one getting fat on your wife’s Italian cooking.”
“You’re just jealous. Juliana and I will be back in Biloxi in a few days. I’ll give you a call when we know for sure.”
“Okay. Later. ’Bye.”
As Mack hung up the phone, the young woman met his gaze and gave him a sad, self-conscious smile. The smile didn’t reach her eyes and the only thing it accomplished was to make her look older and sadder.
A familiar sinking feeling gnawed at his stomach. He knew that smile. He’d never met this woman before, but he knew her type way too well. Standing there with that sadness in her eyes, that furrow between her brows. She was the embodiment of a lot of things he’d worked very hard to forget. She was exactly the type of person—the type of woman—he’d spent his adult life avoiding.
He upped his scowl by about a hundred watts and aimed it directly at her. With any luck, she’d turn and run. Her type was easily intimidated.
But her gaze didn’t waver. She lifted her chin and to his surprise, he recognized a staunch determination in her green eyes, along with a spark of stubbornness. Interesting. But the small furrow between her brows didn’t smooth out and the corners of her mouth were still pinched and tight.
He put his hand on the doorknob, preparing to close the door and get back to his coffee. “Can I help you?” he asked grudgingly.
“I’m looking for Kathleen Griffin,” she said quietly.
The name hit him like a blow to the solar plexus. “Who?” he said, an automatic response designed to give him a second to think. But his brain seemed suddenly to be caught in a loop. Kathleen Griffin, Kathleen. Kathleen.
“K-Kathleen Griffin. The mailbox said Griffin.” She gestured vaguely toward the front door.
It had been twenty years since his mother had died. This young woman wouldn’t have been more than five or six at the time. Why would she be looking for his mother? “What’s this about?”
“It’s...personal,” she said, glancing behind him into his foyer.
“I doubt that,” he said flatly. “Go peddle whatever you’re selling somewhere else. Kathleen Griffin doesn’t live here.” He started to close the door, but she held out a small, dog-eared photo. The paper was old and faded, but one of the two women in the picture looked familiar.
“Please,” she said. Her hand was trembling, making the paper flutter.
“What’s that?” he asked, knowing he was going to regret having asked that question. He held the door in its half-shut position.
The young woman’s throat quivered as she swallowed. “It’s a picture of my mother and Kathleen Griffin,” she said, lifting her chin. “I really need to see her. It’s a—” she bit her lower lip briefly and her gaze faltered “—it’s a matter of life and death.”
He gave a short laugh, but cut it off when she winced. “Life and death,” he said dubiously. “Who are you?”
“Hannah Martin,” she responded. “My mother is Stephanie Clemens.”
She waited, watching him. But he didn’t recognize the name. He gave a quick shake of his head, took a small step backward and started to close the door.
“You’re her son, aren’t you?”
Her words sent his stomach diving straight down to his toes. He shook his head, not in denial—in resignation. She had him and he knew it. He also knew that if he didn’t do whatever he had to do in order to get rid of her this minute, he was going to regret it for a long time. “I’m sorry, but Kathleen Griffin is dead. So...” He put his hand on the door, preparing to close it.
“Oh. Oh, no,” Hannah Martin said, her eyes filling with tears and her face losing its color. “I’m so sorry—” she started, but at that instant, her phone rang. She jerked at the sound, then reached into her purse and pulled it out.
As Mack watched, she looked at the screen as if she was afraid it might reach out and bite her. When she checked the display, her face lost what little color it had. She made a quiet sound, like a small animal cornered by a hungry predator. Her fingers tightened on the phone until the knuckles turned white, and all the time, the phone kept ringing, a loud, strident peal.
Whoever was on the other end of that call frightened her. In fact, she looked as if she’d seen a ghost. When the ringing finally stopped, Hannah dropped the phone back into her purse as if it were made of molten lava.
Mack had missed his best opportunity. He should have closed the door as soon as her phone rang. It was the perfect opportunity to escape. But he hadn’t taken it. He wasn’t sure why.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” she said in a trembling voice. “I don’t know what I was thinking, coming here. I apologize for bothering you.” She closed her eyes briefly.
She’d let him off the hook. He took a step backward, preparing to close the door, because of course, she was about to turn and walk away.
But she didn’t move. Her ghostly white face took on a faint greenish hue. She swayed like a slender tree in a punishing wind. Then she fainted.
Mack dived, catching her in time to keep her head from hitting the floor. She was fairly short, compared to his six-foot-one-inch height and he’d already noticed that she wasn’t a lightweight. Her body was compact and firm. Lowering her gently to the floor, he grabbed a pillow off the couch and placed it under her head, making the decision to leave her on the floor rather than try to move her to the couch or a bed.
By the time he’d gotten the pillow under her head, she’d woken up. He recalled a paramedic telling him once that if someone passed out and woke up immediately, they were probably in no immediate danger.
Her face still had that greenish hue, although surprisingly, it didn’t detract from its loveliness. He retrieved the photo she’d dropped when she’d passed out. He looked at the two young women—girls, really. They were both pretty and pleasant-faced. They were laughing at whoever was taking the picture, and behind them, Mack recognized the furniture. Most of it was still here. He knew one of the girls. It was his mother. He smiled sadly, seeing how young and happy and innocent she looked.
He’d never seen the other girl before, but the young woman lying just outside his door bore a strong resemblance to her. He turned the photo over. On the back was written “Kath and me at her house” in an unfamiliar hand. The other handwriting he knew. It was his mother’s flowery script. She’d written “sisters forever” and his address.
Hannah stirred and tried to sit up. “What happened?” she asked, looking around in confusion.
“You fainted,” he said.
She stared at him. “No, I didn’t,” she said, frowning at him suspiciously. “I never faint. Did you do something—?” But then her hand went to her head. “I feel dizzy.”
“Just sit there a minute. I’ll get you some water,” he said grudgingly. He rose and drew her a glass of tap water. When he handed her the glass, she drank about half of it.
Then she shook her head as if trying to shake off a haze. “I guess I must have fainted.”
“I guess,” he said, a faint wryness in his voice.
She rose onto her haunches and stood, then grabbed on to his forearm for a second, to steady herself. “I never faint,” she said again.
Mack smiled. “So I’ve heard,” he said, thinking she was stubborn. He assessed her. Her color was still not good. “Do you want to sit down?” he asked, then felt irritated at himself for asking. Hell, she’d stood up on her own. So it was the perfect time for her to leave. And again, he’d missed his chance. And right there was one of the primary reasons why he didn’t get involved with her type. She was obviously on some personal mission that would consume her life until she accomplished it. A certain clue—she’d driven all night without stopping except to get coffee and gasoline.
“Thanks,” she said, and turned and headed, a little unsteadily, for the small dining table. He followed her.
She started to sit, then looked around.
“Here,” Mack said, handing her the photo. “This what you’re looking for?”
She took it. “Was this what we were talking about when I—” she gestured toward the front door.
“When you didn’t faint?” He nodded, deciding for the moment not to remind her that she’d received a phone call that had scared her.
She held the photo in one hand and touched the faces of the two girls with a fingertip. “According to my mother, she and Kathleen Griffin swore they’d always be there for one another. Sisters forever.”
“And?” Mack said, working to sound disinterested, even though he was becoming more and more fascinated by this pretty, determined young woman who had driven all night to find her mother’s best friend.
“And—” She stopped, looking confused. Then she shrugged. “And, I don’t know. I’m not really sure why I’m here. I just remember my mother talking about how much she and Kathleen loved Chef Voleur and how they had made that promise to each other.”
She picked up her purse from the dining room table and stood, gripping the back of the chair to steady herself. “I’m truly sorry about your mother.” She paused.
He nodded. “She died a long time ago,” he said dismissively.
That was another reason he didn’t like to be around women like her. Although Hannah was obviously in need of help and had pushed herself beyond her limits, right this minute her concern was for him and he didn’t like that one bit.
She looked down at the photo, then up at him. “You look just like her,” she said. “You have to be her son.”
“MacEllis Griffin,” he said, offering neither his hand nor any further explanation. “Call me Mack.”
“Mack,” she said, “I apologize for bothering you.” She started to stand.
“Wait,” he said. “What’s this life-and-death emergency?” He bit his tongue, literally. But it was too late.
To his dismay, hope flared in her eyes. “I’m—not sure I should—”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong.” What the hell was happening to him? When had his mouth cut itself off from his brain? He was just digging himself in deeper and deeper. And why? Because a pretty woman had fainted in his doorway? No. It was because he had the very definite feeling that when she’d said life and death, she wasn’t overstating the issue at all.
She sank back into the chair and casually picked up a business card from a small stack on the table. “MacEllis Griffin,” she said. “D&D Security?”
“It’s a private firm that takes on certain security issues,” he said, watching her.
“Security—like night guards at office buildings?”
Mack sent her an ironic look. “No.”
She frowned for a second, then eyebrows rose. “You’re a private investigator?”
“You could use that term, although we don’t take the usual divorce or spouse-tailing cases.”
“What do you take?”
The faint hope he’d seen in her eyes grew, although she was still stiff as a board and tension radiated from her like heat.
“We’ve handled our share of life-and-death cases,” he said.
Her eyes went as opaque as turquoise.
“Sorry,” he said. “I can be a sarcastic SOB at times. Here’s a quick rundown of me. I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve been with D&D Security for three years. I’m licensed as an investigator with the state of Louisiana. Now, will you tell me why you drove all night to find my mother?”
“How do you know I drove all night?” she asked.
“Your eyes are twitching and the lids are drooping. Headache and exhaustion, I’d guess. You’re trembling, probably from too much coffee. You haven’t combed your hair and your clothes smell faintly of gasoline. You must have spilled a little while you were filling up. How far have you driven?”
She shifted in her chair. “What are you, some kind of Sherlock Holmes?” she asked drily. “Maybe you can tell me what I had for dinner last night.”
He smiled. “You didn’t eat dinner. You didn’t stop until you were out of gas. You had a cup of coffee and nothing else. Then you didn’t stop again until you got a motel room. You slept in your clothes, although you didn’t sleep much. You couldn’t stop thinking about whatever happened that frightened you so much that you took off without packing.”
“How—?”
“If you’d packed, you’d have changed clothes.” He stopped. “My question is, what or who are you running from?”
She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. He saw tears start in her eyes, but she blinked to keep them from falling. When she spoke, there was no trace of the tears in her voice. “I’m not running from anyone,” she said, straightening her spine.
Mack knew from her voice that she was lying, and from her determined glare that she’d decided something. Probably to unload her woes upon him. He braced himself.
She stared at him for so long he was beginning to wonder if she’d fallen asleep with her eyes wide-open. But about the time he’d decided to snap his fingers in front of her face, she sat back with a sigh. “I drove here from Dowdie, Texas. Eight hours. And I’ve got to start back today. As soon as I can. My mother is—” She stopped as tears welled in her eyes. She wiped a hand down her face, then swiped at the dampness on her cheeks with her fingers.
“Your mother?” Mack said encouragingly.
“She’s very ill. She has to have dialysis or she’ll die.”
Mack waited, but she didn’t say anything else. She pressed her lips together and clenched her jaw, doing her best not to cry.
“Do you need money?” he asked gently. “To pay for the treatments?”
“What? No! I don’t need money. My mother has insurance.”
“So why did you drive all this way just to turn around and go back?”
“It’s complicated,” she said.
“Most things are, especially if they involve running.”
Tears welled again, and she pulled a tissue out of her purse and wiped her eyes. “I’ve kept that photo in my purse for years. Mom always told me that if I needed anything and she wasn’t—wasn’t—” She took a quick breath. “I should find Kathleen.”
Mack’s brows rose when she’d stumbled over her words. He pushed his chair back and stood. “Okay. Well, I’m Kathleen’s son, so if you’ll tell me what you need, I’ll take care of it for you.”
She played with the water glass, tracing a droplet of water up one side and down the other. “I can’t tell you. It’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous to who?” Mack asked.
“To my mother.”
“Look,” he said. “You need to start at the beginning. I can’t figure out what you’re talking about and I haven’t heard anything that sounds dangerous yet, except your mother’s illness. And you said she’s getting dialysis.”
“That’s just it. She’s not.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” She sobbed, then banged her open palm on the table. “I can’t stop crying.”
Mack got up and refilled her water. He set it in front of her and watched her as she drank it, hiccuped, then drank some more.
“Now. Why isn’t she getting dialysis?”
“Because she’s been kidnapped.”
Mack flopped down in the chair. “Kidnapped? Is this some kind of joke?”
She stared at him, anger burning away the tears. “A joke? That’s what you think?”
He opened his mouth then shook his head. He wasn’t sure what he thought at the moment. He’d figured she had come to ask for money and it was just taking her a while to work up the nerve.
He studied her. Her skin was still colorless. She looked exhausted and terrified and so far she wasn’t making a lot of sense.
“Okay. Your mother’s been kidnapped. By who? Have they contacted you? Do they want a ransom? And have you talked to the police?”
“No! No. It’s not that kind of kidnapping. And I can’t go to—” She stopped talking.
Mack sighed. “Of course you can’t. Why not?”
“They can’t help. Nobody can help. I don’t even know why I came here. I had to run. He was going to shoot me.” She looked at the water glass. “I should have stayed,” she said, her voice a mutter now. “I should have confronted him.”
Well, she wasn’t talking to him any longer.
“But there was all that blood,” she continued. “And Billy Joe just collapsed and died. So I ran. I thought I had to save myself so I could find my mother before she died. But now she’s going to die anyway. Oh, I don’t know what to do.”
“Whoa, damn it! Slow down.” Mack did his best to put everything she’d said into logical order. If she wasn’t just crazy, then she’d been through some kind of horrible trauma. “Hannah. Let’s start over and take this slow. Who was going to shoot you? Whose blood did you see and who is Billy Joe?”
She stared at him for a moment, as if trying to figure out what he was doing there, in her reality. Then she blinked. “Oh.” She shot up out of the chair and slung her purse strap over her shoulder. “I apologize,” she said. “I think I’ve made a mistake.” She looked at the business card in her hand, then stuffed it into her jeans pocket and ran out the front door.
“Hannah, wait!” he called. He started to run after her, but his protective instincts kicked in.
Good riddance, he thought when he heard the outside door slam. She had to have come here for money, then lost her nerve and tried to make up some kind of story. She’d never make it as a grifter. Her heart-shaped face gave too much away. He’d watched the kaleidoscope of expressions that flitted across her features as she’d listened to her cell phone ring. Bewilderment, fear, anger, resignation, each taking its turn, then the cycle had started all over again.
He felt sorry for her. Whoa. That was the kind of thinking that could get him into deep trouble, if he let himself get drawn in. He was lucky she’d run out when she did. Good riddance, indeed.
While his brain was congratulating him for dodging that bullet, he found himself rushing out the front door. She’d made it down his long sidewalk to her car, digging a large ring of keys out of her purse and unlocking a dark blue Toyota.
Mack used his phone to snap a shot of the rear of her car just as she climbed in. The license plate was from Texas. And even from half a block away, he could see two bullet holes in the bumper near the plate. Recent ones.
Maybe she hadn’t been making it all up.
Although he had the snapshot, he jotted the license plate number down on a small notepad that he always carried. When he put the pad back into his shirt pocket, it seemed to burn his skin. He sighed. He was going to regret this.
No. That wasn’t accurate. He already did. But even as he thought that, his mind had already latched on to the mystery of Hannah Martin. Kidnapping, murder, blood, pursuit, death.
“Who are you, Hannah Martin?” he muttered. “And why did you come to me?”
Chapter Three
Hannah drove straight from St. Charles Avenue to her motel in Metairie in an exhausted haze. But now, sitting in her parked car, her brain was whirling, replaying every second of the past hour.
What had possessed her to place all her hopes of saving her mother on an old photo of a friendship from more than thirty years before? All she’d done was exhaust herself driving and waste over twelve of the precious hours her mother had left before her body went into toxic liver failure. All she’d gained for her trouble was the not-so-sympathetic ear of Kathleen Griffin’s handsome if grouchy son.
She turned off the engine and got out of the car. As soon as she put weight on her knees, they gave way. She barely managed to grab at the door frame to keep from falling. Her heart raced, her head felt weird—light and heavy at the same time—and the edges of her vision were turning black. It had to be exhaustion and hunger.
After a few seconds, she gingerly let go of the hot metal door frame and tested her ability to walk. Not too bad. But her hands trembled so much that it took her three tries to insert her key card into the motel’s door.
Once she was inside with the door closed, the tears she’d been holding back ever since she’d watched Billy Joe collapse and die came, as if floodgates had opened. She flopped down onto the bed and grabbed one of the pillows to hug as she cried. But within a couple of moments, she clenched her jaw and wiped her face.
That was enough of that. She didn’t have time to cry. She had to figure out what she was going to do. Here she was, eight hours away from her home, and if someone asked her why she’d driven all that way, she wouldn’t have been able tell them. In fact, she’d run away again as soon as Mack had started questioning her. He’d made her realize just how little she’d thought about what she was going to do.
What if she drove back to Dowdie and did what she should have done—gone to Sheriff King? For that matter, what if she’d gone to him about Billy Joe’s obvious involvement in something illegal? Would things be completely different now? Would Billy Joe be in jail instead of dead and would her mother be safe and sound at home, preparing to go for dialysis later in the week?
Or would she and her mother be sitting in an interrogation room trying to explain to the sheriff that they knew nothing about what Billy Joe was or was not doing?
When she’d raced to the Toyota and taken off with Billy Joe’s killer on her heels, she had actually considered going to the sheriff—for about ten seconds. Until she reminded herself that in her world, authorities like the police or Children’s Services had the power to destroy her life.
From long ago when she’d been barely old enough to understand, her mother’s admonitions were ingrained in her. If you tell the police Mommy fell asleep with a cigarette and started a fire, they’ll take you away from me and put you in an orphanage. You can put the fire out, can’t you, sweetie? Just put it out and don’t tell anybody. Then we’ll be safe. We’ll take care of each other.
And they had. Her mother had raised her alone. It had been just the two of them against the world. Then, when the roles had become reversed as her mother’s cirrhosis worsened, Hannah had taken care of her without regret—until the moment she’d witnessed a murder and run away.
Suddenly, Hannah remembered the phone call she’d gotten while she’d been standing outside Kathleen Griffin’s apartment. She blotted her cheeks on her shirtsleeve then fished inside her purse for her phone. Her fingers touched the smooth paper of the envelope, but she pushed it aside. Whatever was inside it wasn’t going to help her right now. In fact, it might make things worse.
She found her phone and sat there holding it, not wanting to look at the display. Maybe she’d misread the caller ID. Maybe her exhausted mind had merely overlaid Billy Joe’s name over whoever had really been calling her. But when she looked, the display definitely read “B.J.” Her heart jumped, just as it had earlier.
Someone was calling her from Billy Joe’s phone. There were only two possibilities. The man with the red tattoo, who’d shot Billy Joe in cold blood, or the sheriff.
As she’d peeled out of her mother’s driveway in her haste to escape Billy Joe’s killer, she’d prayed that the man would keep shooting at the Toyota until he’d emptied his gun. She’d prayed that one of their unconcerned neighbors would hear the shots and call the sheriff, and that the sheriff would catch him red-handed and charge him with Billy Joe’s murder. And she’d prayed that everybody in town would become so wrapped up in the murder that they’d forget about Hannah Martin.
She accessed new voice mails. There were two. If it was the killer who had called her, had he really been dumb enough to leave a message? She skipped the message from the sheriff’s office without listening to it and played the second incoming message.
“Where’d you go, Hannah?” She cringed and swallowed against a sick dread that settled in her stomach. That wasn’t the sheriff. It was the man with the red tattoo on his hand. She’d never forget that awful voice as long as she lived.
“I know you don’t want to talk to me, but I need to see you, talk to you. I need to make sure you’re all right. Call me as soon as possible and let me know where you are. I’m worried about you. Bye-bye, Hannah.”
Numbly, Hannah pressed the off button. She sat there, trying to will away the nausea that was getting worse with every passing second. Then, unable to stave it off any longer, she jumped up and ran into the bathroom, where she heaved drily. After a moment the heaves slowed, then stopped. She splashed water on her face over and over, trying to cool her heated skin and soothe her burning eyes.
At last the nausea dissipated, but there wasn’t enough water in the world to wash away the sight of what that man had done to Billy Joe.
Had her mother’s boyfriend deserved to die in such a horrible way? Maybe. Maybe not. But she wondered—if she’d gotten the chance to kill him, would she? She couldn’t honestly deny it. Of course, she’d have tortured him first to find out where he was holding her mother.
When she’d come home from the drugstore with her mother’s prescriptions only to find her missing, she’d threatened Billy Joe with going to the sheriff, but he’d quickly and effectively reminded her of his earlier warning.
She should have made good on her threat and gone to the sheriff then. She should have realized that of the two, Billy Joe or the sheriff, the sheriff was the more trustworthy. He’d have arrested Billy Joe and Hannah and her mother would be at home now, safe and healthy.
But instead she’d done the cowardly thing. She’d kept her mouth shut. She’d pretended nothing was wrong. It was what she’d always done. Long, harsh experience had ingrained the habit into her, as deeply as drinking was ingrained in her mother. It was what alcoholics did. It was what the children of alcoholics did. They pretended and lied and never told their secrets.
But now, doing what she’d always done was going to get her mother killed.
Hannah stood, grabbing the back of a chair when she felt light-headed. She needed to head back to Dowdie, but a lifetime of taking care of her mother and herself had taught her to pay attention to her body. There was no way she could drive eight hours tonight, no matter how desperate she was to get back home and find her mother. She’d fall asleep at the wheel.
Digging into her purse, she pushed aside the sealed envelope and her wallet, searching for the two high-energy protein bars she’d seen earlier. They were a little misshapen and the worse for wear, but still sealed. When she opened the first one, it was practically all crumbs, but she ate it anyhow, then ate the second one as well, washing them down with water from the tap in the bathroom, hoping that they’d be enough to satisfy her hunger and keep her from feeling so faint.
Then she took a shower, which made her feel a little better, if she didn’t count the exhaustion and her still queasy stomach.
Dressed in the only clothes she had, she lay down on the bed and turned on the TV, hoping to relax by watching a mindless sitcom for a while. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, according to the bedside clock. She groaned. It had been twenty-two hours since she’d witnessed Billy Joe’s murder and run for her life. During that time, she hadn’t closed her eyes, except for that fitful nap she’d taken early that morning.
She flipped channels until she recognized an episode of Friends. She leaned back against the pillows and tried to concentrate on the jokes Chandler was making. Four episodes later, she groaned and shifted position. She scrolled through the other channels on the old TV, but there was nothing interesting on. She reached for her paper cup of water, but it was empty, so she dragged herself up from the bed and went into the tiny bathroom to refill it. The next thing she knew, she’d dropped the cup and splashed water all over her legs and the floor. She’d fallen asleep standing up and dropped the cup.
She tossed a towel down and dried the water, but when she straightened, she started feeling queasy again. And now the edges of her vision were turning black and sparkly, which told her she’d faint if she didn’t lie down.
She lay down on the bed. Was all this caused by her exhaustion and hunger? She’d eaten and rested—a little. She didn’t have to consider for long to figure out that the nausea and light-headedness were the result of all the stress she’d been under added to hunger and weariness. Within the past forty-eight hours, her mother had been abducted from her house, her life and her mother’s had been threatened and she’d witnessed the kidnapper—the only person who knew where her mother was—murdered in cold blood.
Then, panicked and thinking only of staying alive, Hannah had fled.
Breathing shallowly, Hannah waited for the nausea and light-headedness to pass. She closed her eyes and tried her best to relax and clear her mind. But Mack Griffin’s slow, knowing smile rose before her closed lids.
During those first few seconds after he’d opened the door, she’d had the odd notion that her mother had sent her to Kathleen Griffin’s home for this very reason. Because her own personal knight in shining armor had opened the door, ready and waiting to charge into battle for her, to rescue her mother and sweep them both away from harsh reality, pain and heartache.
But as soon as he’d fixed those hazel eyes on her, it had been immediately obvious that he had no idea who she was, nor did he care.
She should have turned and run sooner than she had, but at the time, she hadn’t realized that with each passing second she’d become more mesmerized by his greenish-gold eyes and his large, capable hands and more dismayed that she was so affected by a perfect stranger. Still, in that first fairy-tale moment, something in his eyes behind the cynical smile and the worldly attitude had made her think he really could rescue her, even though she knew nothing about him except that he apparently was Kathleen Griffin’s son.
He might look honorable and trustworthy and knight-like, but Hannah reminded herself of what she had learned at her mother’s knee—men were never trustworthy. As big and strong and protective as they seemed, the reality was that men were always liars, bullies and cheaters.
But somewhere along the line her mother had gotten it wrong, because Stephanie also believed that women were weak. All they could do to protect themselves was pretend there was nothing wrong, lie when questioned and trust the untrustworthy men, since they had no other choice.
Well, not Hannah. She’d decided a long time ago that she would only trust herself. She hadn’t met a man yet who could take care of her as well as she took care of herself and her mother. She lay down and tried to relax. She’d sleep for a couple of hours, then check out and get the car filled up so she could—
The car.
Her eyes flew open. Oh, dear Lord, the car. How had she forgotten about the car? Billy Joe’s voice, filled with naive pride, came back to her. My car. That’s where the drugs are. They’re hidden in the trunk lining.
She sat up, her heart thumping wildly. She’d driven for eight hours in a car filled with drugs. A stolen car, as she’d discovered when she’d gone through the glove box and found that it was registered to a Nelson Vance, of Paris, Texas.
She couldn’t drive the Toyota back to Dowdie. She couldn’t drive it one more foot. She needed to abandon it and leave the motel. Now.
She closed her aching eyes as tears of exhaustion, frustration and hopelessness welled up. That meant she had to wipe down the car, inside and out, to get rid of her fingerprints, and take a cab to another depressing motel, then make arrangements to find another car or ride the bus back to Dowdie. And she had to start right now. She couldn’t afford to sleep until she’d put miles between her and the Toyota.
She pressed her palms against her eyes, wishing she dared to set her phone’s alarm and sleep—if only for a half hour.
As if prompted by her thoughts, her phone rang. Hannah’s heart jumped into her throat and every muscle in her body went on full fight-or-flight alert. It was him again. The man with the red tattoo. The man who’d killed Billy Joe. She sat up straight, wringing her hands. Her chest tightened until she could barely breathe. She was afraid to answer and afraid not to. Cringing with dread, she pressed the answer button and put the phone to her ear.
“Hey, Hannah Martin,” the dreadful menacing voice said.
Terror arrowed through her. She wanted to drop the phone and smash it, but her fingers clutched it tightly and she pressed her other hand against her chest as she waited to hear what he said. She shouldn’t have answered. She should have let it go to voice mail so she’d have a record of what he said.
“Not talking? That’s okay,” the voice said conversationally. “I just wanted to let you know I’ll be seeing you soon. Very soon. You’ve got something that Billy Joe promised us.”
She didn’t speak, wasn’t sure she could. She pulled the phone away from her ear. She needed to record him if she could just find the record button.
“Wh-what are you talking about?” she rasped, hoping to keep him talking. Where was the stupid button? She pressed Menu, Settings, every button she could think of. Then finally, there it was. Memo Record. She jabbed it.
“You know what I’m talking about,” the man was saying. “You ran off with Billy Joe’s car and we need to get it. Why don’t we meet and I’ll trade you my brand-new car for that beat-up Toyota. Oh, and I can pick up that other little item, too, that Billy Joe gave you. I’ve got to say, Hannah, it’ll be good to see you.” The voice was barely audible, but Hannah heard every word. There was no mistaking the implied threat. “Now, remind me where you’re staying.”
“I don’t know who you are and I don’t have anything. Billy Joe didn’t give me anything!” she cried. “Leave me alone!”
“Don’t act all innocent, Hannah. Billy Joe was fighting for his life. Why would he lie? But you were there. You know what he said. He said you stole Mr. Ficone’s money. He said you’re the key to the missing money.” He paused, but she didn’t take the bait. She didn’t answer.
“Hey, that’s okay. I’ll call you back once I get closer to you. I’m driving right now and I really shouldn’t be on the phone. So I’ll be talking to you later, once I get to that town. Watch yourself, Hannah. Don’t make the mistake of lying. You’ll end up like Billy Joe.”
She gasped. “You killed him. I know you did. I saw you.”
“Oh, Hannah, you really should try to control that imagination of yours.” he said, his voice as gentle and sweet as a new father’s. “Oh, by the way, your mom says hi. Bye-bye, now.”
“Wait!” she cried. “You know where my mother is—?”
The line went dead. “Wait—please. No, no, no.” She stared at the display. The icon indicated that the computer was recording. With a shaking finger, she stopped it.
Your mother says hi. That couldn’t be true, could it? The man with the red tattoo couldn’t know where her mother was. Only Billy Joe knew and the man had killed him.
She held her finger over the play button, but after a few seconds, she shuddered and dropped the phone into her purse. She couldn’t listen to it again. Besides, he was lying about her mother. When Billy Joe told him he’d kidnapped her, the man had sounded surprised and shocked. Then Billy Joe had died right in front of him. No. He didn’t know where her mother was. He couldn’t.
Could he?
* * *
MACK DRUMMED HIS fingers on his kitchen table as he waited for the search results to show up on his tablet. He’d input “Stephanie Clemens, Texas.” There were eleven Stephanie Clemenses in the state, apparently, not to mention all the Clemenses that weren’t Stephanies and all the Stephanies that weren’t Clemenses.
He’d found one whose age was about right in a town called Dowdie. She was listed as forty-two years old and living with Hannah Martin, age twenty-five. Mack sat back in his chair, staring at the screen. So Stephanie Clemens was his odd visitor’s mother. She was forty-two, which meant she’d been seventeen when her daughter was born. Mack shook his head. Children having children.
There was a telephone number listed beside Stephanie Clemens’s name. He entered the number into his cell phone under the name Hannah Martin. Then he dialed it. There was no answer. Probably a landline.
He input Stephanie Ann Martin Clemens, Dowdie, Texas, into a search engine, and three police reports popped up. The first, dated two years previously, was a call regarding drug activity at her home address. Mack skimmed the short paragraph. No arrests. Clemens claimed she used marijuana to alleviate nausea from an illness. Although she couldn’t produce a doctor’s order or even a note confirming that, the police hadn’t placed her under arrest.
The second and third calls were for domestic disturbances. The location was the same address, but were four and five months before. They involved Clemens and Billy Joe Campbell, age thirty-eight. One of the calls had been made by Hannah Martin.
Mack typed in Hannah Martin, Dowdie, Texas, but found no other references to her. He sat, staring out through the French doors that opened onto the small patio behind his house. St. Charles Avenue, but what he saw wasn’t a big concrete fountain and fish pool, it was Hannah. He should have known the instant he’d laid eyes on her that she’d be trouble. He should have recognized the signs.
“Two domestic disturbances involving your mother and her boyfriend,” he said aloud. “That’s been your life, hasn’t it, Hannah? Watching your mother get beat up by thugs that didn’t deserve her. She’s the only role model you’ve ever had, isn’t she? That’s all you’ve ever known!” His voice gained in volume as anger built inside him.
Suddenly, the house was too small and hot for him. He vaulted up out of his desk chair, sending it crashing into the kitchen counter behind him. Then he threw open the French doors and stepped outside, gulping deep breaths of the cool breeze that had blown in with an afternoon thunderstorm. It was unusual for a summer storm to cool the air, but he wasn’t complaining. After a few moments, the pressure in his chest and the heat along his scalp dissipated.
Mack knew too much about women like Stephanie Clemens and Hannah Martin. And he knew way too much about abusive boyfriends. He’d been six years old the first time he’d seen blood dripping from his mother’s nose. Her boyfriend had slammed her face against one of the tall columns of the four-poster bed. Mack had flung himself at the guy, trying to break his nose, but at six, he wasn’t strong enough or tall enough.
The jerk had swatted him away like a bothersome fly, then bent down to whisper in his ear, “If you try that again, your mom will hurt worse. Understand?”
Mack’s hands cramped and he looked down to find that he’d clenched his fists. Carefully, he relaxed them, shaking them a little to ease the cramping. He took a few more breaths of chilly air, letting it flow through him, cooling the frustrated anger.
He found himself once again wishing Billy Joe Campbell were alive, because he’d like to have a few minutes with him, just long enough to give him a taste of his own medicine. But Mack had more sense than that, and more self-control—and Billy Joe was dead. He took one more deep breath, filling his lungs with the scent of damp earth and fresh rain, then went back inside.
As he was retrieving his chair and rolling it back up to the table, his phone rang. He looked at the display and sighed. It was Sadie, the woman he’d been seeing. “Hello,” he said, making sure his voice was bland.
“Hey,” Sadie said. “What happened to ‘hi, doll,’ or ‘sexy Sadie’?”
“Busy,” he said impatiently, not really trying to mask the frustration in his voice. He looked at the clock in the corner of the screen.
“Well, business can wait until tomorrow. I’m back in town and I want to see you,” Sadie said in her low, sexy voice. “Come over.”
Mack arched his neck. It was easy to get too big a dose of Sadie. And he’d gotten a nearly lethal overdose about the time she’d gone out of town. Her absence had convinced him that he’d had enough of her to last a lifetime. He’d told her from the beginning that he wasn’t interested in anything long-term, and she’d responded that she wasn’t, either. As he rubbed his eyes, he wondered if she’d been telling the truth.
“Can’t,” he said. “I’m working on a new case and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be tied up for quite a while.”
“Oh, come on,” Sadie said. “You have to eat. Let’s grab dinner and—”
“Sadie,” he interrupted, gently but firmly. “No.”
“Fine,” she said. “Tell me about this big case you can’t tear yourself away from.”
“It’s not just the case,” he said. “It’s a lot of things. It’s been fun, but...”
“But?” she echoed.
“You know. We talked about this. We were never in it for the long haul. We both agreed.”
There was a slight pause. “That’s true.”
He didn’t speak. He really didn’t like this. He wasn’t quite sure why he’d chosen tonight as the night to break up with her.
“Okay, then,” she said. “I enjoyed—everything.”
“Me, too,” he replied. He took a breath to say something else, but she hung up. He winced. That abrupt hang up was the only indication that she might have been upset.
Maybe he should have handled that in person, but unfortunately, Sadie could be quite persuasive in person. Or at least she had been once, he amended, as his brain compared Sadie and Hannah. Hannah, with her unmade-up face and flyaway hair and no lipstick, won by a mile.
Mack shook his head and resisted the urge to pound on his temples with his fists. He didn’t want Hannah Martin in there. She was nothing but trouble. Mack had always loved women, but he’d learned very young that relationships were not for him. Whenever he met someone he was attracted to, he made his position clear from the first moment. If the woman protested at all, then she was not the woman for him. Most women he asked out were happy with the arrangement, because Mack was very careful to pick like-minded women. Usually he picked well. After a while, by mutual agreement, he and the woman parted ways and eventually he met another like-minded woman.
He sat down to send an email to Dusty Graves, Dawson’s computer wizard, to ask how much longer until she had information back on the license plate of the car Hannah had been driving. As he did, his phone rang. Surely it wasn’t Sadie again. Give it up, doll.
But when he looked, the display name was Dust007. “Hey, Dusty, what you got for me?”
“Finally got the info on that plate you wanted me to run,” Dusty said, “but you’re not going to like it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s registered to a Nelson Vance, of Paris, Texas. He reported it stolen about a week ago. The license and registration also report the vehicle as sky blue, not dark blue.”
Mack’s stomach sank. Stolen and repainted? Ten to one, whoever stole it was either reselling cars or running drugs. Either way, this wasn’t good. “A witness? Any sightings by highway patrol? Anything?”
“The Tyler, Texas, police have a BOLO out on the car. The DEA has been watching a small-time narcotics distribution ring operating around the area. The perps apparently steal a vehicle from a neighboring town or county, use it for one drug delivery, then clean it out and abandon it. This vehicle is suspected to have been stolen by the ring.”
Dusty was right. Mack didn’t like what he was hearing at all. What was Hannah Martin doing driving a car suspected of being stolen by a narcotics distribution ring?
Chapter Four
“What kind of narcotics do they deal in?” he asked Dusty.
“Mostly Oxy,” Dusty said.
Stunned, Mack muttered a curse. Oxycontin.
“Yeah,” Dusty continued. “Word is, they’re bringing it into Galveston from Mexico. Get this. The DEA knows all about a big-time trafficker named Ficone in Galveston, but they’ve been spending their time watching a suspected small-time operator, until he was murdered yesterday.”
“Murdered?” Dread settled heavy as an anvil in Mack’s chest. “Yesterday? Who was he?”
“Campbell. Billy Joe Campbell. He was shot once in the chest at close range. A neighbor complained about gunshots.” Dusty took a breath. “You know something about this?”
Hannah’s jumbled words echoed in Mack’s ears. I had to run. He was going to shoot me.
“Where did this happen?” he croaked, positive he knew the answer.
“Hang on.”
Mack heard computer keys tapping.
“A little town called Dowdie.” Dusty paused for a second. “Mack, tell me you don’t have a client who’s driving that chopped car. That would not be good.”
“Nope. No client. Just checking for a friend.” Not a complete lie.
“O-kay,” Dusty said, her tone making it obvious that she didn’t believe him. “You want me to send you the details from the police report?”
“Yeah. Everything you’ve got on Billy Joe Campbell. I appreciate it.”
“No problem, Mack. You be careful. I’ll TTYL. ’Bye.”
Mack hung up, remembering the changing expressions on Hannah’s face and the terror in her eyes when her telephone rang. He knew that terror, knew it intimately. Had Hannah done what Mack hadn’t been able to do when he was twelve? Had she killed the man who had hurt her mother?
He waited impatiently, repeatedly checking for new mail until Dusty’s message about the murder came in. He scanned the police report, his heart sinking with every sentence. A neighbor had called the sheriff’s office around 7:00 p.m. complaining about gunshots at 1400 Redbud Lane, Dowdie, Texas.
A sheriff’s deputy arrived at around seven-thirty to find the house and driveway empty. A quick investigation by the deputy turned up a body of a white male, mid to late thirties, in the garage. Cause of death, a single gunshot wound to the chest. The victim was identified as Billy Joe Campbell of Fort Worth, Texas. The police report indicated that neither the owner of the house, a Ms. Stephanie Clemens, nor her daughter, Ms. Hannah Martin, could be found. Both were being sought for questioning in the matter.
Campbell had been killed around twelve hours before Hannah had turned up at Mack’s door, looking for Kathleen Griffin. She’d also mentioned seeing Billy Joe collapse and die and being shot at. What were the odds that Hannah had witnessed her mother’s boyfriend being murdered?
* * *
A LOUD CRASH and a harsh male voice startled Hannah out of a restless sleep. Her pulse drummed in her ears and she couldn’t catch a full breath. “Mom?” she called, before she came fully awake.
The crashing began again. With a start, she remembered. It couldn’t be her mom. Her mom had been kidnapped by Billy Joe and Billy Joe was dead.
Hannah rubbed her eyes as she forced her brain to sort out the noises that were battering her ears. It had to be the man with the red tattoo. He’d found her.
“Police! Open up!”
Police? Surprised and terrified, Hannah jumped out of bed and ran to the door. “What is it? Did you find my—” She stopped herself just as she was about to throw the dead bolt. What if it wasn’t the police?
She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. She’d slept for a couple of hours. “I need proof you’re the police.” She made her voice as stern as she could, but it still quavered.
“Hannah Martin, I’m Detective Anthony Teilhard of the Metairie Police Department. I’ve got the motel’s night manager here. He’s going to unlock the door and we’re coming in. I’d suggest you move back.”
She scrambled backward as a key turned in the doorknob and then in the dead bolt. The door swung open and slammed against the wall as three officers burst into the room, guns at the ready. Hannah shrieked as two of them, one male and one female, turned their weapons on her. The third officer quickly checked the bathroom and the tiny closet.
“Clear,” he said.
The officer who’d entered first took three steps forward and looked down the barrel of his gun at her. “Hannah Martin?” he said.
Hannah’s head jerked in a nod. Her first instinct was to retreat, but she bumped her hip on the corner of the bedside table. She was trapped between the bed and the wall. “Who—wha—?” Nothing but broken, senseless sounds escaped her constricted throat. She clutched at the neck of her shirt with trembling fingers.
“I’m Detective Teilhard. Keep your hands where I can see them. Good. Now, where did you get the car, Hannah?”
“The car?” she parroted. “It’s—I don’t—” All she could think about was Billy Joe saying, That’s where the drugs are. They’re hidden in the trunk lining.
“Come on, Hannah. Pull yourself together. You’re in a lot of trouble. The best thing you can do is answer my questions. Now tell me about the car.”
“I don’t know anything,” she said. It wasn’t exactly true.
“Nothing?” Teilhard said wryly. “Okay, Hannah. In that case, looks like we’re going to have to do this down at the station. You’re under arrest for possession of a stolen vehicle, driving a stolen vehicle and transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines.”
She waited, her heart in her throat, but he didn’t mention illegal drugs or homicide.
The detective looked at the female officer. “Officer Waller, would you check her for weapons and cuff her, please?”
“Arms straight out at your sides, please,” Officer Waller said.
Hannah obeyed, feeling a profound relief that the police were here about the car and not about Billy Joe’s murder. When she caught Teilhard gazing at her with a puzzled look, she ducked her head and tried to compose her features. Had he seen the relief on her face?
The female officer started to pat her down. Hannah recoiled. “No, wait,” she said quickly. “Please. I didn’t know it was stolen. I’ll tell you what I know. You don’t have to arrest me.” She felt a lump growing in her throat. If they arrested her, how was she ever going to get back to Dowdie to find her mother?
She swallowed hard, trying to stop the tears. She was sure Teilhard wasn’t the type who could be swayed by a damsel in distress. In fact, his mouth was already thinning in a line of distaste at her hedging.
She needed to figure out what to do and fast, because it wasn’t going to take the detective long to find out what she already knew—that the person who had stolen the car was dead, murdered, and that the car was filled with drugs. Then what would he do? He’d put her in jail. No question about it. She’d be charged with grand theft auto and murder. That meant that her mother would surely die.
Officer Waller quickly and efficiently finished patting her down, then pulled her arms behind her back and cuffed her hands.
“Do you really have to do this?” Hannah asked as the cold metal bit into her wrists, desperate to try anything to get out of being arrested. Anything but telling the truth. She was in too deep. If she tried to explain, Teilhard would laugh as he threw her into lockup. “It’s got to be a misunderstanding. I apologize for the trouble. I mean, I thought I was borrowing my mom’s boyfriend’s car. Can’t we just give the car back to its owner? I’ll pay for any damages.” She made her voice sound hopeful.
She could pretend all she wanted, but she knew that there was no way any sheriff’s office or police station would send three armed officers to bring in one relatively harmless female driving a stolen car. This had to be about something else. Then a horrible thought occurred to her. Had her mother been found—dead? Were they really here to arrest her for two murders, Billy Joe’s and her mother’s?
Teilhard laughed. “Yeah. It’s a misunderstanding,” he said sarcastically. “Why’d you go to the trouble to repaint the car when you didn’t bother to change the license plate or replace the broken passenger-side mirror? Kind of amateurish for a car thief. But it certainly narrows the suspect pool.” He turned toward the door. “Let’s go. I don’t have time to stand around all day listening to ‘he’s my mom’s boyfriend’ and ‘I didn’t know.’” The last was said in a tinny falsetto. The other two officers laughed.
Hannah wanted to cry as she felt the last droplets of hope drain from her heart.
They put her in the back of the squad car and drove to the Metairie Police Station. Waller and Teilhard were in the car with her. The third officer had taken her key to drive the Toyota to the impound lot.
After several intensely uncomfortable minutes as she tried to keep her hands from going to sleep and her wrists from being permanently marked by the tight metal cuffs, they arrived. She was pulled out of the car and marched into the police station, handcuffed like a common thief. Officer Waller stood her in front of the booking counter in view of all the other officers, detectives and criminals, with the cuffs hurting more after the ride, while Teilhard got the forms filled out. Then he turned to her.
“I’m placing your purse in this plastic bag to be held until your release or until someone posts bail. Officer Waller?” He turned to the female officer.
“Yes, sir,” Waller said, stepping forward.
“Please remove her earrings,” Teilhard said, nodding toward Hannah. “Hannah, do you have any other jewelry? Piercings? Any prosthetics like a partial bridge in your mouth?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Sir?” Waller said to Teilhard. “Do you want a full search?”
Teilhard assessed Hannah, then shook his head. “I don’t think that will be necessary.” He turned to a cop who’d been waiting at the counter. “Put her in one of the interrogation rooms and get her some coffee if she wants.”
Hannah shook her head, but neither one of them paid any attention to her.
The cop took her into a small, stark room. “I’ll get that coffee,” he said and left.
She stood there next to the wooden table, not wanting to try sitting again with her hands cuffed behind her. As hard as it had been to sit in the police car with its upholstered backseat, a hard-backed chair would be torture.
She tried to take her mind off her aching shoulders and stinging wrists by studying the Formica tabletop. It was old and chipped, and had names and phrases carved into it. Idly, she wondered where Tony or Eddie Jewels or Turk had gotten their hands on something sharp enough to use to carve those deep grooves. She spent a few moments trying to read some other names and phrases, but her eyelids kept drooping.
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Mallory Kane
SHE WAS A COMPLICATION P.I. MACK GRIFFIN DIDN'T NEED–BUT A TEMPTATION HE COULDN'T RESIST. From the moment he opens his door to her, P.I. Mack Griffin knows he's inviting trouble. Not only has Hannah Martin fled to New Orleans after witnessing a brutal murder, but the killer has kidnapped her ailing mother. Nothing but trouble, so…Why does the sexy P.I. decide to help Hannah and keep her safe? Because watching her fight for justice while trying to stay alive demonstrates a bravery he finds nothing short of amazing. With criminals on their trail and everything to lose, Mack will be there for her as any professional investigator would. And yet winning this battle has suddenly turned into something much more personal.
SHE WAS A COMPLICATION P.I. MACK GRIFFIN DIDN’T NEED—BUT A TEMPTATION HE COULDN’T RESIST.
From the moment he opens his door to her, P.I. Mack Griffin knows he’s inviting trouble. Not only has Hannah Martin fled to New Orleans after witnessing a brutal murder, but the killer has kidnapped her ailing mother. Nothing but trouble, so…
Why does the sexy P.I. decide to help Hannah and keep her safe? Because watching her fight for justice while trying to stay alive demonstrates a bravery he finds nothing short of amazing. With criminals on their trail and everything to lose, Mack will be there for her as any professional investigator would. And yet winning this battle has suddenly turned into something much more personal.
“You know, Mack, I’d have made you as a player. What’s the matter? Got some kind of lawyer rule against kissing a client?”
He swallowed, unsure how to answer her. The thing was, he was a player—when the game was being played by his rules, which this game was not.
He allowed himself a small smile at her brazen challenge.
Watch out, Miss Martin, he said to himself. This game’s about to change.
“Well?” she taunted.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said softly, the smile still in place.
“What do you mean?” she asked, feigning innocence.
“Oh, it’s not your fault. You’ve only had boys to play with. It’s understandable that you don’t know what you’re getting into by flirting with a man. I’d advise you to stop now.”
“Stop?” she said as a flush rose all the way to her cheeks. “I don’t want to stop.”
Sanctuary in Chef Voleur
Mallory Kane
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
MALLORY KANE has two very good reasons for loving reading and writing. Her mother was a librarian, and taught her to love and respect books as a precious resource. Her father could hold listeners spellbound for hours with his stories. He was always her biggest fan.
She loves romantic suspense with dangerous heroes and dauntless heroines, and enjoys tossing in a bit of her medical knowledge for an extra dose of intrigue. After twenty-five books published, Mallory is still amazed and thrilled that she actually gets to make up stories for a living.
Mallory lives in Tennessee with her computer-genius husband and three exceptionally intelligent cats. She enjoys hearing from readers. You can write her at mallory@mallorykane.com (mailto:mallory@mallorykane.com).
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Hannah Martin—When Hannah witnesses the murder of her mother’s boyfriend, she runs for her life, ending up in New Orleans, where she meets private investigator Mack Griffin.
MacEllis “Mack” Griffin—Mack decides to investigate Hannah while helping her find her kidnapped mother. Despite the danger he faces to protect her, his biggest fear is falling for the stubborn young blonde who has already half captured his heart.
Billy Joe Campbell—Hannah witnesses Billy Joe’s murder by a drug lord’s henchman, and now she’s next on his list.
Hoyt—Hoyt is a hit man who knows which side of his bread is buttered. His job is enforcement, and he’s good at it. But as he chases Hannah and Mack, he’s unwittingly carving a path that will change the lives of everyone involved.
For Anna, who has been so supportive. Thanks for understanding how it can be.
Contents
Chapter One (#u67314b30-7236-54c9-9108-e1292b8c5f0c)
Chapter Two (#udeaff07d-2287-5ffa-958a-a0a3957fac29)
Chapter Three (#ua7267684-2cc2-5359-a8e6-2f2141515fa1)
Chapter Four (#u21f063ec-908d-5579-8c83-3a790b83d75b)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Hannah Martin’s heart leaped into her throat as she waved at Mr. Jones, their neighbor, whose house was a mile away from theirs. He was watering his window boxes as she drove past.
Billy Joe had told her to be friendly with the neighbors but not to talk to them. “If you say one word to anyone, you’ll never see Stephanie alive,” he’d told her more than a few times in the past twenty-four hours.
Her mom, Stephanie Clemens, had gone into liver failure from cirrhosis a couple of weeks ago and was receiving hemodialysis while waiting for a donor liver. Then two days ago, Hannah had overheard Billy Joe, her mother’s boyfriend, talking on his cell phone. He was arranging some kind of delivery to Tulsa, Oklahoma. And from his side of the conversation, it was obvious to Hannah that the goods were illegal and very valuable. It had to be drugs.
She’d confronted him and kicked him out of her mother’s house, saying if he showed back up, she’d go to the sheriff. He’d left.
Then, yesterday, when she’d returned from a short run to the drugstore, her mother was gone and Billy Joe was back. He’d abducted her mom and was holding her somewhere.
Hannah growled in frustration and desperation as she pulled into the driveway of her mother’s house. Popping the trunk lid, she grabbed one heavy case of beer, leaving the other case for a second trip.
“Billy Joe?” she called as she hooked her index finger around the handle of the screen door and then toed it open enough to catch it with her elbow. “Billy Joe? I’m back. My car’s battery died again. That’s why I took the Toyota.”
She set the beer on the kitchen counter and listened. Nothing. The house felt empty. Where was he? He was always waiting at the door to make sure she got back from the grocery store not one minute later than he’d told her to be—with his cigarettes and beer.
An ominous thought occurred to her. Had something happened to her mother? She went through the house, but as she’d known, it was empty. Billy Joe wasn’t there. Nearly panicked, she ran back outside. The setting sun reflected on the tin roof of the garage, but she thought she could see a light on inside it. Billy Joe never left a room without turning off the light, just like he never left the house without checking the locks three times. And woe to anyone who didn’t put a tool or a book or even a ballpoint pen back exactly where they got it, down to the millimeter. So if the lights were on in the garage, then Billy Joe was in there.
From the first moment her mother had let him move in a few months ago, he’d taken over the garage. He’d kept it locked and never let her or Hannah near it. His reasoning was because he was working on his prized vintage Mustang Cobra and the engine had to stay free of dust. He was as obsessive about his cars as everything else.
Hannah walked across the driveway to the garage, her shoulders stiff, her heart thudding so hard it physically hurt. Maybe her mother was in there? It wasn’t the first time she’d thought that, but she was genuinely afraid of Billy Joe. After all, he’d pushed and slapped her mother a couple of times.
She wasn’t sure what she thought—or hoped—to find when she looked through the glass panes of the side door, but she couldn’t continue to sit by and do nothing while her mother was missing. Luckily, she’d just had her dialysis and wouldn’t need it again until the end of the week. But Hannah didn’t trust Billy Joe to take care of her. So although her stomach was already churning with nausea and a painful headache was making her light-headed, she was determined to see the inside of the garage.
Then she heard Billy Joe’s voice. She nearly jumped out of her skin. In the first instant, she thought he was yelling at her. But by the time she’d heard three or four unintelligible words, she realized that his tone wasn’t angry, it was afraid. Then she heard another voice. It was low and menacing, and she didn’t recognize it.
With horrible visions swirling in her head of her mother dying while Billy Joe and some buddy of his drank beer, she approached the door cautiously. She slid sideways along the outside wall until she was close enough to see through the glass panes, her heart beating so loudly in her ears that she was positive the people inside could hear it.
When she peeked through the dusty glass panes, Billy Joe’s back was to her, so she couldn’t see his face. He was standing in front of his workbench, arms spread plaintively, talking in an oddly meek voice.
Her gaze slid to the man standing in front of him. He was twice the size of Billy Joe. Not quite as tall but much larger. He had on a dark, dull-colored T-shirt that fit his weightlifter’s torso and beefy biceps like a glove. On the back of his right wrist was a tattoo. It was red and heart-shaped with what looked like letters in the center. Hannah blinked and squinted. Did it say MOM? She thought so, although the O wasn’t exactly an O. It was a dark circle. Before she could focus on it, the man reached behind his back and pulled a gun. The fluorescent light glinted off the steel barrel. Hannah stared at it, her pulse hammering in her throat.
Billy Joe froze in place. His voice took on an edge of shrill panic and he stepped backward and turned his palms out. “Hey, man, watch out with that thing. It could go off.” He laughed nervously. “I swear! You know everything I know. I’d never cheat the boss. I ain’t that stupid.”
Hannah saw a quick smirk flash across the other man’s face and knew he was thinking the same thing she was. Billy Joe was pretty stupid.
“So what happened to the drugs and the money?” the man said, not raising his voice. “Because our customer says he was shorted, and the last payment you sent to Mr. Ficone was short, as well. Mr. Ficone depends on his distributors to pay him so he can pay his suppliers. Now his suppliers are expecting to be paid everything they’re owed when Mr. Ficone meets with them in three days. So you’ve got three days to get that money to him.”
“I don’t know what happened to them, man. I had to use a new courier because my regular guy got picked up for not paying child support. Maybe he took it. I swear it was all there when I sealed the envelope. Or, hey, it coulda been the girl. Hannah Martin. My girlfriend’s daughter. Smart-mouthed bitch.” Billy Joe was sweating, literally. “She’s always snooping around. She probably stole the money out of the envelope. That new guy coulda left it lying around.”
The man with the red tattoo looked bored and disgusted. “I don’t think Mr. Ficone’s going to be satisfied with somebody else must have done it. He doesn’t like people that can’t control their people. That delivery was short almost twenty grand.”
“Twenty? That’s im-impossible,” Billy Joe stammered.
Beneath the fear, Hannah heard something in his voice she’d heard before. Billy Joe was lying.
He took another step backward, toward the door. “I’m telling you, it had to be Hannah Martin. She’s as sneaky as a fox. She musta got into it. I wouldn’t be surprised. But I swear, when I sealed that envelope, it was all there. I counted it.”
Hannah felt a heavy dread settle onto her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. He was throwing her to the wolves. She’d known he was trouble the minute she’d first laid eyes on him, and she’d tried to tell her mother, but Stephanie had never been smart when it came to men.
The man with the red tattoo shook his head. “Money doesn’t disappear from a sealed envelope,” he said. “I’ve got better things to do than stand here and listen to you lie. Mr. Ficone needs his money and he needs the drugs that were missing from your last delivery to our customer in Tulsa.”
“But, man, I swear—”
“Shut up with your whining,” the man yelled. “Where’s the money?”
Hannah jumped at the man’s suddenly raised voice. She shrank back against the wall by the door, terrified. He was holding a very big gun and his voice told her he was sick of Billy Joe’s rambling excuses.
What if he shot him? Everything inside her screamed “no!” Billy Joe was the only person in the world who knew where her mother was. She wanted to burst into the garage and beg the man to make Billy Joe tell her where her mother was, but the man looked ruthless and he was already sick of Billy Joe’s whining. If she called attention to herself, he was liable to shoot her, too.
“All right, punk. Mr. Ficone has no use for you if you’re not going to talk about where the money and the drugs are. That’s all he wants.”
Hannah shifted until she could see through the door again. She saw the man lift the barrel of the gun slightly, aiming it at Billy Joe.
“What he doesn’t want is screwups like you working for him. He hates people who can’t control their women. He hates thieves and he sure as hell hates loose ends.”
“Listen. I’ll get the money back. I’ve got a plan,” Billy Joe said, his hands doubling into fists. “My girlfriend’s sick. Real sick. And I kidnapped her. I’ve got her hidden away.”
Hannah gasped. Where? Tell him where, she begged silently.
“I told Hannah she’ll never see her mom again if she doesn’t do what I tell her. She’ll give me back the money.”
The larger man frowned and brandished the huge gun. “You kidnapped your sick girlfriend? You’re a real piece of work.”
“Okay, listen, man.” Sweat was running down Billy Joe’s face and soaking the neck of his T-shirt. “Here’s the deal. The drugs are hidden in the Toyota. But that bitch Hannah took it to town. She’s got strict orders not to touch my damn car, but she took it anyway. Bet you can’t guess where I put ’em. The drugs.” Despite the gun pointed at him, Billy Joe’s voice took on the bragging tone he used when he was sure he’d done something brilliant. “They’re hidden in the trunk lining.”
The man rolled his eyes and raised his gun.
“No, wait,” Billy Joe begged. “I was trying something new. A better way to hide them for transport. I swear man, that’s all. As soon as I made sure it worked, I was going to ask to show it to Mr. Ficone.” Billy Joe took a nervous breath. “Or you. Maybe you’d want to see it first. You could take the credit for thinking it up if you want.”
The man with the tattoo flexed his fingers around the handle of the handgun.
“Okay, listen. Hannah will be back any minute. She’d better be.” He turned his hands palms out and continued babbling. “Wait till you see the car. It’s brilliant, the way I hid the drugs. It’s all fixed up, ready to go.”
Fear and desperation twisted Hannah’s heart. Billy Joe was off on his favorite subject. Cars. The moment when he might have revealed where her mother was had passed.
“It’s a blue Toyota. Oh, I said that already. Anyhow, I painted it and boosted the engine. Th-the passenger-side mirror is broken and there’s a crack in the windshield. It looks like any old family car on the outside, but under the hood is a screaming turbo-charged V-8. It’s perfect for transport.” Billy Joe had turned his body slightly to the right and was gesturing with his left hand to emphasize what he was saying, but Hannah saw him slowly reaching behind him to the waistband of his jeans.
“What about the money? I don’t buy that your new guy or the girl—Hannah?—stole it.”
“No, no. Listen. I swear. I’m giving you the real deal.” Billy Joe’s words tumbled over each other. “It’s Hannah. That bitch is the key.” He giggled. “The key. You’d better believe me. She’s the one you want.” He got his fingers wrapped around the handle of the gun that was stuck in his waistband and covered with his untucked shirt.
The man with the red tattoo stiffened and gripped his weapon tightly. “Don’t move, slimeball!” the big man shouted.
“Look, I swear on my mama’s life. Okay, so I kept those few drugs that are hid in the Toyota. But Hannah’s the one who took the money. Not me. Make her talk. She’s holding the key to everything,” Billy Joe stammered.
Then, as Hannah watched in horror, he pulled out the gun. No! Don’t! She covered her mouth with her hand to keep from screaming.
Billy Joe fired. The gun bucked in his hand and the bullet struck the garage wall at least three feet above the other man’s head.
Without changing his position or his expression, the big man’s finger squeezed the trigger. Billy Joe bucked once, then the back of his shirt blossomed with red, like ink in water. He made a strangled sound, then collapsed to the floor, right where he stood. The small gun he was holding dropped to the concrete with a metallic clatter.
Hannah tried to scream, but her voice was trapped behind her closed throat. The last thing she saw before she turned and ran toward Billy Joe’s car was the big man’s dark eyes on her and the gaping barrel of the gun pointed directly at her.
* * *
A LONG TIME later, Hannah wrapped her hands around the thick white mug, savoring its warmth. It was almost midnight—four hours since she’d watched a man shoot Billy Joe in the heart. In one sense it seemed as though it had happened to someone else. But then she would close her eyes and she was there, watching the blood spread across the back of his shirt like a rose blooming in fast-forward on a nature show.
He was dead. Billy Joe was dead, and the secret of where he’d taken her mother had died with him. A spasm of panic shot through her and her hand jerked, spilling the coffee. She grabbed a napkin from a chrome dispenser and laid it on top of the spilled liquid.
Ever since her mother had disappeared, Hannah had been imagining things. She knew her mother was not literally dead yet—not from her disease. But nightmarish images of where she was being held swirled continuously in Hannah’s mind.
She could be lying in a bed or on a pallet on a cold floor, her breathing labored, her paper-thin skin turning more and more sallow as the time since her last dialysis treatment grew longer. Without the life-giving procedure, the toxins that her diseased liver couldn’t metabolize would kill her within days, if Billy Joe hadn’t killed her already.
Her once-beautiful mother, still young at forty-two, was an alcoholic. She’d been as good a mother as she could be, given her addiction, while the liquor had systematically destroyed her liver. By the time Hannah was sixteen, she had become her mom’s caregiver.
Right now, sitting in the bright diner with the mug of hot coffee in her hands, she couldn’t even remember how she’d gotten into Billy Joe’s car, peeled out of the driveway or gotten on the interstate. Her only thought had been to run as if the hounds of hell were behind her. All she remembered was that desperate need to stay alive so she could find her mother.
A few minutes ago, four hours and almost two hundred miles later, she’d been forced to stop because she was about out of gas. She took a swallow of hot, strong coffee. What was she going to do? Go back to Dowdie, Texas, where Sheriff Harlan King was already suspicious of her and her mother? He’d been called twice in the past few months, once by neighbors and once by Hannah herself, complaining about her mom’s and Billy Joe’s screaming fights. Two years ago, he’d nearly busted her mom for possession of marijuana.
She thought about what he and his deputies would find this time. Her brain too easily conjured up a picture of Billy Joe, lying in a puddle of his own blood on the floor of the garage, her mother, missing with no explanation, Hannah herself gone, with brand-new tire skid marks on the concrete driveway, and who knew what kind of evidence of illegal drugs in the garage, on Billy Joe’s body, even in her mom’s house.
She couldn’t go back.
The sheriff would never believe her. He’d arrest her and send her to prison and one day they’d find her mother’s body in a ditch or a remote cabin or an abandoned car, and people in Dowdie would talk about Hannah Martin, who’d killed her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, and how quiet and friendly she’d always seemed.
It was a catch-22. If she went back, all the sheriff’s emphasis would be on her, and they probably wouldn’t find her mother until it was too late. But if she didn’t go back, then it might be days before anyone knew her mother was missing. Either way, she was terrified that her mom’s fate was sealed.
She put her palms over her eyes, blocking out the restaurant’s harsh fluorescent lights. She’d spent the past twenty-four hours begging Billy Joe to bring her mother back home. She’d sworn on her mother’s life and her own that she wouldn’t tell a soul, that she would do anything, anything he wanted her to, if he would only bring her mother back home so Hannah could take care of her.
But Billy Joe had been cold and cruel. He’d pushed her up against the wall of her bedroom and told her in explicit detail what he would do to her if she didn’t shut up.
At that moment, Hannah had begun to devise a plan to follow Billy Joe to where he was holding her mother. But now, Billy Joe was dead.
Hannah’s eyes burned and her insides felt more hollow and scorched than they’d ever felt before. Her mother was her only family, and she had no way to find her. Pressing her hand to her chest, Hannah felt the loneliness and grief like a palpable thing.
She picked up the mug and drained the last drops of coffee, then slid out of the booth and went to the cash register. A girl with straight black hair and black eye shadow that didn’t mask the purplish skin under her eyes gave Hannah a hard look along with her change. “You want a place to sleep for a couple hours?” she asked.
Hannah shook her head.
“No charge. There ain’t a lot of traffic tonight. I’ll give you the room closest to here. You don’t have to worry about anybody bothering you.”
“Thanks,” Hannah said, “but I’ve got to get to—” Where? For the first time, she realized she had no idea where she was going. Or where she was. “Where am— I mean, what town is this?”
The girl frowned. “Really? You don’t know? Girl, you need some rest. You’re about ten miles from Shreveport.”
“Louisiana?” Hannah said.
The girl angled her head. “Yeah.... You sure you don’t want to sleep awhile?” She paused for a second, studying Hannah. “You can park your car in the back. Nobody’ll see it back there.”
Hannah shook her head as she took her change. “Thanks,” she said, giving the girl a tired smile. “That’s awfully nice of you, but I’d better get going.”
“Where you headed?”
Hannah stopped at the door and looked out at the interstate that ran past the truck stop, then back at the girl. She’d driven east, but she had no idea where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there. She had to have a plan before she went back to Dowdie. Otherwise all she’d accomplish would be to get herself arrested.
Shreveport, Louisiana. She wasn’t quite sure where in the state Shreveport was, but there was one place in Louisiana she did know. Chef Voleur, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
She recalled a photo her mother had given her a long time ago. It was a picture of two young women, arm in arm, laughing. Her mother had always talked about Chef Voleur and her best friend. We loved that place, Kathleen and me. That whole area around Lake Pontchartrain, from New Orleans to the north shore, is a magical place. She stayed, and I wish I had. Living there was like living in a movie.
She made a vague gesture toward the road. “This is I-20, right?”
The girl nodded.
“I’m going to a town called Chef Voleur,” she said. “To visit a friend of my mother’s.”
“You know you’re going to get there around three o’clock in the morning, right?” the girl said dubiously.
Hannah waved a hand. “My mom’s friend won’t care.”
Hannah prayed that her mother was right about the place being magical. Maybe things would be better there. They certainly couldn’t get much worse. Could they?
As she walked back to Billy Joe’s car, Hannah scanned the nearly empty parking lot, looking for the large maroon sedan that must have belonged to the man with the red tattoo, but she didn’t see any sign of it.
Chapter Two
Just like the girl at the truck stop had predicted, Hannah wound up in Metairie at 3:00 a.m., unable to hold her eyes open any longer. She found a small, seedy motel that she figured wouldn’t push the limit of her credit card, checked in and managed to sleep a little—in fits and starts, interrupted by nightmares of finding her mother just as she was breathing her last breath, or worse, leading the killer to her.
Around eight, she got up, showered and dressed, then sat down on the bed and dumped the contents of her purse. Like her mother, Hannah carried everything essential, valuable or meaningful in her purse. And like her mother, she wasn’t sentimental, so most of the bag’s contents were practical, except for two items. One was a photo her mother had given her years ago. The second was a sealed envelope.
Hannah picked up the envelope. With the traumatic events of the past couple of days, Hannah had totally forgotten about it. Looking at the words scrawled across the front made her want to break down and cry, but she didn’t have time for that. So she carefully placed the envelope back in her purse and picked up her wallet.
She pulled the fragile, dog-eared photo out of a hidden pocket. It had to be thirty years old and was of her mother and Kathleen Griffin, her best friend. On the back it read, “Kath and me at her house.” In a different hand was written “sisters forever,” and an address in Chef Voleur, Louisiana.
Hannah looked up the address and took note of the directions. She was about to head out when her cell phone rang.
When she looked at the display, her heart skipped a beat. It was the Dowdie, Texas, sheriff’s office. Hannah’s already queasy stomach did a nauseating flip, the result of too little sleep, too much coffee and the image of Billy Joe’s blood in her head.
She stared at the display, not moving, until the phone stopped ringing, then she dropped the phone back into her purse. There was no doubt in her mind why they were calling. They’d found Billy Joe’s body. But how could she talk to them? What would she say? How would she explain to the authorities why she had run away to South Louisiana after witnessing a murder if she couldn’t explain it to herself?
It took her about half an hour to drive to the address written on the back of the photo. It was across the street from a pizza place. With the photo in her hand she walked up to the building, hope clogging her throat.
A small voice deep inside her asked why she thought that talking to her mother’s old friend would help her find and rescue her mother back in Texas.
She had no idea. Except that her only other choice was to trust Sheriff King to believe her, and she’d been taught at her mother’s knee that authorities couldn’t be trusted. Sheriffs. Police. Lawyers. They were the people who took children away from their mothers and placed them in foster care. They threatened sick people with prison for using marijuana to relieve the debilitating nausea associated with cancer and other diseases.
* * *
SHE KNOCKED ON the heavy wood door, then realized immediately that her tentative rapping probably couldn’t be heard by anyone inside. So she rapped a second time, harder.
For a long moment that probably spanned no more than eight or ten seconds, she stood there listening and heard nothing. As she lifted her hand to rap again, she heard soft thuds on the other side of the door, as if someone was walking on a hardwood floor in socks or barefoot.
Standing stiffly, not quite ready to believe that she’d actually found her mother’s best friend, Kathleen, she waited for the door to open.
When it did, it was not a pretty, dark-haired woman with even, striking features and a beautiful smile who stood there. It was a man. He was tall and lean and he had the same even, striking features but they were distorted in a scowl. And he had a cell phone to his ear.
After a brief, dismissive glance at her, he scanned the hallway behind her. Once he’d assured himself that she was the only one there, he said, “Hang on a minute,” into the phone. “I’ve got to deal with somebody at the door.” His tone was irritated and impatient.
Private investigator MacEllis Griffin kept his expression neutral as he eyed the young woman from the top of her streaked blond hair to the toes of her clunky sandals.
“What is it?” he growled. She stood there looking at him with all the apprehension of a kid called to the principal’s office. Only she was no kid and he was no schoolteacher.
She could have been a kid. Her hair was pulled back into a single messy braid that looked like she’d slept in it. The skinny jeans were slightly loose on her slender frame and the shirt looked more slept in than her hair.
“Hmm? Oh, nope. It’s pretty slow here,” Mack said into the phone as he tried to guess her age. Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Under twenty-five? Hard to tell. She had that heart-shaped face that always looked young. But faint blue circles under her eyes that matched the color of her jeans told him she was much older than her hair or clothes might indicate. She opened her mouth but he held up a finger. “Buono’s working a missing person case,” he said. “A seventeen-year-old. Probably ran away with her boyfriend.”
“Well, get to the office and do something useful,” Dawson Delancey, his boss, replied. “You could file your past three months’ expenses if you’re bored.”
Mack didn’t take his eyes off the young woman as he laughed. “I’ll never be that bored,” he said. “In fact, I might be real interested in something real soon.” He smiled when the woman’s gaze dropped from his and her cheeks turned pink.
“In what?” Dawson asked. “Was that the mailman delivering your latest issue of Playboy?”
“Right. He just got here from 2002,” Mack responded. “Nope. Looks like I’m about to be hit up for Girl Scout cookies or a donation to a religious cause. I’d better go.”
“I hope it’s the donation. You don’t need the cookies,” Dawson said.
“Bite me,” Mack said conversationally. “You’re the one getting fat on your wife’s Italian cooking.”
“You’re just jealous. Juliana and I will be back in Biloxi in a few days. I’ll give you a call when we know for sure.”
“Okay. Later. ’Bye.”
As Mack hung up the phone, the young woman met his gaze and gave him a sad, self-conscious smile. The smile didn’t reach her eyes and the only thing it accomplished was to make her look older and sadder.
A familiar sinking feeling gnawed at his stomach. He knew that smile. He’d never met this woman before, but he knew her type way too well. Standing there with that sadness in her eyes, that furrow between her brows. She was the embodiment of a lot of things he’d worked very hard to forget. She was exactly the type of person—the type of woman—he’d spent his adult life avoiding.
He upped his scowl by about a hundred watts and aimed it directly at her. With any luck, she’d turn and run. Her type was easily intimidated.
But her gaze didn’t waver. She lifted her chin and to his surprise, he recognized a staunch determination in her green eyes, along with a spark of stubbornness. Interesting. But the small furrow between her brows didn’t smooth out and the corners of her mouth were still pinched and tight.
He put his hand on the doorknob, preparing to close the door and get back to his coffee. “Can I help you?” he asked grudgingly.
“I’m looking for Kathleen Griffin,” she said quietly.
The name hit him like a blow to the solar plexus. “Who?” he said, an automatic response designed to give him a second to think. But his brain seemed suddenly to be caught in a loop. Kathleen Griffin, Kathleen. Kathleen.
“K-Kathleen Griffin. The mailbox said Griffin.” She gestured vaguely toward the front door.
It had been twenty years since his mother had died. This young woman wouldn’t have been more than five or six at the time. Why would she be looking for his mother? “What’s this about?”
“It’s...personal,” she said, glancing behind him into his foyer.
“I doubt that,” he said flatly. “Go peddle whatever you’re selling somewhere else. Kathleen Griffin doesn’t live here.” He started to close the door, but she held out a small, dog-eared photo. The paper was old and faded, but one of the two women in the picture looked familiar.
“Please,” she said. Her hand was trembling, making the paper flutter.
“What’s that?” he asked, knowing he was going to regret having asked that question. He held the door in its half-shut position.
The young woman’s throat quivered as she swallowed. “It’s a picture of my mother and Kathleen Griffin,” she said, lifting her chin. “I really need to see her. It’s a—” she bit her lower lip briefly and her gaze faltered “—it’s a matter of life and death.”
He gave a short laugh, but cut it off when she winced. “Life and death,” he said dubiously. “Who are you?”
“Hannah Martin,” she responded. “My mother is Stephanie Clemens.”
She waited, watching him. But he didn’t recognize the name. He gave a quick shake of his head, took a small step backward and started to close the door.
“You’re her son, aren’t you?”
Her words sent his stomach diving straight down to his toes. He shook his head, not in denial—in resignation. She had him and he knew it. He also knew that if he didn’t do whatever he had to do in order to get rid of her this minute, he was going to regret it for a long time. “I’m sorry, but Kathleen Griffin is dead. So...” He put his hand on the door, preparing to close it.
“Oh. Oh, no,” Hannah Martin said, her eyes filling with tears and her face losing its color. “I’m so sorry—” she started, but at that instant, her phone rang. She jerked at the sound, then reached into her purse and pulled it out.
As Mack watched, she looked at the screen as if she was afraid it might reach out and bite her. When she checked the display, her face lost what little color it had. She made a quiet sound, like a small animal cornered by a hungry predator. Her fingers tightened on the phone until the knuckles turned white, and all the time, the phone kept ringing, a loud, strident peal.
Whoever was on the other end of that call frightened her. In fact, she looked as if she’d seen a ghost. When the ringing finally stopped, Hannah dropped the phone back into her purse as if it were made of molten lava.
Mack had missed his best opportunity. He should have closed the door as soon as her phone rang. It was the perfect opportunity to escape. But he hadn’t taken it. He wasn’t sure why.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” she said in a trembling voice. “I don’t know what I was thinking, coming here. I apologize for bothering you.” She closed her eyes briefly.
She’d let him off the hook. He took a step backward, preparing to close the door, because of course, she was about to turn and walk away.
But she didn’t move. Her ghostly white face took on a faint greenish hue. She swayed like a slender tree in a punishing wind. Then she fainted.
Mack dived, catching her in time to keep her head from hitting the floor. She was fairly short, compared to his six-foot-one-inch height and he’d already noticed that she wasn’t a lightweight. Her body was compact and firm. Lowering her gently to the floor, he grabbed a pillow off the couch and placed it under her head, making the decision to leave her on the floor rather than try to move her to the couch or a bed.
By the time he’d gotten the pillow under her head, she’d woken up. He recalled a paramedic telling him once that if someone passed out and woke up immediately, they were probably in no immediate danger.
Her face still had that greenish hue, although surprisingly, it didn’t detract from its loveliness. He retrieved the photo she’d dropped when she’d passed out. He looked at the two young women—girls, really. They were both pretty and pleasant-faced. They were laughing at whoever was taking the picture, and behind them, Mack recognized the furniture. Most of it was still here. He knew one of the girls. It was his mother. He smiled sadly, seeing how young and happy and innocent she looked.
He’d never seen the other girl before, but the young woman lying just outside his door bore a strong resemblance to her. He turned the photo over. On the back was written “Kath and me at her house” in an unfamiliar hand. The other handwriting he knew. It was his mother’s flowery script. She’d written “sisters forever” and his address.
Hannah stirred and tried to sit up. “What happened?” she asked, looking around in confusion.
“You fainted,” he said.
She stared at him. “No, I didn’t,” she said, frowning at him suspiciously. “I never faint. Did you do something—?” But then her hand went to her head. “I feel dizzy.”
“Just sit there a minute. I’ll get you some water,” he said grudgingly. He rose and drew her a glass of tap water. When he handed her the glass, she drank about half of it.
Then she shook her head as if trying to shake off a haze. “I guess I must have fainted.”
“I guess,” he said, a faint wryness in his voice.
She rose onto her haunches and stood, then grabbed on to his forearm for a second, to steady herself. “I never faint,” she said again.
Mack smiled. “So I’ve heard,” he said, thinking she was stubborn. He assessed her. Her color was still not good. “Do you want to sit down?” he asked, then felt irritated at himself for asking. Hell, she’d stood up on her own. So it was the perfect time for her to leave. And again, he’d missed his chance. And right there was one of the primary reasons why he didn’t get involved with her type. She was obviously on some personal mission that would consume her life until she accomplished it. A certain clue—she’d driven all night without stopping except to get coffee and gasoline.
“Thanks,” she said, and turned and headed, a little unsteadily, for the small dining table. He followed her.
She started to sit, then looked around.
“Here,” Mack said, handing her the photo. “This what you’re looking for?”
She took it. “Was this what we were talking about when I—” she gestured toward the front door.
“When you didn’t faint?” He nodded, deciding for the moment not to remind her that she’d received a phone call that had scared her.
She held the photo in one hand and touched the faces of the two girls with a fingertip. “According to my mother, she and Kathleen Griffin swore they’d always be there for one another. Sisters forever.”
“And?” Mack said, working to sound disinterested, even though he was becoming more and more fascinated by this pretty, determined young woman who had driven all night to find her mother’s best friend.
“And—” She stopped, looking confused. Then she shrugged. “And, I don’t know. I’m not really sure why I’m here. I just remember my mother talking about how much she and Kathleen loved Chef Voleur and how they had made that promise to each other.”
She picked up her purse from the dining room table and stood, gripping the back of the chair to steady herself. “I’m truly sorry about your mother.” She paused.
He nodded. “She died a long time ago,” he said dismissively.
That was another reason he didn’t like to be around women like her. Although Hannah was obviously in need of help and had pushed herself beyond her limits, right this minute her concern was for him and he didn’t like that one bit.
She looked down at the photo, then up at him. “You look just like her,” she said. “You have to be her son.”
“MacEllis Griffin,” he said, offering neither his hand nor any further explanation. “Call me Mack.”
“Mack,” she said, “I apologize for bothering you.” She started to stand.
“Wait,” he said. “What’s this life-and-death emergency?” He bit his tongue, literally. But it was too late.
To his dismay, hope flared in her eyes. “I’m—not sure I should—”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong.” What the hell was happening to him? When had his mouth cut itself off from his brain? He was just digging himself in deeper and deeper. And why? Because a pretty woman had fainted in his doorway? No. It was because he had the very definite feeling that when she’d said life and death, she wasn’t overstating the issue at all.
She sank back into the chair and casually picked up a business card from a small stack on the table. “MacEllis Griffin,” she said. “D&D Security?”
“It’s a private firm that takes on certain security issues,” he said, watching her.
“Security—like night guards at office buildings?”
Mack sent her an ironic look. “No.”
She frowned for a second, then eyebrows rose. “You’re a private investigator?”
“You could use that term, although we don’t take the usual divorce or spouse-tailing cases.”
“What do you take?”
The faint hope he’d seen in her eyes grew, although she was still stiff as a board and tension radiated from her like heat.
“We’ve handled our share of life-and-death cases,” he said.
Her eyes went as opaque as turquoise.
“Sorry,” he said. “I can be a sarcastic SOB at times. Here’s a quick rundown of me. I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve been with D&D Security for three years. I’m licensed as an investigator with the state of Louisiana. Now, will you tell me why you drove all night to find my mother?”
“How do you know I drove all night?” she asked.
“Your eyes are twitching and the lids are drooping. Headache and exhaustion, I’d guess. You’re trembling, probably from too much coffee. You haven’t combed your hair and your clothes smell faintly of gasoline. You must have spilled a little while you were filling up. How far have you driven?”
She shifted in her chair. “What are you, some kind of Sherlock Holmes?” she asked drily. “Maybe you can tell me what I had for dinner last night.”
He smiled. “You didn’t eat dinner. You didn’t stop until you were out of gas. You had a cup of coffee and nothing else. Then you didn’t stop again until you got a motel room. You slept in your clothes, although you didn’t sleep much. You couldn’t stop thinking about whatever happened that frightened you so much that you took off without packing.”
“How—?”
“If you’d packed, you’d have changed clothes.” He stopped. “My question is, what or who are you running from?”
She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. He saw tears start in her eyes, but she blinked to keep them from falling. When she spoke, there was no trace of the tears in her voice. “I’m not running from anyone,” she said, straightening her spine.
Mack knew from her voice that she was lying, and from her determined glare that she’d decided something. Probably to unload her woes upon him. He braced himself.
She stared at him for so long he was beginning to wonder if she’d fallen asleep with her eyes wide-open. But about the time he’d decided to snap his fingers in front of her face, she sat back with a sigh. “I drove here from Dowdie, Texas. Eight hours. And I’ve got to start back today. As soon as I can. My mother is—” She stopped as tears welled in her eyes. She wiped a hand down her face, then swiped at the dampness on her cheeks with her fingers.
“Your mother?” Mack said encouragingly.
“She’s very ill. She has to have dialysis or she’ll die.”
Mack waited, but she didn’t say anything else. She pressed her lips together and clenched her jaw, doing her best not to cry.
“Do you need money?” he asked gently. “To pay for the treatments?”
“What? No! I don’t need money. My mother has insurance.”
“So why did you drive all this way just to turn around and go back?”
“It’s complicated,” she said.
“Most things are, especially if they involve running.”
Tears welled again, and she pulled a tissue out of her purse and wiped her eyes. “I’ve kept that photo in my purse for years. Mom always told me that if I needed anything and she wasn’t—wasn’t—” She took a quick breath. “I should find Kathleen.”
Mack’s brows rose when she’d stumbled over her words. He pushed his chair back and stood. “Okay. Well, I’m Kathleen’s son, so if you’ll tell me what you need, I’ll take care of it for you.”
She played with the water glass, tracing a droplet of water up one side and down the other. “I can’t tell you. It’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous to who?” Mack asked.
“To my mother.”
“Look,” he said. “You need to start at the beginning. I can’t figure out what you’re talking about and I haven’t heard anything that sounds dangerous yet, except your mother’s illness. And you said she’s getting dialysis.”
“That’s just it. She’s not.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” She sobbed, then banged her open palm on the table. “I can’t stop crying.”
Mack got up and refilled her water. He set it in front of her and watched her as she drank it, hiccuped, then drank some more.
“Now. Why isn’t she getting dialysis?”
“Because she’s been kidnapped.”
Mack flopped down in the chair. “Kidnapped? Is this some kind of joke?”
She stared at him, anger burning away the tears. “A joke? That’s what you think?”
He opened his mouth then shook his head. He wasn’t sure what he thought at the moment. He’d figured she had come to ask for money and it was just taking her a while to work up the nerve.
He studied her. Her skin was still colorless. She looked exhausted and terrified and so far she wasn’t making a lot of sense.
“Okay. Your mother’s been kidnapped. By who? Have they contacted you? Do they want a ransom? And have you talked to the police?”
“No! No. It’s not that kind of kidnapping. And I can’t go to—” She stopped talking.
Mack sighed. “Of course you can’t. Why not?”
“They can’t help. Nobody can help. I don’t even know why I came here. I had to run. He was going to shoot me.” She looked at the water glass. “I should have stayed,” she said, her voice a mutter now. “I should have confronted him.”
Well, she wasn’t talking to him any longer.
“But there was all that blood,” she continued. “And Billy Joe just collapsed and died. So I ran. I thought I had to save myself so I could find my mother before she died. But now she’s going to die anyway. Oh, I don’t know what to do.”
“Whoa, damn it! Slow down.” Mack did his best to put everything she’d said into logical order. If she wasn’t just crazy, then she’d been through some kind of horrible trauma. “Hannah. Let’s start over and take this slow. Who was going to shoot you? Whose blood did you see and who is Billy Joe?”
She stared at him for a moment, as if trying to figure out what he was doing there, in her reality. Then she blinked. “Oh.” She shot up out of the chair and slung her purse strap over her shoulder. “I apologize,” she said. “I think I’ve made a mistake.” She looked at the business card in her hand, then stuffed it into her jeans pocket and ran out the front door.
“Hannah, wait!” he called. He started to run after her, but his protective instincts kicked in.
Good riddance, he thought when he heard the outside door slam. She had to have come here for money, then lost her nerve and tried to make up some kind of story. She’d never make it as a grifter. Her heart-shaped face gave too much away. He’d watched the kaleidoscope of expressions that flitted across her features as she’d listened to her cell phone ring. Bewilderment, fear, anger, resignation, each taking its turn, then the cycle had started all over again.
He felt sorry for her. Whoa. That was the kind of thinking that could get him into deep trouble, if he let himself get drawn in. He was lucky she’d run out when she did. Good riddance, indeed.
While his brain was congratulating him for dodging that bullet, he found himself rushing out the front door. She’d made it down his long sidewalk to her car, digging a large ring of keys out of her purse and unlocking a dark blue Toyota.
Mack used his phone to snap a shot of the rear of her car just as she climbed in. The license plate was from Texas. And even from half a block away, he could see two bullet holes in the bumper near the plate. Recent ones.
Maybe she hadn’t been making it all up.
Although he had the snapshot, he jotted the license plate number down on a small notepad that he always carried. When he put the pad back into his shirt pocket, it seemed to burn his skin. He sighed. He was going to regret this.
No. That wasn’t accurate. He already did. But even as he thought that, his mind had already latched on to the mystery of Hannah Martin. Kidnapping, murder, blood, pursuit, death.
“Who are you, Hannah Martin?” he muttered. “And why did you come to me?”
Chapter Three
Hannah drove straight from St. Charles Avenue to her motel in Metairie in an exhausted haze. But now, sitting in her parked car, her brain was whirling, replaying every second of the past hour.
What had possessed her to place all her hopes of saving her mother on an old photo of a friendship from more than thirty years before? All she’d done was exhaust herself driving and waste over twelve of the precious hours her mother had left before her body went into toxic liver failure. All she’d gained for her trouble was the not-so-sympathetic ear of Kathleen Griffin’s handsome if grouchy son.
She turned off the engine and got out of the car. As soon as she put weight on her knees, they gave way. She barely managed to grab at the door frame to keep from falling. Her heart raced, her head felt weird—light and heavy at the same time—and the edges of her vision were turning black. It had to be exhaustion and hunger.
After a few seconds, she gingerly let go of the hot metal door frame and tested her ability to walk. Not too bad. But her hands trembled so much that it took her three tries to insert her key card into the motel’s door.
Once she was inside with the door closed, the tears she’d been holding back ever since she’d watched Billy Joe collapse and die came, as if floodgates had opened. She flopped down onto the bed and grabbed one of the pillows to hug as she cried. But within a couple of moments, she clenched her jaw and wiped her face.
That was enough of that. She didn’t have time to cry. She had to figure out what she was going to do. Here she was, eight hours away from her home, and if someone asked her why she’d driven all that way, she wouldn’t have been able tell them. In fact, she’d run away again as soon as Mack had started questioning her. He’d made her realize just how little she’d thought about what she was going to do.
What if she drove back to Dowdie and did what she should have done—gone to Sheriff King? For that matter, what if she’d gone to him about Billy Joe’s obvious involvement in something illegal? Would things be completely different now? Would Billy Joe be in jail instead of dead and would her mother be safe and sound at home, preparing to go for dialysis later in the week?
Or would she and her mother be sitting in an interrogation room trying to explain to the sheriff that they knew nothing about what Billy Joe was or was not doing?
When she’d raced to the Toyota and taken off with Billy Joe’s killer on her heels, she had actually considered going to the sheriff—for about ten seconds. Until she reminded herself that in her world, authorities like the police or Children’s Services had the power to destroy her life.
From long ago when she’d been barely old enough to understand, her mother’s admonitions were ingrained in her. If you tell the police Mommy fell asleep with a cigarette and started a fire, they’ll take you away from me and put you in an orphanage. You can put the fire out, can’t you, sweetie? Just put it out and don’t tell anybody. Then we’ll be safe. We’ll take care of each other.
And they had. Her mother had raised her alone. It had been just the two of them against the world. Then, when the roles had become reversed as her mother’s cirrhosis worsened, Hannah had taken care of her without regret—until the moment she’d witnessed a murder and run away.
Suddenly, Hannah remembered the phone call she’d gotten while she’d been standing outside Kathleen Griffin’s apartment. She blotted her cheeks on her shirtsleeve then fished inside her purse for her phone. Her fingers touched the smooth paper of the envelope, but she pushed it aside. Whatever was inside it wasn’t going to help her right now. In fact, it might make things worse.
She found her phone and sat there holding it, not wanting to look at the display. Maybe she’d misread the caller ID. Maybe her exhausted mind had merely overlaid Billy Joe’s name over whoever had really been calling her. But when she looked, the display definitely read “B.J.” Her heart jumped, just as it had earlier.
Someone was calling her from Billy Joe’s phone. There were only two possibilities. The man with the red tattoo, who’d shot Billy Joe in cold blood, or the sheriff.
As she’d peeled out of her mother’s driveway in her haste to escape Billy Joe’s killer, she’d prayed that the man would keep shooting at the Toyota until he’d emptied his gun. She’d prayed that one of their unconcerned neighbors would hear the shots and call the sheriff, and that the sheriff would catch him red-handed and charge him with Billy Joe’s murder. And she’d prayed that everybody in town would become so wrapped up in the murder that they’d forget about Hannah Martin.
She accessed new voice mails. There were two. If it was the killer who had called her, had he really been dumb enough to leave a message? She skipped the message from the sheriff’s office without listening to it and played the second incoming message.
“Where’d you go, Hannah?” She cringed and swallowed against a sick dread that settled in her stomach. That wasn’t the sheriff. It was the man with the red tattoo on his hand. She’d never forget that awful voice as long as she lived.
“I know you don’t want to talk to me, but I need to see you, talk to you. I need to make sure you’re all right. Call me as soon as possible and let me know where you are. I’m worried about you. Bye-bye, Hannah.”
Numbly, Hannah pressed the off button. She sat there, trying to will away the nausea that was getting worse with every passing second. Then, unable to stave it off any longer, she jumped up and ran into the bathroom, where she heaved drily. After a moment the heaves slowed, then stopped. She splashed water on her face over and over, trying to cool her heated skin and soothe her burning eyes.
At last the nausea dissipated, but there wasn’t enough water in the world to wash away the sight of what that man had done to Billy Joe.
Had her mother’s boyfriend deserved to die in such a horrible way? Maybe. Maybe not. But she wondered—if she’d gotten the chance to kill him, would she? She couldn’t honestly deny it. Of course, she’d have tortured him first to find out where he was holding her mother.
When she’d come home from the drugstore with her mother’s prescriptions only to find her missing, she’d threatened Billy Joe with going to the sheriff, but he’d quickly and effectively reminded her of his earlier warning.
She should have made good on her threat and gone to the sheriff then. She should have realized that of the two, Billy Joe or the sheriff, the sheriff was the more trustworthy. He’d have arrested Billy Joe and Hannah and her mother would be at home now, safe and healthy.
But instead she’d done the cowardly thing. She’d kept her mouth shut. She’d pretended nothing was wrong. It was what she’d always done. Long, harsh experience had ingrained the habit into her, as deeply as drinking was ingrained in her mother. It was what alcoholics did. It was what the children of alcoholics did. They pretended and lied and never told their secrets.
But now, doing what she’d always done was going to get her mother killed.
Hannah stood, grabbing the back of a chair when she felt light-headed. She needed to head back to Dowdie, but a lifetime of taking care of her mother and herself had taught her to pay attention to her body. There was no way she could drive eight hours tonight, no matter how desperate she was to get back home and find her mother. She’d fall asleep at the wheel.
Digging into her purse, she pushed aside the sealed envelope and her wallet, searching for the two high-energy protein bars she’d seen earlier. They were a little misshapen and the worse for wear, but still sealed. When she opened the first one, it was practically all crumbs, but she ate it anyhow, then ate the second one as well, washing them down with water from the tap in the bathroom, hoping that they’d be enough to satisfy her hunger and keep her from feeling so faint.
Then she took a shower, which made her feel a little better, if she didn’t count the exhaustion and her still queasy stomach.
Dressed in the only clothes she had, she lay down on the bed and turned on the TV, hoping to relax by watching a mindless sitcom for a while. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, according to the bedside clock. She groaned. It had been twenty-two hours since she’d witnessed Billy Joe’s murder and run for her life. During that time, she hadn’t closed her eyes, except for that fitful nap she’d taken early that morning.
She flipped channels until she recognized an episode of Friends. She leaned back against the pillows and tried to concentrate on the jokes Chandler was making. Four episodes later, she groaned and shifted position. She scrolled through the other channels on the old TV, but there was nothing interesting on. She reached for her paper cup of water, but it was empty, so she dragged herself up from the bed and went into the tiny bathroom to refill it. The next thing she knew, she’d dropped the cup and splashed water all over her legs and the floor. She’d fallen asleep standing up and dropped the cup.
She tossed a towel down and dried the water, but when she straightened, she started feeling queasy again. And now the edges of her vision were turning black and sparkly, which told her she’d faint if she didn’t lie down.
She lay down on the bed. Was all this caused by her exhaustion and hunger? She’d eaten and rested—a little. She didn’t have to consider for long to figure out that the nausea and light-headedness were the result of all the stress she’d been under added to hunger and weariness. Within the past forty-eight hours, her mother had been abducted from her house, her life and her mother’s had been threatened and she’d witnessed the kidnapper—the only person who knew where her mother was—murdered in cold blood.
Then, panicked and thinking only of staying alive, Hannah had fled.
Breathing shallowly, Hannah waited for the nausea and light-headedness to pass. She closed her eyes and tried her best to relax and clear her mind. But Mack Griffin’s slow, knowing smile rose before her closed lids.
During those first few seconds after he’d opened the door, she’d had the odd notion that her mother had sent her to Kathleen Griffin’s home for this very reason. Because her own personal knight in shining armor had opened the door, ready and waiting to charge into battle for her, to rescue her mother and sweep them both away from harsh reality, pain and heartache.
But as soon as he’d fixed those hazel eyes on her, it had been immediately obvious that he had no idea who she was, nor did he care.
She should have turned and run sooner than she had, but at the time, she hadn’t realized that with each passing second she’d become more mesmerized by his greenish-gold eyes and his large, capable hands and more dismayed that she was so affected by a perfect stranger. Still, in that first fairy-tale moment, something in his eyes behind the cynical smile and the worldly attitude had made her think he really could rescue her, even though she knew nothing about him except that he apparently was Kathleen Griffin’s son.
He might look honorable and trustworthy and knight-like, but Hannah reminded herself of what she had learned at her mother’s knee—men were never trustworthy. As big and strong and protective as they seemed, the reality was that men were always liars, bullies and cheaters.
But somewhere along the line her mother had gotten it wrong, because Stephanie also believed that women were weak. All they could do to protect themselves was pretend there was nothing wrong, lie when questioned and trust the untrustworthy men, since they had no other choice.
Well, not Hannah. She’d decided a long time ago that she would only trust herself. She hadn’t met a man yet who could take care of her as well as she took care of herself and her mother. She lay down and tried to relax. She’d sleep for a couple of hours, then check out and get the car filled up so she could—
The car.
Her eyes flew open. Oh, dear Lord, the car. How had she forgotten about the car? Billy Joe’s voice, filled with naive pride, came back to her. My car. That’s where the drugs are. They’re hidden in the trunk lining.
She sat up, her heart thumping wildly. She’d driven for eight hours in a car filled with drugs. A stolen car, as she’d discovered when she’d gone through the glove box and found that it was registered to a Nelson Vance, of Paris, Texas.
She couldn’t drive the Toyota back to Dowdie. She couldn’t drive it one more foot. She needed to abandon it and leave the motel. Now.
She closed her aching eyes as tears of exhaustion, frustration and hopelessness welled up. That meant she had to wipe down the car, inside and out, to get rid of her fingerprints, and take a cab to another depressing motel, then make arrangements to find another car or ride the bus back to Dowdie. And she had to start right now. She couldn’t afford to sleep until she’d put miles between her and the Toyota.
She pressed her palms against her eyes, wishing she dared to set her phone’s alarm and sleep—if only for a half hour.
As if prompted by her thoughts, her phone rang. Hannah’s heart jumped into her throat and every muscle in her body went on full fight-or-flight alert. It was him again. The man with the red tattoo. The man who’d killed Billy Joe. She sat up straight, wringing her hands. Her chest tightened until she could barely breathe. She was afraid to answer and afraid not to. Cringing with dread, she pressed the answer button and put the phone to her ear.
“Hey, Hannah Martin,” the dreadful menacing voice said.
Terror arrowed through her. She wanted to drop the phone and smash it, but her fingers clutched it tightly and she pressed her other hand against her chest as she waited to hear what he said. She shouldn’t have answered. She should have let it go to voice mail so she’d have a record of what he said.
“Not talking? That’s okay,” the voice said conversationally. “I just wanted to let you know I’ll be seeing you soon. Very soon. You’ve got something that Billy Joe promised us.”
She didn’t speak, wasn’t sure she could. She pulled the phone away from her ear. She needed to record him if she could just find the record button.
“Wh-what are you talking about?” she rasped, hoping to keep him talking. Where was the stupid button? She pressed Menu, Settings, every button she could think of. Then finally, there it was. Memo Record. She jabbed it.
“You know what I’m talking about,” the man was saying. “You ran off with Billy Joe’s car and we need to get it. Why don’t we meet and I’ll trade you my brand-new car for that beat-up Toyota. Oh, and I can pick up that other little item, too, that Billy Joe gave you. I’ve got to say, Hannah, it’ll be good to see you.” The voice was barely audible, but Hannah heard every word. There was no mistaking the implied threat. “Now, remind me where you’re staying.”
“I don’t know who you are and I don’t have anything. Billy Joe didn’t give me anything!” she cried. “Leave me alone!”
“Don’t act all innocent, Hannah. Billy Joe was fighting for his life. Why would he lie? But you were there. You know what he said. He said you stole Mr. Ficone’s money. He said you’re the key to the missing money.” He paused, but she didn’t take the bait. She didn’t answer.
“Hey, that’s okay. I’ll call you back once I get closer to you. I’m driving right now and I really shouldn’t be on the phone. So I’ll be talking to you later, once I get to that town. Watch yourself, Hannah. Don’t make the mistake of lying. You’ll end up like Billy Joe.”
She gasped. “You killed him. I know you did. I saw you.”
“Oh, Hannah, you really should try to control that imagination of yours.” he said, his voice as gentle and sweet as a new father’s. “Oh, by the way, your mom says hi. Bye-bye, now.”
“Wait!” she cried. “You know where my mother is—?”
The line went dead. “Wait—please. No, no, no.” She stared at the display. The icon indicated that the computer was recording. With a shaking finger, she stopped it.
Your mother says hi. That couldn’t be true, could it? The man with the red tattoo couldn’t know where her mother was. Only Billy Joe knew and the man had killed him.
She held her finger over the play button, but after a few seconds, she shuddered and dropped the phone into her purse. She couldn’t listen to it again. Besides, he was lying about her mother. When Billy Joe told him he’d kidnapped her, the man had sounded surprised and shocked. Then Billy Joe had died right in front of him. No. He didn’t know where her mother was. He couldn’t.
Could he?
* * *
MACK DRUMMED HIS fingers on his kitchen table as he waited for the search results to show up on his tablet. He’d input “Stephanie Clemens, Texas.” There were eleven Stephanie Clemenses in the state, apparently, not to mention all the Clemenses that weren’t Stephanies and all the Stephanies that weren’t Clemenses.
He’d found one whose age was about right in a town called Dowdie. She was listed as forty-two years old and living with Hannah Martin, age twenty-five. Mack sat back in his chair, staring at the screen. So Stephanie Clemens was his odd visitor’s mother. She was forty-two, which meant she’d been seventeen when her daughter was born. Mack shook his head. Children having children.
There was a telephone number listed beside Stephanie Clemens’s name. He entered the number into his cell phone under the name Hannah Martin. Then he dialed it. There was no answer. Probably a landline.
He input Stephanie Ann Martin Clemens, Dowdie, Texas, into a search engine, and three police reports popped up. The first, dated two years previously, was a call regarding drug activity at her home address. Mack skimmed the short paragraph. No arrests. Clemens claimed she used marijuana to alleviate nausea from an illness. Although she couldn’t produce a doctor’s order or even a note confirming that, the police hadn’t placed her under arrest.
The second and third calls were for domestic disturbances. The location was the same address, but were four and five months before. They involved Clemens and Billy Joe Campbell, age thirty-eight. One of the calls had been made by Hannah Martin.
Mack typed in Hannah Martin, Dowdie, Texas, but found no other references to her. He sat, staring out through the French doors that opened onto the small patio behind his house. St. Charles Avenue, but what he saw wasn’t a big concrete fountain and fish pool, it was Hannah. He should have known the instant he’d laid eyes on her that she’d be trouble. He should have recognized the signs.
“Two domestic disturbances involving your mother and her boyfriend,” he said aloud. “That’s been your life, hasn’t it, Hannah? Watching your mother get beat up by thugs that didn’t deserve her. She’s the only role model you’ve ever had, isn’t she? That’s all you’ve ever known!” His voice gained in volume as anger built inside him.
Suddenly, the house was too small and hot for him. He vaulted up out of his desk chair, sending it crashing into the kitchen counter behind him. Then he threw open the French doors and stepped outside, gulping deep breaths of the cool breeze that had blown in with an afternoon thunderstorm. It was unusual for a summer storm to cool the air, but he wasn’t complaining. After a few moments, the pressure in his chest and the heat along his scalp dissipated.
Mack knew too much about women like Stephanie Clemens and Hannah Martin. And he knew way too much about abusive boyfriends. He’d been six years old the first time he’d seen blood dripping from his mother’s nose. Her boyfriend had slammed her face against one of the tall columns of the four-poster bed. Mack had flung himself at the guy, trying to break his nose, but at six, he wasn’t strong enough or tall enough.
The jerk had swatted him away like a bothersome fly, then bent down to whisper in his ear, “If you try that again, your mom will hurt worse. Understand?”
Mack’s hands cramped and he looked down to find that he’d clenched his fists. Carefully, he relaxed them, shaking them a little to ease the cramping. He took a few more breaths of chilly air, letting it flow through him, cooling the frustrated anger.
He found himself once again wishing Billy Joe Campbell were alive, because he’d like to have a few minutes with him, just long enough to give him a taste of his own medicine. But Mack had more sense than that, and more self-control—and Billy Joe was dead. He took one more deep breath, filling his lungs with the scent of damp earth and fresh rain, then went back inside.
As he was retrieving his chair and rolling it back up to the table, his phone rang. He looked at the display and sighed. It was Sadie, the woman he’d been seeing. “Hello,” he said, making sure his voice was bland.
“Hey,” Sadie said. “What happened to ‘hi, doll,’ or ‘sexy Sadie’?”
“Busy,” he said impatiently, not really trying to mask the frustration in his voice. He looked at the clock in the corner of the screen.
“Well, business can wait until tomorrow. I’m back in town and I want to see you,” Sadie said in her low, sexy voice. “Come over.”
Mack arched his neck. It was easy to get too big a dose of Sadie. And he’d gotten a nearly lethal overdose about the time she’d gone out of town. Her absence had convinced him that he’d had enough of her to last a lifetime. He’d told her from the beginning that he wasn’t interested in anything long-term, and she’d responded that she wasn’t, either. As he rubbed his eyes, he wondered if she’d been telling the truth.
“Can’t,” he said. “I’m working on a new case and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be tied up for quite a while.”
“Oh, come on,” Sadie said. “You have to eat. Let’s grab dinner and—”
“Sadie,” he interrupted, gently but firmly. “No.”
“Fine,” she said. “Tell me about this big case you can’t tear yourself away from.”
“It’s not just the case,” he said. “It’s a lot of things. It’s been fun, but...”
“But?” she echoed.
“You know. We talked about this. We were never in it for the long haul. We both agreed.”
There was a slight pause. “That’s true.”
He didn’t speak. He really didn’t like this. He wasn’t quite sure why he’d chosen tonight as the night to break up with her.
“Okay, then,” she said. “I enjoyed—everything.”
“Me, too,” he replied. He took a breath to say something else, but she hung up. He winced. That abrupt hang up was the only indication that she might have been upset.
Maybe he should have handled that in person, but unfortunately, Sadie could be quite persuasive in person. Or at least she had been once, he amended, as his brain compared Sadie and Hannah. Hannah, with her unmade-up face and flyaway hair and no lipstick, won by a mile.
Mack shook his head and resisted the urge to pound on his temples with his fists. He didn’t want Hannah Martin in there. She was nothing but trouble. Mack had always loved women, but he’d learned very young that relationships were not for him. Whenever he met someone he was attracted to, he made his position clear from the first moment. If the woman protested at all, then she was not the woman for him. Most women he asked out were happy with the arrangement, because Mack was very careful to pick like-minded women. Usually he picked well. After a while, by mutual agreement, he and the woman parted ways and eventually he met another like-minded woman.
He sat down to send an email to Dusty Graves, Dawson’s computer wizard, to ask how much longer until she had information back on the license plate of the car Hannah had been driving. As he did, his phone rang. Surely it wasn’t Sadie again. Give it up, doll.
But when he looked, the display name was Dust007. “Hey, Dusty, what you got for me?”
“Finally got the info on that plate you wanted me to run,” Dusty said, “but you’re not going to like it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s registered to a Nelson Vance, of Paris, Texas. He reported it stolen about a week ago. The license and registration also report the vehicle as sky blue, not dark blue.”
Mack’s stomach sank. Stolen and repainted? Ten to one, whoever stole it was either reselling cars or running drugs. Either way, this wasn’t good. “A witness? Any sightings by highway patrol? Anything?”
“The Tyler, Texas, police have a BOLO out on the car. The DEA has been watching a small-time narcotics distribution ring operating around the area. The perps apparently steal a vehicle from a neighboring town or county, use it for one drug delivery, then clean it out and abandon it. This vehicle is suspected to have been stolen by the ring.”
Dusty was right. Mack didn’t like what he was hearing at all. What was Hannah Martin doing driving a car suspected of being stolen by a narcotics distribution ring?
Chapter Four
“What kind of narcotics do they deal in?” he asked Dusty.
“Mostly Oxy,” Dusty said.
Stunned, Mack muttered a curse. Oxycontin.
“Yeah,” Dusty continued. “Word is, they’re bringing it into Galveston from Mexico. Get this. The DEA knows all about a big-time trafficker named Ficone in Galveston, but they’ve been spending their time watching a suspected small-time operator, until he was murdered yesterday.”
“Murdered?” Dread settled heavy as an anvil in Mack’s chest. “Yesterday? Who was he?”
“Campbell. Billy Joe Campbell. He was shot once in the chest at close range. A neighbor complained about gunshots.” Dusty took a breath. “You know something about this?”
Hannah’s jumbled words echoed in Mack’s ears. I had to run. He was going to shoot me.
“Where did this happen?” he croaked, positive he knew the answer.
“Hang on.”
Mack heard computer keys tapping.
“A little town called Dowdie.” Dusty paused for a second. “Mack, tell me you don’t have a client who’s driving that chopped car. That would not be good.”
“Nope. No client. Just checking for a friend.” Not a complete lie.
“O-kay,” Dusty said, her tone making it obvious that she didn’t believe him. “You want me to send you the details from the police report?”
“Yeah. Everything you’ve got on Billy Joe Campbell. I appreciate it.”
“No problem, Mack. You be careful. I’ll TTYL. ’Bye.”
Mack hung up, remembering the changing expressions on Hannah’s face and the terror in her eyes when her telephone rang. He knew that terror, knew it intimately. Had Hannah done what Mack hadn’t been able to do when he was twelve? Had she killed the man who had hurt her mother?
He waited impatiently, repeatedly checking for new mail until Dusty’s message about the murder came in. He scanned the police report, his heart sinking with every sentence. A neighbor had called the sheriff’s office around 7:00 p.m. complaining about gunshots at 1400 Redbud Lane, Dowdie, Texas.
A sheriff’s deputy arrived at around seven-thirty to find the house and driveway empty. A quick investigation by the deputy turned up a body of a white male, mid to late thirties, in the garage. Cause of death, a single gunshot wound to the chest. The victim was identified as Billy Joe Campbell of Fort Worth, Texas. The police report indicated that neither the owner of the house, a Ms. Stephanie Clemens, nor her daughter, Ms. Hannah Martin, could be found. Both were being sought for questioning in the matter.
Campbell had been killed around twelve hours before Hannah had turned up at Mack’s door, looking for Kathleen Griffin. She’d also mentioned seeing Billy Joe collapse and die and being shot at. What were the odds that Hannah had witnessed her mother’s boyfriend being murdered?
* * *
A LOUD CRASH and a harsh male voice startled Hannah out of a restless sleep. Her pulse drummed in her ears and she couldn’t catch a full breath. “Mom?” she called, before she came fully awake.
The crashing began again. With a start, she remembered. It couldn’t be her mom. Her mom had been kidnapped by Billy Joe and Billy Joe was dead.
Hannah rubbed her eyes as she forced her brain to sort out the noises that were battering her ears. It had to be the man with the red tattoo. He’d found her.
“Police! Open up!”
Police? Surprised and terrified, Hannah jumped out of bed and ran to the door. “What is it? Did you find my—” She stopped herself just as she was about to throw the dead bolt. What if it wasn’t the police?
She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. She’d slept for a couple of hours. “I need proof you’re the police.” She made her voice as stern as she could, but it still quavered.
“Hannah Martin, I’m Detective Anthony Teilhard of the Metairie Police Department. I’ve got the motel’s night manager here. He’s going to unlock the door and we’re coming in. I’d suggest you move back.”
She scrambled backward as a key turned in the doorknob and then in the dead bolt. The door swung open and slammed against the wall as three officers burst into the room, guns at the ready. Hannah shrieked as two of them, one male and one female, turned their weapons on her. The third officer quickly checked the bathroom and the tiny closet.
“Clear,” he said.
The officer who’d entered first took three steps forward and looked down the barrel of his gun at her. “Hannah Martin?” he said.
Hannah’s head jerked in a nod. Her first instinct was to retreat, but she bumped her hip on the corner of the bedside table. She was trapped between the bed and the wall. “Who—wha—?” Nothing but broken, senseless sounds escaped her constricted throat. She clutched at the neck of her shirt with trembling fingers.
“I’m Detective Teilhard. Keep your hands where I can see them. Good. Now, where did you get the car, Hannah?”
“The car?” she parroted. “It’s—I don’t—” All she could think about was Billy Joe saying, That’s where the drugs are. They’re hidden in the trunk lining.
“Come on, Hannah. Pull yourself together. You’re in a lot of trouble. The best thing you can do is answer my questions. Now tell me about the car.”
“I don’t know anything,” she said. It wasn’t exactly true.
“Nothing?” Teilhard said wryly. “Okay, Hannah. In that case, looks like we’re going to have to do this down at the station. You’re under arrest for possession of a stolen vehicle, driving a stolen vehicle and transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines.”
She waited, her heart in her throat, but he didn’t mention illegal drugs or homicide.
The detective looked at the female officer. “Officer Waller, would you check her for weapons and cuff her, please?”
“Arms straight out at your sides, please,” Officer Waller said.
Hannah obeyed, feeling a profound relief that the police were here about the car and not about Billy Joe’s murder. When she caught Teilhard gazing at her with a puzzled look, she ducked her head and tried to compose her features. Had he seen the relief on her face?
The female officer started to pat her down. Hannah recoiled. “No, wait,” she said quickly. “Please. I didn’t know it was stolen. I’ll tell you what I know. You don’t have to arrest me.” She felt a lump growing in her throat. If they arrested her, how was she ever going to get back to Dowdie to find her mother?
She swallowed hard, trying to stop the tears. She was sure Teilhard wasn’t the type who could be swayed by a damsel in distress. In fact, his mouth was already thinning in a line of distaste at her hedging.
She needed to figure out what to do and fast, because it wasn’t going to take the detective long to find out what she already knew—that the person who had stolen the car was dead, murdered, and that the car was filled with drugs. Then what would he do? He’d put her in jail. No question about it. She’d be charged with grand theft auto and murder. That meant that her mother would surely die.
Officer Waller quickly and efficiently finished patting her down, then pulled her arms behind her back and cuffed her hands.
“Do you really have to do this?” Hannah asked as the cold metal bit into her wrists, desperate to try anything to get out of being arrested. Anything but telling the truth. She was in too deep. If she tried to explain, Teilhard would laugh as he threw her into lockup. “It’s got to be a misunderstanding. I apologize for the trouble. I mean, I thought I was borrowing my mom’s boyfriend’s car. Can’t we just give the car back to its owner? I’ll pay for any damages.” She made her voice sound hopeful.
She could pretend all she wanted, but she knew that there was no way any sheriff’s office or police station would send three armed officers to bring in one relatively harmless female driving a stolen car. This had to be about something else. Then a horrible thought occurred to her. Had her mother been found—dead? Were they really here to arrest her for two murders, Billy Joe’s and her mother’s?
Teilhard laughed. “Yeah. It’s a misunderstanding,” he said sarcastically. “Why’d you go to the trouble to repaint the car when you didn’t bother to change the license plate or replace the broken passenger-side mirror? Kind of amateurish for a car thief. But it certainly narrows the suspect pool.” He turned toward the door. “Let’s go. I don’t have time to stand around all day listening to ‘he’s my mom’s boyfriend’ and ‘I didn’t know.’” The last was said in a tinny falsetto. The other two officers laughed.
Hannah wanted to cry as she felt the last droplets of hope drain from her heart.
They put her in the back of the squad car and drove to the Metairie Police Station. Waller and Teilhard were in the car with her. The third officer had taken her key to drive the Toyota to the impound lot.
After several intensely uncomfortable minutes as she tried to keep her hands from going to sleep and her wrists from being permanently marked by the tight metal cuffs, they arrived. She was pulled out of the car and marched into the police station, handcuffed like a common thief. Officer Waller stood her in front of the booking counter in view of all the other officers, detectives and criminals, with the cuffs hurting more after the ride, while Teilhard got the forms filled out. Then he turned to her.
“I’m placing your purse in this plastic bag to be held until your release or until someone posts bail. Officer Waller?” He turned to the female officer.
“Yes, sir,” Waller said, stepping forward.
“Please remove her earrings,” Teilhard said, nodding toward Hannah. “Hannah, do you have any other jewelry? Piercings? Any prosthetics like a partial bridge in your mouth?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Sir?” Waller said to Teilhard. “Do you want a full search?”
Teilhard assessed Hannah, then shook his head. “I don’t think that will be necessary.” He turned to a cop who’d been waiting at the counter. “Put her in one of the interrogation rooms and get her some coffee if she wants.”
Hannah shook her head, but neither one of them paid any attention to her.
The cop took her into a small, stark room. “I’ll get that coffee,” he said and left.
She stood there next to the wooden table, not wanting to try sitting again with her hands cuffed behind her. As hard as it had been to sit in the police car with its upholstered backseat, a hard-backed chair would be torture.
She tried to take her mind off her aching shoulders and stinging wrists by studying the Formica tabletop. It was old and chipped, and had names and phrases carved into it. Idly, she wondered where Tony or Eddie Jewels or Turk had gotten their hands on something sharp enough to use to carve those deep grooves. She spent a few moments trying to read some other names and phrases, but her eyelids kept drooping.
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Mallory Kane
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: SHE WAS A COMPLICATION P.I. MACK GRIFFIN DIDN′T NEED–BUT A TEMPTATION HE COULDN′T RESIST. From the moment he opens his door to her, P.I. Mack Griffin knows he′s inviting trouble. Not only has Hannah Martin fled to New Orleans after witnessing a brutal murder, but the killer has kidnapped her ailing mother. Nothing but trouble, so…Why does the sexy P.I. decide to help Hannah and keep her safe? Because watching her fight for justice while trying to stay alive demonstrates a bravery he finds nothing short of amazing. With criminals on their trail and everything to lose, Mack will be there for her as any professional investigator would. And yet winning this battle has suddenly turned into something much more personal.