“Have you found the video footage on his hard drive?” Juliet asked.
“Yep,” Darren said. “But we didn’t know where the place was.” He checked out something on the computer, then glanced at her. “You can go on back out now. You guys never should have come in here before calling us. I could slam you for interfering with an investigation.”
“We told you we didn’t touch anything.”
“It doesn’t matter. Evidence could be contaminated just by your walking through.”
His tone heated her blood, and she bit her lip as he typed something on the keyboard. “You know, Darren, this is my life. Bob was my husband. The father of my children.”
He looked up at her. “I know that, Juliet.”
“And all this affects me. It’s not just a case. It’s not a mystery to be solved. It’s my life.”
“But your life could be in jeopardy if you keep interfering. You have children to think about, Juliet. You need to back away and let us do this.”
“You’ve had his computer,” she said. “You have all the information the DEA had on him. Yet you didn’t find this place.
We
did.”
“You don’t know what we’ve found or what we’ve done.”
“So you knew about it? And you hadn’t been here yet?”
He turned back to the computer. “No, we didn’t know. We haven’t been here. You want me to give you a trophy because you got to it first?”
“Of course not. But I’m trying to point out that we aren’t interfering. We’re helping. You have access to all this now, and you didn’t before.”
Darren shook his head. “Juliet, it’s time for you to go.” He took her arm and walked her to the front door. Tears stung her eyes.
Darren stopped before putting her out. “Look, Juliet, it doesn’t matter how long I’ve known you or how long I knew Bob. I have to be objective. If you were any stranger who went into a crime scene and contaminated the evidence before we got there, I would treat you just the same.”
“We didn’t contaminate evidence! You can log our gloves and shoe covers to see if they have trace evidence. But we took those precautions.”
“From this point on, I want you out of this. I’d like to put you and your kids in a safe house.”
Juliet liked that idea. “Okay, but why now? We’ve been in danger all this time.”
“If these traffickers learn that you’ve gained access to this place, they’ll be even more desperate to force you to help them.”
The thought made her sick. “All right. I’ll do whatever you say. But how will you get back in here without my fingerprint and retina scan?”
“We’ll do some reprogramming now, adding our prints and retinas to the mix. We can override what’s there, now that we’re inside. We’re professionals. Unlike you guys.”
She didn’t know why that put her on the defensive. “Michael’s not an amateur.”
“No, he’s not. But I still want all of you to leave this to us. Do you understand?”
Tears glistening, she nodded her head. “All right. And if someone contacts me or I trip over more evidence, do you want me to call you or sit on it? Because I don’t want to get chewed out.”
Darren closed his eyes and shook his head. “Obviously, you call me. But don’t go looking for things. I don’t want to have to investigate your death, Juliet.”
She turned away, but Darren caught her arm and turned her back. “Juliet, look at me.”
She met his eyes.
“I care about you, okay? You’re my friend. I want you safe.”
Her anger melted. “I’m sorry. I know you’re just doing your job. So about the safe house. How does that work? I still have to get my kids from school and pack up their stuff.”
“I’ll send for someone to escort you when you leave here. They can let you go home so you can pack a quick bag. Hopefully you won’t have to stay there long.”
She couldn’t help feeling relief. “Okay. Yeah, I guess that’s best.”
She stepped out the front door.
Michael and Cathy were standing at the edge of the yard, beside the wall. “You okay?” Cathy asked.
Juliet shook her head. “Not my best day,” she said. “It’s like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. That Bob could sit in church every Sunday and say his prayers with our kids at night and go to men’s conferences and . . . act like he was some big Christian.”
They both looked at their feet.
“How do I explain this to my children?”
“You don’t have to explain anything,” Cathy said.
“Yes, I do. Zach already knows. If it’s going to be on the news, he’ll find out about it.”
“Maybe we can keep it off the news.”
“There’s no way a prominent doctor in town is caught in a drug ring, murdered for it while hiding a huge stash of money in a local upscale neighborhood, and it stays out of the news.”
“Let’s not worry about the media right now, honey. One thing at a time.”
She drew in a long, ragged breath. “Well, the one thing that’s going to happen next is that they’re taking me and the kids to a safe house.”
Michael’s eyebrows lifted. “Really? That’s good.”
She nodded. “Things are starting to feel even more dangerous. I’ll feel better when we’re where they can’t find us.”
R
obbie was still sick. Amber had tried to take him to daycare that morning in spite of his fever, but they had refused to take him. She had to do something. Lenny hadn’t been able to get into the house where the cash was, the delivery had been aborted, and the prospects of her walking away from this mess with any cash at all were getting slimmer all the time.
The babysitter Amber preferred was at school, so she called her neighbor across the street who homeschooled her children. “I need a babysitter,” she said. “Could your oldest kid babysit for me? What’s her name? Ariel? Allison?”
“Her name is Lizzy.”
“Oh. Sorry. I need her to babysit right now. I have an emergency.”
“But she’s only twelve. Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. She knows how to change diapers, right? You have a dozen kids.”
“I have five.”
“So she knows what to do. I’ll pay her.”
The woman hesitated. Amber wanted to scream.
“Why isn’t he at daycare?”
“He was sick this morning, but he’s better now.” He wasn’t, but Amber couldn’t take the chance that the woman would refuse. “He’s sleeping, anyway. He may sleep the whole time I’m gone.”
“How long do you need her?”
“Just a couple of hours. Come on, I’m in a hurry!”
“All right. I’ll send her over.”
Amber waited, fidgeting, about to go crazy, until she heard the knock on her door. She opened it. The girl was smaller than she remembered. She looked ten at the most.
“Hurry up, come in,” Amber said. “I have to go.”
The girl looked up at her. “Well, where is his food? Does he take a bottle? Where are his diapers?”
Amber quickly gave her a rundown.
“My mom says he’s sick. What if he has a fever?”
“Then call your mom. I’m sure she’ll step in.”
The girl just looked at her.
“Okay, I’m outta here. Call me if you need me, but if I don’t answer, I’ll get back to you when I can.”
She went to her car and pulled out of the driveway. As she drove, she called Lenny on the disposable phone he’d given her.
He answered quickly. “Amber, did you forge the documents?”
“Yes,” she said. “I worked on it all night. I think I can prove I’m his wife now.”
“Amber, don’t screw this up.”
“I won’t!”
Last night, he’d made her reset her phone, take the battery out, and throw it out the car window a few miles from her house, just in case it was wiretapped. But the question of who had pretended to be her plagued her.
“Lenny, do you think it was the police who had my phone? Yesterday they came to tell me not to leave the baby in my car. Maybe they’ve been watching me.”
“Doubtful. Stealing your phone would ruin their case if there was one. But somebody had it. It’s too much of a coincidence that you happened to misplace it at the exact moment somebody hacked into it. No, I think somebody stole your phone out from under your nose. They probably bugged it and put it back. Your head wasn’t in the game yesterday.”
“I didn’t expect to have a sick baby with me!”
“It doesn’t matter. It cost us a mint. We lost the load because of that, Amber. You have to pay attention or we’ll lose the rest.”
Amber closed her eyes. “But what if we can’t get into those accounts? I’m not going to walk away with nothing!”
“There’s cash in the house. We can settle for that.”
“But we haven’t figured out how to get in there yet! And that load is worth another couple of million.”
“Amber, it’s not worth the risk. You screwed up yesterday, and now somebody’s onto us. Trust me, the transporters are going to call it off anyway.”
She grunted. “Then what’s your plan?”
“I think we need to get to Juliet Cole. She got the codes today, and they reprogrammed things to her fingerprint and retina.”
Her mouth fell open. “How do you know?”
“I told you I have a contact at Griffin Security. But she’s
low level—she doesn’t have computer access and she can’t get to the codes. She only knows that Juliet came in and got what she wanted.”
“So Juliet has the address? How did she even know about that place?”
“Who knows, Amber? You’ve botched a lot.”
Amber almost couldn’t breathe. So Juliet knew where Bob’s delivery point was? She would tell the police, take them there, and all that cash in those safes . . . This couldn’t be happening. She had to get that money!
“Lenny, call your contact at Griffin Security. Threaten her if she doesn’t get you the codes. We have to get in there before Juliet drags the entire Panama City police force in there with her.”
“It’s worse than that. She’ll drag the FBI and the DEA in. Maybe she already has. Maybe we should just focus on the bank accounts.”
“But there’s no guarantee we’ll get into those either! I’m not going to be penniless, Lenny. I earned that money. I worked with Bob on all of this. He couldn’t have done it without me. I deserve it and I’m not going to walk away without it.”
“And I’m not going back to prison. I haven’t stayed under the radar all this time by taking stupid chances.”
“There’s got to be a way! Lenny, do you understand how much money we’re talking about? It could be fifty million dollars altogether. More, even.”
He was silent for a long moment.
“Lenny, we could take Juliet. Force her.”
Lenny seemed to consider that. “What do you know about her?” he asked.
She tried to dredge up everything Bob had told her about
Juliet. “She’s rigid. Unbelievably rigid. And she’s been working as a PI, so she’s not stupid, and she has a little training.”
“What about her kids? We could use them.”
Amber’s eyebrows shot up. “Yes, that could work. Bob said she’d throw herself in front of a train for her boys. If we could just make her think that they were in enough danger. Threaten them somehow.”
“We’ve done that.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” She tapped her solar nails on the steering wheel. “It needs to be something more. If we could . . . take her kids. Then we’d have leverage. She’d do anything we told her.”
“Do you realize what you’re saying? If we did that, how would we end it? There’s no exit strategy. It’s not like we could let the kids go once we got her to do what we wanted. They’d know too much about us.”
She hated this. Why did things have to be so complicated? Everything had gone so smoothly for so long when Bob was alive.
If only he hadn’t turned on them.
“We could lock them up somewhere until we could get out of the country,” she said. “Your friend who flies planes. We could hire him to take us to Mexico.”
“Juliet and the kids would talk when they’re found. The authorities would be waiting for us when we landed.”
“Then we’ll have to kill them!” The minute the words were out of her mouth, Amber knew that was the only possible solution. “We use them to make her give us the codes and the cash, and then we kill all of them. That’s our only option.”
Lenny thought it over for a moment. “It’s too messy. Too much could go wrong.”
Amber’s plumped lips grew tight over her teeth. “The only other option is to walk away with nothing, and I won’t do that. I had it all when Bob was here. Now he’s gone and I have nothing. I’m not going to be left with nothing, do you understand, Lenny? I’m not going to be destitute. I’m getting something out of this.” She tried to think. “Juliet will pick the kids up from school today. You could find her there and follow her to where she’s been staying. Are you with me on this, or not?”
For a moment she thought he would balk, but finally, he said, “Yeah, I guess it’s our only choice.”
“Do you have guys you can trust to take them?”
“Yeah. You know which schools?”
“Yes.” She told him the names. “She’ll pick up Abe first. Go to the second school, the middle school, wait for her there. She’ll either be in Bob’s silver BMW or in her van. Bob said she bought a Caravan, but I don’t know what color it is. Just drive up the line and look for her. Red hair . . .”
“I know what she looks like. She came to my trial every single day.”
“Good. Follow them home after she’s gotten Zach. Bob said they were outdoor kids. If they go outside when they get home, grab them then. If the kids don’t go out, your guys might have to go in. Once you get them, we tell her that we’ll kill them if she brings in the police. We’ll have her meet us.”
Lenny was quiet, and she held her breath, waiting. “Come on, Lenny,” she said at last. “It’s the only way. Millions of dollars. We could live the rest of our lives on an island in the Caribbean, eating shrimp and drinking margaritas.”
Finally, he spoke. “All right. If we do it right, it could work. But the plan has a lot of moving parts. Things could go wrong.”
“Things are already going wrong.”
He let out a hard sigh. “All right. Let me get the Harper boys to help. I have enough to pay them some up front. We’ll promise them more money than they’ve ever seen on the back end.”
“Perfect. Call me the minute you have them.”
“All right. Don’t lose this phone, Amber.”
Amber didn’t find that funny.