“I said it
looked
like that.”
“But you don't think so?”
“I've never been a believer in coincidental crimes. Let me be perfectly clear. I'm worried that someone or some group has targeted you, Governor. I'm concerned that they killed your son and your ranch manager, and attempted to murder your husband. The odd thing is, they haven't tried to kill
you
so far. And that worries me even more.” He stopped for a moment. “Because they probably will.”
Frank's words jarred her feigned composure. All at once she saw the events differently. She felt a total fool.
Helen reached out and touched his hand. “This is why I value you, Frank. Why I need you, working with me, doing your best to fight this . . . situation. No more self-recriminations, for either of us. Agreed?”
Frank nodded.
“Good.” Helen felt the veteran prosecutor inside her stir, rising to meet the challenge. “Now that we know we may be dealing with determined killers, we need to plan accordingly.”
Frank had bosses, a chain of command to report to and take orders from. But he nodded again. “I'm with you entirely.”
Helen sat back, somewhat comforted, as always, by his steely determination, by the promise that her enemies would be Frank's enemies.
But that guaranteed nothing, as she'd learned so painfully tonight.
Helen understood determined killers. She'd dealt with them all of her professional life. She'd tried hundreds of them in court and signed their death warrants as governor. Determined killers would never give up. Not until they were dead themselves.
Special Agent Frank Temple hadn't made the next logical leap yet, but Helen was already there: Some sick bastard had killed Eric because he knew there are many things more devastating than one's own death. For Helen, for any mother, losing her child was one of them. Worse yet was knowing her child had killed another child. Losing her husband would be a third.
If someone had tried to kill Oliver tonight, he
would
try again. She allowed reality to soak into her mind and into her heart, felt it hum in her veins like high-voltage lightning. Every nerve ending seemed to vibrate with the unwelcome truth.
Interpreting her silence as a dismissal, Frank walked to the door and reached for the knob.
“Frank?”
He stopped and turned. “Don't worry. I've learned my lesson. Until we neutralize the threat, we'll keep the security detail on Oliver twenty-four seven.”
She nodded. Exactly what she'd been thinking. “I also want you to get with Mac Green and figure out how you can provide total security at the ranch. I don't want Oliver to be in this hospital a minute longer than necessary. I'd be out of here now if the doctors would allow it.”
“Agreed. Anything else?”
“Yes.” Helen felt the long-dormant skills she'd wielded as a superior prosecuting attorney within her return and infuse her with steel-hardened resolve. “Bring me a preliminary report on the arson investigation tomorrow morning. And I want to see photographs and every scrap of evidence from the Todd Dale crime scene sooner, if possible.”
If the bastard wanted a fight, he had it. And he'd badly underestimated his opponent.
Chapter Twelve
Tampa, Florida
Thursday 11:30 p.m.
DARKNESS ENVELOPED THE SPEEDING SUV, the instrument panel seeming unnaturally bright with its illuminated dials and gauges. Jess had the radio tuned to a classical music station and piano nocturnes reinforced the stillness. Under different circumstances, Jess might have fallen asleep in the quiet. Tonight, her nerves were strung like steel guitar strings and equally likely to snap without warning. She rolled her shoulders in a futile attempt to relieve her stress.
Jess kept the speedometer at ninety except when she had to slow for another vehicle or the radar detector. The Interstate between Ocala and Tampa was dry and straight. Like many Florida roads, it was in good repair and dead flat. The only significant hazard she'd noticed thus far was a pair of deer that ran across the southbound lanes a few miles back. She could see rare oncoming headlights for quite a distance.
They'd been on the road about twenty minutes when Mike's cell phone rang again. Jess glanced over and saw his face illuminated by the phone's screen which was flashing a picture of an attractive young woman at the beach.
“Your girlfriend?”
“Yeah. Lydia.”
“Pretty helpful for a local reporter,” she said. “Having a girlfriend working a number-one trauma center in the area.”
Mike grinned and picked up the call. “Hey, what's up? None of my pals around? . . . What about her husband? . . . Okay, thanks. We should be there in about an hour.” He ended the call. “Lydia says Governor Sullivan is in ICU, but she's only suffered some superficial injuries. A few cuts to her face and a burn on her right arm.”
Jess glanced briefly toward Mike, but couldn't see him in the darkness. “And her husband?”
“Not so lucky. He's unconscious. They've called in a neurosurgeon.”
“Does she know why?”
“Not sure. She'd be in trouble if they knew she'd told me anything at all, so she's got to be careful.”
Mike sounded a little bit worried for Lydia, but more interested in being a part of a big story. Jess wondered how serious they were about each other.
“Is the hospital a mob scene already?”
“That big security guy's at the governor's bedside, but so far, no reporters or anything. Since Sullivan's ranch is out in the middle of nowhere and it's already pretty late, and with the holidays and all . . . .” His voice trailed off.
“So you're thinking we'll get there before any other reporters do and we'll be able to walk right in the front door? Don't count on it.”
“It could happen,” he said. “We could get lucky.”
He sounded so young. Jess remembered exactly when she'd stopped believing she might have any kind of good luck. It was a long time ago. “Well, I'm not a lucky person, Mike, so let's start figuring out how I'm going to get up to Helen Sullivan's room, okay?”
“Okay,” he said sulkily, “but we could get lucky.”
She tried to brighten her tone a bit. “It never hurts to be prepared. Do you think Lydia knows if there's a back entrance or a restricted stairway or a private elevator? Anything like that?”
Mike didn't answer right away. She stole another quick glance at his face, which she couldn't really see in the dark interior of the SUV. She sat back and decided to let him answer in his own time.
While driving around Florida chasing this story, she'd been impressed with the vast open land that still existed here. Sometimes miles of tarmac passed without a glimpse of another human being. In daylight, she'd seen acres of cattle and horse farms, orange groves, tomato farms and strawberry fields. Between the coasts and in the panhandle, Florida was still wild with alligators and mosquitoes, and she had the bug bites to prove it.
The land between Ocala and Tampa was some of the emptiest space in Central Florida. There were no street lights along the Interstate, few homes and fewer lighted buildings. As in any rural area after dark, the brightest light was the moon. Tonight, the cloudy sky blacked out everything that wasn't centered in the beam of her headlights.
At last Mike broke the silence. “I usually park in the regular parking deck, but there might be private parking for the docs. Lydia told me sometimes nurses go out on the landing to smoke. Maybe there's a side door or something.” He pulled out his cell phone again and pushed a button. Jess heard the ringing on the other end, and Lydia's voice mail pick up. Her voice sounded sweet and southern.
When Lydia's greeting ended, Mike said, “Call me,” then paused a moment and added, “please,” and hung up. “She'll call back if she can. Or maybe when we get there I'll be able to find it.”
Jess nodded her approval. “Okay. That's good.”
A few minutes later, in a quiet voice, Mike said, “I'm sorry about your son.”
The comment was so unexpected, and hit so close to her own thoughts in the darkness, that Jess's hands reflexively gripped the steering wheel tighter.
After all these years, people had stopped asking her about Peter, but Jess spent so much time thinking about him, searching for him, that he was never far from her mind. When someone did ask, Jess had schooled herself to judge the inquirer's motives. To the morbidly curious, she'd learned to simply say thank you in a tone that discouraged further conversation, which she was about to do.
“I read about it online,” Mike continued, “while you were in with Vivian Ward. I was just Googling your name, you know, to see what kind of photographs you've used before. So I could get the right stuff. The story came up. Don't be mad.”
“I'm not mad. Thank you for your sympathy. But let's just keep our minds on the job at hand, okay? Where in Tampa is this hospital?”
The dodge seemed to distract him at first. “On Florida Key. I'll tell you how to get there when the time comes,” Mike said. But then, like the multi-tasker everyone in his generation seemed to be, he kept on. “It must be hard. Being a great investigative journalist, but never able to track down who took your own kid.”
“I said drop it.” She didn't mean to snap at him. Normally, she handled questions about Peter much better. The day's tension must be exacting a toll. She took a deep breath and calmed her voice. “I'm sorry. Let's not talk about this, okay? I really need to concentrate on what we're doing here.”
Again, she thought she'd gotten her message across. He was quiet a few moments before he said, “I was just thinking about what it would be like, following any story for ten years. But instead of a story, it's your kid.”
Anger flushed through her. “I said stop it!” The sound of her voice reverberated in the silent car. She felt her arms fatigue with the death grip of her hands on the steering wheel. With force of will, she managed to slow down her racing heart. Her outburst shocked her as much as it had Mike, but it had the desired effect.
She said nothing for half an hour, and neither did he. During the silence, she examined her uncharacteristic reactions to his guileless questions. The kid meant no harm. She knew him well enough to realize that much.
Certainly, Peter's disappearance was not a secret. She'd written about it many times and whenever she was interviewed, the same questions always came up. Her quest to find her son required her to be open about her goals. She'd needed the cooperation of so many people over the years.
But something about the dark interior of the car, the conversation she'd had with Vivian Ward, the reason she was racing toward Helen Sullivan, the crimes Tommy Taylor had committed against children, even the work she'd been doing on all of the criminal cases before this one, had combined to make her shout at Mike. Which was crazy. She couldn't lose her grip on her sanity or her mission.
Without warning, her remorse sent her in an entirely different direction. Almost without volition, she found herself telling Mike about Peter.
“He was just a toddler when he went missing. Hell,
I
was a baby myself. I'd gotten pregnant at sixteen and the father took off. I was trying to finish high school and go on to college. Peter was a colicky baby. He cried all the time. And I couldn't sleep. I was working as a waitress, trying to pay rent on a crappy one-room flat.” She stopped for a moment, recalling the sheer exhaustion in body and soul she'd lived back then.
“Anyway, he was asleep in our flat, quiet for once, and I didn't want to wake him, so I left him alone while I ran down to the basement to put the laundry in the dryer. And when I came back, he was gone.” She turned on her left blinker and moved out to pass a slow moving truck in front of them. When she was safely past, she moved back into the right lane. The small effort seemed to anchor her back in the present.
“At first, I left finding Peter to the authorities until I finished school and finally realized they'd given up. There are so many missing kids and so little they can really do after the first few days. For the past ten years, I've been looking for him myself. I took this job with a national magazine so I could travel wherever I need to go and get the national exposure that might allow Peter to find me or anyone with information about him to know how to reach me. I've followed every lead, no matter how unlikely. We've used age-progression software to create pictures of him as he might appear now and posted them everywhere. I've used every ounce of my investigative skills to find him.” Jess heard the weariness in her voice, something she rarely revealed. She wondered why she was telling Mike all this and realized that sharing her frustration was somehow helping her feel better.
“But no luck at all?” he asked, as if he found the idea curious and perplexing, like quantum physics or time travel.
Jess put a tone of finality in her words, hoping they could move on to a different subject. She needed her wits about her and this topic wasn't going to keep her on her game. “That's right. Like I said, I'm not a lucky person.”