Millionaire's Last Stand (22 page)

Finn was at Gideon’s, which meant he could get here in no time, Cole realized. “Look, I need you to come and pick me up. Someone slashed my tires, probably when I was at the station with you, and I have no way to—”

“Someone slashed your tires?”

“Yes. So get over here, Finnegan.” He swallowed a lump of panic. “I think Jamie’s in danger.”

“What are you talking about? What’s going on, Donovan?”

“I’ll explain everything when you get here.” Cole spoke quickly, urgently. “Just hurry.”

A click sounded in his ear. He could only hope that Finn had hung up without a word to save time and was running to his car at this very second. Gideon’s cabin was only a five-minute drive, the sheriff could make it here in less than that if he ignored the speed limit.

Cole bounded to the security room to unlock the gate, then went out to the porch, where he fixed his gaze on the end of the driveway, as if he could will Finn’s Jeep to appear. It must have worked, because the Jeep burst onto the dirt path a minute later. Cole was in the passenger seat before the vehicle came to a complete stop and then Finn did a sharp turn and barreled down the driveway again.

“Where are we going?” he demanded.

“My house.” Cole’s lips tightened. “Where Teresa died.”

“Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?”

The trees on the side of the road whizzed past like streaks of lightning as Finn sped toward the main intersection.

“I think Jamie is in danger,” Cole burst out. “I got a phone call from— Oh crap.”

His abrupt exclamation came at the same time Finn slammed on the brakes. Cole hadn’t bothered with his seat-belt, and he nearly smashed his head against the dash as the Jeep came to a screeching stop. A few yards from the intersection sat a white Honda Civic, its passenger door carelessly flung open.

Cole’s heart thumped as he squinted for a better look. A dark head was slumped over the steering wheel. Valerie. He recognized the car, knew it had to be Teresa’s sister in the driver’s seat. The open passenger door indicated that someone else had been in the car with her.

Jamie.

After Finn drove the Jeep onto the shoulder of the road, Cole jumped out and ran to the white car, reaching it seconds before the sheriff lumbered up from behind. As Finn rounded the vehicle to examine any potential damage, Cole stuck a hand through the open window and touched Valerie Matthew’s raven hair, nudging her gingerly. “Valerie. Valerie!”

She gave a strangled moan and then her head moved ever so slightly.

“Valerie, wake up. Where’s Jamie?” Cole pleaded.

Another moan, followed by a whimper, and then she slowly looked up at him, her gray eyes glazed with confusion. “C-Cole?”

“Someone hit them from behind,” Finn muttered, returning to the driver’s side. “The bumper is all but gone.”

Cole cursed at the news, then glanced back at the injured woman. “Valerie, are you okay?” He touched her hair again, lifted his hand and saw it was stained with blood.

“He…he knocked me out,” Valerie murmured, awe and bewilderment ringing in her voice.

Cole choked down the lump of horror in his throat. “Who knocked you out, Val? Tell me what happened.” When she just whimpered again, he grew frantic. “Valerie, where’s Jamie?”

“He took her.” A wobbly breath left her mouth. Shaking her head as if to clear it of cobwebs, she blinked several times, then focused her silvery gaze on Cole. “That guy who works for you…your assistant…he took Agent Crawford. He
took
her.”

Chapter 16

“G
et out of the car, Agent Crawford.”

Jamie stared at the barrel of the gun, then up at the face of the man wielding it. For the hundredth time, she had trouble accepting that this was Ian Macintosh. Ian, the young man who’d been so pleasant to her the morning after the storm.

He looked like a completely different person. Brown eyes wild, boyish features twisted in a mask of evil loathing. She resisted the urge to rub her aching right temple, fearing any sudden movements would set him off. Or the gun. Her gun, she realized as she stared at the familiar Glock with the scratch on the butt. He must have grabbed it from her purse, after he’d run Valerie’s car off the road.

She’d hit her head during the accident, and her memory was still fuzzy, but she recalled the crunching of metal, being propelled into the dashboard, then hearing muted footsteps and seeing Valerie droop forward. She remembered fumbling for her purse, and then…then Ian’s face appeared in the passenger window, the door was thrown open and everything went black.

“I
said,
get out of the car!”

She blinked, trying to stay alert despite the throbbing of her head. She was in a beige sedan, most likely Ian’s rental, and it was dark outside but not pitch black, which told her only a short amount of time had passed since he’d knocked her unconscious. The sun had just set when she’d gotten into Valerie’s car, so it couldn’t be later than seven o’clock, maybe eight.

“All right then, if that’s how you want to be,” Ian snapped.

The gun disappeared and he was out of the car, his footsteps thudding against the ground as he walked around to her side, opened the door and pulled her out of the sedan by her hair.

Her arm flew out in a desperate punch, but she’d instinctively used her right one, the injured one. Pain shot up to her shoulder and she sagged onto the gravel. She realized she’d landed on a driveway. Where the hell had he taken— She gasped when she caught sight of the commanding stone mansion.

She immediately figured out where they were. The house Cole had shared with Teresa.

“Why are you doing this?” she blurted out. “I thought you were loyal to Cole.”

“Loyal to that murdering bastard?” Ian smirked. “You thought wrong, luv. Now get up.”

She did as he asked, wishing she had a backup weapon right about now. She needed to neutralize this situation before Macintosh decided to pull the trigger.

He gestured her to move ahead of him. “Walk to the door.”

Jamie used the walk along the limestone path to assess the situation. Ian definitely wasn’t of sound mind, but his motive for doing this made no sense to her. Was he after Cole’s company? Was he simply crazy?

His reasoning became clear as he made her open the double doors at the mansion’s entrance, planted a hand on her back and shoved her into the house. Darkness shrouded them and then she heard a click and light flooded the impressive marble-lined parlor.

“You just couldn’t do your damn job, could you, Agent?” Ian said with contempt in his voice. “Go through the doorway to the left.”

He flicked another switch and Jamie found herself in an enormous living room with high ceilings and a gorgeous slate fireplace. Horror clogged her throat. This was the room in which Teresa Donovan had died. She glanced at the floor by the coffee table, growing sick when she saw the dark brown stain on the hardwood. Evidently the cleaning staff hadn’t been able to scrub away the bloodstain.

Ian waved the gun. “Sit down.”

When she moved to the couch, he barked at her again. “Not there. On the floor.”

Nausea knotted around her insides as she realized where he wanted her to sit. Knowing she had to cooperate until she found a way out of this mess, she slowly moved across the room and sank down on the marred hardwood. Forced herself not to think about the pool of sticky blood that had once congealed there.

“You know,” Ian said, his voice colder than a glacier, “I was quite pleased when you showed up in town. I thought,
Hey, now here’s a smart woman, surely she’ll see that he’s a killer and send him to death row.
” He sneered at her. “But no, you had to go and screw the guy, didn’t you,
Agent?
”

“Cole isn’t a killer,” she said quietly.

He went on as if she hadn’t even spoken. “I tried to be nice to you! I left you that note, trying to help you get your priorities straight, but you ignored it! And then I tried warning you by messing with your car and you—”

“Warning?” she interrupted. “I could have died.”

“And if you did, then the sheriff would have called in another agent, one capable of carrying out a simple task.” Ian shrugged. “If you survived, I figured you’d skip town and let someone else take over, but you stuck around. I guess you do have a death wish.”

“You shot me this morning.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I missed,” he confessed. “I wasn’t planning on doing it—I was just keeping an eye on the house to make sure the bastard didn’t try and skip town. Then you came outside and I decided, what the hell, might as well go for it. But you moved at the last second, and I’m afraid I’m not very good with guns.” He wagged the weapon around as if to hammer the point home.

Jamie ran a hand through her hair, wincing when she unconsciously put her right arm to use again. She ignored the resulting pain and shot Ian a curious look. “So you’re doing this because you hate Cole?”

His eyes flashed. “What I did before, I did because that son of a bitch needs to be in prison.” His lips twisted in a malevolent smile. “But now…well, since you’re obviously not going to punish him for his crime,
I’m
going to punish him.”

She sighed. She didn’t normally provoke psychopaths, but this was bordering on nonsensical. “I have no idea what you’re saying, Ian. It’s starting to sound a lot like crazy talk.”

“Oh, I’m not making enough sense for you, Agent Crawford?” He made a tsking sound. “Not surprising, seeing as you’re completely incompetent at your job. How about I spell it out for you then?”

“Please do,” she couldn’t help but bite out.

“Cole belongs in jail,” Ian announced in a pleasant voice. “You’re too stupid to put him there. Ergo, I’ve decided to dish out my own form of punishment.” He leaned against the arm of the sofa, his gun hand swinging back and forth like a pendulum. “I’m going to make the bastard feel what it’s like to lose the woman you love. Clear enough for you?”

Her mind reeled with shock. The woman you love? Who on earth—

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You…you were one of the men Teresa had an affair with.”

“Affair?” he roared. “We had more than an affair! We were in love! Those other men didn’t matter, none of them mattered!
I
was the one she loved, and that son of a bitch took her away from me!”

She exhaled in frustration. “Cole didn’t kill her.”

“Yes, he
did!
He threatened to do it, too. She told me all about it. I was the one who told her to get the restraining order.” Ian’s cheeks turned red. “But it was too bloody late, wasn’t it? He got to her! She tried to fight him off in the parking lot of the bar and he followed her home to finish the job.”

“Cole was in the woods with Joe Gideon when Teresa died,” Jamie said gently. “Gideon admitted to it.”

“Then that bastard was paid off! Mr. Millionaire got to him,” Ian snapped. “Now you know what? Shut up. I’m getting rather bored of this. Congratulations, luv, you did it, you got the bad guy to spend a few minutes outlining his motives and all that fun stuff. Now shut the hell up and lie down.”

She faltered. “What?”

The gun in his hand jerked up. Even from her perch on the floor, she could see his fingers tightening over the trigger. “Lie. Down.” He gestured to the bloodstain.

For the first time since he’d brought her here, Jamie experienced a rush of pure, unadulterated fear.

As she positioned herself the way Ian instructed, she realized with growing terror precisely what he was doing.

He was recreating Teresa’s crime scene.

“I mean it, Donovan, either you tell me what’s happening or I’ll pull my gun out and shoot you in the knee.”

It was an empty threat, but Cole heard the desperation in the sheriff’s voice as the Jeep bounced over a pothole on the hasty ride to the house where Teresa died. Ian must have taken Jamie there. He would want to kill her in the place where Teresa had died. Cole felt it deep in his gut.

“My pilot called,” Cole started.

“Your pilot? Is this let-me-brag-about-how-rich-I-am time or do you have a freaking point?”

He ignored the sarcasm. “My pilot, Pierre, called, wondering why I ordered the jet to stay in the hangar. Apparently Ian grounded the jet two days ago, when he told me he was flying back to Chicago. My pilots have been twiddling their thumbs at the hotel since then.”

“You’re talking about your assistant?” Finn sucked in a breath. “He lied about leaving town?”

Cole gave a sharp nod. “He was here, when Jamie had her accident, when she got shot, he was here the entire time.” A sick feeling crept up his chest. “And it gets worse. After I spoke to Pierre, I called my P.I. to check into Ian’s past flight records, to see if this has happened before.”

“And it has.”

“Yep. A dozen times over the past two years, he made visits to Serenade, when he was supposed to be somewhere else. Often he did stop off at the city I sent him to, then came here afterward.”

Finn swore loudly. “And you didn’t notice?”

“I was a little distracted, what with my cheating wife and tabloid-worthy divorce,” he snapped, a sharp edge to his voice. “Besides, I trusted Ian. He’s done a good job for me, especially in these past couple of years.”

“Yeah, well, he was banging your wife.”

“You made the connection too, huh?”

Cole battled an explosion of resentment at the thought. There was no other reason for Ian to be visiting Serenade without his boss. Unless he was involved with someone in town.

And seeing as Teresa slept with every man who so much as bumped into her, Ian must have been one of the men on her adultery list.

Swallowing down a lump of bitterness, Cole glanced at the sheriff. “That woman was poison. It wouldn’t shock me in the least if she seduced my assistant. It would just be another fun way to get back at me.”

“Did I ever apologize for not warning you ahead of time about Teresa?”

Cole’s head swiveled in surprise. Was he hearing things?

“I’m serious,” Finn continued, sounding gruff. “I always felt like an ass for not saying something before you married her.”