Ransomed Dreams (14 page)

“This is madness. Harry would not approve. Not at all.”

He clenched his jaw and pocketed his gun. “Dear sister, may I remind you that you are party to a wad of felonies from which Her Majesty will not rescue you.” He plucked the black hood and a fresh roll of duct tape from the floor. “I could leave the two of you here for the Feds to find.”

He shoved Charlotte away and replaced Olivia’s bindings and hood. The little rag doll didn’t put up a fuss. Too worn out from a week of water and scraps.

No matter.

Weak or not, she still had a part to play in his plans for the ambassador.

“May I remind you, prison is a dank place. Full of rats and all manner of evil vices. Besides, what would become of your Stewart? Can’t leave your baby to his American father, now can you?”

Charlotte wagged her finger at him. “Leave my son out of this, Gordon.”

He laughed, then turned back to his office, leaving Olivia in the black hood and Charlotte trembling near her. Both of them too afraid to move.

Dismantling his equipment required precious moments, but leaving everything was out of the question. The coppers were too smart. He couldn’t leave them more than a scrap.

Not even one of his many latex gloves.

“Take your sniveling self back home, dear. If you hurry, the Feds might not ever know you were here.” He narrowed his eyes. “But I’d wager they could track your tire imprints. You might concentrate on distancing yourself from your current convertible and find a sensible mum wagon.”

Charlotte clomped through the drafty living quarters and out the door.

Within minutes, he flung Olivia’s limp, whining frame into her basement cell. Keeping an eye on her while packing wouldn’t do.

Gordon resumed his trek to the black limo with another round of baggage to dispose of en route. Her Majesty’s training left him with many options and no need of panic. Worry would only serve the federal idiots well.

Not his plan.

Soon they’d be on their way to Dulles Airport. This bothersome distraction amounted to little more than a nuisance. The game continued. With him at the helm, as always.

The ambassador had yet another little brat at his knee, but Gordon would never have another brother.

Thinking over his next move, he grinned. He would continue to even the odds. All in good time.

Steven’s SUV flew outside the Beltway.

Michael’s communications expertise had provided a quick triangulation of Olivia’s call. She was alive. He still had time.

Steven’s white-fingered grip on the steering wheel didn’t hold the raging thoughts from tumbling through his head.

Olivia’s picture.

Jordan’s bruised arms and terror-filled eyes.

So like Ryan’s.

When he tried to dismiss those pictures, Gracie’s wide-eyed response to their date’s ending left a hollow place in his gut. They’d connected. But after tonight?

Steven shook his head. James’s hopeful eyes would match his pleading questions in the morning.
Did you kiss her, Daddy? Will she be my new mommy?

It had to happen sooner or later. James knew that a traditional family required a mother and a father. The boy had never known Angela, had never seen her picture. Maybe that was wrong, but Steven couldn’t take the reminder of yet another failure …

Pulling onto the dirt driveway of a rundown farmhouse, he parked behind Clint’s truck. The solitary vehicle blended into the evening shadows of tall pines and scrubby brush surrounding them.

“We beat the ERT?” Steven unlatched his holster.

Clint nodded. “The hostage team is on their way too.”

Michael joined them.

Steven inched to the edge of the wooded perimeter. The dark and silent three-story presented a quandary.

Do a three-man assault, or wait for the Hostage Rescue Team?

Disrupt a crime scene and possibly save Olivia, or wait on the evidence crew?

Move now and find a hot trail if the farmhouse was deserted, or wait ’til everything went cold?

Steven longed for his hotheaded rookie days when he would have charged into the house and trusted his God and his gun to provide all he needed to survive. But now? Now he had agents under him to protect as well as a teen to rescue.

“Let’s do a preliminary, Clint.”

Clint worked his jaw muscles while he surveyed the farmhouse structure.

“She could be in there,” Steven said. “Almost dead. Just like Ryan.”

His partner fixed him with narrowed eyes. “Don’t pull that
trash on me. We did all we could. Just like now. Olivia’s life isn’t in my hands. Or yours.”

Steven yanked at his yellow silk tie. “I’m going in.”

Clint exhaled. “I’ll go low Watch your back, partner.”

Michael double-checked his sidearm. “I’ll start high, up the back stairs.”

With a nod, Steven watched his companions circle around to the other side of the house. He crouched down and stayed low as he neared the front porch. Bypassing the holes in the front steps, he tried the door.

Unlocked.

Gun up, he flung the door wide and slipped in.

His breath came in short, shallow bursts. His heart thundering in his ears, the only sound.

He scanned the open room. Nothing. Not a trace of life. Dusty threadbare furniture and a few odds and ends tables. Steven followed the main wall around the front room. At the corner, he paused before entering one of the two closed doors.

The first door creaked open as he touched it. Dust and empty wood floors. Shredded curtains. Faded and peeling paint.

He pushed open the second door and plastered himself to the wall, waiting. Scanning the room, he found more of the same.

Back in the hall, he saw Michael make his way down the rickety stairs. He nodded toward the basement door. No sounds of Clint coming up.

Maybe Clint had found Olivia.

And her captor.

God help us all.

T
om settled in for a quiet Saturday at work.

He liked the silence of Hope Ridge Academy during summer break, when schoolkids stayed home and teachers didn’t laugh and chatter in the halls before or after classes. Days exactly like today.

He rifled through the papers on his desk. Gracie’s file lay open on the far left corner. But in front of him, he spread the newspaper clippings from two years ago. Something in all this melodrama played for sympathy had to yield a clue to the woman’s weaknesses.

Gracie’s visit to a private investigator had precipitated the need for his ideas becoming reality. Finding one place of vulnerability should prove easy. Ten articles later, he realized maybe not.

He grew tired of reading Gracie’s long moralisms and the reports full of bleeding hearts longing to help this widow find her family’s killer. She wouldn’t. Not if he had anything to say about it.

And he did.

So he turned to the Internet. Finding websites on the practices of serial killers provided interesting reading, but nothing he needed for the present.

Medical websites provided a few more fascinating tidbits. Amazing how detailed the World Wide Web had become. A housewife in Iowa could find enough pharmacological information to diagnosis and treat any ailment. Or kill a horse.

Information on how to build a bomb.

Poison a human and not get caught.

Tom shuddered. He wanted none of that last bit of information. Getting that close and personal was not on his agenda. Not yet.

Thoughts of Kimberly gnawed at him. What would life have been like if he married the pretty brunette from Georgia? Loud, emotion-filled fights, no doubt. Punctuated
with
the wailing of a child that wasn’t his.

No thanks.

But watching Gracie at night …

“Tom? What on earth are you doing here so early?” Janice Hall—or Mother Dearest—entered his office.

He swallowed his heart back into his chest and focused on his mother. Perfect black hair fashionably in place. Modest diamond earrings. Designer gray suit and makeup fit for a model. The four-inch stilettos, though, were not a sight he cared to have impressed behind his eyelids.

No sixty-year-old woman should keep up with a twenty-year-old and wear shoes meant to entice. Not even his attractive mother. Especially not when she’d divorced his stepfather. The only man besides his dad who’d given Tom more than expensive toys. All for her job. Everything for her job.

No wonder he’d do anything to keep his.

Janice moved to the desk. “What’s all this about Gracie Lang?”

Tom snatched up the newspaper clippings and slid them into a file. “Reviewing her background to make sure she can handle all the upcoming events, that’s all. What about you, Mother? Why are you here, dressed to the nines?”

A schoolgirl blush warmed her face. Tom wanted to puke.

“Some personnel business to attend to.”

“Dressed like that?” He leaned back in his leather chair, putting his hands behind his head. He enjoyed his mother’s discomfort. Living without a father for most of his life, he had no intention of another man muscling into his tidy world.

“Thomas, my private life is mine to manage. Much like you’ve always demanded that yours stay out of my frame of reference.” She moved back to his opened office door. “Unless, of course, you’d like to tell me the truth about that photo of Gracie you were studying when I walked in.”

How much had his astute mother seen? Time for damage control that would rock her world so much that she’d forget about newspaper articles and start planning for grandchildren.

“Actually, it’s not Gracie I’m interested in. It’s the agent who will be working in her classroom. Getting to know Gracie will help me create inroads to spending more time with Maria Grivens.”

Janice’s smile touched the edges of her steel gray eyes. “Well, Tom. I had no idea.” She folded her slender form into his guest chair. “I remember your first real girlfriend like it was yesterday College, wasn’t it?”

A warm fuzzy trip down memory lane held no appeal. But it would serve as an apt distraction. “Yes. College. A lovely season of life.”

“Didn’t you date that girl for a time?”

“Her name was Kimberly, and we dated for two years when I was in grad school.”

And right before he could offer her the tiny diamond he’d scraped to afford, she’d informed him that she was pregnant with someone else’s child. A younger college hero with biceps Tom could never rival without steroids.

He stood and walked along the far wall of his office, hands clasped behind his back. His paintings brought no comfort. Neither did the bookshelf full of long-ago memorized leather-bound works of Shakespeare.

“ … Maria seems like a very nice woman. Exotic beauty too.”

“Yes. A Secret Service agent to boot.”

Janice sighed. “I hope you’ll let me know more about Maria than you did about that Kimberly.” She stood up and crossed the thick cream carpet. “Have a good morning, Tom. I’ll check in with you before I leave.”

He stood as his mother walked out of his office. Strange emotions rummaged through his mind. His mother blamed him for not talking about Kimberly Like Mother was ever around to listen.

Funny how time altered perceptions, skewed the facts into unrecognizable bits of information. All according to what one desired to remember. Or forget.

He could only hope that would happen to Gracie as well.

Then when she abandoned her fruitless quest for answers, he could relax. Maybe even pursue a future with Maria Grivens or some other attractive female.

Tom huffed. Thankfully, Agent Steven Kessler’s attention was focused on Gracie, not Maria. Like that mattered. FBI hotshots were more her style.

Would Maria ever be interested in him? Yeah, right.

“So how exactly are you gonna top your first date, partner?”

Clint watched for Steven’s reaction as he flipped large, juicy burgers on the grill. The savory smell of beef and all the picnic fixin’s on the table next to him caused his stomach to growl. Loud.

“Better feed that bottomless pit.”

Clint ignored his partner’s ribbing. All he had to do was wait and enjoy the beautiful blue Saturday skies overhead. The silence would drag out Steven’s dating information.

Jonathan, Susannah, and James squealed in the backyard kiddie pool just beyond the deck he and Steven had built a few years back. And his Irish princess swaggered toward him in a white two-piece under her bathing suit cover-up. The one he’d make disappear after Steven and the kids said good night.

Sara kissed his cheek before going into the house to retrieve one more necessity for their already overflowing table. Maybe she’d break out the homemade ice cream chum.

To any outsider, their life would resemble a summertime spread in
The Saturday Evening Post
.

“I could top the ending of last nights date by not answering the cell phone.”

Clint chuckled. “Nice try Kessler, but I doubt that’ll work. If she’s going to stick around, she needs to know what to expect. Annoying cell phones are part of the package.”

“Who says she’s going to stick around?” Steven leaned on the banister to watch the kids splash in the pool.

“My gut instinct.”

Steven scowled. “I think you should turn that gut instinct back to our case. I want this thing wrapped up. The sooner, the better.”

Clint grunted a reply.

“Think Olivia’s still alive?”

One at a time he flipped the dozen hot dogs on the upper rack of the grill. “Don’t know. All that duct tape says she was there. Evidence techs found nothing to prove a death occurred on the premises.”

“But?”

“But little about this case makes sense—paper trails end with no rhyme or reason, every tip a waste of time, the ambassador’s screwy story.”

Steven nodded.

“I met with Jordan and her folks Thursday.”

“Why didn’t I know that?”

“You were busy I took care of things. It’s all in my case notes if you want to do some reading tonight.” Clint had no intention of finishing this shoptalk. Or of answering Steven’s question. He wanted one Saturday cookout to relax. The problems would still be there come Monday morning.

Was that asking too much?

Sara’s soft footsteps behind him didn’t fully register until she wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned up to kiss his neck.