“Which is why we’re sharing half of the contents of Andy’s safe with her,” I said. “That’s her consolation prize for giving you the full share of the deal with InvoTech and leaving her alone for the rest of her—hopefully—long life. After all, it’s the least you can do for her after convincing her to hand over the house key to Robin and Andy’s home the second it gets turned over to her by APD, and you’d head over there with Dave and Gwen and force him to tell you where the hidden safe is. And for incentive with Rachel, you gave her Robin’s Black Card, didn’t you? She was able to save her mother from certain eviction on the last day the nursing home had extended her, which was so nice.”
“I—I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rachel stammered. I could see how scared she was, and I didn’t care. She’d made a deal with the devil, and she deserved to feel terrified.
“Oh,” I said to her as I wiggled my cell phone. “I think you do, dear. See, when I let you make that phone call using my phone, I simply assumed you’d called Maldonado directly. Imagine my surprise when you dialed this number instead. . . .”
With a little twirl of my finger I pressed the recently placed number and a second later Eldridge’s butt began to ring. He reached into his back pocket, pulling out his phone, and silenced it.
“There’s a flaw with your plan here, ladies,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked him, all innocence and confusion.
“McKenzie,” he said.
My heart skipped a beat.
“Once he’s free, he’ll talk,” Stanton continued. “His wife too. They can’t be released. They’ll have to be eliminated.”
I felt a flood of relief, but we weren’t exactly out of the woods yet. We had enough now to obtain the warrant for our team to storm Stanton’s home and search it for Dave, but there was no way to know if Dave was actually there. I had to try to tease more information out of him by continuing to gain his trust, but I couldn’t seem too eager. “No,” I said to him. “Eldridge, these are my friends. You’re not going to kill them.”
He shrugged as if he didn’t give a damn. “They’ll point the police to me. It’s nonnegotiable.”
“What if you wait to make that anonymous phone call until the funds on the deal with InvoTech have been transferred?” Candice suggested. “That way you could be on a plane out of the country before anyone even thinks to come looking for you.”
“Oh, and in the meantime, by uploading the video on Robin’s cell, you can continue to paint Murielle as the main suspect out for revenge against the woman who had all of her secrets. Speaking of which, I have to hand it to you, that whole gig was a stroke of genius. Knowing how Murielle stalked the Roswells for all those months, pointing us in her direction subtly by telling us about her relationship with Robin, then hiring Maldonado—a member of Murielle’s posse—to represent every suspect in the case and make it look like she was behind it all . . . well . . . that was sheer brilliance.”
Stanton’s shoulders lifted slightly. I knew he was proud of that one.
Feeling overly confident, I maaaaaaaay have then taken it one teeny-weeny step too far. “You had the bureau field office convinced she was the puppet master. The whole team is still trying to nail her for those crimes, actually.”
Stanton’s smirk dissolved slowly, like the blood draining from my face as I watched his reaction. “Your two husbands have been trying to nail her for murder and they’ve been sleeping with her?” he asked.
Gulp.
“They slept with her way before they were trying to pin her for the murders,” I said quickly. Too quickly.
“Abby!” I heard Candice shout as Stanton moved fast toward the laptop, slapping the lid closed with a loud bang. He then picked up the computer and threw it against the wall, breaking it into several pieces.
Meanwhile, I heard a flurry of pounding feet coming down the hallway a second before he reached me.
Chapter Twenty-three
Stanton held the gun to my temple and used me as a human shield to address the eight hundred law-enforcement folks who’d flooded his conference room.
Okay, maybe not eight hundred, but the room was packed with people. And guns. Mostly guns. Literally all of them pointed in my direction.
I’m nothing if not a glutton for attention.
“Can we talk about this?” I squeaked. Stanton had me around the throat and he was cutting off some of my air supply.
“Shut. Up,” he said.
It bothered me immensely that he’d said that so calmly. He should’ve been hyper, sweating profusely, and ready to pass out.
You know, like I was.
“Let her go, Eldridge,” Dutch said. Maybe not quite as calmly as Stanton, but close.
I tried to find him in the sea of people, but my vision kept darkening at the edges and it was tough to focus on individual details. Well, other than all those gun muzzles.
“Eldridge,” came another voice—it sounded like Nikki. “Seriously, you’ve got no move here. You either let her go and leave in handcuffs, or you don’t and you leave in a body bag.”
Morbidly I wondered if the order for body bags would be for a party of one or two. Lifting my index finger, I croaked, “I have a suggestion.”
“I told you to shut up,” he hissed into my ear.
“Yeah, but maybe you’ll want to hear me out.”
There was a pause; then he whispered, “What?”
I pulled on his arm a little and took a strangled breath. “Dave and Gwen aren’t at your house, are they?”
Stanton didn’t say anything.
I continued. “You’re in a position to make a deal. You can offer their lives for taking the death penalty off the table, and getting yourself secured to a better prison than some maximum security shithole somewhere out in the desert.”
Again Stanton was silent, so I added, “Guys like you don’t do well in maximum. But I know of a place in Virginia that’s got some nice white-collar criminals that you might get along with.”
I could feel Stanton take a deep breath against my back. He was considering it. “I’d want the opportunity for parole,” he said.
Nobody said a word.
That’s cuz nobody was ready to make that deal.
Still, Dutch said, “Sure, Eldridge. We’ll see what we can do.”
Stanton still didn’t move a muscle to release me. I was afraid we hadn’t been very convincing. And then he surprised me. “McKenzie and his wife are at Barbara Schultz’s house, locked in her panic room.”
I remembered the elderly woman we’d interviewed several days earlier. She’d been going on vacation. Her house was currently vacant. It was the perfect hiding spot.
I closed my eyes in relief, but it was short-lived. A second after he’d spoken, the barrel of Eldridge’s gun lifted from my temple. “Tell my mother I loved her,” he said.
And then I heard several shouts of “NO!” followed by a bang so loud it felt like a blow to the head.
A second later I was falling. . . .
• • •
“You look like shit,” Dave said to me from the gurney next to mine.
“Back atcha,” I said, grinning in spite of the massive headache.
“And you’re covered in blood,” he added.
“Back atcha,” I repeated.
“Yeah, but all this is mine. You?”
“Mostly Eldridge’s,” I said. “Mostly.”
“How’s the head?”
“Still hard enough to take a crack against a conference table and have the table come out the loser.”
Dave chuckled. I think it was one of the most wonderful sounds I’d ever heard. “Yeah, well, my hip can take a bullet pretty good too.”
“So I see. You nervous about the surgery?”
“Nah,” he said. “My old lady says it ain’t no b
ig deal.”
“You mean, Gwen?”
Dave chuckled again. “Had you guessing about her name for a few years, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I still don’t understand why.”
He gave a small shrug. “With that radar of yours, you can be a little smug, sometimes,” he said. “Stuff we can’t wait to tell you, you already know, and the stuff we don’t want you to know, you know. This was just something to tease you with to let you know that maybe you don’t know everything.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Touché,” I told him. “Still, it was a lucky thing Gwen was there to get you through the infection.”
“Yeah, it was touch and go there for a while. Lucky we found a good stash of meds at Mrs. Schultz’s. Her safe room was decked out good enough to survive a zombie apocalypse. Too bad Eldridge smashed the landline she had in there. I tried to fix the phone a couple of times, but he smashed it beyond repair.”
“Lucky us that her house is where Eldridge had you parked, Dave. Anywhere else and you might not be here.”
He nodded. “He had me parked at his house for almost two days, but when the infection and fever set in, he moved me to Mrs. Schultz’s, and thank the good Lord for that. And for the fact that he brought me Gwen. If he hadn’t, I don’t think I’d be here either. I know he was thinking he could use her against me once he got back into the Roswells’ place, but I was running a really good fever by then, and Gwen helped me fake the delirium. Eldridge might’ve thought I was faking, but he was willing to wait a couple of days to haul us both over there and make me give it up. Anyway, he wanted access to Andy’s safe more than he was willing to kill us at least. Gwen kept promising to get me well enough to tell him where the hidden safe was, and I kept ‘relapsing.’” Dave had used air quotes on that last word.
“I think you’ve been ‘relapsing’ as long as I’ve known you,” I said, returning the air quotes. And then I asked the questions I knew I needed to, but would be hard for Dave. “Can you tell me what happened?”
Dave sighed, and it was such a troubled sound. “I was headed to Mrs. Schultz’s house when a truck came right up on my bumper and punched my tail. It spun me around pretty good, and I knocked my head really hard. I blacked out, I think, for a few seconds. The next thing I know, there’s a gun in my face, and two guys are pulling me out of the truck. I thought I was being carjacked, but that was only the start of it.”
My mind filled with the images of what that must’ve been like from Dave’s perspective. It had to have been terrifying.
“So, they tie me up and throw me in the back of my own truck,” he said next. “That gave me a good rattle to the noggin too. I think I had a concussion going, because so much of the rest of it is a little fuzzy. I remember we stopped a couple of times and I tried to call for help, but they’d put a gag in my mouth and I was strapped to the truck bed with rope. I couldn’t sit up or yell. And then we stopped one last time and I heard the guy who’d pulled me out of the truck say, ‘We’ll wait here for the signal and take out the maid, but I get some time with the lady of the house,’ and I knew that I was in deep shit.”
I wanted so badly to reach out and give Dave a reassuring squeeze on his arm, but I held back. His voice was quavering a bit as he recounted the tale, and I didn’t want to do anything that might make him feel uncomfortable, or more emotional. So I simply listened.
“So,” he said, after clearing his throat. “I hear everyone get out of the truck and move off a ways, and nothing happens for a minute or two until the gunshot.”
“Mario,” I whispered.
“Who?” Dave asked. He’d heard me.
“Mario Tremblee. He was the Roswells’ gardener. He was killed by Stanton Eldridge moments before the two guys who carjacked you stormed the front door.”
Dave was quiet for a moment, probably taking that in. Then he continued. “Not long after that, I heard screams. They were faint, but I heard them. And then there were two more muffled gunshots.”
“That was Rosa Torrez. She’d worked for the Roswells for three years,” I said sadly. I’d learned that Rosa was a grandmother of three. I wasn’t up to sharing that with Dave quite yet.
“I think I saw her near the stairs,” Dave said. “She was still breathing when I passed her, and I wanted so bad to help her.”
Dave’s voice hitched and I averted my eyes, allowing him a semiprivate moment to collect himself. A few moments later he could speak again. “Anyway, the whole time I was in the bed of that truck, I kept hoping someone would hear and send the police, but the shots were pretty faint and I doubted the neighbors heard anything. Nothing happened for a long time, but then someone came to the bed of the truck and untied the straps. I sat up and there was one of the guys who’d carjacked me, but with him was a different guy. He puts a gun to my forehead and says to come with him. So I do.”
Dave paused for another moment, and again he had to clear his throat. I couldn’t imagine how terrified he must’ve been.
“I was really dizzy from getting clocked in the head so much, but the two guys dragged me inside the house and up the stairs. Mr. Roswell’s there, but his wife wasn’t. Anyway, Andy looks pale as a ghost and terrified. I felt so bad, because he was standing right next to the safe in the room and it’s locked tight. I kept wondering why he didn’t just open it. Anyway, I was having a hard time making sense of it all, but then the guy who’d ordered me out of the truck says, ‘Open the safe, McKenzie.’”
I bit my lip. What a terrible choice to have to make, I thought. My poor, dear friend.
Dave’s voice cracked as he said, “I didn’t know why he thought I’d know Andy’s safe code. Maybe he thought if I installed it, I must know how to get into it, and I didn’t have a chance to tell him to go to hell because from somewhere in the house we heard Mrs. Roswell start screaming. And then we heard . . .”
Dave paused again, and I knew exactly what he’d heard and it killed me that he’d been there for Robin’s rape. “We heard Mrs. Roswell being violated,” Dave said, his voice shaking with emotion. “At that moment, I think I lost my mind a little. I tried to shove my way past the goon holding me to help her and the next thing I know I’ve been shot.”
I winced.
“I went down to the floor, and I’m screaming. It hurt like nothing I’d ever felt before, but then I hear Andy tell the guy that he’ll open the door as long as they promise not to kill me and to bring Robin back to him. So he puts in the code, it opens, and I’m still rolling around on the floor, waiting to get shot again. I look up and I see that the safe is empty except for this weird-looking flash drive, which he hands to Eldridge.
“Mrs. Roswell comes back into the room then and they put the two of them together up against the wall while Eldridge plugs in the flash drive to a laptop. He looks at the screen and says, ‘Okay, boys, have your target practice,’ and right before the two goons start shooting, Andy shouts, ‘Dave! Don’t tell him about the other safe!’
“Eldridge tried to stop the two guys from shooting, but he was a second too late. They open fire and spray Andy and Robin with bullets.”
I was staring at Dave’s face while he spoke, my heart breaking for him because no amount of therapy was ever going to erase the horror of that moment. This time I didn’t hold back. I reached out and grabbed hold of his hand, squeezing tightly and crying myself, for him, and for the Roswells.
It was a long time before he could speak again.
“Once the dust settles,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “Eldridge starts typing on the computer all frantic like, and then he points a gun in my face and yells, ‘Tell me where the other safe is!’ but I blacked out right at that moment and sort of came to as they were hauling me out of there. I think they were worried they’d made too much noise, which is a good thing, because if we’d stayed there, Eldridge would’ve killed me for sure and torn apart th
at room, looking for the other safe.
“I came to a little bit as they were dragging me down the stairs, and they dropped me at one point outside. That was a hell all by itself. The next couple hours were a big blur. Mostly all I remember is the pain. I hurt all over. It was bad.”
“But you were alive,” I said, giving his hand another squeeze.
“Yeah. On borrowed time, though. Eldridge was furious, going on about how Andy had tricked him, and he wanted the money that was supposed to have been in the safe with the flash drive. I knew Andy kept a load of cash in that place—he’d told me he needed two safes big enough to hold a couple of million.”
“Talk to me about that extra safe,” I said. “Why’d Andy have the extra one hidden behind the mirror?”
Dave sighed sadly. “That’d been Andy’s idea, and the crazy thing is that in the beginning, I’d tried to talk him out of it. I’d told him the best place to put any wall safe was inside the panic room, but he said he had a gut feeling about the extra one hidden behind the mirror. I guess knowing you made me stop trying to talk him out of it. You’ve taught me to trust any gut feelings, so I built him his hidden wall safe behind the mirror. It was never on any of the blueprints for the panic room; it’s something I did for him as a spec order on the side. It took me a weekend, and I only charged him for materials and a little bit of the labor. He was a really nice guy and tipped me a grand for the job anyway.”
“Do you want to know what you were protecting?” I asked him.
“Besides my own hide?”
I offered him a gentle smile. He knew he’d been protecting something vitally important. Something Andy was willing to die for. I was fairly certain Dave had considered that first, and his own hide second, in withholding the location of the hidden safe. “You were protecting an electronic key. One that could pick almost any cyber lock. In the wrong hands it could’ve been a catastrophe for our national security, and Eldridge wasn’t the kind of man who would’ve cared about protecting our national security if it meant he could make enough money to buy a chain of islands.”