Midnight Vengeance

But John? What did John care?

  “Why do you care?” she blurted, then bit her lips. But she needed to understand. Putting herself in Jacko’s hands when he cared for her, that made sense. But John was about to be involved too. Why?

  He didn’t take offense. He just sat back in his chair, looking between her and Jacko. Jacko was staring straight ahead, but he reached over and held her hand tightly.

  “We’re all military men in this company,” John said. He had a deep, mesmerizing voice. Well spoken but with a slight hint of the South. Not as much as Jacko, but definitely there. “We had each other’s backs in the military and we have them now. A threat to Jacko and who he cares for is like a threat to my own family. I’d expect him to defend Suzanne and Isabel with his life, and he would. It’s mutual. We’re all in this together. And—” He shrugged broad shoulders. “Suzanne loves you. That goes a long way with me.”

  Something deep inside, something that had been frozen for a long time, suddenly thawed in a hot rush of emotion. She’d been alone for so very long. Jorge’s pursuit had cut her off from everyone, leaving her in a cold bubble of fear and dread. Day after day of loneliness, keeping her head down, trying not to be noticed. Not answering the smile of the girl who poured her coffee, not responding to the nice guy who pumped the gas and who wished her a good day. Because any kind of human contact painted a huge bull’s-eye on her and anyone who’d been nice to her.

  Like Cheryl. Like Carla.

  She clutched Jacko’s hand, warm and hard, with a trembling hand. “Oh God. I—I’m having trouble coming to terms with this.” Not being frightened all the time. Not being so relentlessly alone.

  She held her other trembling hand to her mouth to keep in the sobs. But the hydraulic principle of emotion made tears well in her eyes.

  John’s eyes widened, almost in fear. She could see the whites all around his gunmetal eyes. Jacko simply held her hand tightly. Both men turned at the sound of the door opening.

  “Senior,” John said, relief in his voice. “Come in. We have a situation. Lauren’s in trouble.”

  Douglas Kowalski moved quietly and quickly across the room, grabbed a chair and sat down beside John. He looked carefully at Jacko holding her hand and then at her. Unlike John, Douglas didn’t have an avuncular CEO look as a default setting. His setting was tough warrior, always. It ratcheted up even more when he saw her.

  “Sitrep,” he said.

  John nodded at Jacko, who sat even more stiffly in his chair, as if coming to attention sitting down. Jacko turned to Douglas. “Lauren has someone after her,” he said. “A bad guy. Killed two people trying to get to her.”

  “Whoa.” John held up a big hand, palm out. “This is new. We need to talk to the cops. Senior—”

  But Douglas was already tapping on his cell. “Bud,” he said. “Got a minute?” The answer must have been yes because a second later the image of Detective Tyler Morrison, known universally as Bud, Claire’s husband, showed up on a monitor. Douglas angled it so everyone could see. Bud was in his office, Spartan and efficient.

  “‘Sup?” he asked genially. “John, you gonna bribe me with some more Trailblazers tickets?” He leaned forward a little. “Hey, Jacko. Hi Lauren.”

  “Yeah,” John answered, “but first we’ve got a problem. Jacko here’s been telling me Lauren has a bad guy after her. Killed two people to try to get to her.”

  Like with John, the geniality left Bud’s face immediately, his features sharpened, and he looked every inch a cop. Lauren remembered that he was ex-military, too. Not a SEAL, but a Marine. She’d heard the guys joke about the wusses in other parts of the military but never the Marines.

  “Lauren,” he said, curling his fingers up. “Talk.”

  “Yes...” Lauren swallowed the instinctive “sir.”

  She looked at the four men, three in the room, one on a screen, listening to her intently. Jacko looked impassive, as always, though she knew he was paying close attention. She held on to Jacko’s hand tightly.

  “My name isn’t Lauren Dare. I’ve only had that name for the past year.” No going into close detail on that. Felicity deserved her anonymity. “Basically, I inherited what I believe to be a criminal empire two years ago. My mother married a man called Alfonso Guttierez, who runs—ran—all sorts of nasty things from a hotel-and-casino empire. Guns, drugs, prostitutes, you name it. Alfonso and my mother died in a car crash. My mother died an hour after my stepfather. She was his universal heir and I was my mother’s, so the whole thing came to me. My stepfather, who was childless, had imported a nephew of his from Colombia but he turned out to be a fuck-up.” Lauren looked around. “Can I say that? It’s what my stepfather—who might have been a crime boss but never used profanity around women except when talking about his nephew—called him.”

  “What’s the name of the fuck-up? And where was this?” Bud asked. He was tapping on the keyboard of a monitor to the side.

  “Jorge Guttierez, Palm Beach, Florida,” Lauren answered and suddenly had an image of the next-to-the-last time she’d seen him, at the funeral, clearly drugged up and smelling of sweat and alcohol. The last time she’d seen him, he was trying to kill her. “At least Alfonso could control himself but Jorge...Jorge is in thrall to the products he sells.”

  “Yeah. Got him. Nasty fucker.” Bud turned another screen to them. “Rap sheet as long as my di—er, arm.” A flush of color appeared on his cheeks.

  The three men in the room leaned forward to read off Bud’s monitor. Lauren didn’t bother. She knew what they were seeing.

  If Bud’s dick was as long as Jorge’s rap sheet, Claire must be one happy woman. Actually she did look always happy. Despite his roughness, Bud seemed to be a really good husband.

  A long list of arrests showed up, with Jorge’s booking photos. He looked more and more disheveled as the photos scrolled down. His hair grew longer, beard going from chic stubble to unshaven mess.

  “The arrests never stuck, though.” Bud sounded angry. “What the—”

  “Alfonso had set up a very good team of lawyers. ‘The most expensive in Florida,’ I heard him say once to my mother. Jorge was never officially charged with anything—he always got off.”

  “The serious stuff started two years ago,” Bud said, eyes scanning what was on his monitor.

  “Right after his uncle’s death. He was scared of Alfonso, kept himself in check. But after Alfonso died there was no one to rein him in. I think he went a little nuts when he realized he hadn’t inherited anything. That I’d inherited everything.”

  “A lot nuts.” Jacko sat back after having carefully studied Jorge’s dealings with the law. His lips were pressed tight. “Used to easy money, little work, thinking to inherit an empire. Certain kinda guy—yeah, it’d push him over the edge.”

  “So, Lauren—do I call you Lauren?” Bud asked.

  “Yes. I like the name. It was my grandmother’s.”

  All four men scowled. At her. She scowled back. “What?”

  “Not good, honey,” Douglas answered. “If you’re going underground, you should choose names that have nothing to do with you.”

  Yes, that was exactly what Felicity had said. She’d taken two seconds to find out that Lauren was her paternal grandmother’s name.

  Lauren sighed. “Yes. You are absolutely right. But—I’d had everything taken from me. My past, my present, my future. My job—I was a museum administrator, and a good one. Everything was taken. And my first fake name, I never remembered it. People would call my name and I wouldn’t answer. I loved my grandmother. I guess it was a way to hold on to something of my past.”

  Silence.

  Maybe they understood.

  “So who are the dead bodies?” Bud asked.

  Lauren shivered. Two women dead—because of her. Jacko brought her hand to his mouth, kissed the back. His touch steadied her, gave her warmth.

  “The first is a friend of mine from Palm Beach, Cheryl Goddard.” Sweet, funny, too-rich-for-her-own-good Ch
eryl, whose parents had given her money instead of love. Cheryl, who’d never had loving grandparents like Lauren had. “I was working in Chicago when my mother’s lawyer called up with the news of my mother’s death. And that I had inherited the house and casinos and a slew of hotels.”

  Lauren pinched the bridge of her nose, looked at the three tough men before her, glanced at the monitor to one side. They were all leaning forward, faces tight with attention, including Bud.

  “At the time, I didn’t realize exactly what it was I inherited. I knew Alfonso was bad news but I didn’t realize exactly how bad. My mother’s marriage to him had created a rift between us. We rarely saw each other and I’d never seen the house, which my mother had just finished decorating.” She tried a smile on for John. “Suzanne would be appalled. So much money, for so little style. So I traveled down to Palm Beach for the funeral and hadn’t thought to book a hotel. After the funeral, this lawyer pressed a set of keys and some remote controls in my hand and said that I should stay in the mansion, start taking stock because I was the new owner. He’d send someone for me the next day. I was in a daze. I don’t remember much. It was hot. All the colors seemed so outrageously bright. My head hurt.”

  Her heart, too, as she realized she’d never be able to reconcile with her mother. It was too late.

  “Jorge was there. I barely noticed him. He was tall, good-looking in a sleazy kind of way. Dressed in black Armani. When he gave me the keys to the mansion, the lawyer whispered that I should watch out for Jorge.”

  “Jorge had nothing to do with it,” Bud said. “If the estate had been deeded to you, he couldn’t do anything at all. And even if you died, if you hadn’t made out a will deeding everything to him, he got zilch.”

  “I know that and you know that but Jorge isn’t too smart and not entirely sane.” Lauren tried a shaky smile. For a second, she was back in the suffocating heat of Palm Beach, the smell of a billion flowers overwhelming, almost nauseating, the memorial facility filled to the brim with overdressed darkly tanned people she’d never met. Complete strangers, men and women drenched in perfume and cologne, embracing her. Murmuring platitudes while eyeing each other. Bling that nearly blinded her. Trying to come to terms with the fact that her mother—her vain and cold mother—was gone. Her entire family, gone. Father, grandparents dead. And now her mother. And she couldn’t even begin to grasp what she was feeling. On top of it all, it turned out that she was rich, unbelievably rich, the money coming from the bowels of hell.

  “My friend Cheryl attended the funeral with me and refused to let me sleep alone in the mansion. The place was huge, garish. We found two guest bedrooms that were larger than my apartment in Chicago, I took one, she took the other. I—I couldn’t sleep. Around two in the morning I gave up trying and slipped outside to take a walk in the gardens. I saw two men dressed in black walking toward a third man. Jorge. Something told me to stay quiet.”

  She could never forget. The two men dressed for stealth. Jorge still in his black Armani. A full moon that showed his expression of vile malevolence. He was swaying as if in a full wind, stoned out of his mind.

  Lauren tightened her hand around Jacko’s hand. “They—they were reporting to Jorge that they’d ‘found the bitch and taken care of her.’ Those words exactly. He asked if they’d made it look like an accident and they said yes. He took two packets from inside his jacket. Payment. They took off. I went back in and found—”

  Her teeth began to chatter. Jacko put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against his chest. She felt his words more than heard them.

  “That’s enough for now,” he said. “She needs some rest. We can go over this some other time.”

  “No, no!” Lauren pushed against his chest. She could never make him let go if he didn’t want to, but he let her go immediately. She straightened, wiped her eyes. It was the first time she’d told the story to anyone. Even Felicity knew only part of it. She had to get it out now, get the grief and the guilt off her chest. She leaned her forehead briefly against Jacko’s broad shoulder then lifted her head. “I have to do this,” she whispered, meeting his eyes.

  He nodded.

  Lauren looked at John, at Douglas, glanced over to the monitor at Bud, then finally at Jacko. He was, as usual, impassive. No. On closer look, he wasn’t impassive. He was totally focused on her, and she could almost feel his attention on her skin.

  And she remembered—these men were warriors. They had faced death and dismemberment every day for their country. Most of the incredibly brave things they had done had been classified so no one even knew. She couldn’t be a coward in front of them—she simply couldn’t.

  “I found Cheryl at the foot of the stairs. Her neck was broken. They’d thrown her down the stairs, but I couldn’t prove anything. I ran upstairs, packed a quick bag and got out of there. My mother had a dozen cars. I took one of hers because when Jorge realized he had the wrong woman he’d come after me again. I thought it might take him a day or two to figure out I took one of my mother’s cars.”

  “Cheryl Goddard?” Bud asked over the computer.

  “Yes.”

  “Spell the name.” She did. He held up a big hand for silence, then started typing furiously. They were all quiet while he checked screens. He nodded abruptly. “Okay. They found it an accidental death.” He looked up. “No one reported you missing.”

  Lauren swallowed. No. There wouldn’t be anyone to report her missing. There wouldn’t be anyone who really cared. The people who cared enough for her to take action were all in this room. And in a virtual chat room.

  She shook her head. “Jorge certainly wouldn’t report me missing once he realized he’d had the wrong woman killed. And I think Jorge must have bought someone off. I am absolutely certain he has plenty of cash even if he can’t access his uncle’s accounts. Or maybe not so much now but he would have had access to plenty of money then.”

  “I’ll check into it carefully,” Bud said, and she knew he would.

  “You said two.” Jacko said quietly. He was watching her intently, listening so carefully she was sure he could repeat what she was saying verbatim. “Two dead.”

  “Yes. And the second dead person is my fault, too.” Lauren felt bitter bile in her throat as she spoke. Two people dead, because of her. “I—I was in shock. And I wasn’t thinking clearly. I called my college roommate who lived in Indiana. Carla Whitman. Asked if I could come and stay with her for a few days. It never occurred to me—” Her voice broke; her throat closed. Jacko looked as impassive as ever but his hand tightened around hers again.

  Lauren straightened. She had to own this. It was her fault entirely and she had to own it. She met the eyes of the three men in the room, checked the monitor. Bud was watching soberly. “It never occurred to me that I was endangering her. I was driving my mother’s car. I was traveling anonymously. It just—I felt like I was safe. And I wasn’t.”

  Jacko stirred. “Nothing in your background led you to believe you could be tracked.”

  True, but—”Still, I should have thought it through. But I didn’t. I was shocked, stressed and I just wanted to get away. I thought if I could hole up somewhere, I could figure things out. Regroup. Call the police. Get out a restraining order or something. Then tell them what I’d heard.”

  “And instead?” Bud asked.

  “Instead, I got Carla killed, too. We met at a café in town close to where she worked. She was worried—she heard the panic in my voice over the phone. I explained the situation to her and she was angry. Said that a friend of her father’s knew someone who could help. I started calming down. I’d driven all night and I was exhausted. She said to come home with her and she’d call in a security company she knew through work to protect me.” Lauren stopped, looked around the elegant premises, at the owners of the security business, John and Douglas. “Maybe like this one. It was just what I needed, safety. The time to think. We paid the bill and I needed to go to the bathroom. I left everything on the table, includin
g—”

  “Including your cell,” Jacko said.

  Lauren hung her head in shame.

  “Yes,” she whispered. That one careless, thoughtless act had snuffed out Carla’s life. “Yes, except my cell. They killed her instead of me. I came back out of the bathroom to see two men walk into the café, right up to her. One took out a gun, put it against her forehead and pulled the trigger. Then they walked right back out again, fast. Everyone in the café was so shocked no one tried to stop them. Carla looked a little like me.”

  “Like this?” On the monitor, Bud turned another monitor around. And there it was—Carla’s portrait photo that had been on her social media pages. Pretty, blond, lively.

  Now dead.

  Lauren nodded, chest burning with remorse.

  “She’s blond,” John noted.

  “So is Lauren,” Jacko chimed in.

  Lauren blushed, a hot rush of blood to her face and chest. Clearly Jacko had a way to know that. An intimate way. But none of the men showed signs of anything but concentration.

  “I, ah. I have changed my hair color several times.”

  Polite silence.

  “I should have gone to the police. But I had zero proof. It would have been my word against Jorge’s, and he can hire the best lawyers there are. I didn’t think of hiring a lawyer myself or, even better, bodyguards. All I could think about was getting away, as far away as possible.”

  “He would have gotten to you anyway,” Jacko stated, voice flat. “No question. Throw enough money or men at the problem of getting to you and you’d be dead. You were right to run. Except...” Jacko gave a long hard stare at John, then Douglas. “The running stops. Right here. Right now.”

  “Damn straight.” John leaned back in his chair.

  “Oh yeah,” Douglas said.

  “So now you—” John pointed a finger at Jacko. “You’re taking the week off. You’ve got a lot of accumulated leave you haven’t taken. We’re going to put together a protection roster and protocol to ensure 24/7 protection for Lauren when you come back to work.”

  “Thanks.” Jacko bowed his head slightly, then lifted it. “And Bud’s going to look into this Jorge, find out what’s happening. Get some eyes on the fu—creep.”