“Damn it, Sheridan! When this is over I’m going to haul your ass in for interfering with police operations, violating a goddamned lawful order, and pissing me off!”
“I don’t think the latter is a crime, but as long as Kara is alive and safe you can do whatever the hell you want with me afterward. Who has jurisdiction out here?”
“The Adams County Sheriff’s Department, and, yes, they’ve already dispatched several units, including the S.W.A.T. team. They’ll get there before you do.”
Ahead in the distance loomed white industrial silos as tall as skyscrapers.
“I wouldn’t bet on that.”
KARA SAT on the floor of the van, her hands bound and her mouth covered with duct tape, her hope waning. She could see the security checkpoint through the windshield and knew they had arrived at Northrup. It seemed a lifetime ago that she and Holly had tricked their way through this same gate.
Juan de la Peña’s fingers bit into her shoulder. In his other hand, he held a gun. He leaned down and whispered, “Are you afraid of what’s going to happen in the next ten minutes?”
And in that instant, she recognized his voice. He was the one. He’d called her late at night, tried to frighten her, just as he was trying to frighten her now. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, no matter how badly her stomach pitched and rolled. She glared at him.
He gave her a shove and muttered something in Spanish.
God, she was an idiot. There was nothing to stop Stanfield from killing Reece the moment his men had her. Her life was the only bargaining chip she’d had with Stanfield, and she’d already given it away. What would he have done if she’d hung up on him and called the police? Would he have killed Reece outright, knowing that she had all the information the police would need to convict him of murder one? Or would he have released Reece, hopped on his Cessna, and flown for the border?
She would never know. She’d been so terrified that Reece would die because of her that she’d given away the game. But that wasn’t her only regret.
Why hadn’t she called Florida this morning to talk with Connor? The thought of him—the innocence in his big, brown eyes; the smell of baby shampoo in his silky hair; the sound of his laughter—made her heart ache until she thought her chest would split. He was only four. Would he remember her? Would he remember how she’d drawn pictures for him with shaving cream, made him spaghetti, and read to him for hours? Would he remember how much she loved him?
A lump formed in her throat, and tears pricked behind her eyes.
And her mother. She’d take good care of Connor, even if she did get his chakras realigned. But Kara’s death would crush her. Reece had been right. Her mother might be a bit eccentric, but Kara knew her mother loved her. She hoped someone would be there for her.
And Reece. Oh, God, Reece! If she got even one moment in the same room with him, she was going to tell him she loved him. She didn’t care who was watching or listening. She wanted him to know. She wanted at least to give him that much. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter to him now, but she would tell him just the same.
God, let him still be alive!
She’d never given much thought to what it meant to die, had never spent much time wondering if anything came after this life . . . And, damn it, she wasn’t going to waste precious time doing that now! Here she was still alive and breathing, and she had all but resigned herself to being Stanfield’s next murder victim.
Pull yourself together, McMillan!
She would feel her way through the next few minutes, try to find out where Reece was, and make certain he was safe. And then she would do everything she could to keep them both alive. And if she died, at least she would have justice. Every document in the van had been copied, and Tom and Tessa knew enough to wrap this story in the next twenty-four hours if need be.
And then there was the whistleblower.
Stanfield couldn’t kill them all.
The van pulled inside what seemed to be an empty warehouse and lurched to halt. The doors were jerked open, and rough hands forced her across the floor of the van and outside onto her feet. She expected Juan to put his gun to her head and pull the trigger at any moment, fought back a wave of terror.
Instead, he pulled out a cell phone. “We’re here.” He nodded a few times, then hung up and turned to the other men. “The boss wants you to take this stuff to the kiln and throw it all in. I’m taking her to see him. We’ll see you there in about five minutes.”
Juan took her arm and pulled her roughly across the warehouse toward a door. The door led to a tiled hallway lit with fluorescent lights that led them past what looked like laboratories or testing facilities of some kind. At the end of the corridor was what seemed to be ordinary office space. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Friday. Maybe someone there would see her, realize she was being held prisoner, and call the police.
“Forget it, bitch.” Juan seemed to read her mind. “We’ve pulled most of the staff into a safety meeting. This plant is almost totally automated anyway, and everyone who’s not in the meeting is loyal to Stanfield. No one is going to help you.”
He shoved her through an open door on her right into what seemed to be a conference room with a long table and several chairs.
She recognized the man immediately. She’d seen him once before—in Owens’s office at the health department dressed impeccably in his expensive suit, each silver hair on his head perfectly in place. He hadn’t said a word then, but had stared at her through the coldest eyes she’d ever seen.
“If those are public documents you’ve got, you’re not leaving until they’ve been catalogued and photocopied,” she’d said to him then, as he’d tried to leave with several folders in his hand.
The look on his face had been pure loathing, just as it was now.
Behind him stood Galen, wearing a three-thousand-dollar suit and looking uncomfortable. The stab of betrayal she felt any time she thought of him lanced through her with renewed pain. It was one thing to leave her pregnant and alone. But how could he participate in this? She forced herself to ignore him and focused her gaze on Stanfield.
“I see from your expression that you recognize me, Ms. McMillan. But the circumstances are a bit different this time, aren’t they?” Stanfield motioned to Juan, who forced her to sit in a chair and ripped the duct tape off her mouth.
It stung, made her eyes water. She gave herself a moment to steady her breathing, then looked straight into Stanfield’s arctic eyes. “Where’s Reece?”
He sat and adjusted his tailored trousers. “You’ve been pursuing me for a solid month, and that’s the first thing you ask me? I’m disappointed. I expected something more challenging from a journalist of your reputation.”
“It’s the only question that matters to me right now.”
“Too bad. You’re going to have to wait for the answer.” Then a slow smile spread across Stanfield’s face. “But not for long.”
Galen stepped forward, stammered. “I-I had nothing to do with this, Kara. I had no idea—”
Four years of anger and hurt exploded. “Shut the hell up, Galen! It’s a little late for you to be developing a conscience, isn’t it?”
“I’d forgotten that you two know each other.” Then Stanfield turned to Galen, the velvet of his voice not entirely concealing the threat held within his words. “I didn’t invite you here this afternoon. You came on your own. You are bound both ethically and legally to maintain your client’s secrets. Let me know the moment that starts to become a problem for you.”
Galen blanched and took a step backward. “You know I would never betray a client.”
But Stanfield had already dismissed him and turned back to face Kara. “I have a few questions for you—questions you need to answer if you want to see your sanctimonious senator alive again. Where is Henry Marsh?”
The question took her by surprise, though it shouldn’t have. Stanfield wouldn’t be able to put this behind him until everyone involved had been silenced. “Who’s Henry Ma
rsh?”
She wasn’t prepared for the blow, a sharp jab to her battered ribs that forced the breath from her lungs. Dizzy with pain, she might have sunk onto the floor had her hair not been held fast in Juan’s closed fist.
Juan’s voice was a hiss in her ear. “Were those the ribs Johnny-boy broke? Sorry. I won’t hit you there again. I’ll make my own mark somewhere else.”
She saw Galen take a step in her direction, then stop himself. Coward.
“Answer the question, Ms. McMillan, and we can avoid any further unpleasantness.”
She pretended to fight for breath and whimpered at the pain—not entirely an act. She needed to stall, to hold on to the information for as long as she could. One thing was absolutely clear to her: the moment Stanfield had everything he wanted from her, she was dead.
“Mr. Marsh left Colorado weeks ago.” She labored over her breathing. “He didn’t give me his new address. I didn’t want to know it.”
Behind her, Juan moved, but Stanfield motioned for him to wait. “How did you get in touch with him?”
“I called his cell.”
“Give me that number.”
“I don’t have it memorized,” she lied. “It’s programmed into my cell phone.”
Stanfield looked irritated now. “Then give me your cell phone.”
“You’ll have to get it from the Denver Police Department. That’s where it is.”
The next blow landed on her cheek. It startled her, but it didn’t hurt as much.
“Why would they take your cell phone?”
“Because Chief Irving didn’t trust me not to use it while I was in hiding. They were afraid it might be tapped.”
Stanfield laughed. “It takes a lot of money to buy that kind of technology, Ms. McMillan. You’re hardly worth that.”
“This is all about money, isn’t it?”
He looked at her as if she were crazy. “Everything is about money, because money is power. Do you know what money buys?”
“Besides convicts and corrupt politicians, you mean?”
He gave her a cold smile. “Money buys everything, Ms. McMillan. Everything and everyone. It cost me a measly ten grand to hire someone to take your life. True, the money was wasted in the end.”
“How much did you pay to have Alexis Ryan murdered?”
“Juan handled that for free—makeup work for a sloppy job done by a friend.” Stanfield’s gaze moved to the man behind her and then back. “It cost me less than that to find out where the cops had hidden you. Hackers come cheap these days. And of course, once we knew your boyfriend had gotten past security—one of my men saw him enter and not come back out until morning—we knew we could, too. It was just a matter of figuring out how.”
Kara grasped for questions, tried to keep him talking. “Why go to all this trouble?”
“Your investigation would have dragged my name through the mud and cost this company millions. In fact, your interference already has cost us millions. We were going to cut seven million from expenses by burning tires, and now we’re going to have to wait until next year.”
“Pardon me if I don’t give a damn.”
“Of course. But I have two more questions for you. Who else knows about this investigation, and what kind of files do you have on your computer at the newspaper?”
Kara’s mind darted for a way not to answer the first part of his question. Anyone she named would become a target. “The computer in the van is my computer from the newspaper. As for the rest of your question, I’ll answer it when I know that Reece is alive and safe.”
Please, let him be alive!
“You want to see the senator? Fine.” Stanfield stood. “Juan, let’s take Ms. McMillan to the senator. Come along, Prentice.”
Galen looked like he’d rather do anything than go with them, but fell silently in behind Stanfield.
Juan laughed, jerked her up out of the chair, and forced her out of the conference room and back down the hallway. “Stupid bitch.”
She glanced up at him. “You know, Juan, I read through your criminal record. You turned out to be a real loser, didn’t you?”
That earned her another jab to the ribs, but it was worth it.
This time they took a different exit that led them down stairs and through a poorly lit corridor that seemed to go on forever. Cement kiln dust lay thick on the floor. As they walked, a roar like the grinding of heavy machinery grew louder until it almost hurt Kara’s ears.
They exited through another door and climbed two flights of stairs that led them outside into the late afternoon sunshine, where the noise was a deep rumble beneath their feet. Before them, a tower of crossing steel beams and cyclone-shaped bins rose several stories high. From its center stretched a long rotating cylinder that must have been several hundred feet in length and almost wide enough to drive a small car through. At the base of the tower was a structure made of heavy steel. Two men stood near it dressed in yellow, hooded suits, their faces covered by shields. Fire suits.
Kara looked around, hoping and praying to see Reece, but he wasn’t there. Dread crept down her spine, beneath her skin, into her heart.
Please be alive!
“This is the preheater tower.” Stanfield pointed. “Everything that enters the kiln passes through here first and is heated to almost two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. This door is our only access, apart from the pipes that pump in raw, ground rock, but they’re too small to pass a human body.”
A human body.
It took a moment for her to understand what he was trying to tell her, for the horrid truth to sink in. Blood rushed from her head, made her knees weak. Her heart thrashed painfully inside her chest. She shook her head, her breath coming in shuddering gasps. “No! No! You didn’t!”
A sneer spread across Stanfield’s face that said, indeed, he had.
Behind her, Juan laughed.
Reece was inside the kiln.
He was dead.
He’d been incinerated.
And she was about to join him.
CHAPTER 29
* * *
HOT TEARS sprang to Kara’s eyes and ran unnoticed down her cheeks, as she stared at the closed kiln door. A thousand thoughts ran through her mind in the span of a second. Had he suffered? Had he felt alone and afraid at the end? Did he know how much he meant to her?
Oh, God, Reece!
She met Stanfield’s frosty gaze, her voice unsteady. “You son of a bitch! You think killing people makes you powerful? How pathetic and afraid you must be on the inside!”
Stanfield’s smile became rigid. He motioned the two men in the fire suits toward the steel door and then took several steps backward. “We’ll see who’s afraid.”
Juan jerked her back and put distance between them and the door. The men worked together to move the heavy bolts and slowly pulled the steel door open.
The blast of heat took her breath away. The white-orange blaze was painfully bright even in the daylight, and the roar was like that of a freight train. Red, glowing bricks lined the interior, even the door. She turned her face away and shut her eyes against the glare. “Killing me constitutes a major violation of the First Amendment!”
“To quote you, ‘Pardon me if I don’t give a damn.’ Your computer and files have already gone into the fire,” Stanfield shouted over the blaze. “You’re next. Oh, don’t worry. It won’t hurt—at least not for long. I doubt you’ll even have time to scream.”
Her mouth went dry. Her legs began to tremble, her heart to flail in her breast. She didn’t want to die. Not now. Not here. Not like this. “Y-you won’t get away with this!”
Behind Stanfield, Galen vomited down the front of his suit and onto his expensive leather shoes.
Stanfield didn’t spare him a glance. “I rather think I will. You see, Ms. McMillan, the kiln is hot enough to melt rock almost instantaneously. Imagine what it can do to flesh and bone. The water inside your body will instantly evaporate, and the compounds that make up the rest of you
will chemically bond with the melted rock. In a few moments, there will be nothing left of you, not so much as the smallest bit of DNA. Without a body, your disappearance will remain a mystery.”
He spoke as if he were discussing a science experiment, his words conjuring an unbearable image in her mind of Reece enduring what he described. Through a haze of jagged terror, she saw Reece in the flames, all that he was, all that he might have become, vanishing in a moment of unbearable agony. She squeezed her eyes shut against the image and tried to blot it from her mind.
And she realized Stanfield was right. The last call she’d made had been to Reece’s cell phone. Stanfield hadn’t been at the hotel, so there was no chance anyone would have spotted him there. The phone had been destroyed, so there was no recording. Apart from her call to Stanfield’s secretary, there was no record of contact between the two of them. Chief Irving would search, but he would find nothing strong enough to charge anyone with murder.
Over the horrified pounding of her own heart, she heard laughter. They were laughing. Everyone was laughing, except for Galen.
Then something strange happened. The fog of grief and horror lifted, and her mind cleared, raw emotion fusing into a glassy calm she’d never felt before. She knew what she had to do. She could see it in her mind, each step. It was so simple. She could do it. She could survive.
The men in the fire suits were moving toward her.
Stanfield was still talking. “They can take the heat, but you can’t. You’ll begin to burn long before they throw you in. It’s up to you whether you go in quickly or one excruciating step at a time. Tell me who else knows the details of your investigation, and I’ll make certain you don’t suffer.”
Kara began listing made-up names in a whimpering voice, allowed herself to sink, as if legless with fear, toward the ground. When Juan bent down to adjust his grip and jerk her to her feet, she exploded upward, catching him full in the face with the top of her head.
He fell to the ground, seemingly unconscious, and Kara ran.
Life seemed to go into slow motion as she fled away from the tower, away from Stanfield, back toward the main gate. If she could only get outside the gate, back to the highway, she could flag someone down and escape.