"I don't know about that. Look, I wanted to be done after the last bomb went off. Nothing was going the way I thought, and I wanted it to end, but Cal said he wasn't done. I would have to keep paying him, or he'd turn me in. He had everything on me. He could send me to prison. Or he could kill me. I'm not sure which he had in mind. But he told me there would be more explosions, that everyone on my target list would eventually die or suffer terribly, but other people would, too, because this was bigger than both of us now."
"Was he talking about the summit on Tuesday?" Max asked. "Where Dominic is the headliner, where the city officials will be, and some of the other investors and builders tied to Wexler and Redstone and all the others?"
"I think so, but I'm not sure. Cal said something about not being obvious."
"When did you last communicate with Cal?" she asked. "And did he mention who else he was working with?"
"Yesterday. He requested another payment, even bigger than the last. He said the people in charge now needed cash, and the only way he could stop them from killing me was to pay up. I paid him last night, and then I got a motel room. I was afraid to go home. I drove out here a few hours ago. I had decided to leave the country, but I needed to get some photos to take with me and I couldn't go back to my house. I knew Amelia, Tori's mother, had some here."
She couldn't believe he'd halted his escape plan to get a few family photos. But clearly, David Hartford had been obsessed with his wife and his child and their tragic deaths.
"I don't like it," Max said suddenly.
Her gaze swung to his. "What do you mean?"
"He wasn't that hard to find. And it's too quiet." Max shook his head. "We need to get out of here. Get up," he ordered Hartford. "If you don't want to die, you better come with us, because we're the only ones who can protect you."
Hartford stood up, grabbing the photo and holding it close to his chest as they ran through the house to the back door. They had just cleared the house and gotten into the middle of the driveway when David stopped abruptly, his face panicked. "Wait. The letters Tori wrote to Ariel when she was a baby. They're in my briefcase. I have to get them."
"Stop," she yelled, but he was already running back to the house. "We have to get him."
Max grabbed her arm as another heart-stopping, ear-ringing blast knocked them off their feet and onto the paved drive. The pain in her ears was even worse than before. And she could barely breathe with dust and debris falling around her. When the smoke finally cleared a little, she looked for Max, terror entering her heart once more.
"Max," she yelled as she struggled to get to her feet.
She didn't see him anywhere, but he had been right beside her. He had stopped her from going after David. God, David!
She pressed her hands to her ears in a desperate attempt to stop the painful ringing and moved forward, but it was hard to see more than a foot in front of her. And then she heard him call her name.
"Kara!"
"Max," she yelled back, a wave of relief running through her as he came toward her. He looked into her eyes, then wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly against his chest. She breathed him in, feeling the safety of his embrace, but she couldn't linger there as much as she wanted to. "Are you hurt?" she asked.
"No. You?"
"I'm fine."
They turned to look at the house, which was engulfed in flames. And there, by the side door, was David. He wasn't moving.
But when she got to his side, she dropped to her knees and saw his eyes were open, flickering, his hand against his chest, his whole body shaking as a sharp, jagged piece of metal was coming out of his chest.
"Call 911," she told Max, but he was already on his phone, calling it in. "You're going to be okay, David. Help is coming."
"I just wanted someone to pay," he gasped. "Just the bad people, the ones who didn't care about the loss of life, who didn't know that my daughter was about to have her seventh birthday, and my wife thought she was pregnant."
The pain and grief in his gaze were difficult to see. "I understand," she told him, even though she didn't. Because he'd tried to kill those people and had hurt others in the process. But she needed him to calm down, to hang in there. He still had the information they needed. But his breath was coming in strangled gasps.
"Better this way," he stuttered. "Now I'll see them again."
"David, hold on," she ordered. "Where is the next explosion going to be? Tell me so I can stop it, so you can make up for what you did."
"Too late," he said, the last word barely getting off his tongue before his breath stopped and his eyes turned glassy and unseeing.
He was gone, and they still didn't have the answers they needed. Someone had made sure of that.
It was more than an hour later and a little after six o'clock when they finally drove back to the city in grim silence. After communicating what had happened to the various agencies that had shown up, including her own, Kara had driven away from the scene of yet another explosion, another blast that had rocked the world and taken a life.
"Does this make sense?" she asked Max. "Why kill Hartford in such an explosive way?"
