“I hope your intuition is off, and you and the rest of the crew have a long, boring shift.”
Still, Mick could relate to the captain’s discomfort. He’d been walking around for days expecting the other shoe to drop, and now it felt like every piece of footwear in town was falling from the sky. He continued past the bays and out the door without being interrupted since it was nearly dinnertime. Once outside, he had to force himself not to run to his truck. His heart pounded as though he had.
As he drove, a dozen scenarios played out in his head. What could have happened at the school? How could they know what she’d learned about her father? And even if someone had discovered that, what did it matter? Her dad was the only one implicated in any of the documents they’d found. Were they worried that she’d found the undoctored originals?
Back at the apartment, he threw some clothes in a bag and then poured them out again and folded them so he could fit in a few days’ worth of street clothes. After putting his shaving kit on top, he glanced out the open blinds of the apartment’s back window. It was still daylight. The time she’d given him probably included a healthy cushion after sunset. He’d never hated daylight savings time more.
He spent the next ninety minutes pacing, grumbling and waiting until he could finally go to her. She’d admitted she needed his help, or at least he’d inferred from that dearth of texted characters. But would she finally trust him enough to let him do whatever was necessary to keep her and the girls safe? And, still not knowing who or how many people they were up against, could he really protect them if he tried?
Chapter 22
Mick had tried to be patient through hotel bed jumping, pizza with more mess than they could have predicted and an extra thirty minutes of kid TV before they could tuck in the girls. But as he sat at the table near the window, waiting for Rachel to do one last check to see if their fellow guests were asleep, he couldn’t keep his crossed leg from jiggling. He’d waited long enough. He had to know.
When she finally crossed the room to him, she dragged the second chair over until they were close enough to whisper. Close enough that he could have touched her, too, but she was still so keyed up that he didn’t dare.
“What happened?” he whispered as soon as she’d lowered into the chair.
“I thought he’d taken the girls,” she said in a low voice.
“What?He?” Mick pounded her with questions before he could stop himself and shot a look at the two sweet lumps in the bed, just to make sure they were still there. When he turned back, Rachel was watching him, her hands gripped in front of her.
“Please. Tell me.”
Using detached, clinical words, she gave him an overview about the incident at the school, skipping over the terror she must have felt in those endless moments before learning that the girls were safe. He broke out in a cold sweat. His chest ached with his inability to shield them from any of this. Like the victims back in Chicago, he’d failed them.
“It was just a game to them,” she said. “They used my daughters as a way to show how easy it would be to hurt me. They know my weakness.”
With her arms crossed, she brushed her hands over her sweater from shoulders to elbows again and again. He shivered as well, though the room was toasty warm.
“Could they have actually abducted the twins?”
“I don’t think they could have pulled that off. At least not there.” Rachel shook her head, her expression pinched. “The school’s safety protocols probably would have held. Even if the guy could pretend to be Riley on the phone, what would he do when he had to show his face and driver’s license to the camera to be buzzed inside? After that, he still would have to go to the front office to sign out the girls, who would have said they didn’t know him.”
“Someone in the office might have recognized that he wasn’t your brother, too,” he said, nodding. “But what about if he—”
Mick stopped himself from saying that the guy could have shot his way into the building, but her brows lifted as though the same thought had crossed her mind. After a few seconds, she shook her head again.
“I don’t think he—or they—would do anything so…public. Most of everything they’ve done, at least to us, has been threatening but not obvious to everyone else. Until today. Even then, the principal jumped to the conclusion that it probably involved their father.”
“Could it be…?”
She lifted her chin. “Absolutely not. You have to give a damn in order to go to that kind of effort. Tyler never cared about anything but himself.”
“Makes sense.” But it didn’t lessen his suspicion of her old boyfriend. They couldn’t rule anyone out yet, and the pool of possible suspects had become an ocean.
“They wanted to get under my skin. And they did. They even sent me one of their little quotes to make sure I got the message.”
“Where? To your email address? Not Riley’s?”
“To my phone.”
She pulled her cell from her purse, opened her texts and let him read it. His shoulders jerked as the words stared back at him on the screen, the most damning of all the messages. It couldn’t have been clearer that they were talking about the reason her father took his own life. Mick read it again, managing not to shiver visibly, but he was glad he wasn’t standing since there was no way his legs would have held him.
“Webster said that ‘suicide is confession.’ So, this is what you meant when you texted that they knew that you knew.”
“Maybe I should have written ‘what I had discovered’.” She tilted her head as though considering and then continued. “All those warnings, all the quotes like today’s and even the cars though I still don’t know how they’re connected were about convincing Riley and me not to poke our noses into the past. But if they were too late, they wanted to scare us into silence.
“We can’t let them succeed.” She shook her head hard.
