She fired a snarky smile at Vick. “Oh, yeah, I should’ve mentioned we found his body.”
Vick’s face paled in the dim light, as white as the marble rock behind him. He cast his gaze around, as if wondering if he could run and get away from them. He shoved a hand in his pocket and pulled it out before they could react.
His fingers cupped a grenade. He jerked out the pin with his left hand.
What in the world?
He sneered at them and waved the grenade like a man who’d lost his mind. “You don’t want me to let go of the handle in a cave holding that lovely group of visitors.”
No.This couldn’t be happening.
She swallowed and let the grenade register in her brain. She glanced at Finn.
He was assessing their options, and his tight jaw said he didn’t like them.
She looked at Vick again. “You can use the grenade to force your way out of here, but we have a deputy waiting for you outside.” Ryleigh could only hope the local deputy had arrived by now.
“I’m not going to prison,” Vick said, his voice high and tight. “I didn’t mean to kill Gates, and I won’t go to prison for something that’s all that stupid Tobias Hogan’s fault.”
He confessed. He really confessed. Unbelievable.
And he was talking. That was good. They were in a hostage situation now, and one of the first skills in hostage negotiations was to get the hostage taker talking and keep them talking. If he incriminated himself even more along the way, all the better.
“I’ve had some problems with Tobias too.” She fibbed to gain his trust. “What did he do that has you so upset?”
“Upset?” Vick’s voice rose. “He killed my dad. You don’t just get upset with that. You get mad.” He waved the grenade. ”You get even.”
“Well, of course you do,” she said, trying to keep her voice stable, which was nearly impossible with a crazed man waving a grenade in her face when the walls of the cave seemed to be closing in all around them. She worked hard to look empathetic too. “How did he kill your dad?”
“Prostate cancer.”
Finn stared at the guy. “You know that Tobias didn’t give your dad prostate cancer.”
“He did too.” Vick raised his chin. “Recent studies prove it.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to explain that to me.” Ryleigh understood, but she wanted to get his confession. “Because I really want to understand your situation so we can work out a solution.”
He gave a firm nod.
Good. He was buying into her concern. “It’s no secret that men who work as loggers have a higher rate of prostate cancer.”
It’d been a secret to her until she’d read that article in his office, but she wouldn’t interrupt him to tell him that.
“Even if that’s true,” Finn said, taking on the role of bad cop in this questioning, which allowed her to keep working on gaining the grenade-wielder’s trust. “Your dad chose to work for Tobias.”
“True. Yeah. Sure. But the old guy could’ve upgraded his equipment sooner so Dad wouldn’t have had to manually fell trees so often.” He relaxed his arms, a good sign that talking might be helping. “If he’d bought a motorized logger to fell a lot of the trees, Dad would’ve only had to do the difficult ones that the machine couldn’t reach.”
“I heard Tobias say a good quality machine, even a used one, could cost more than a hundred grand,” Finn said. “He would’ve had to lay off a lot of the loggers to afford that. Plus, the machine would put men out of work, and then your dad might not have had a job at all.”
“But he would still be alive.” Vick glared at Finn.
“Maybe,” Ryleigh said. “You can’t know that for sure.”
“What about your dad?” Finn asked. “Did he blame Tobias?”
“Nah. He said Tobias was a great guy and boss, and Dad’s cancer was just the luck of the draw.” Vick shook his head. “He was brainwashed by the old guy, but I didn’t fall for it. The old dude could’ve acknowledged it was a possibility when I went to see him, but he didn’t care.”
Similar to Tobias’s account, but she suspected the mill owner had been far more sympathetic than Vick was letting on. “Why wait until now to do something?”
