Sandra Brown - Lethal

Searching the rooms this thoroughly would have taken a while. Hours, Stan estimated. A near impossible task for one man working alone.

Honor .

The thought caused Stan’s heart to painfully constrict. Had his daughter-in-law actually participated? Stan tried denying that such was possible. As Eddie’s widow, shouldn’t she, more than anyone, want to preserve his good name, if not for her own sake, then for Emily’s? But the evidence before him indicated that she had assisted the man bent on tarnishing Eddie’s reputation.

Stan felt her betrayal keenly. Before she made a fatal mistake, he had to reach her, talk sense into her.

Toward that end, he’d been beating the bushes all day. He’d come close to making an ass of himself at the FBI office, railing at Tom VanAllen, in whom he had even less confidence than in Deputy Crawford or the agencies the two of them represented. If he wanted Honor and Emily found and brought home, it was up to him.

He’d gone to every place he could think of where she might be. He’d called on some of Honor’s faculty members, other friends and acquaintances, but had met with no success. Even the priest of the church where she worshiped insisted that he hadn’t heard from her, but he was praying for her and Emily’s safe return. Stan had put the verbal thumbscrews on everyone he’d talked to, and he believed he would have known if he was being lied to.

Doral, who had a man watching Tori Shirah’s house, informed him that she hadn’t left it all day except to retrieve her newspaper just after dawn. Her car was still in the driveway.

Stan’s gut instinct said otherwise. He remembered a place out in the countryside that Eddie had once shown him, a place that Honor mistakenly believed was her secret. Eddie had confided to Stan, with a goodly amount of chagrin, that he’d followed Honor from home one night when, following a brief telephone call, she’d abruptly left the house with a flimsy and transparently false explanation.

But her mysterious errand had amounted to nothing more than a meeting with Tori. Eddie had laughed it off, saying their clandestine meeting was probably a holdover from their high school days.

It was just possible that the tradition continued.

When Stan had talked to Tori the day before, she had seemed genuinely shaken and worried about Honor’s so-called kidnapping. He wondered if she’d been playing him. Or if, since then, Honor had sent her a distress signal that she had deliberately withheld from him and the authorities.

So, acting on that hunch, he’d driven out to the remote spot. In the years since Eddie had shown him the place, the old wooden bridge had become more rickety. The live oak tree seemed to have spread even wider, its roots become even more gnarled.

Immediately Stan had noticed tire tracks that looked as if they’d been recently made. But they didn’t particularly excite him. Honor and her friend couldn’t be the only two people to have discovered this picturesque spot. It would be a perfect out of the way place for teenagers looking to park and make out, or smoke pot, or drink purloined booze. Movie companies were constantly scouting out the area looking for scenic spots for location filming.

He was about to leave and resume his search elsewhere when he noticed some characters that had been drawn in the mud. He was looking at them upside down, but when he squatted down to take a closer look right side up, his breath escaped his body in a slow hiss.

Etched in the mud, the letters were irregularly sized and shaped, but readable:

EmiLy.

On the way back to town, he’d called Doral. “Your man needs his ass kicked. Tori Shirah isn’t inside her house. She’s with Honor and Emily.”

They had agreed to meet at Stan’s house to discuss how they would go about tracking down the Shirah woman, believing that if they applied themselves to it, they could get Honor’s whereabouts from her.

Now, hearing a car door close, Stan retraced his steps through his house and into the garage. Doral was standing there, hands on hips, his eyes on the punctured football.

He turned around as Stan approached. “That son of a bitch.”

“That’s the least of it. The inside of my house looks like Honor’s.”

Doral expelled a long breath that carried with it several choice words. “Any sign that Honor and Emily were here, too?”

Stan said a terse no, and just that. He wasn’t going to share with anyone his misgivings about Honor’s loyalty. “But I know where they were at some point recently, and Tori Shirah was probably with them.”

Doral’s cell phone rang. He held up a finger to tell Stan to hold the thought while he took the call. He listened, then said, “Soon as you know.”

When he clicked off, he grinned. “We may not need Tori. That was my guy at the FBI office. Coburn is sending Honor in.”

“When? How?”

“My guy’s standing by for details.”

Hamilton had been very specific about timing. “If you’re already there when Coburn arrives, he’ll be suspicious. If you come late, he’ll probably scotch the plan altogether, and you’ll never even see him or Mrs. Gillette. So get there with only a couple minutes to spare.”

Tom VanAllen had arrived at the designated place at exactly two minutes before ten o’clock. He’d turned off the motor of his car, and after the popping of the cooling engine had stopped, the silence was complete except for the sound of his own breathing and the intermittent screech of a cricket.

He wasn’t cut out for this cloak-and-dagger stuff. He knew it. Hamilton knew it. But Coburn had set the terms, and they’d been given no other choice except to agree.

The rusting train was to Tom’s right, a darker bulk against the surrounding darkness. It crossed his mind that Coburn might be hiding somewhere on the train, watching and waiting, assuring himself that his conditions had been met before producing Mrs. Gillette.

Praying to God he wouldn’t screw up, Tom slid back his cuff and checked the lighted hands on his wristwatch. Only thirty seconds had elapsed since his arrival. He wondered if his heart could withstand the pounding for an additional minute and a half.

He watched the second hand tick off another few seconds, marking more time since he’d called home.

He made an involuntary sound of utter despair when his mind tracked back to the scene that had played out this afternoon when he’d caught his wife on her cell phone. Caught her in the act, so to speak.

He lunged and snatched the phone from her hand .

“Tom?” she cried in shock .

Then angrily, “Tom!”

And finally, “Tom,” on a soft, plaintive, remorseful groan as he read what was on the screen .

Some of the words were so blatantly sexual, they seemed to jump out and strike him. But he couldn’t associate them with Janice. His wife. With whom he hadn’t had marital sex in… He couldn’t even remember when the last time had been .

But whenever it was, the words he was reading off her cell phone screen hadn’t been part of their foreplay or whispered in the heat of passion. In fact, before today he would have bet a month’s wages that language like this had never crossed her lips, that she would abhor it. Beyond bawdy, it was the dirtiest vernacular of the English language .

He scrolled up to the last text that someone-who?-had sent her. It was a salacious invitation, outlining in explicit detail what the sender would like to do with her. The reply she’d been so busily composing was an equally graphic acceptance .

“Tom-”