Sandra Brown: Lethal

She lowered her hands from her mouth. Her lips were white from the pressure her fingers had applied to them. They barely moved as she dully recited the number.

That call also went straight to voice mail. “Dammit!”

Tremulously she asked, “Coburn? Is Emily alive?”

“If they had killed her, they wouldn’t have anything to bargain with.”

He could tell she wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe it.

She hiccupped a sound. “Is he holding her hostage at the lake house?”

“Sounded like he was in his car.”

“Do you think Tori is-” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the question and ended on a whimper.

Coburn punched in 911, and when the operator answered he gave her the address of Tori’s lake house. “A woman at that address has been assaulted. Send police and an ambulance. Got it?” He made the operator repeat the address, but when she started asking questions, he disconnected.

Honor was trembling. “Will they kill my baby?”

As bad as the bald truth was, he refused to lie to her. “I don’t know.”

She made a sound of such abject despair that he put his good arm around her and pulled her hard against him, laying his cheek on the top of her head.

“We’ve got to call the police, Coburn.”

When he didn’t say anything, she raised her head and looked up at him. “We can,” he said quietly.

“But you don’t think we should.”

“She’s your kid, Honor. You’ve got to make the decision. Whatever you decide, I’ll go along. But I think if you bring the cops into it, The Bookkeeper will know in a matter of minutes.”

“And Emily will be killed.”

He nodded bleakly. “Probably. The Bookkeeper wouldn’t back down. He’d have to follow through on the threat or he’d look weak. He won’t let that happen. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I won’t bullshit you.”

She gnawed her lower lip. “The FBI office?”

“Is no better. Case in point, VanAllen.”

“So it’s up to us?”

“I’ll do whatever it takes to save her life.”

“Whatever it takes.” Both of them knew what that implied. “That’s the deal, isn’t it? You for Emily.”

“That’s the deal.” But he didn’t say it with his customary shrug. He wasn’t as indifferent to his mortality as he had been only a few days ago. Death was no longer a possible outcome he regarded with nonchalance.

“I don’t want you to die,” she said huskily.

“Maybe I won’t. I’ve got another good bargaining chip.”

He released her, sat down at the computer desk, and accessed the contents on the USB key.

“We don’t have time for this.” Honor stood at his shoulder, wringing her hands. “Where do they have Emily? Did you hear her crying?”

“No.”

She made a mournful sound. “Is that good or bad? She has to be afraid. Why wasn’t she crying? Do you think that means… What do you think that means?”

“I’m trying not to think about it.”

Her near hysteria was justified, but he tried to tune her out long enough to concentrate on what he needed to do hurriedly but without making any mistakes. He opened Gillette’s web browser, went into a web-based email service, and used his password to access his account. He sent the file on the USB key as an attachment to an email, then reversed the process by rapidly logging out and closing the browser, but not before remembering to clear the browser history, so that no one could tell, not in a timely fashion anyway, that he’d visited an email service.

The email address to which he’d sent the file was assigned to only one computer, and it could be opened with a password known to him and Hamilton exclusively. The location of the computer was also known only to the two of them.

The job done, he pulled the key from the port, stood up, and placed his hands on Honor’s shoulders. “If it wasn’t for me, you could have died of old age without ever knowing the significance of that tattoo. None of this would have happened.”

“You’re apologizing?”

“Sort of.”

“Coburn,” she said, shaking her head frantically. “I don’t care about an apology now.”

“Not for what I’ve done. For what I’m about to ask you to do. If you want Emily back alive-”

“You always use her as leverage.”

“Because it always works.”

“Tell me what to do.”

Following his conversation with Hamilton, Crawford had stepped outside the building, whose walls had ears, and used his cell phone to call police officers and sheriff’s deputies he trusted implicitly. He’d asked for their immediate assistance. It was imperative that he beef up his search for Mrs. Gillette, her daughter, and Lee Coburn.

He had a brief and secret meeting with those whom he enlisted and emphasized discretion. Some he asked to patrol areas they’d already patrolled. “Go back to the boat, Coburn’s apartment, Mrs. Gillette’s house. We might have missed something.”

He dispatched others to follow up on various leads, everything from the crazy lady on Cypress Street who called in at least once a day reporting sightings of Mussolini, Maria Callas, and Jesus-who’s to say she hadn’t mistaken Coburn for one of them?-to a rural couple who’d returned home from a two-week Mediterranean cruise to discover that during their absence a car had been stolen from their locked garage, their kitchen had been rummaged through, and the apartment above the garage had been inhabited by what appeared to be at least two people. The occupation looked recent. The towels in the bathroom were still damp.

Probably these would be dead ends, but at least he was being proactive, not reactive, and he hadn’t liked having his hand spanked by Hamilton of the big, bad FBI. He decided to interview Mrs. Gillette’s father-in-law himself.

Stan Gillette, who popped up anywhere the action was, had what seemed to be a direct line into local law enforcement. His association should have ended when his son died. It hadn’t. And that bothered Crawford. A lot. Just how much did Gillette know about Honor’s so-called abduction? What was he withholding?

He didn’t want to wait until daylight to pose these questions to Gillette. He would wake him up and go at him hard. People dragged from bed were groggy and disoriented and more likely to make mistakes, like giving up information they wouldn’t ordinarily disclose.

But when he arrived at Gillette’s house and saw that it was lit up inside like a Christmas tree, Crawford felt a tingle of apprehension. A veteran Marine might be in the habit of rising early, but this early?

Crawford got out of his car and went up the walkway. The front door was standing ajar. He pulled his service weapon from its holster. “Mr. Gillette?”

Getting no answer, he tapped on the front door with the barrel of his pistol and, when that received no response, pushed the door open and stepped into a living room that looked like a cyclone had gone through it. Drops and smears of blood showed up bright red on the beige carpeting.

In the center of the room, securely taped to a straight chair, was Stan Gillette. His head was bowed low over his chest. He appeared to be unconscious. Or dead. Moving quickly but carefully around the bloodstains, Crawford made his way toward him, calling his name.

The man let out a moan and raised his head just as Crawford reached him. “Is anyone else in the house?” the deputy whispered.

Gillette shook his head and replied hoarsely, “They left.”

“They?”

“Coburn and Honor.”

Crawford reached for his cell phone.

“What are you doing?” Gillette asked.

“Calling this in.”

“Forget it. Hang up. I won’t have my daughter-in-law arrested like a common criminal.”