Carter (7 page)

The cave was lit but not much. Candles had been lighted but they were spurting out one at a time. Two did just as he entered the room and moved along the wall. He could make out someone slumped over in a lawn chair, and a fire burning just enough to show he had his eyes closed. Lifting his nose to the air, he could smell blood, as well as the drugs he’d encountered before. He looked at Murph, who nodded and just disappeared.

Murph?
She touched his hand and he could see her. She nodded to the family, and he let her go only to have her disappear again.
This is what you and Max do to keep safe.

It is. Now get your ass in gear.

Bossy little thing, but she was right. He made his way to the other side of the room just as someone came into the cave. Murph touched him again and told him to stand still.

“What the fuck, Tony?” The man in the chair was knocked over, and he fell on his ass when the newcomer kicked him over with his booted foot. The two of them looked ready to do battle when the guy standing pulled a gun. “This is not watching them. And where the hell is that mutt? You said that the stupid thing never leaves them.”

“I don’t know, Lenny.” Tony looked around and right at them when Carter realized that they couldn’t see him either. “He was right here. Maybe he had to take a piss. I do too.”

As Tony left, Carter reached out to Misha to let him know that someone was coming toward them, and to be careful, he was armed. Lenny moved around the cave, and that’s when Carter realized he was a wolf. The fucker could probably smell them.

No, he can’t.
Murph squeezed his hand.
I’m going to take care of him. I want you to just stay still, then when he’s down, get to the family.

Carter felt her hand leave his, and he didn’t even breathe. Turning toward the family huddled on the floor, he didn’t turn when he heard Murph tell the man to drop his weapon. When her gun went off in the small cave, it echoed around them so much that his cat seemed to want to come out. But he calmed him with the assurance that it was almost over.

Murph came to stand over him as he knelt to the woman first. “She’s alive. Hurt…raped, but alive.” He reached for the man and felt for his pulse, and knew that he was gone. Taking a deep breath, he put his fingers to the little girl’s throat. When she wrapped her fingers around his, he looked down into the most amazing blue eyes.

“You’re going to save us?” Carter nodded. “My daddy is dead. That man over there…I can’t see him, but he put his hands around his throat and choked him to death.”

“I’m sorry about that, honey. But there are people coming to get you out of here, all right?” She nodded at him and tried to stand. “No, you stay right here until we can make sure that you’re not hurt too badly, okay?”

“Where’s my dog, Gus? He left me a little while ago. I think they hurt him too.” Carter only nodded, not sure how the dog was faring. But the little girl seemed to think he’d been killed too. “That man cut him up really bad when he tried to save me. Gus was my bestest friend in the whole world. He wanted to tear that man’s throat out, but he runned off fast. But he came back. For me.”

“That’s right, he did. He’s a great pet, and he loves you very much. Did you know that? And he told my partner where you were by…he led us here. We had a vet taking care of him when we came in here to get you.” He heard noises at the entrance of the room and turned with his gun out. Murph had hers up as well when he heard Misha speak.

“It’s us. We’re coming in. We got the other man; he’s with Nic and Andrew.”

Murph told him to come in slowly and with his hands up where she could see him. Carter almost asked her what she was doing when she continued.

“For all I know that bastard has you too. So if you’d just do what I asked, nobody gets their nuts blown off.” Misha did as she asked, as did his brothers. Phillip was laughing, and Thomas was coming in with a medic right behind them.

The woman never woke while they worked on her. She’d been beaten as well as raped, as he’d told Murph, and Carter wondered if the little girl had seen it. When she crawled into his lap, her back to her mom, he thought she might have. Carter looked up at Murph when she said his name.

“They’re ready to roll.” He nodded and looked at his brother as the police were talking to him. “They were going to ransom them, but there wasn’t anyone to call. They raped her in front of the man when he didn’t give them what they wanted. Then when nothing worked, they strangled him to get her to talk. But she told them the same thing; there wasn’t any money to be had.”

It was hard to hand off the little girl—Dani—because she wanted to stay with him. She told Carter that she was going to be fine. Her daddy had told her that he needed her to be brave for him, and she said she would. But she was hurting too. As they left the cave, winding their way out, someone called on the radio to Misha. He knelt down in front of Dani to let her hear.

“Gus is doing fine. The surgery went great. In a couple of days, less maybe, he’ll be up and around as good as new.” Dani sobbed and wrapped her arms around Misha as he picked her up off the gurney. He told her that she was very lucky and that Gus would be really proud of her.

“He’s a good dog.” Misha told her he was. “I wanna go and see him, please. When they have me done, I want to go and see him.”

The officer that took her finally said that he’d take her there as soon as she was released. Carter was glad that the wolf, this one a good guy, was being so good to her. As soon as they were all together, Misha put his hand out to Murph. The little girl was going to stay with her elderly grandmother for a few days, and Misha said he’d pay for a nurse to be brought in to help out. Everyone was happy with the outcome. And it looked as if the woman was going to make it as well.

“We couldn’t have done this without you.” She flushed, but Misha nodded. “You noticed the license plate, talked to the dog…I’m still trying to figure that one out. But without you leading us, we might not have found them until it was too late. If you’d like, there is a position here for you should you want it.”

She glanced at him before taking his offered hand. “But I’m a cop. And I know that you’re bending the rules a great deal to make this work for you. I can do that too. As far as I can see, bending is better than breaking, but…I don’t know right now what my future plans are. I have…Max and I have some things to finish up before I can make any kind of commitment.”

Misha nodded and turned to the rest of them. “We’re leaving. Anybody want dinner before we go? I’m buying.”

Ending up in a nice restaurant wasn’t something that they normally did. But this was a good rescue. The bad guys were taken care of, both of them dead as it turned out. The people they were sent to save were now being taken care of, and even though the man of the house was dead, he was being taken care of rather than left out in the cave. And none of the rescue team had been hurt. Carter knew that Misha was mostly happy about that, but he needed to talk to him.

Misha was on the phone with their mom and Hannah when he found him standing in the back of the building. As soon as Carter started to walk away and give him some privacy, he told him to wait. When he closed his phone and leaned against the wall where they were, he asked him if he was all right.

“She kicked my ass out there. Not just in knowing what to do, but how to handle me.” Misha nodded. “I…I’m an ass, and I need to fix this with her.”

“You do. And soon. I just got word that her father knows she’s at our compound. Thomas is making some inquiries to her job as well. Apparently your mate is next in line to take over the department here in town when the chief retires. It’s why she transferred here. She’d had some issues with the guy who had found her hideaway. How he found them is anyone’s guess, but he’s dead now and that part of it is taken care of. Did she mention who shot her and why?” He told him she’d not done that. “His name was Conrad Snyder. She had him fired when she got here. But that’s all I know for now. He was taking his revenge the only way he knew how, with deceit and thugs. It was his bad fortune that he ended up dying by his own hand more or less.”

“I’m glad.” He looked down the hall into the kitchen, too embarrassed to admit the next part. “I’m going to need your help on something else. I need…I have no idea how to be a stepdad to Max. Not even an uncle, should that be how he wants to treat me.”

“Ask her. Or Max would be a better choice. Tell him you don’t know what to do. But first thing I’d do is tell him you’re a fuck up and that you need his help. That might get you in better with them both.” Carter thought it was sound advice, and started on his speech as soon as they were on the plane to head home.

Chapter 7

Daniel Murphy looked at the pictures that he’d been handed over an hour ago. He knew that she’d grown up. Hell, he would have been stupid to think that she’d remained the same after all these years, but she’d turned into a real beauty. Not at all like her mother had been.

He’d hated her from the beginning. Not even after all these years was he sure why he’d married her but for the money. By then he’d had a lot; not like now, but enough. And when she’d told him her worth, he’d married her almost right away. Then she’d gotten herself pregnant, and things had fallen down a slippery slope ever since she’d given birth. Maybe even before. Daniel looked at Victor when he cleared his throat.

“The house where she’s staying is like a fortress. There are all kinds of animals running around the place that have a system that I can’t seem to figure out. Armed guards as well. The fence alone has enough juice running through it that it could fry a man in seconds should he be stupid enough to touch it. I’m telling you, that place is under more surveillance than this place.” He nodded to Victor Guy, his man of all men. “What do you suppose they’re doing back there?”

“Keeping me from what I want.” He tossed the pictures on the desk, disgusted with them. “The boy…I’m supposing that there are no shots of him because of the surveillance and fence.”

“Yeah. We tried, but if he’s coming out of the house, it’s too far away for any of us to see him. And flybys don’t work either. They got that place locked the fuck down.”

Daniel nodded. He was going to do the same once he had them. Not that he cared all that much for Dane, but the child would be difficult enough to control without her there, so he had to have them both. But Daniel wasn’t above killing her to bring the boy in line.

“There has to be some way to get in. Deliveries? Maybe one of them goes shopping. You said there were women there. How do they function without the mall?”

Victor laughed and handed him another set of pictures. Looking through them, he had to ask what they were.

“The way they inspect each thing that comes in. See that picture where there is a large building? That’s where everything is taken that is stopped at the gate. Twice a day someone comes to that building and goes in. When whoever it is comes out, he has everything loaded in a truck then taken to the house. Nothing goes up there without him looking at it. There is a large SUV that leaves the property in the morning. Misha Lanning is who it is registered to, but it’s not anything I’d fuck with either. And the office that the other Lanning’s work from is almost as tight as the house.”

Daniel was getting pissed. This was just too much. Why would a person need that much protection if not for hiding something? But the more they dug into their lives, all of them, the more he found that he hated them. These people were cleaner than the silk sheets he had put on his bed daily.

“That woman…the one that let you in at the house a few months ago; anything on her? Other than that some asshole killed her too. She was going to be our ticket, not a name on a list of reasons for Dane not to trust us.” Their contact was dead now, and he hadn’t seen that coming. And that, too, pissed Daniel off.

“Nothing that I can find. Her accounts have been closed, but I can’t figure out by who. Oh, and you might like to know that a man by the name of Conrad…let me look.”

As he searched his notes, Daniel tried to wrap his mind around the fact that Dane had eluded him again. He was, frankly, getting sick of chasing her ass all over the place. If she’d just come to heel, things would be so much better for them all.

“Conrad Snyder. He shot her a few days ago. I’m still trying to figure out why. But I do know that he’s dead now too. Killed in a blast that he caused. Not sure what he was up to, but he and two other men are now dead, along with our contact. Some ex-cop is all I know.”

“Find out what you can. Perhaps he had something somewhere that can be of use to us. His apartment? Have you searched it too?” Victor said that he had. “Well fuck. This is a mess and I don’t like it one bit; you know that, don’t you? She should have been here months ago, if not years. I want her found. Oh, and one more thing. I want you to find out why, after all this time, she is living with a family out in the open. She’s been in hiding for years with the boy, and I want to know why now and why these morons. Her job; have you gotten anything about that? Why she transferred in?”

“Just that she was ready for a change is all anyone seems to know. There were rumors that she was going to be running the place here about, but there’s nothing I can nail down on that right now. And you were right about the kid. No one knows she has one. Same as her other precinct. How the hell did she hide a kid for all this time?” Victor handed him more papers. “She took some vacation once in all the time she worked for the other place. She had five weeks and took them all at once. I’m assuming that’s when she had the boy. If so, that makes him eleven years old.”

Daniel had no idea if that was true or not, but it was something more than he had before. And it pissed him off that she was that good at keeping him out of the loop. Better than anyone he had working for him, including Victor. When he got her—and Daniel had no thoughts that he wouldn’t—she was going to answer a great deal of things for him. But he wanted that boy now.

After Victor left, he reached into his bottom drawer and pulled out the thick envelope that only he had seen. There were tapes in there as well, digital recordings that he’d changed from VCR tapes to DVD’s all on his own. But the folder was what he looked at now. It was Dane’s birth certificate, her health records, as well as her school and college transcripts. There was nothing there that gave him a clue as to why she could do the things that she could.

He’d known that she was different from nearly the beginning. The first time he’d noticed it was when she’d been five months old. Daniel had been entering the nursery, where she’d been fussing, to tell the nanny to shut her up. The bottle going across the room to her had startled him badly. He watched her as she drank it down, then put it back on the dresser across the room. He’d set up a camera in her room to watch her do that every day.

Over the next five years he’d recorded her doing all kinds of extraordinary things. Not just with the bottles, but books and other things she could move. And her intelligence level was off the charts. Sending her to college, he realized now, was the greatest mistake he’d ever made. One that he regretted almost as soon as she was there. But it was too late then.

“Bitch.”

She’d learned a few things on her first few days that had her hiding from him. Mostly about him and his need to control her. And she’d also found that he’d been using her. Completely against her will, of course. He’d made millions off just her knowledge, and her abilities had netted him even more; horses, people, and anything or anyone else that she could read. It was her first call home, three days after she got away, that she told him she was done with him.

There were no more board meetings where she controlled the men who worked for him. The races that he took her to, gave her part of the winnings of, were also done. He’d made billions off her for only pennies on the dollar. She’d taken that with her as well. He’d unknowingly funded her escape from him. She no longer was there to tell him when a deal was going badly, a man was cheating him, or someone was going to try and buy him out. Daniel had lost his biggest money maker because he’d made a promise to her one night when she’d made him over two billion dollars on a deal. Daniel wondered if she’d known then what he’d been doing with her.

The few times he’d gone there to bring her back, something always happened. Once she’d not been on campus; there had been a trip that was class related. No one knew what the trip was, but she and others, also unknown to the campus security, were on it. The next few times he’d gone there, no one knew who he was talking about. They didn’t have her registered for any classes and never had. The room that he knew she was staying in was devoid of anything that was hers, and there wasn’t a person on campus that had seen her.

And sending a crew to get her had resulted in her getting hurt. Not that he cared, but when she started sending his men to him in body bags, he’d gotten pissed. She was a minor, his minor, and she was going to fucking do as he told her or he was going to know the reason why. And now she had a kid.

Everything he’d read about what she could do told him that the boy would be stronger. Would know more than her. Daniel had no information on the boy other than he was male and hers. Now he knew how old he was, but nothing else. He didn’t even know what he looked like, who his father was, or—and this really pissed him off—what abilities, if any, he had. For all he knew, the boy could be a dud.

It was only by chance that they’d found the woman who worked for his daughter. She’d had a picture on her cell phone that one of his men had seen. It was then that he’d put a man on her to do whatever he deemed necessary to find Dane. Two weeks into the project, they found out about the son.

That had been over two months ago. And now…Christ, he was back to square one again. And it was going to be harder now that she knew he was onto her than it had been before. Trying to buy out the Lanning man was impossible. All of them had more money than Daniel had ever had over his entire life. His door opened after a short knock and he bid them enter.

“Dane just landed at a little airport about three miles from here. The plane is registered to Lanning Search and Rescue. They’re still on the strip.” Daniel grabbed his coat as Victor continued telling him what he knew. “I don’t know what she’s doing with them, but the company is known for its ability to find anything or anyone. Mostly they work in disasters, landslides, kidnappings. This one involved a family of three that was taken from their home. She isn’t mentioned in the report, but she’s there. I have men working at all the strips around here, and he was just handed her picture this morning.”

“How long do we have?” Victor looked at him when he didn’t answer. “You just happened to be handing out the picture and there she was? Just like that, after years of trying to find her?”

“Pretty much. I was driving by that one when some of the pictures came in. I stopped in, printed a few of them, and handed him one. Lucky for us, I’d given him my cell number so he could contact me when I’m not at my office. This guy thought she was on it when she left so had pulled up the footage from that time and found her. He said that the plane had called in for landing time, and he tried to delay them but was overridden when he stepped out. I’ve got two men at the runway now, as well as a cop that I know on standby. I’m sort of playing this by ear right now.”

The police escorted him through lights. Stop signs meant nothing to them. He was this close to getting her, and he wasn’t going to be stopped by a couple of broken laws. It was most unfortunate that someone had been cleaning house at the precinct or he might have had more help. As it was he had no ears within the building, and no one to keep him apprised of when he was being investigated. But soon that would stop as well. He was going to clean his own house as soon as he got Dane back.

He got out of the plane just as they were disembarking. Daniel watched them on the strip as they all seemed to be joking and having a grand time. He didn’t see his daughter, but that didn’t mean anything. She was there, and he knew it. What he didn’t count on was a limo going out to the plane to pick them all up. The police had done nothing to stop it, either.

“Stop that car.” The cop that was with him nodded and made his way to the gate. Daniel was making his way out as well when the gates simply opened and the car moved out. He looked at it as it passed by the cop, who was still staring out at the runway, and saw Dane at the backseat window. She was flipping him off and blowing him kisses as she left him standing there.

“Mother fuck.” Daniel actually pulled out his gun to shoot the stupid shit cop that was still standing there when Victor put his hand on his gun. “I’m going to kill him. He let them go by.”

“I don’t think he knew.” The stupid fuck was still standing there looking like he was still waiting for something. “You said she was good. Is it possible that she’s got him in some kind of trance?”

Daniel felt his temper take over. The fucking bitch was right there and she knew that he’d come for her. He had to get her, had to…he was fucking going to kill her himself. As soon as he had her, he was going to put a bullet in her head, and fuck the fact that she could make him money. She was dead.

“Get me out of here.” Victor nodded and they left the cop standing there. “Get that piece of shit out of my sight and find someone to replace him. Today. I don’t care if you have to hire some idiot off the streets, he’s gone.”

Daniel sat in the back of his own car and tried to think. She knew he was there. Not that he knew how, but she had known. The limo, the driver, all of it had been because he’d been there, and he wondered what else she’d learned to do in the years since she’d been without him. Apparently a great deal. More than he knew how to deal with.

Daniel tried to think beyond what she’d done as a child. Moving things and having predictions was one thing, but it appeared that she could manipulate minds too. Not just one, either, but a great many of them to get what she wanted. All he could think of was how much more he was going to enjoy killing her. But he was going to make sure that she knew what he was going to do with her son once she was gone. The kid would be his greatest gift to himself. And there would not be any way for him to escape.