Innocent Prey (A Brown and de Luca Novel) (23 page)

The next second we were all heading for the nearby woods.

* * *

Mason didn’t like it. He let the others go off in pursuit of the moving cell phone ping, but he kept heading in the same direction he’d been heading, straight through the woods toward the clearing the chief had told him was on the other side. Something in his gut told him that was where he would find Rachel. And he’d seen too much since he’d met her to doubt his gut feelings. She might have a little bit more of whatever
it
was than most people did, but he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that everyone had a little bit of
it
in them.

Then he heard a gunshot, and he knew he was right. He ran flat-out, crashing through brush, breaking branches, leaping deadfall and stumps like a freaking athlete, everything in him turning to ice as the image of Rachel with a bullet in her head kept flashing into his brain.

He burst out of the woods to see Rachel and three other women running toward him, two with their hands behind them as if bound. Rachel was holding one of them by the arm. Stephanie Mattheson.

And beyond them he saw a woman, Loren Markovich, pulling off her ski mask and picking herself up off the ground, raising her gun and pointing it right at Rachel’s back just as Rachel spotted him and smiled in relief.

He couldn’t reach her in time, but he tried, stretching out his arms and pouring on the speed, shouting
“Down!”
as he lifted his gun to take aim. But he knew he couldn’t get a shot off in time. There was no way.

And then a gunshot rang through the night and Mason relived the worst horror he’d ever felt in his life. He flashed back to that nightmare moment last year when he’d walked into his apartment just in time to see his brother put a bullet into his own head. This time he saw Rachel arching forward as the bullet ripped into her back, then falling facedown in the thick, tall grass.

And beyond her, Loren Markovich also went down.

What the hell?

Behind the fallen blindness coach, Jake Kravitz rose to his feet, holding his hands over his head and throwing the gun he held away.

The other girls crowded around Rachel.

Mason ignored Jake and raced toward them, unable to see past them to Rachel, moving them carefully aside.

Rache was pushing herself upright in the grass, looking for him, finding him. “You found us. Dammit, you really waited till the last possible fucking minute, didn’t you?”

“You’re hit. Stay still.”

She frowned at him. “I’m not hit.”

“You went down. She shot you and you went down.”

“You yelled
down
at the top of your fucking lungs, Mace. When someone yells
down
at me like that, I get down.”

He helped her to her feet, searching her face, still unclear on what had just happened. “You’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

He felt like every muscle in his body wanted to go weak all at once. He wanted to grab her, kiss her, hold her and feel for himself that she wasn’t shot or bleeding.

One of the girls, the blonde, was unwrapping the duct tape from the other.

“We’re all okay,” she said.

He nodded. “All right, get into the woods out of sight and wait there.” He handed his phone to Rachel, told her to call the chief, then shifted his attention back to the man who was standing out there with his hands on top of his head. Mason hurried forward across the grass. When he got to Loren lying facedown, clearly shot in the back, he paused to kick the gun away, then bent to check for a pulse but didn’t find one. “On your knees, Jake,” he called.

Jake dropped to his knees, hands still on his head. Mason walked over and cuffed him quickly. Then he went back to Loren, rolled her over and double-checked.

Yup. Dead as a doornail. That shot hadn’t been Loren’s, it had been Jake’s.

“There’s another one down in the hole,” Rachel said, her voice coming from close by. He hadn’t expected that.

“Dead?”

“I don’t think so. Stevie beaned him with a table leg, and I tied him up with my bra.”

“Stevie?”

She nodded. “Oh, yeah. She’s totally found her girl power again.” Then, shaking her head, she looked at Jake, who was sitting on the ground with his legs crossed and his hands cuffed behind him. “Why did you shoot your partner, Jake?” Rachel asked.

“I was never really working for her,” he said.

“Yeah, right. Tell it to the judge,” Mason said.

“Just not the one you killed.”

“I didn’t do that. Loren did. And I didn’t take Stephanie, either. It was Loren and her fucking family. One of whom, by the way, took off with that cell phone we found to lead you guys away.”

“So then why...?”

“I was trying to save Stevie.”

Rachel looked at Mason, one brow cocked upward. He said, “Right. You have the right to remain silent—”

“No fucking way. I want to hear this,” I said.

But Mason went on, finished Mirandizing the guy, then asked him point-blank if he wanted to give up the right to remain silent.

Jake looked at Rachel, looked at Mason, nodded. “This was my fault, all of it. I ran my mouth in jail about the judge. I hated him for making me do time for the cardinal sin of loving his daughter. I was an idiot, ranting to my cellmate about how the judge had killed someone when he was driving drunk and covered it up. Fucker. I hated him for that as much as for what he did to me. It didn’t seem fair, you know. He could kill a guy and walk away. But I was doing time for taking Stevie across state lines.”

Mason nodded. “And your cellmate was—”

“Ivan Orloff,” he said. “So then I get out of jail and I forget all about it. Then Ivan’s brother, Uri, comes to me. Offers me a job. Tells me about this cherry setup with his sister. Says Ivan bought it last November, so they’re short a guy. He tells me how they kidnap girls and sell ’em as sex slaves for a cool hundred grand apiece. Tells me how they’re using what I told his brother about the judge to blackmail him for info on girls who age out of the foster care system. Girls who don’t have families or anyone to go looking for them. Says it’s the perfect crime, that no one ever even knows the girls are missing.”

“And you said yes,” Rachel all but spat.

“No, I didn’t say yes! I said no. I was racking my brain to figure out what to do with the information. I mean, I knew I had to tell someone, but Jesus, I was gonna look guilty as hell if I did. My cellmate blackmailing the guy who sent me up the river with info I gave him?”

Mason nodded. He could see where that would look pretty bad.

“Before I could figure out what to do, you guys showed up at my door asking about Stevie. Shit, I knew damn well you’d never believe I didn’t have anything to do with it at that point. My ex-girlfriend, right? And she’d been calling, too, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to get into that mess again, not with a powerful guy like the judge looking to mess up my life.” He lowered his head. “But I had to save Stevie. Somehow. And I knew they were the ones who had her. So I called Uri back, told him I’d changed my mind, that I wanted the job. I figured I could save her from the inside.”

“You realize one of the girls you helped kidnap and hold hostage was killed, right?”

“I wasn’t anywhere near that. I wasn’t even working for them yet.”

Mason looked at Rachel. “Is he telling the truth?”

“He is. I was right, and you owe me fifty bucks.”

“You already took my fifty bucks.”

“I was right about Rodney Carr, too.”

“We didn’t make a bet about Rodney Carr.”

She rolled her eyes. “Details.” But beneath the banter, there was something else. Mason was just about eating her up with his eyes, and she was doing the same to him. She turned to Jake. “I hope you can prove some of this.”

“I hope so, too.”

Mason took Jake by the arm and led him toward the headlights that were bounding into the clearing now.

Epilogue

J
ake would have a trial, Mason said, but he was pretty sure that with the judge’s widow and daughter speaking up for him, he’d wind up with a suspended sentence.

Loren Markovich was dead, and so was her brother, Uri Orloff. He’d had a blood clot in his brain that Stephanie had knocked loose when she’d pasted him with the table leg. Poetic justice, if you asked me.

Their other henchman, a cousin—this was entirely a family business—had been tracked down easy as shit, because the dumb-ass had been driving around with the pinging cell phone trying to lead the cops away from the rest of the gang and their captives. The bomb shelter—that was what our hole in the ground turned out to have been—had belonged to a distant relative who claimed to have no idea it was being used as a prison but did admit to having been the one who’d had it built, and so recently that it wasn’t considered finished yet. Since the Cold War was long over, the cops figured it had never been intended for bombs but for the exact purpose for which it had been used.

Loren’s computer had given up the names of her customers. She had kept careful records, including photos that looked as if they’d been taken secretly, of them taking possession of their girls and handing over stacks of cash. This, Mason presumed, was just in case she ever needed to blackmail any of them.

Aside from Halle Chase and Venora LaMere, the rest of the girls were found alive and rescued. Thirteen arrests had been made and more were pending.

It was over. I was alive and well, and so was Mason. And there was something between us that hadn’t been there before.

I sat on the lawn near the little lakeside campfire that would probably be a summer staple around here. The boys were on the dock, fishing, and couldn’t have cared less about Mason and me, and it was a good thing. He was sitting on the ground, and I was nestled in the crook of his arm like a devoted lover. Didn’t have any desire to move away, either. I was sipping a lovely vodka Diet, and he was working on a beer. First drink of the evening for both of us, and while we might go for a second, that would be the limit. We had the kids to take care of, after all.

He’d been different since that rescue. I felt it but couldn’t put my finger on what it was, exactly. He looked at me oddly all the time. And he seemed as interested in just hanging out as he was in sex. Weird.

“So you gonna tell me what’s going on with you, Mace?”

He nodded. “That was the plan, yeah.”

“Anytime soon?”

“Any minute now, actually.”

“What are you waiting for, then?”

He shrugged. “The beer to kick in?”

I elbowed him. “You thought I was shot dead out there. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s what it is.”

“And it shook you up. I know, ’cause it would shake me up, too, if it were you.”

“Would it?”

“Oh, hell, yes. Big-time. More than you know, I bet.”

He looked down at me, smiled a little. “That’s good to hear.”

“The thing is, I’m here. I’m alive and well. Jake—who I was right and you were wrong about, you’ll recall—saved me by shooting what’s-her-name.”

“Loren Markovich.”

“Yeah, whatever. Blindness coach, my ass. I was right about that, too.”

“You’re always right. I concede on that, so you can stop pointing out each incidence of your rightness.”

“I will never stop pointing that out.”

“I know you won’t.”

I sighed and snuggled a little closer.

“I’m not gonna take the chief’s job,” he said.

“I know you’re not. I’m not gonna give you a hard time about it, either. And the only reason I did to begin with was because I’m afraid you’ll get yourself killed one of these days.”

“Has that changed?”

“No. I’m still afraid of it.”

“Then why did you change your position?”

“Because I decided that I really do believe we’re all here for as long as we’re supposed to be. And then we’re not. And that it doesn’t matter what we’re doing. When it’s time, it’s time. So it’s really better to make the most of the moment, right now and right now and right now, than it is to worry about what might be coming later.”

He nodded really slowly. “So you believe your own widely published philosophy at long last.”

“Parts of it, at least. That’s progress, right?”

“That’s progress for sure.”

I tipped my head back against his shoulder and stared up at the stars. “Gosh, it’s a beautiful night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many stars. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

“It is.” He lowered his head so his cheek rested on top of my hair. And then he said, “So here’s the thing,” he said.

“Ahh, at last, he gets to the crux of the matter. I knew something was on your mind.”

“Yeah. Something.”

“So?”

He inhaled, exhaled again. “When I thought you were dead, it hit me that I’m probably in love with you.”

I sat up fast and stared into his eyes, mine wide as a thousand things tumbled through my mind. Fear? Yeah. Surprise, too. And love? Hell, was that what this was? I didn’t know. How could I know? It was my first time. Out of sheer panic, I said the first thing that came to me. “You’re shitting me.”

I don’t think it was the response he was expecting.

* * * * *

Look for the next Brown and de Luca novel,

DEADLY OBSESSION,

coming soon from Harlequin MIRA

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