“Give me your keys,” Chris told Sam as soon as breakfast was over. “I’ll park your truck in the garage—make it look as if Holly’s alone in the house.” He glanced at Holly. “And as soon as I make one phone call, I’m driving over to the Merrills’ to swap my truck for your SUV, so we can set the stage. I’ll park your SUV right out front, so anyone who knows what you drive will know you’re here.”
Holly looked hopeful. “I can go with you and see Ian and Jamie?”
He shook his head and said gently, “Probably not a good idea. You wouldn’t be able to stay long, and it might upset your sons more to have you come and go quickly than if you don’t show up at all.”
At her crestfallen expression he said even more gently, “Why don’t you go call them now? I’ll clean up in here.”
He could tell she was disappointed, but she was putting a good face on it. “You cooked, I’ll clean,” she insisted. “Besides, it’s still early. They might not be awake yet.”
Chris was going to argue but thought better of it, since he was anxious to call Angus McCay. So while Sam and Annabel went to get some much-needed sleep, he moved Sam’s truck, then headed for his office.
He hooked a recording device to his phone and dialed Angus McCay’s home phone number. It rang five times before it was answered, and by the third ring he was saying, “Come on, be home!” under his breath.
“Hello?” A man answered and Chris had no difficulty recognizing Angus McCay’s gruff voice.
“Mr. McCay? Chris Colton here.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, Mr. Colton. I...I haven’t had a chance to book a flight yet, so I can’t tell you when my wife and I will be there. But soon, as soon as we can, because we can’t wait to see our grandsons now that you’ve found them for us.”
“About that,” Chris said, smiling to himself. “I thought you should know your daughter-in-law called the police early this morning. Apparently someone tried to break into the house where she’s staying. The police took her report, of course, but they have more important things to worry about than a break-in that never actually happened. You’ve probably seen the news by now—the Alphabet Killer claimed another victim last night. The FBI and the Granite Gulch police are all focused on that investigation.”
“Sorry to hear—another victim, you say? No, I haven’t read my newspaper yet this morning, so I didn’t know.” Angus cleared his throat. “Of course, it’s terrible two men tried to break into Holly’s house. Good thing her dog scared them off.”
Bingo, Chris exulted inside. Got you on tape, too.
Angus kept talking. “If Holly was back home where she belonged, and Ian and Jamie, too, she wouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”
Chris rolled his eyes at the fake concern, but all he said was “Yes, sir. I totally agree with you. Holly and her sons need the kind of protection and support only a family can give.” Spreading it on thick. “So when do you think you might get here? The thing is, an emergency cropped up in my Dallas office, and I’m going to have to drive over there—it’ll probably take me all day to resolve. So I won’t be able to meet you at my office in Granite Gulch today after all.”
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Angus McCay reassured Chris. “You gave us the address last night. If we can get a flight, I’m sure we can find the place. As for your bill—”
“Not an issue. I can mail the bill to you after your daughter-in-law and your grandsons are safely back in Houston. Good luck convincing her that’s where she belongs.”
Chris hung up, laughing softly to himself. He disconnected the recording device and played back the conversation, nodding to himself as Angus McCay revealed three things that could be crucial at trial. First, Chris had never mentioned any details about the attempted break-in. But Angus McCay had revealed without prompting he knew it was two men. Second, he knew the men had been scared off by a dog. A dog he had no idea Holly had. Third, Angus McCay had admitted Chris had given him Holly’s address last night. So he couldn’t claim he didn’t know where she was staying.
“What’s so funny?” Holly asked from the doorway.
“Your father-in-law makes a lousy criminal,” Chris joked. “Almost as bad as you.”
Holly’s face turned solemn, and Chris realized too late it wasn’t a joke to her. “I had more difficulty accepting he was trying to kill me than I did about my mother-in-law,” she said quietly. “She never liked me. Not when Grant and I were little, and not when we got married. But I never got that impression from my father-in-law. He...he’s weak, though. His wife rules him. So if she decided I had to die, he’d go along.”
She breathed deeply, letting the air out long and slow. “My parents were so different. Theirs was an equal partnership as far back as I can remember. Neither tried to dominate the other. Doesn’t mean they didn’t have their ups and downs. Doesn’t mean they never argued. But the few times they couldn’t reach an agreement, they agreed to disagree and left it at that. I promised myself that when I grew up I’d have a marriage like theirs.”
He had to ask. “And did you? Was that what your marriage to Grant was like?”
She nodded slowly. “In a way. It wasn’t like my parents’ marriage, because Grant never— I mean, he loved me, but he was never in love with me. And that made things difficult at times.”
She sighed softly. “But it wasn’t like Grant’s parents’ marriage, either, thank God. I’m not a doormat kind of woman,” she said, as if she were revealing a closely held secret. “Maybe you can’t see that in me because you’ve only known me on the run. Terrified something will happen to me, but more because if something did, Ian and Jamie wouldn’t have a mother. They’ve already lost their father. I can’t let them lose their mother, too. If I didn’t have them, I don’t think I would have run. I would have stayed and fought it out with the McCays.”
One corner of his mouth turned up in a half smile. “I know you’re not a doormat kind of woman. Would a doormat have told me I’m not the boss of her?”
She smiled, but there was a touch of sadness to it. “That was an inside joke between Grant and me. If one of us tried to—oh, you know what I mean—the other would say that as a joking reminder. Then we’d laugh and things would be okay between us. But that was before we were married. When we were just friends.”
More than anything in the world, he wanted to erase that sadness from her face. Wanted to banish it forever. Wanted to tell her how sweet she was, without being too sweet. Wanted to confess what a difference she and her sons had made in his life. Wanted her to know he couldn’t imagine a more responsive lover—not just in the heat of passion, but the before and after, too. The way she fit so perfectly in his arms. The way she touched him so tenderly. The way she looked at him at times as if all light and hope in life emanated from him.
The way she loved him.
The realization hit him and knocked him for a loop. She loves you.
Hard on the heels of that thought came another, just as much of a body blow as the first. And you love her.
He opened his mouth to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come. And before he could stop her, she turned away, saying, “I’m going to call Peg, see if Ian and Jamie are awake now.” Then she was gone.
Chris stared at the doorway where Holly had stood, calling himself all kinds of a fool for not grabbing the chance to tell her how much he loved her. He started after her and was halfway across the office when his cell phone rang. He was going to ignore it at first, but when he glanced at the touch screen, he recognized the caller and cursed softly because he knew he had to take the call.
“Hey, Brad,” he said when he answered his phone. “What’s up?”
“Hey yourself. Just wanted to touch base with you about those names you asked me to track down. Desmond Carlton and Roy and Rhonda Carlton.”
Chris quickly sat at his desk and pulled a pen and a pad of paper in front of him. “Okay, yeah, what have you got?”
“You were right. There’s no mention of Desmond Carlton on any search engine I could find. Not that I didn’t trust you, Chris, but it never hurts to double-check, you know? Desmond Carlton is a zero in cyberspace. A cipher. You’d think the guy didn’t exist, unless...”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you peruse old police blotters and dig out old copies of newspapers. That’s where I hit pay dirt. Desmond Carlton was a drug lord who was murdered six years ago—I located an article from that time. And get this—the obit on the guy lists he was survived by his brother and sister-in-law—”
“Roy and Rhonda Carlton?”
“Give the man a cigar. Also mentioned was a daughter, Julia. I haven’t been able to track her down, but what I could find is that she was eighteen when her father bought the big one.”
“She could have moved away. Gotten married. Changed her name some other way.”
“Gee, thanks, why didn’t I think of that?” Brad asked drily.
Chris chuckled. “Sorry. What else have you got?”
“Roy and Rhonda died five years ago in a car crash, just as you said.”
“Was it really an accident?”
“Sure looks that way. Particularly gruesome one, but there never seemed to be a question it was anything other than an accident.” Brad hesitated. “You know, when I dug into Roy and Rhonda, I came across a couple of names that—”
“Let me guess,” Chris said laconically. “Josie Colton and Lizzie Connor, now Lizzie Colton. Right?”
“Yeah.” Brad seemed relieved this wasn’t news to Chris. “Lizzie’s older than Josie, but both fostered with the Carltons from an early age. Josie until she was seventeen—when she up and vanished—Lizzie until the car accident. Apparently the Carltons considered her like their own daughter, and she was still with them even after the state was no longer paying for her foster care.”
“Anything tying Desmond and Roy together other than they were brothers?”
“Nada. Roy was a straight arrow, and so was his wife. But Desmond?” Brad snorted his disgust. “Desmond had a rap sheet as long as my arm,” he said. “But get this, Chris—no convictions. A dozen arrests, not a single conviction.”
“That’s got to be a mistake. A major drug dealer with no convictions?”
“No mistake. Not even a misdemeanor.” Brad’s voice took on a cynical tone. “One thing after another. Problem with the chain of custody of the evidence? Case tossed out. Witness against him fails to show up at trial? Case tossed out. Oh, and I love this one. Evidence mysteriously disappears from the police lockup? Cased tossed out. The prosecutors were fit to be tied.”
Chris cursed under his breath. “Either this guy was the luckiest SOB on the planet, or—”
“Or someone on the police force—maybe more than one—was helping him out.”
“Right.” Chris thought for a moment, trying to put all the puzzle pieces together. “Anything else?”
“Desmond Carlton’s name came up in a murder investigation eleven years ago. He was never arrested, but he was brought in for questioning. A small-time drug dealer was murdered and word on the street was that Carlton had something to do with it. You know how that goes. But the police could never pin it conclusively on him, and the case went cold.”
Eleven years ago. Something about that niggled at the corners of Chris’s memory, as if it should mean something. I was twenty, he mused. I’d just finished my sophomore year in college, but Laura and I weren’t engaged yet. That was in the fall. So what happened eleven years ago?
Try as he might he couldn’t pull a thread loose, so he shelved the question, knowing that forcing your brain to remember rarely worked. But if you put it aside, the answer usually came when you least expected it.
“Is that all?” Chris asked.
“Pretty much.”
“This is terrific stuff, Brad. No kidding. I knew you were the right guy to put on this case, and you really came through for me. I won’t forget it.”
Chris took a moment to ask about Brad’s wife and his three daughters, who were all in college and grad school. Then he disconnected and sat there, staring at the notes he’d jotted down on the pad of paper. “Eleven years,” he’d written near the bottom, and circled it twice. It meant something. He didn’t know what, but he knew it did.
The more he stared, the more convinced he became. Then he did something he would never have done a week ago...before Holly entered his life. He picked up his cell phone and hit speed dial. When the phone was answered, he said, “Trev? It’s Chris. I know you’re busy, but I need to ask you a quick question.”
* * *
The urge to see her sons was so strong when Holly hung up the phone, she acknowledged Chris had been right. If she’d had her SUV, she wouldn’t have been able to resist driving over to Peg’s, even if only for a few minutes. And that could have been fatal. Not just for her, but for Ian and Jamie, too. Whoever had tried to break in during the wee hours of the morning could be lying in wait somewhere, watching for her SUV. She could be followed to Peg’s house, and...
Chris had also been right about not going with him when he went to pick up her SUV. Ian and Jamie were doing okay. They missed her, but they were okay because Peg was making sure of it. It wouldn’t be fair to Peg to flit in and out, getting the twins all wound up when their mother left.
One more day, she reminded herself. Only one more day away from my babies.
Holly wandered into the bathroom to brush her teeth, which she’d forgotten to do after breakfast. Her gaze fell on the whirlpool tub, and her memories of last night came rushing back. Not just what she and Chris had done in the tub. Not even what they’d done in the bed, although that qualified as one of those “just once in my life I want to” occasions she’d never forget. No, it was the moment they’d stood together in the kitchen, when she’d fallen in love with Chris, that she was thinking of now.
She stared at the mirror, but she wasn’t seeing herself, she was seeing Chris in her mind’s eye. So many different aspects of his character, but none more lovable than the “born to be a father” persona that came so naturally to him.
She wasn’t looking for a father for her sons. She could never fall in love with a man who wouldn’t be a good father, but that wasn’t why she loved Chris. She loved him for the gentle, caring way he had, for the tenderness not far beneath the surface. She loved him for his straightforward approach to sex, and how he made her believe physical perfection was highly overrated. She loved him for the protectiveness he displayed, not just to her and her sons, but toward his sister and brother—his love for them ran so deep, but she wasn’t sure he knew how deep it ran. She even loved him for his insecurities, for his self-doubt.
But most of all she loved Chris because he made her laugh. Despite the threat hanging over her head, despite her fear for herself and the twins, he made her laugh—she’d forgotten how much fun life could be. Nothing could ever be so bad that Chris couldn’t find some humor in it, and she loved that about him. Gallows humor, maybe, but humor nevertheless.
“Now all you have to do is make Chris fall in love with you,” she murmured to her reflection, “and you’ll be in high cotton.”
That was the problem in a nutshell. Holly had tried to make a man love her once and had failed spectacularly—she wasn’t going down that road ever again. She’d even done something of which she would forever be ashamed in her quest for her love to be returned. Never again would she marry a man who didn’t love her, heart and soul, unreservedly. No matter how much she loved him. No matter how tempted she might be.
“But if Chris grows to love you,” Holly whispered to herself, “then...”
He was attracted to her. Okay, more than attracted. She was the first person he’d made love to since Laura, and that said a lot about how much he wanted her for herself. The question was, did he want her permanently? With all the baggage she brought with her?
“Not that Ian and Jamie are baggage,” she corrected. “But we are a package deal.”
She wouldn’t use her sons, though. She wouldn’t hold them out as an inducement to Chris to replace the child he’d lost—Chris had to love her for herself alone.
But if he did...she and the twins could make him so happy. Ian and Jamie were already attached to Chris—they could easily grow to love him, just as she did. They could be a family here. So much love had gone into this house—Holly could feel it. Not just the love Laura had for Chris, wanting to make a happy home for him and their baby. But the love Chris had for Laura, too. All the safety features he’d built in, to make his wife and child as safe as he could when he wasn’t there.
Holly wouldn’t be taking anything away from Laura—a part of Chris would always love Laura, just as a part of Holly would always love Grant. Holly didn’t want to replace Laura in Chris’s heart, she wanted to build her own place there...if he wanted it, too.
Love wasn’t linear, it was exponential. And there was room in Holly’s heart for the man she’d once loved...and the man she loved now.
She just prayed Chris would come to feel the same way.
* * *
“Eleven years ago?” Trevor asked Chris. “All I can think of is Josie telling the social worker she didn’t want to see us anymore. I was a year out of college, just starting my career with the FBI. It was a knife to the gut, but Josie was adamant.”
Chris snapped his fingers. “That’s right. I’d forgotten exactly when that happened, but you’re right.”
“Is there anything else you needed?” Chris heard the exhaustion in Trevor’s voice and figured he’d been up all night with the latest Alphabet Killer murder, same as Annabel and Sam. He’d been tempted to do as Holly had suggested—ask Trevor point-blank why he’d abandoned him when they all went into foster care. But his brother had enough to deal with right now. “Nothing urgent,” Chris said. “Thanks for reminding me about Josie. Good luck on the case.”
“Same to you.”
“How’d you know I—”
Trevor cut him off. “I hadn’t seen you around for a few days, so I asked Annabel. If anyone knew what was going on with you, it’d be her. She mentioned she and Sam were helping you set a trap to catch a couple of attempted murderers in the act. I wish we were that fortunate—catching our serial killer in the act,” he added drily. “So good luck.”
“Thanks.” Chris disconnected, then sat there for a moment, mulling over what Trevor had said, carefully fitting one more puzzle piece in place. Then he saw it, the whole picture. And he could have kicked himself it had taken him this long.