French-curve swing gates forged from wrought iron blocked the entry to the home King was renting. The house had gotten its name from the big-horned bull silhouettes that decorated each grille. The setup was a show of wealth and exclusivity, and was not padlocked. When the county plow made it this far along the Lake Road, it cleared the driveways of citizens who paid extra for the service—but the gates had to remain unlocked. Nicole climbed from the Yukon, slid the latch, and opened the gate wide. She was the first to arrive.
The driveway was a straight shot for a hundred yards, then veered sharply west, toward the lake and through a copse of dense tree cover. The pines were frosted with snow, and drifts were piled up on either side of the drive. Shades of white and gray blended and added a layer of charcoal to an already darkening sky. The isolation wasn’t lost on Nicole, nor was the fact that people paid extra for that luxury with reason. From Gatling’s description of the man, it was a safe bet that King wasn’t a recluse. He’d come to Montana knowing that the need for secrecy was paramount. Big Horn was the perfect place for clandestine meetings where medical advancements were proofed and bartered for.
The paved drive made a final curve before it broke into a secluded plot of land where the house stood along with several outbuildings, including a three-car garage and barn. Behind the house were the pool, changing cabana, and sauna. Nicole idled at the bend and pulled her cell phone from her coat pocket. She dialed Lars.
“How far out?”
“Four minutes. Wait for me.”
He knew she just as often proceeded alone as waited for backup. The department was too thin to send personnel out in pairs. But they didn’t deal with murder every day, and they handled kidnapping even less. The case was fraught with obvious danger, but vulnerabilities as well. Nicole had to assume that two children were, if still alive, held prisoner in the house. Would King find it less threatening if Nicole arrived alone?
She thought so. She also thought it was entirely possible that King had summoned Mrs. Esparza the night before, when Beatrice became uncooperative. Good girls don’t do this. Don’t do what? Rebel? Disobey their parents? Nicole did not believe that Beatrice knew more than her mother about the great doctor’s cure. Had Alma Esparza realized that her position in the world could be about to skyrocket but teetered on the brink, depending on the cooperation of a reluctant fourteen-year-old girl?
Or was Nicole wrong about the mother? She wondered if the woman had made it as far as the home. Had she asked for her children? Had she connected with Beatrice, even for a few moments, and calmed her distraught daughter? Or had she found King and Beatrice and a situation she wasn’t able to handle? And was that when the calls to her husband began?
Had she feared, or had she fought?
For herself, or for her children?
Nicole had experience in hostage negotiation. Some training from when she was with the Denver PD.
She shifted the Yukon into gear, and the tires spun on the icy surface of the road, a sharp whine, before they gripped pavement and the vehicle jumped forward.
The house was huge. Seven bedrooms, each with its own bath. A cook’s kitchen and three family areas, including a game room and a formal dining room. The roof of the barn peaked behind the three-car garage. Pastures were contained by a white slatted fence and were empty of livestock. The barn probably held more toys than tools.
Nicole stopped where the driveway branched. With no tree cover, she was as exposed as a turkey in the gallows, but she climbed from the Yukon without hesitation.
Show no uncertainty, she reminded herself.
The guy who’d built the house had a thing for the number three. Three levels. The front facade had three pairs of French doors—two on the second level, one on the third—that opened onto expansive balconies. The roof was peaked thrice, once front and center, then once to either side, with those peaks being set back from the first. The home was elaborate, designed for show and entertaining, but with its stone masonry and leaded glass set in iron millwork, it was also a fortress.
Nicole glanced at each of the front-facing windows but saw no small faces peering out. The windows were not covered and reflected back, dark and empty. Stone stairs led to a double front entry. Her boots crunched in the snow as she advanced, but she never made it off the driveway. A set of French doors on the second floor opened, and the man from the photo with Beatrice stepped out. He wasn’t wearing a jacket. His shirt, red and tailored, was open at the throat, and the tails flapped in the wind. His hair was dark and disheveled. He had a drink in his hand and gestured with it.
“Is this a social call?” he asked. He was smiling, but there was no joy or amusement in his face. The man’s eyes were turbulent and bottomless.
She went with the truth. She kept her voice steady, strong, unrelenting. “No, not at all.” Her pace even, she trod closer to the house so that King had to adjust if he wanted to keep his eyes on her. He put his hands down on the railing and watched. “I’ve come for the girls, Dr. King.”
He watched her a moment longer, that smile like a bleeding wound, and then nodded.
“I wanted Enrique to come,” he said. “You’d think he’d come for his children, right? I thought he would.” And his voice was full of censure and rose and fell like the ringing of a bell. The Christmas lights, strung among boughs of holly from the veranda railing, twinkled first red, then green.
“He asked me to get them.”
“Really?” King was surprised. He thought about her words, then shook his head. “No, Enrique is a man first, a doctor second. Father doesn’t even make his top-five list.”
And King seemed to find that offensive.
“He didn’t come to you, did he?” he asked.
“Where are the girls?” Nicole returned.
“Enrique wouldn’t do that.” He shook his head, and that smile reappeared. “You almost had me. Hope sparked.” His face twisted at that. “I hate it, you know? Hope. Keeps us fighting even when there’s nothing left to believe in.”
“What do you believe, Dr. King?”
“That Enrique Esparza is a coward. That my daughter will die, and very soon. She will die never knowing a single day of normal.” His mouth opened, and Nicole suspected it was laughter that fell from it, but it was sharp and cutting and hurt her ears. “That’s not much, huh? A father should want more than normal for his only daughter, right? But I would die to give that to her.”
“Would you kill for it?”
Tears streamed from his eyes, and he nodded.
“It was easy. Too easy,” he said, but he gasped and his words were fragmented.
Nicole’s worry for the Esparza girls increased.
“Who did you kill, Dr. King?”
“Are you worried about Isla and Sofia?” he asked.
“Someone should worry about them,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Because Dr. Esparza doesn’t?”
“And that’s a shame. Perfect girls in every way. Healthy and smart, beautiful girls. Beatrice would have changed the world.”
Past tense.
“You know Beatrice is dead,” Nicole said.
“I do.”
“Did you kill her?”
“I loved her,” he said. “She gave up everything for my daughter.” His composure broke with a short, wrenching sob, and then he continued, “She wanted to help Violet as much as I did.”
“How did she die?” Nicole persisted.
“Loving the world and everyone in it.”
“And Violet?” The girl who would never make snow angels. The Gatlings had confirmed Etienne’s story.
“Hanging on.”
“But without Beatrice—”
“My Violet will die.” His hand shook, and he spilled some of the amber liquid from the glass. “It’s a no-win situation. Seems like it was that from the beginning.”
He turned and threw the glass, and it landed in the snow, far left of where Nicole stood. He hadn’t been aiming for her, but her hand twitched anyway, and it was with controlled thought that she kept her arms at her sides, her gun holstered.
Behind her, she heard the crunch of tires on snow, the sharp whine of rubber tread searching for traction, as a department Yukon turned the bend and came into view. Nicole didn’t turn but kept her eyes on King. She knew, though, the sound of the department vehicles, the feel of backup.
“Your cavalry,” he said. “It’s too late, you know.”
“We’re coming inside,” she told him. “For the girls.”
He looked down on her, his eyes for the first time deep, calm, reasonable. “They want to go home. I called, but Enrique wouldn’t come.”
“Mrs. Esparza came,” Nicole said, and took another step toward the front doors.
“Yes, but only for Beatrice.”
“She took Beatrice but not her youngest daughters?”
“Beatrice is a fighter. She’s a Joan of Arc. And she wouldn’t leave.”
The clouds seemed to part then, a moment of shining clarity came to King’s face, and he shifted so that he could look down on Nicole and connect with her gaze.
“I loved Beatrice. She was beautiful, heart and soul, and I used that. For Violet.”
“And when she refused to cooperate?” Nicole pressed. “What then?”
“I decided to take what I wanted. I’d been doing it all along; it wasn’t a big jump.”
“The Rohypnol.”
“Yes. You should have seen the look in her eyes. I had betrayed her. I had used her. And in that moment, she realized it.”
“What happened then?”
“She ran. Before I could get the sample. Not that it would have mattered. Enrique wasn’t selling to Magellan.”
“Who was the highest bidder?”
“Who cares? It wasn’t us.”
He swallowed and choked, a wet cough that caused his nose to run. “I loved her.”
“Beatrice?”
“Yes, but I killed her. She had what Violet needed and she wouldn’t give it to me. And so I held her in my arms and looked into her eyes, and I crushed her windpipe.”
With that, King reached behind his back and pulled a gun from his waistband. Nicole watched as time slowed. The tug on his pants as the barrel of the gun resisted, caught in his belt. The big hand contracting around the cold metal. The wide arc of King’s arm as he raised the pistol—from this distance she thought a Sig Sauer. It was a smooth motion, completely without hesitation. The ripple of muscle from neck to shoulder to arm, and then the squeeze of the trigger.
Yes, a Sig. It blew cleanly through the man’s skull, and he was down. Dead.
Nicole walked the twenty or so yards to the body, her arm hanging at her side, her gun clenched in her fist, drawn as he’d drawn his. Blood sprayed the snow and was beginning to spread in a large puddle beside his head. She pressed her fingers to his carotid artery, but it was purely routine. There were no signs of life.
She heard the crunch of snow under boots. Lars wore Sorels, ankle-high, laced and double-tied. Distinctive because everyone else wore department-issued Martens, so she didn’t need to look up.
“Dead,” she said.
“Was that a confession?”
Nicole stood and turned away from the body, the house, and stared beyond Lars’s inquiring face.
He hadn’t bothered with the driveway once he saw King wavering on the balcony and had parked the Yukon on the lawn, several yards behind Nicole. His coat was open, his cheeks already at a full flush with the cold. His breath plumed in front of him.
The front yard rolled into fenced pastures and beyond that a copse of trees. Camera-ready. It could have been a backdrop for a commercial featuring a rough cowboy and cologne. She followed the winding driveway with her gaze, into the trees, and picked up its thread on the other side. Her deputies were arriving in a caravan of SUVs with bar lights turning and the department seal emblazoned on the front doors.
“He killed Beatrice,” Nicole said.
“Are we sure?”
“No.” She shook her head, bit down on her back teeth. “He held her in his arms, looked into her eyes, and ‘crushed her windpipe.’”
“He said that?”
“Exactly that.”
She ordered the scene contained and left Lars to wait for the deputies, who were only a breath behind them. The front doors were not locked and opened onto a foyer with a sweeping staircase to the right and a living room to the left. Empty. Her feet echoed on the marble tile as she advanced, seeking the back of the house. And that was where she found them—Isla and Sofia and King’s own daughter, Violet, wheelchair bound and upright with the help of belts and a headrest. Someone had shoveled snow into the sun-room, and the girls were taking turns making snow angels while Violet watched, her eyes sleepy but, Nicole realized when the girl shifted slightly and hooked her gaze, stubbornly aware.
And then the back door opened and the cold air blew in, followed by a lanky teen armed with a shovelful of snow. He wore a down jacket, unzipped, and a blue cap over dark hair that was just long enough to get in his eyes. He’d already noticed her; his eyes flared and his mouth pinched. He dropped the shovel and demanded, “Who are you?”