The phone slipped from Kristen’s nerveless fingers. Nick caught it before it hit the pavement. He stared at the screen. She stared at him. His face was grim. Hers felt bloodless, nerveless, stiff. She thought she might be sick or cry again or, worst of all, fling herself against Nick’s broad chest and cling to him as the only thing in her world that appeared solid.
“Blocked call.” Nick sounded matter-of-fact.
Of course he did. This was his job. He dealt in potential danger or the real thing every day.
“Let’s get you inside.” He held his hand out to her as he had in the parking lot, a kind gesture of support.
She took it, holding on perhaps a little too tightly. “My mom—” That was all she managed through her constricted throat.
She sounded like a lost child and wanted to kick herself for not being stronger in this crisis.
“We don’t know that was your mother.” Nick paused and looked behind them.
Checking for someone lurking in the shadows between streetlights?
All was quiet save for a bass guitar thumping from inside the building to their right and the distant rumble of the elevated train a couple blocks away. Nothing moved but tree branches in a light breeze, but those movements created shadows, and Kristen wanted to race into the carriage house tucked behind the block of four apartments.
A light burned over the front door of the house and more light shone behind filmy curtains at the windows. Light spoke of welcome, shelter, rest. Kristen would love all those things if not for that scream echoing through her skull.
“I can’t imagine my mother screaming, but someone can be made to scream against their will.” She admitted the truth.
“They can under duress.” Still holding her hand, his fingers warm and strong, Nick led the way up the steps of the porch.
The minute their footfalls echoed on the boards, the front door opened to a rush of cooled air and a spill of lamplight. “Nick, you made it at last.”
The woman standing in the doorway was probably a decade older than Kristen’s twenty-five, and as pretty as her brother was handsome, with her long, dark hair in a ponytail, her deep brown eyes and sculptured cheekbones. She smiled with a warmth that put the summer night to shame. “Hi, I’m Gina. Come on in and let me feed you.”
“You don’t need to go to any trouble on my behalf.” Kristen doubted she could eat.
“No trouble.” She fixed her eyes on Nick. “Speaking of trouble, our big sister says you’re in trouble for not calling her to say you’re not coming to dinner after all.”
“I forgot.” Nick’s ears looked red. “Now may we come in before you assassinate my character in front of Kristen?”
Not an assassination to Kristen, just a confirmation. She knew all about jobs that made men unreliable for showing up to dinner. Her father had been that way all her life. Once she tried to get him home early. She was learning to cook and made him a special meal for his birthday. He promised to be home. He arrived long after she had placed everything in the refrigerator, washed the dishes and gone to bed. An emergency at work had been her father’s excuse, his apology accompanied by a gift certificate to her favorite store. Not even a gift.
Kristen felt an odd urge to ask Gina if her husband came home to dinner when he said he would, unlike her brother.
“Are you going to introduce me to your guest?” Gina asked.
“This is Kristen Lang.” Nick stepped back so Kristen could precede him into the house.
The door opened directly into a living room with lovely hardwood floors and big windows sheltered from view of buildings too close by draping greenery inside and out. An archway led into a small dining room and kitchen beyond, where a man was rounding the corner from a hallway, leaning on a cane, though he was probably the same age as Gina.
Nick’s brother-in-law, the former cop. Kristen guessed all she needed to know. Wounded on the job. Left for security analysis work.
She offered him a smile.
“I’m old-fashioned enough to ask if we can call you Kristen?” he asked, returning her smile.
Despite lines of pain on his face, he appeared as welcoming as his wife.
Tears pricked Kristen’s eyes for the show of kindness from these strangers. She swallowed twice before she could speak. “Please do.”
“I should have asked if it’s all right.” Nick rubbed his chin with his knuckles. “I just associate Lang with your mother.”
The knowledge shouldn’t have bothered her, but it did. Once more, her powerful mother overshadowed her.
Her powerful mother who may have been forced to scream. Her powerful father who hadn’t answered his phone when she’d called.
She should call him again. She now knew his number by heart, she had made sure of it once she had her phone in her hands again. She wanted to be able to call her father even if Nick or anyone else held her phone again.
“Let me show you to a room and then you can have something to eat, and rest.” Gina touched Kristen’s arm. “Do you have anything to wear other than that dress?”
Kristen shook her head. “I haven’t been home. I live in the western suburbs.”
“And there are now marshals there,” Nick added. “And at her mother’s house.”
Kristen startled, though she knew she should have figured this out. Law enforcement would be waiting to see if anyone tried to reach them.
“You’re taller than I am, but I can find you something that’ll work.”
In no time, Gina found sweatpants and a T-shirt and left Kristen to wash and change.
Self-conscious among these strangers, Kristen made herself more presentable, then moved to the end of the hallway and stood at the opening to the kitchen. Gina was setting the table. Her husband was already seated there with an iPad propped beside a mug in front of him. Nick was nowhere to be seen.
“Come in, Kristen,” Gina said without looking up. “I have lasagna heating and here’s a salad.”
Kristen wanted to say she wasn’t hungry. Her stomach was knotted like a pretzel. But she needed to eat. If she had to run, she should have fuel.
She moved toward the table. “Where’s Nick?”
“Securing the perimeter.” Sean glanced from his iPad. “It’ll make our tenants angry to have to use their key cards on the gate, but we need to keep you safe.”
“We have cameras all around the property,” Gina added. “This is mostly a safe neighborhood, but one never knows nowadays.” She pulled a roasting dish from the oven.
Despite her knotted stomach, Kristen’s mouth watered at the aroma of garlic and melted cheese.
“Tell Nick to get in here,” Gina told her husband.
Sean tapped the screen of his tablet. “He’s on the porch talking on the phone.”
“Phone?” Kristen pushed away from the table and hobbled to the door as fast as her feet allowed. She started to yank open the door, then wondered if Nick would stop talking if she did, so she leaned against the panel instead and tried to hear the conversation on the other side.
“Yes, of course I have her phone.” He sounded impatient. “No, I won’t let her—”
A passing motorcycle drowned his words.
“Let me know if anything comes in on the judge’s phone, of course.” The next remark was clear. “I’ll tell her tomorrow.”
Kristen yanked open the door. “You’ll tell me what tomorrow?”
Nick grimaced and slipped the phone into his pocket. “I’m hoping it’ll be a moot point tomorrow. Now let’s eat.”
“You don’t trust me?” Kristen persisted.
Nick said nothing.
“I’m useless to you if you don’t trust me.”
“It’s my job to be cautious.” Nick’s voice was soft, almost tender, his words as good as an answer confirming her suspicions.
Kristen bowed her head. “I’m a disappointment to my parents.”
The confession slipped out, something she would never have admitted to a stranger under normal circumstances.
“I doubt—”
“Stop.” Kristen held up a staying hand. “I don’t want platitudes about how you’re sure that’s not true.”
“Are you two coming before this food gets cold and the cheese dries to dust?” Gina called from the dining room.
Kristen slipped past Nick and headed for a meal she believed she didn’t want. But when she sat before the plate of lasagna, a crisp salad and crusty bread, she discovered she was hungry. While conversation flowed between Nick, his sister and brother-in-law, light banter over baseball scores and an anecdote about one of their nephews, Kristen kept silent, listened and ate. Then, halfway through the meal, she wondered if her mother was getting fed anything, and Kristen’s appetite fled. With care, she set her fork on the side of her plate and dropped her hands to her lap.
“Have enough?” Gina asked.
Kristen nodded.
“Then feel free to go to your room,” Gina said.
Everyone wished Kristen good-night. She stumbled down the hallway, readied herself for bed and slid between the sheets. She took the time to pray for Mom’s safety, then began to wonder how she would learn what the kidnappers wanted. How would she get her phone back from Nick? They had called her on it twice now. They might call her on it again. They wanted her.
Why? Why? Why?
She needed her client records. All of them, not just the ones she had been working on so they were on her computer. Along mundane lines, she needed clothes to wear that fit. She needed to be on her own and not watched every minute.
She needed sleep, but it eluded her beyond short intervals. She drifted off, then a memory, a dream, perhaps a sound from outside, jerked her awake to lie listening to the hiss of the cooled air through the vent overhead and a distant siren.
At last, with the waking of birds and increase of street noise, she gave up trying to sleep. She made herself as presentable as she could and slipped down the hall to the kitchen. Sean sat at the dining table, again with an iPad and cup of coffee in front of him. He smiled at her and indicated the coffee carafe beside him and mugs on the kitchen counter. Kristen grabbed a mug and started for the carafe. Sean swiped the screen of the tablet, but not before Kristen read the blazing headlines on the news app.
“Federal Judge Kidnapped”
“Daughter’s Involvement Suspected”
Nick saw Kristen sway as he entered the kitchen. In a bound, he grasped her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
“Okay? Of course I’m not okay.” She jabbed her finger toward Sean’s iPad and the glaring headline. “What’s that mean? How can I be a suspect in my own mother’s kidnapping?”
“I don’t know. No one bothered to tell me...anything...” He trailed off as his phone rang.
He pulled it from his pocket. Callahan. His boss didn’t wait for Nick to say hello before he began talking.
“If you haven’t seen the morning news, don’t turn it on. I don’t want her to see—”
“Too late, sir.” Realizing he still rested one hand on Kristen’s shoulder, Nick backed away. “What’s going on?”
“We don’t know. We had nothing to do with this.” Callahan sounded tired and frustrated, rather like Nick felt. “But whoever planted this with journalists is no petty criminal. We’re dealing with people with power.”
“Why would they want people to think I’m a suspect?” Kristen demanded, apparently able to hear Callahan through the phone.
“We don’t know,” Callahan answered. “But I think it’s all the more reason why she needs to be someplace safer than your sister’s house. These people have a plan they’re not letting us in on.”
“And you’re not going to leave me out of it when they do,” Kristen said, drowning out Callahan’s next words.
Nick held up his free hand and slipped into Sean’s home office, where he could close the door. “We can’t force her to go, sir.”
“We can go along with the suspect angle and lock her up.”
“You can only hold her for twenty-four hours unless you can arrest her, and there’s no cause for her to be under arrest.”
Callahan growled.
“Let’s stick with the current plan, sir. I have her phone. If anyone calls, I’ll give it to her to answer and monitor the call.”
“I’m counting on you not to fail, Sandoval.” Callahan was back to sounding weary.
Nick said goodbye and returned to the dining room to find Kristen seated at the table, her chin resting in her hands and a cup of untouched coffee before her. Her eyes, such a beautiful blue, appeared a little glassy, as though she stared into the distance beyond the greenery and brick wall outside the windows. Sean and his tablet were gone, but singing inside the master bathroom suggested Gina was awake and ready to join them.
“May I have some of this coffee?” Nick picked up the carafe to see if it held anything.
Kristen shrugged, then removed her elbows from the table and sat up. “My mother would be appalled to see me with my elbows on the table.”
“You’re not eating, so we’ll let it slip.” Nick offered her a smile.
She didn’t respond.
“But you’re about to eat,” Nick continued. “Gina’s awake, and her life is centered around feeding people.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I mean literally. She’s a professional chef.”
Kristen’s eyes flicked to the rather small kitchen, and one eyebrow arched.
“They like living in the city close to work, so this is the sacrifice she makes.”
“A gnat-sized kitchen.” Gina blew into the kitchen on a cloud of steam, her hair curling from the band holding it in a ponytail. “But I still make the best omelet you’ll ever eat. What do you want in it? And don’t tell me you’re not hungry.”
“I am,” Nick said.
“May I have my phone?” Kristen held out her hand. “I need to try my father again.”
Nick pulled her phone from his pocket, ready for the fight. “What’s his number. I’ll put it in for you.”
“I can’t make my own phone calls?” Kristen narrowed her eyes, intensifying their blue.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Because I’m a suspect?”
“Not to our knowledge, and we should know if you were since you’re in our custody.”
She flinched visibly at that word.
“Protection,” Nick corrected himself. “Someone fed that information to the media, and we don’t know who or why.”
“To make me less sympathetic.” She rose and began to pace between the front door and the dining room archway. “I’ve seen this with victims before. The other party tries to assassinate their character to make whatever happened to them appear less horrendous.”
“I’ve never even asked. Are you a lawyer too?”
“On the contrary. I’m a social worker, a victims’ advocate to be precise. I know what happens to those harmed by crimes and how too many others treat them. You know—the spouse who’s abused is accused of neglecting her husband or being a terrible mother. The college girl who’s assaulted has loose morals. My mother is kidnapped and saves me from the same fate, and I’m accused of being involved so I am a terrible person who doesn’t deserve to have anyone care about what happens to me if these men get to me.”
Nick gazed at her in awe. Despite her borrowed and ill-fitting clothes, her hair pulled up in a messy ponytail, she looked rather magnificent striding about his sister’s house. The longer she talked, the straighter her shoulders grew, emphasizing her graceful height. Her strides lengthened. Her eyes shone like Lake Michigan in full sunlight.
He had thought her pretty the day before. At that moment, to him, she was possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Which scared him more than any criminal ever had.
If Gina hadn’t entered the room at that moment carrying plates filled with omelets and fresh fruit, Nick might have run for the nearest hills, something not easy to find in the flat Midwest.
“Orange juice and fresh coffee coming up.” Gina set the plates on the table. “Eat. They’re avocado, bacon and cheese.”
“They look amazing.” Kristen slid onto her chair and picked up a fork.
“You’d better eat,” Nick told her. “Gina might force-feed you otherwise.”
“I’d better eat if I—” She stopped talking and speared a strawberry.
Nick waited for her to finish her sentence, while he dug into his own breakfast. She never did continue, but ate with mechanical precision like someone fueling a machine rather than enjoying every tasty bite.
Fueling a machine. A machine that might have to run at any moment.
“Don’t do it, Kristen,” Nick said.
“Don’t do what?” Her face was too innocent, too bland.
Nick frowned. “Don’t even think about running away.”
“I can’t. You won’t let me take my phone and then I won’t know where they took my mom.”
Too quick, too pat an answer.
She was up to something. Or she was thinking about doing something. He rubbed the back of his neck as though he truly possessed hairs there that could stand like a dog’s hackles. He needed to watch her every move. As much as possible, he wouldn’t allow her to be alone, and he wouldn’t let her phone out of his sight.
As though she sensed his distrust, Kristen rose, her plate in hand. “I’ll take your dishes too. Gina shouldn’t have to clean up as well as cook.”
“I never clean up,” Gina called from the kitchen.
Nick rose and entered the room with Kristen. His sister stood at the counter chopping fresh herbs. “The fallback of all working women—a slow cooker.” Gina flashed them a smile. “This should be ready by six o’clock. I’ll be home by ten.”
“Just tell me what else needs to be done,” Kristen said. “I’m not restaurant kitchen caliber, but I’m a pretty good cook anyway.”
The women began rattling off ingredients and instructions. Nick slid onto a stool at the breakfast bar and listened and watched. He wasn’t a bad chef himself, thanks to his mom and sister, but Kristen seemed to relax under Gina’s warmth and care, unlike how she was with him—distant and tense.
Gina left Kristen caramelizing onions and slipped into Sean’s office.
Nick rose. “What can I do to help?”
“Tuck those herbs under the skin of the chicken?” Kristen flicked a glance to the sliced chicken on a cutting board and then to where he had left their cells side by side on the bar.
He expected her to ask him something about her situation, but she turned back to the fragrant onions. “Don’t they have children?” Her voice was barely audible. “Or is it none of my business?”
“We’re a pretty open family, so I can tell you. Gina can’t have kids, so they’re waiting to adopt now that Sean’s business is doing well.”
“That’s wonderful. I mean about adopting.” She stirred the onions with too much vigor, sending a few pieces to sizzle on the stove top. “So you have two older sisters?”
“And brothers.” Nick wrinkled his nose and began to tuck the chopped herbs beneath the chicken skin, trying not to feel the rubbery texture of the raw meat. “I’m the baby.”
“Better than being the only.”
“Uh-huh. Do you want to trade jobs?”
She glanced at him. “What’s wrong?”
“I hate the feel of raw meat.”
“Seriously?” She laughed, a genuine ripple of humor straight from her lungs. “You didn’t flinch when you saw my bloody feet, but raw chicken makes you squeamish?”
“Yep. I fully admit it.”
And the weakness was worth it to hear that laugh. The sound warmed the overly air-conditioned room.
“Okay, we’ll trade.”
Nick washed his hands probably longer than necessary, then took over the sautéing. “How are your feet?”
“They’re improved, but I wish I had a good pair of flip-flops, something thick and soft.” She looked at her phone. “Any chance we can go to my house so I can get some clothes of my own?”
“Maybe someone can bring you some.” Nick turned off the flame and scraped the onions into a waiting bowl.
“The idea of a stranger going through my things doesn’t make me happy, but if it’s the only way...” She fell silent for a moment, glaring at him. “They already have, haven’t they?”
“There could have been clues.” He defended the agency’s actions.
“And you wonder why the media called me a suspect when you’re treating me like one?” She began to throw the chicken pieces into the slow cooker with more vigor than necessary.
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say.
She knew the action was necessary.
“I’ll get someone to bring you clothes. Do you want to make a list? I can email it.”
“Thank you. Let me finish putting this food together.” She elbowed him aside in the tiny galley kitchen, then proceeded to stir ingredients into the pot with an economy of movement that said she had performed such actions many times.
Nick retreated to his stool and texted Callahan about getting a female marshal to pick up clothes and whatever else Kristen wanted. Within a quarter hour, Kristen had made a list and Nick passed it along.
Then the day stretched before them with Sean working in his office, Gina heading off to the nearby restaurant where she worked and Kristen’s cell phone lying on the coffee table in the center of the living room where she and Nick retreated.
Her phone wasn’t silent. In truth, it rang or pinged with incoming texts so often she set it to silent. Her office wanted to know if she was coming into work. What appeared to be friends texted to see if she was all right and what was going on. To each, under Nick’s instruction, she responded that she couldn’t talk about the situation, but she was safe and well.
After texting this for perhaps the tenth time, she glanced at Nick, a crease between her smooth, dark gold eyebrows. “What if these men have access to the tower to triangulate where my phone is located?”
“It’s not likely they’d find exactly where you are. Lakeview is pretty densely populated. But Sean has this house under constant surveillance from outdoor cameras.” Nick hesitated then told her what he had learned from his own messages. “But because that is not an impossibility, you will have to go somewhere else tomorrow morning if we haven’t heard from the kidnappers.”
“And if we have?” Her gaze challenged him.
He shrugged. “You’ll still have to go somewhere else.”
She nodded and picked up a paperback novel from a stack on a side table. Nick read the news on his phone and tried not to fall asleep. At lunchtime, Sean emerged from his office to offer to make sandwiches. Kristen leaped up and took over the duty. Before they finished eating, a series of beeps rang from the office and Sean went to check on the alarm.
“We’re about to have company,” he announced upon his return to the dining room.
A moment later, one of the female marshals knocked on the door. She wheeled a suitcase. “Where’s your computer?” she asked without giving anyone a greeting.
“What do you need my computer for?” Kristen asked.
“It shouldn’t have been given back to you. We need to take it to our office, Kristen.” The deputy marshal, who Nick didn’t know, looked at Nick rather than Kristen. “We need to look for clues.”
“That information is private.” Kristen gripped the retractable handle of her suitcase so hard Nick was sure she would rip it out of its track. “I work on client files on that computer.”
“That’s what we need to look at,” the deputy marshal said.
Kristen was shaking her head before the woman finished her brief explanation. “No one looks at those files other than me without the permission of each of our clients or a warrant.”
“Then we’ll get a warrant.” The deputy marshal left with a none-too-gentle closing of the door.
Without a word, Kristen stalked into the guest room and shut the door behind her. Despite outside cameras, Nick watched the door as though she could slip away.
In a few minutes, she emerged wearing jeans and a T-shirt that fit her, along with thong sandals that probably felt better on her sore feet than flat slippers. Still not speaking, she went straight to her phone and checked for messages.
When she glanced up, her eyes were wet.
“What’s wrong?” Nick held out his hand, wanting the phone.
Instead, she gripped his fingers. “It’s from my father’s secretary. She can’t reach him either.”
Nick let her hold his hand. “Is that unusual?”
“My father had a cell phone all my life. It’s never far from his hand.”
“Where is he?” Nick tried to sound calm, as if interested only out of politeness, while his mind spun over the possibility that the kidnapping of Judge Lang and saying they really wanted Kristen was a ruse. Her father wouldn’t be the first spouse to try to get rid of a partner in a horrendous way.
“He’s in Switzerland,” Kristen said.
“Then he could be out of cell range?”
“In Zurich?” Kristen’s thumbs flew across her screen. “His secretary says he hasn’t been at his hotel for two days.”
“Do you want me to have someone look into whether or not he’s come back to the States?”
She lowered the phone. “You can do that?”
“I can’t, but I can get another agency to do it.”
He called Callahan. Within fifteen minutes, they knew that Stephen Lang had not returned to the US. As far as anyone knew, he was still in Switzerland and merely out of cell range. But a lack of contact for two days raised suspicions.
The way Kristen rotated from reading files on her computer, to pacing the house, or starting back to the coffee table every time her phone pinged, then away again suggested to Nick she was worried.
In the middle of the afternoon, he made coffee and raided Gina’s stash of cookies, then urged Kristen to sit and have a break. “Your feet must hurt.”
“A little.” She flopped onto a chair. “I see nothing significant in the files on my laptop. I should go to my office and look through files there. Not that I know how that will help. It would take weeks to eliminate anyone with a grudge or whatever is motivating this.”
As if on cue, Kristen’s cell phone rang. Both of them jumped and turned toward the device in its shiny red case.
Unknown Caller
Hand visibly shaking, Kristen reached for the phone.