Bridal Falls Ranch Ransom (17 page)

He was a civilian now. Having an open FBI case file in his possession could be considered a crime.

Clicking on the run of security video he’d memorized, he paused and captured the image of the phony maid outside Eve’s suite. A side profile was the best he could come up with. He hit Send and fired the freeze-frame off to the printer.

“J.P.” Mike strode into the room and sat down in the chair facing his desk. A frown pinched his forehead. He looked tired and irritable, like a single poke might set him off.

“If you’ve got something, buddy, you better lay it on me now. She’s running out of time.”

Mike’s comment left a sick uneasiness in the hollow of his heart.

“Three years ago, the suits in the bureau found a single fingerprint in the Shelly McGinnis case.”

“I know. I watched the forensics team collect it off of her body in the lab.”

“And I know it didn’t produce a hit in IAFIS back then, but I’d like you to run it again. Now.”

He waded all the way in. “The technician who lifted it indicated it was a small print. He also noted in the file that it could belong to a woman. I’ve got a woman posing as a maid to gain entry into Eve’s suite. If I’m right, we get an ID on her. If not, we keep working.”

Mike eyed him for a moment, opened his cell phone and contacted the bureau with his rush request. He hung up and sat back. “This is a stretch, Ryker.”

“Is it? I just verified that the ransom demand is the same in all three cases. It’s an insignificant amount of money for a family with a combined wealth in the multimillions. Eve’s earning the bulk of it through her company, EBBC.”

Bennett let go of a whistle from between his teeth. “I see your point.”

“Shelly McGinnis’s kidnapping was all about the money. An amount the kidnapper saw as significant. The next attempt was aimed at Thomas Avery, and Eve was tapped for the ransom, only the kidnapper wasn’t able to collect because a pipe bomb went off next to where Eve was standing, and there was a witness who called the cops.”

“That’s what happened to her face?”

“Yeah. You didn’t read that in the tabloid rag this morning, did you?” A wave of pride surged through him, making him smile as he thought about her courage under fire.

“Eve’s ransom request is for the same amount, linking the kidnapper to Shelly, and Thomas, and now Eve.”

Mike’s cell phone rang. “Yeah. Address?”

J.P. shoved a notepad and pen across to Mike and watched him scribble a name and address on the paper.

Damn, he’d seen that name somewhere before
.

Yanking the file out from under the keyboard, he pulled it open and scanned for the woman’s name, finding it buried in the interview section.

Mike slapped his phone shut and jumped to his feet. “I’m not even going to ask, Ryker,” he said, nodding to the FBI file on the desk. “But we caught a break. The print belongs to a Jacqueline Cordova. It was entered into the database via an employment background check last year. She works at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center and lives nearby. I’m dispatching tactical. Let’s go.”

“Cordova and McGinnis were enrolled in the same nursing program. The suits interviewed her the day after Shelly went missing.” J.P. snagged the phony maid’s picture out of the printer as he ran by and beat Mike to the elevator.

He hadn’t been able to finish theorizing over the most disturbing aspect of his thought train. The one smothering him with a sense of dread he couldn’t shake.

The kidnapper’s focus had evolved after Shelly’s murder. Their new mark was Eve. But it wasn’t about the ransom anymore. It was about something a pipe bomb in the middle of the desert had failed to do.

Kill Eve Brooks.

Chapter Seventeen

“She’s pretty out of it.”

Eve opened her right eye a crack, just enough to see the woman with the light on her head talking on a cell phone. She’d managed to fake her way out of a dosing in the last round of drug-laced water the woman had tried to pour down her throat by pretending to be unconscious.

“No, I didn’t give her too much! I’m not an idiot. I know my Valium. Okay. I’ll get started. She’ll be wide awake when you get here.” She hung up the cell phone.

“Jackass,” the woman grumbled as she stepped closer.

Eve slipped back into her sleep act, but almost cried out as her captor cut through the tape she’d used to secure her hands above her head.

Life-giving blood pulsed back into her fingers, tipped with fingernails she wanted to jab into the woman’s eyes, but she remained limp, waiting for the right moment to strike.

* * *

“J
acqueline
C
ordova
! FBI! Open the door!”

Mike Bennett gave the nod.

J.P. stood on the outskirts of the action and gritted his teeth. As a civilian, he wasn’t allowed to play a role in the takedown. If it weren’t for Mike Bennett, he’d be sitting in a bureau car a block away.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

A third brutal impact with the battering ram and Jacqueline Cordova’s front door caved on its hinges. The mass of wood and splinters slapped back into the wall of the entryway.

“Go! Go! Go!”

One after another, the agents stepped over the threshold and disappeared like ants into a sidewalk crack.

Frustration put J.P. in motion. He sprinted onto the front lawn and took cover behind a eucalyptus tree. Close enough to hear the shouts coming from inside, but the calls weren’t what he wanted to hear.

“Clear!”

“Jacobs?”

“Clear!”

“Young?”

“All clear, Bennett.”

“Matthews?”

“Clear.”

He buckled against the trunk of the tree and closed his eyes. Every cell in his body ached for her. He had to find her. Where in the hell had the kidnapper taken her? The possibilities in a city the size of L.A. were endless. They were running out of time.

“Ryker!” Mike yelled from just inside the door. “Get in here. I think we’ve got something.”

A spark of hope hissed through his veins. Pushing away from the tree, he jogged up the walk, taking the steps two at a time.

“One of my guys found a planning session on the wall in a back bedroom. Eve’s at the center.”

He pushed through the door and followed Mike down the hallway and through a bedroom door on the right, where a couple of the agents had congregated. They immediately parted when he stepped up to stare at the patchwork scraps of information pinned up with thumbtacks. He swallowed the tension that had him by the windpipe and stared at the eight-by-ten glossy of Eve.

Gritting his teeth, he reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out the picture of the phony maid taken by the surveillance camera at the hotel. He unfolded it and handed it to Mike.

“Have your boys see if they can find a photograph of Jacqueline Cordova in the house. Do a comparison.”

“Matthews, take a look.” The agent snagged the picture and left the room.

“You care about her, don’t you?” Mike asked from next to him.

“What gave it away?”

“The way you looked at her picture just now.”

J.P. grinned, ignoring Mike’s attempt to quantify the nature of their relationship.

Agent Matthews came back into the bedroom carrying a picture frame containing a photograph of Jacqueline Cordova in a nurse’s uniform, her name tag clearly visible. “Looks like her, Chief.”

Mike took the two photos and held them out. “J.P.?”

“The chin, the nose, it’s her. Cordova took Eve.” Turning his attention back around, he studied a blueprint tacked on the wall in front of him. It was marked up in some areas with a yellow highlighter.

Recognition pulled him closer to the line drawing. “I’ll be damned.”

“What is it?” Mike moved closer.

He traced his finger over the blueprint in search of identifying information and found a tiny set of letters along the bottom right edge.

A cold chill worked his muscles. “It’s the Omni, Mike.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” Pinpointing the executive elevator in the hotel lobby, he traced it up to Eve’s floor. “Her suite is here. The corridor has been highlighted. It’s the route the maid took after she went into the room and incapacitated Eve. I suspect she put her in the cleaning cart so she could get her out without being seen.”

With his finger he picked out the highlighted route. “She went to the service elevator, down to the basement and loaded Eve into some sort of vehicle from this area right here.” He pointed out a square room off the main corridor that was shaded in.

“Maybe not,” Mike said as he studied the drawing. “The service entrance is on the north side of that building. I had my agents check it out. This highlighted area is on the south side.”

Tension coursed through his body, twisting his nerves into knots. He stared at the blueprint, trying to make sense of what was right in front of him.

“If this is Cordova’s premeditated escape route from the hotel, and we have no reason to believe it isn’t, then there aren’t any indications that she ever left the hotel with Eve.”

“You’ve been all over the security footage. Did you ever see her leave?”

“No.” Alarm ticked through him. “Eve’s in the belly of the hotel, right under our feet.” He tapped the blueprint with his finger. “She never left. She’s right there. I’m going to get her.”

* * *

S
alvatore
F
erragamos?

Eve stared at them in the light someone had turned on in the small gray room. Her throat closed, locking the breath in her lungs as she studied the expensive shoes paired up in front of her.

In increments she paced her gaze all the way up to the man wearing them until she met his cruel stare.

“Did you miss me while you were banging around in the wilds of Idaho?” Thomas Avery asked without taking his eyes off her.

A wave of nausea surged in her stomach. She fought it back with several gulps of oxygen and glanced around the room for anything she could use as a weapon, but came up empty.

“You SOB!”

“I’m sorry it had to come to this, Eve. If you’d have died on the side of the highway that night like you were supposed to, none of this would have been necessary. I’d be sitting on the pile of cash I’ve embezzled from your company and soaking up the sun on a beach in Brazil.”

“You bastard! You planted the pipe bomb that destroyed my face.” But it hadn’t destroyed her.

“I hired the anarchist who did, and who planted the other pipe bombs to make it look like a random act of violence. But instead, you lived and took off to that damn ranch in Idaho, where I couldn’t touch you. Even the phone calls I made to you as the kidnapper didn’t get you back here. But threaten your company, and bam, you’re here.”

Disbelief hitched to her brain as she stared at him. “What now?” Fear climbed over her nerves. “You collect the ransom and disappear, climb back underneath whatever rock you slithered out from?”

He knelt beside her. “I kill you. Leave you to rot down here until someone discovers your body and the cops conclude you were murdered by your kidnapper. Our legally binding employment contract with its gaping loophole in regards to your untimely death will be put permanently in place, and I’ll control what’s left of the company without your once-beautiful face. I’ll declare bankruptcy in a year or two, and walk away.” He reached out to stroke his knuckle down her left cheek.

She dodged his touch, pushed back and spit on his hand.

“Bitch!” He wiped it across his pant leg and backhanded her across the cheek before she could react.

Resolve burned through her as she glared at him without flinching.

J.P. had taught her she had courage. Now she knew it was true because she felt it surge in her veins, giving her the strength to stay alive any way she could. Strength to fight the monster she’d once thought she loved. She knew better now. She’d experienced real love. The love of a man she knew would come, but she had to hold on. Had to keep Thomas on the defensive, bide her time.

“There are no loopholes, Thomas. My lawyers were thorough, the best money can buy.”

“Stupid little rich girl. My cat’s got more claws than you. You failed to include an exit strategy in the event of your death. My lawyers are already preparing to exploit the legalities.”

Eve glanced away at the sound of the door and watched it swing open, catching a glimpse of the corridor beyond the solid metal barrier of her prison. Pipes and conduit, the hiss and grind of machinery. She could be anywhere a building existed.

The door slammed shut and she stared at a young woman who stared back, minus the light on her head. The maid who’d entered her suite when she’d answered her knock, then cracked her on the back of the neck with a champagne bottle. But she’d fought back, evidenced by the scrape across the woman’s right cheek, until she’d been overpowered and hit with the lamp then had a stinky cloth slammed against her nose and mouth so hard, it split
her lip.

“Eve, this is Jackie. My sister.”

A scintilla of recognition zipped across her mind. She chased it, trying to run down exactly where she’d seen the woman before. It hit her all at once. A cry raised in her throat.

“I know you. You and Shelly—”

“Amazing,” Thomas mocked. “The world is such a small place.”

“You were Shelly’s friend from nursing school. She brought you home with her over Christmas break one year.”

“That’s right.” She stepped forward, shoved her hand into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a gun.

Fear twisted along Eve’s spine, raising the hair on the back of her neck.

Jackie casually handed the pistol to Thomas.

“Thanks, sis. Did your friend file off the serial number?”

“Just like you asked.”

Eve stared up at the two of them, noting their similar features, the coloring they shared. Thomas had claimed he was an only child.

Waves of terror crashed inside her as she put the scenario together. “You two were behind her kidnapping.”

“Have brain, will function.” Thomas snorted. He stared down at her and shook his head. “Poor Shelly. Nice girl. Too nice. Let her guard down. She was dead ten minutes after we put her in the trunk.”

Rage exploded inside her. She lashed out, clawed her way across the floor, aiming for Thomas, oblivious to everything around her except the need to hammer her fists into him for killing Shelly.

Pop!

A single shot bit into the floor next to her, sending chips of concrete flying. It ricocheted into the wall with a thud.

Eve froze.

“The next one’s straight at you.”

She rocked back onto her butt, feeling her fight wane. “How’d you kill her?”

“Accident. I choked her for too long. By the time we got her back to the flophouse and opened the trunk, she was dead. We made the ransom call anyway, got the hell out of there and dumped her the next morning at her gate.”

Tears burned the back of Eve’s lids. Tears for Shelly. Tears for the time she’d spent blaming J.P. and his team for getting her killed. Tears for the open wound the kidnapping had left on her and her parents.

* * *

J.P.
held up his balled
fist and signaled a stop. “You hear that, Mike?”

“Copy. Could have been a gunshot. Came from the left side of the corridor.”

J.P. turned on the miniflashlight in his hand and pointed it at the detailed schematic Dan had given them of the sealed-off section of the hotel’s basement, set to be renovated in the coming month. Uneasiness furrowed his insides as he studied the map. He wanted to charge down the hallway, guns blazing, and take what was his.

“There are two rooms on the left. One is maintenance storage, the other an antiquated heating and AC control room.”

Caution steeled his nerves and dialed his focus down the long narrow corridor. He killed the light and stowed the map.

“Let’s move.” He didn’t wait for Mike, not this time. This time he was going to get to Eve before it was too late.

* * *

T
homas raised the pistol
, his eyes bright in the overhead fluorescent as he took aim, pointing the barrel at her chest where she sat on the floor.

Eve stared, gauging his actions in milliseconds, waiting for her opportunity to strike. No matter what, she planned to live to tell J.P. he wasn’t responsible for Shelly’s death. Even if it might be with her dying breath.

Thomas reached up and brushed the side of his hand across his forehead.

Jerking to the left, she raised her leg and jammed her booted foot into his kneecap. The pistol discharged. A bullet whizzed past her ear.

Thomas stumbled back and dropped the gun. It clattered to the ground.

Jackie dove for it at the same time she did.

In a tangle of hands and arms, the weapon skidded free. Thomas scooped it up.

Wham!
The metal door kicked back and slapped against the wall.

Thomas spun around, gun raised.

Pop! Pop!

J.P. double-tapped Avery and watched him drop. He stepped through the doorway and kicked the pistol away, into the corner of the room.

“Stay on the ground!” Mike trained his weapon on Jacqueline Cordova and reached for the handcuffs on his belt. Two more members of the tactical team appeared in the doorway.

J.P. holstered the Glock and collapsed on the floor next to Eve. Reaching out, he gathered her in his arms. She shivered as he smoothed back the hair from her face and kissed her forehead. He breathed her in, pulling her tight against him.

“Are you hurt?”

“Not anymore. I knew you would come,” she whispered against his neck.

“I never should have left you alone in the suite. I should have stayed to fight.”

Pushing back, she stared up at him, her eyes shimmering with tears ready to spill over. “Thomas killed Shelly. He admitted he choked her. She was dead and gone before you ever hit their location, and I owe you an apology.” Her voice raised in volume as she looked at the other agents in the room.