Innocent Hostage (21 page)
“Questions? Questions? I’ll give you questions!” She struggled to get to her feet but Breck had trussed her up in the blanket from her bed and she found herself rolling forward into his arms instead of poking him in the chest and telling him what he could do with his rules.
“See? Weak as a kitten. You need a few hours rest.” Grinning, he kissed her chastely on the forehead and hurried Kit towards the door. “See you later!”
The door banged behind them.
Grrrrr
. Who the hell did he think he was?
Then she remembered the paint splashes on Breck’s wrists and the tired lines around his eyes. While she’d been lying sedated in hospital, he’d been working like a slave on her behalf. Fine, but she wanted to see for herself what condition the preschool was in and see how Stella was managing with the small space available until the builder had completed the repairs. Perhaps she could phone the builder and hurry him along.
Then she realized she had no idea who Breck had contracted to get the job done. Damn it all, he’d taken over so completely, he’d squeezed her out. For some stupid reason she felt like crying. “Remnants of concussion,” she told herself. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
Well, she’d promised Breck to find out about Angela, Tania’s friend or cousin or whatever she’d been. That was something useful she could do. She struggled to her feet and went to find her laptop.
Chapter Twenty-One
Breck’s cellphone warbled and vibrated. He scooped it up with one clean hand while the other kept wielding a paintbrush. “Marchant. Oh, hello Raker. Oh, no. Poor woman.” He rested the brush on the lid of the paint can.
Raker’s men had been unable to contact the elderly Miss Reynolds and had begun to question her neighbors. What they’d learned had given them cause to force an entry to the woman’s home where they’d found her body. She’d been dead for at least a week.
“What did the neighbors say, exactly?”
“That on the 6
th
she had a couple of visitors. The only person who ever came to see her was her grand-niece, but this time the niece brought someone with her. It sounded to the next door neighbors as if Albertine Reynolds objected to the newcomer because there were raised voices, then the visitors left abruptly.”
Albertine Reynolds had been bludgeoned to death. And she’d lain in her own congealed blood for a week. She would have been there longer if it weren’t for Breck’s identification of her numberplate on the getaway car outside the Kerr home.
“Was there a car in her garage?” he asked.
“Yeah. An old unregistered mini with no numberplates. Listen, Marchant, you do good work. Tony Hull contacted me. He told me you’re applying for the detective division. Hope you’ve got your application under way.”
Breck felt a glow in the pit of his stomach. Maybe he
would
make a halfway decent detective. Then a thought struck him. “Before you go, Raker, did you get a clear description of the grand-niece?”
“Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons I’m calling you. This grand-niece sounds awfully like your missing ex. Could there be a connection?”
Breck drew in a breath. “I was going to contact you about that. Look, I haven’t a clue what is going on with Tania, but she’s popping up everywhere. Did you read the memo I sent you?”
There was a rustle and a thump. “Got it. Hang on a minute.” After a short silence Raker muttered, “Shit! What’s with the woman? Just as well you ditched her way back.”
“Yeah,” Breck answered laconically. He’d have to come clean with Raker and Hull and give them a few more details about Tania. He took a deep breath. “Look, I need to tell you a few things about Tania. Should have told you before but…I could never prove anything. And in trying to protect our son, I made a huge mistake.”
“Huh? Look, I’ll see what Hull is doing and if it’s possible, we’ll all meet first thing in the morning. I’ll be in touch.”
Raker had sounded intrigued, and no wonder. As a cop, Breck should have known better than to hide anything from investigating officers. Talk about treading a thin line. But Tania had been his wife for more than three years and while they’d been together, although she’d given him hell, she’d been a good mother to Kit. He’d let her walk all over him for the first couple of years because he was unsure about the unwritten rules of marriage. With his background he’d had no yardstick to measure their marriage by. He wasn’t weak, he told himself, just ignorant.
It wasn’t until he saw how Abel and Jace interacted that he’d begun to have doubts about his own relationship.
Worst of all, he hadn’t known about the way she and Marty had treated Kit once she’d moved in with Marty. But he laid that squarely at his own door, not Tania’s. If he’d been more assertive and less unwilling to rock the boat, he doubted that Tania would have neglected Kit to such an extent. He’d made it easy for her.
That day when he’d discovered those papers in the laundry cupboard, he’d not known whether to believe her glib explanation or not. After all, who keeps documents belonging to someone else? By that stage of their marriage, he was unwilling to take anything she said at face value. She’d snatched them and said “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Breck. Pull yourself together. What do you
think
I’m doing with this stuff? When I bought the business, these were sent to me with all the other stuff.” She had purchased a small distribution business and the garage was permanently full of boxes of leaflets. Breck had had no way of disproving her words, but when she’d gone out “to meet some friends for a drink—nobody you know” he’d gone back to check on those papers.
They’d been moved, which he’d expected, but he hadn’t expected to find them by chance when he was putting his work clothes away. To his shock, he’d found them jammed at the back of his chest of drawers. Wondering why one drawer didn’t close properly, he pulled it out to investigate.
Then all sort of scenarios had zipped through his mind. Insurance? Was she setting him up to take a fall for something he didn’t yet know about? If so, the documents must be incriminating.
Once he’d read them carefully he’d boiled with fury. They were incriminating all right. The documents contained information that Tania had no right to—nor any other person who was not the original owner. They were a mix of unpaid bills, some amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and letters from well-known public figures containing startling disclosures. Breck had been rattled to see a note from Auckland’s Deputy Police Commissioner written on plain paper to a woman, obviously not his wife. The letter revealed emotions that Breck was sure the DPC would rather not have disclosed.
The only possible explanation was that his wife was a blackmailer.
But he had not been able to prove it. When she’d returned home he’d held out the papers and demanded an explanation. What he got was a wife who screamed vitriol, so he’d taken a deep breath and did what he should have done long ago. “Get out,” he’d said.
And she had, with alacrity, but she’d taken Kit with her. “I wouldn’t leave a cat with you,” she’d snarled. “You know damn well you don’t have a clue about bringing up kids. He’s way better off with me.”
And he’d been certain she was right so he’d kissed Kit goodbye and watched them leave.
It had been four months till she’d let him see Kit again.
****
Next morning Hull and Raker listened to Breck’s story but as Hull said, “It doesn’t alter anything apart from the fact that we want to get our hands on Tania Kerr even more than we did before. We’ll worry about the blackmail stuff when we find her.”
Raker asked, “How’s your boy holding up? He must be a bit shaken after his mother tried to drag him out of your vehicle like that.”
“Surprisingly well,” Breck answered. “He seems to have washed his hands of her since she attacked his favorite preschool teacher.”
“
Your
favorite preschool teacher too, I hear.” Hull wiggled his eyebrows and Breck grinned.
“Uh, huh.” There were no secrets among cops. They were the biggest gossips on the planet.
Fortunately Hull’s cell phone rang before he could delve any deeper into Breck’s life. Beck felt awkward discussing his relationship with Ingrid. It was so new and shiny and filled with hope that he almost didn’t dare go there.
“Great. Thanks for that. We’ll be there in a half-hour.” Hull flipped his phone closed. “The hospital has finally brought that bashed guy out of his induced coma. They said we can question him now, but they gave the usual provisos. Not too long. Don’t stress the patient, blah blah.”
Breck grinned. Hull was not full of the milk of human kindness when he was seeking information.
“You coming?” he asked Breck.
“Me? Uh…sure.”
And when they walked into the hospital room, several of Breck’s questions were answered. The guy in the hospital bed was almost bald and his thick neck and huge hands hinted at his chunkiness.
“Name?” Hull barked.
“Billy Kerr.” His hands twitched and he took a good hard grip on the bed sheet.
Breck pushed forward. “
You’re
Billy? I’ve been searching for you.”
“No kidding.”
Breck turned to Raker. “This is the guy who was at the Kerrs’ place last week. And I’m sure he was the guy who clobbered me in our underground carpark a while back.”
“Prove it.”
Breck smiled. “Got your coat all neatly tucked up in an evidence bag, buddy. And although I don’t like using my son, Kit got a better look at you than I did when you ambushed us.” He shrugged. “Seems to me, you’ve got no cause to be cocky.”
Billy Kerr sat back, the smug look wiped from his face. He looked from Raker to Hull and then back to Breck.
“Where’s Tania?” Raker asked.
“Bitch.” Billy’s chin tucked into his chest. His shoulders rose and fell as he inhaled shakily.
“Took you for a ride too, did she?” Breck said.
“You’d think after all I’ve done for her…” Billy trailed off then burst out, “The bitch bashed me on the head and left me to die.”
“
She
was the one who cold-cocked you?” Breck had long suspected Billy was Tania’s accomplice, but why had she tried to get rid of him? Billy was right. He could have died, left alone in the cold with a severe head wound. But since he hadn’t died, she’d left him swinging in the wind, because at the moment Billy was the main suspect for the school vandalism. Tania must have wanted to make sure she was well rid of him. Just another of her dupes.
But why had Tania tried to grab Kit? He opened his mouth to ask Billy, and then shut it again. He was here under sufferance. Hull and Raker were riding this pony.
Raker nudged him. “Go on. Spit it out.”
“Uh…Billy, what does Tania want with my son? She tried to snatch him tonight.”
Billy shrugged. “Must be running out of money.”
“Oh.” How stupid of him not to realize that Tania still regarded him as a cash cow. Even though she couldn’t ‘kidnap’ her own son since she still officially had custody, it wouldn’t stop her from holding Kit’s freedom over Breck.
Hull and Raker settled down to interrogate Billy and Breck stepped away from the bedside. He peered out of the grimy hospital window, listening as Raker tapped away on his iPad and Hull held out a recorder in front of Billy, garnering everything they could about the puzzle that was Tania Kerr. It seemed as though the bang on his head had released Billy from his thrall of loyalty to Tania.
“Where do you think she’ll be now?” Raker asked him.
Billy frowned. “Doubt she’ll be at my place, so I don’t have a clue.”
“And your address is?”
Billy told them. As Breck had surmised, it was close by Billy’s martial arts studio.
Hull nodded to Raker and left the room, flipping open his cell phone as he went. The hospital room fell silent, Hull’s murmur cut off by the door.
Billy looked from Raker’s face to Breck’s. “What happens to me now?”
Breck shrugged. He didn’t give a damn. “Not my problem.” He could still feel Kit’s trembling as they huddled together in the dark of the parking garage, tensing for the next blow. Billy Kerr could go to hell.
“Why did Tania contact my parents?” he asked, before he could stuff the words back into his mouth.
“Your
parents
?” Billy’s incredulous tone said it all. Another one of Tania’s little schemes that her cohort had no idea about.
“I’m more interested in why you went to the preschool center last night.” Hull had come back into the room.
Billy opened his mouth, and then shut it again.
Hull raised a supercilious eyebrow. “Suddenly you’ve gone silent. Why?”
“She hated that preschool teacher,” Billy burst out as if the words had been yanked out of him. “Really hated her. Don’t know why. And then she learned that Marchant and the woman were seeing each other.”
Breck gritted his teeth. “The woman is called Ingrid. And how could Tania have known? We didn’t exactly advertize it.”
Billy shrugged again. “She’s been watching you for ages. Knows all about you.”
“See? Weak as a kitten. You need a few hours rest.” Grinning, he kissed her chastely on the forehead and hurried Kit towards the door. “See you later!”
The door banged behind them.
Grrrrr
. Who the hell did he think he was?
Then she remembered the paint splashes on Breck’s wrists and the tired lines around his eyes. While she’d been lying sedated in hospital, he’d been working like a slave on her behalf. Fine, but she wanted to see for herself what condition the preschool was in and see how Stella was managing with the small space available until the builder had completed the repairs. Perhaps she could phone the builder and hurry him along.
Then she realized she had no idea who Breck had contracted to get the job done. Damn it all, he’d taken over so completely, he’d squeezed her out. For some stupid reason she felt like crying. “Remnants of concussion,” she told herself. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
Well, she’d promised Breck to find out about Angela, Tania’s friend or cousin or whatever she’d been. That was something useful she could do. She struggled to her feet and went to find her laptop.
Chapter Twenty-One
Breck’s cellphone warbled and vibrated. He scooped it up with one clean hand while the other kept wielding a paintbrush. “Marchant. Oh, hello Raker. Oh, no. Poor woman.” He rested the brush on the lid of the paint can.
Raker’s men had been unable to contact the elderly Miss Reynolds and had begun to question her neighbors. What they’d learned had given them cause to force an entry to the woman’s home where they’d found her body. She’d been dead for at least a week.
“What did the neighbors say, exactly?”
“That on the 6
th
she had a couple of visitors. The only person who ever came to see her was her grand-niece, but this time the niece brought someone with her. It sounded to the next door neighbors as if Albertine Reynolds objected to the newcomer because there were raised voices, then the visitors left abruptly.”
Albertine Reynolds had been bludgeoned to death. And she’d lain in her own congealed blood for a week. She would have been there longer if it weren’t for Breck’s identification of her numberplate on the getaway car outside the Kerr home.
“Was there a car in her garage?” he asked.
“Yeah. An old unregistered mini with no numberplates. Listen, Marchant, you do good work. Tony Hull contacted me. He told me you’re applying for the detective division. Hope you’ve got your application under way.”
Breck felt a glow in the pit of his stomach. Maybe he
would
make a halfway decent detective. Then a thought struck him. “Before you go, Raker, did you get a clear description of the grand-niece?”
“Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons I’m calling you. This grand-niece sounds awfully like your missing ex. Could there be a connection?”
Breck drew in a breath. “I was going to contact you about that. Look, I haven’t a clue what is going on with Tania, but she’s popping up everywhere. Did you read the memo I sent you?”
There was a rustle and a thump. “Got it. Hang on a minute.” After a short silence Raker muttered, “Shit! What’s with the woman? Just as well you ditched her way back.”
“Yeah,” Breck answered laconically. He’d have to come clean with Raker and Hull and give them a few more details about Tania. He took a deep breath. “Look, I need to tell you a few things about Tania. Should have told you before but…I could never prove anything. And in trying to protect our son, I made a huge mistake.”
“Huh? Look, I’ll see what Hull is doing and if it’s possible, we’ll all meet first thing in the morning. I’ll be in touch.”
Raker had sounded intrigued, and no wonder. As a cop, Breck should have known better than to hide anything from investigating officers. Talk about treading a thin line. But Tania had been his wife for more than three years and while they’d been together, although she’d given him hell, she’d been a good mother to Kit. He’d let her walk all over him for the first couple of years because he was unsure about the unwritten rules of marriage. With his background he’d had no yardstick to measure their marriage by. He wasn’t weak, he told himself, just ignorant.
It wasn’t until he saw how Abel and Jace interacted that he’d begun to have doubts about his own relationship.
Worst of all, he hadn’t known about the way she and Marty had treated Kit once she’d moved in with Marty. But he laid that squarely at his own door, not Tania’s. If he’d been more assertive and less unwilling to rock the boat, he doubted that Tania would have neglected Kit to such an extent. He’d made it easy for her.
That day when he’d discovered those papers in the laundry cupboard, he’d not known whether to believe her glib explanation or not. After all, who keeps documents belonging to someone else? By that stage of their marriage, he was unwilling to take anything she said at face value. She’d snatched them and said “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Breck. Pull yourself together. What do you
think
I’m doing with this stuff? When I bought the business, these were sent to me with all the other stuff.” She had purchased a small distribution business and the garage was permanently full of boxes of leaflets. Breck had had no way of disproving her words, but when she’d gone out “to meet some friends for a drink—nobody you know” he’d gone back to check on those papers.
They’d been moved, which he’d expected, but he hadn’t expected to find them by chance when he was putting his work clothes away. To his shock, he’d found them jammed at the back of his chest of drawers. Wondering why one drawer didn’t close properly, he pulled it out to investigate.
Then all sort of scenarios had zipped through his mind. Insurance? Was she setting him up to take a fall for something he didn’t yet know about? If so, the documents must be incriminating.
Once he’d read them carefully he’d boiled with fury. They were incriminating all right. The documents contained information that Tania had no right to—nor any other person who was not the original owner. They were a mix of unpaid bills, some amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and letters from well-known public figures containing startling disclosures. Breck had been rattled to see a note from Auckland’s Deputy Police Commissioner written on plain paper to a woman, obviously not his wife. The letter revealed emotions that Breck was sure the DPC would rather not have disclosed.
The only possible explanation was that his wife was a blackmailer.
But he had not been able to prove it. When she’d returned home he’d held out the papers and demanded an explanation. What he got was a wife who screamed vitriol, so he’d taken a deep breath and did what he should have done long ago. “Get out,” he’d said.
And she had, with alacrity, but she’d taken Kit with her. “I wouldn’t leave a cat with you,” she’d snarled. “You know damn well you don’t have a clue about bringing up kids. He’s way better off with me.”
And he’d been certain she was right so he’d kissed Kit goodbye and watched them leave.
It had been four months till she’d let him see Kit again.
****
Next morning Hull and Raker listened to Breck’s story but as Hull said, “It doesn’t alter anything apart from the fact that we want to get our hands on Tania Kerr even more than we did before. We’ll worry about the blackmail stuff when we find her.”
Raker asked, “How’s your boy holding up? He must be a bit shaken after his mother tried to drag him out of your vehicle like that.”
“Surprisingly well,” Breck answered. “He seems to have washed his hands of her since she attacked his favorite preschool teacher.”
“
Your
favorite preschool teacher too, I hear.” Hull wiggled his eyebrows and Breck grinned.
“Uh, huh.” There were no secrets among cops. They were the biggest gossips on the planet.
Fortunately Hull’s cell phone rang before he could delve any deeper into Breck’s life. Beck felt awkward discussing his relationship with Ingrid. It was so new and shiny and filled with hope that he almost didn’t dare go there.
“Great. Thanks for that. We’ll be there in a half-hour.” Hull flipped his phone closed. “The hospital has finally brought that bashed guy out of his induced coma. They said we can question him now, but they gave the usual provisos. Not too long. Don’t stress the patient, blah blah.”
Breck grinned. Hull was not full of the milk of human kindness when he was seeking information.
“You coming?” he asked Breck.
“Me? Uh…sure.”
And when they walked into the hospital room, several of Breck’s questions were answered. The guy in the hospital bed was almost bald and his thick neck and huge hands hinted at his chunkiness.
“Name?” Hull barked.
“Billy Kerr.” His hands twitched and he took a good hard grip on the bed sheet.
Breck pushed forward. “
You’re
Billy? I’ve been searching for you.”
“No kidding.”
Breck turned to Raker. “This is the guy who was at the Kerrs’ place last week. And I’m sure he was the guy who clobbered me in our underground carpark a while back.”
“Prove it.”
Breck smiled. “Got your coat all neatly tucked up in an evidence bag, buddy. And although I don’t like using my son, Kit got a better look at you than I did when you ambushed us.” He shrugged. “Seems to me, you’ve got no cause to be cocky.”
Billy Kerr sat back, the smug look wiped from his face. He looked from Raker to Hull and then back to Breck.
“Where’s Tania?” Raker asked.
“Bitch.” Billy’s chin tucked into his chest. His shoulders rose and fell as he inhaled shakily.
“Took you for a ride too, did she?” Breck said.
“You’d think after all I’ve done for her…” Billy trailed off then burst out, “The bitch bashed me on the head and left me to die.”
“
She
was the one who cold-cocked you?” Breck had long suspected Billy was Tania’s accomplice, but why had she tried to get rid of him? Billy was right. He could have died, left alone in the cold with a severe head wound. But since he hadn’t died, she’d left him swinging in the wind, because at the moment Billy was the main suspect for the school vandalism. Tania must have wanted to make sure she was well rid of him. Just another of her dupes.
But why had Tania tried to grab Kit? He opened his mouth to ask Billy, and then shut it again. He was here under sufferance. Hull and Raker were riding this pony.
Raker nudged him. “Go on. Spit it out.”
“Uh…Billy, what does Tania want with my son? She tried to snatch him tonight.”
Billy shrugged. “Must be running out of money.”
“Oh.” How stupid of him not to realize that Tania still regarded him as a cash cow. Even though she couldn’t ‘kidnap’ her own son since she still officially had custody, it wouldn’t stop her from holding Kit’s freedom over Breck.
Hull and Raker settled down to interrogate Billy and Breck stepped away from the bedside. He peered out of the grimy hospital window, listening as Raker tapped away on his iPad and Hull held out a recorder in front of Billy, garnering everything they could about the puzzle that was Tania Kerr. It seemed as though the bang on his head had released Billy from his thrall of loyalty to Tania.
“Where do you think she’ll be now?” Raker asked him.
Billy frowned. “Doubt she’ll be at my place, so I don’t have a clue.”
“And your address is?”
Billy told them. As Breck had surmised, it was close by Billy’s martial arts studio.
Hull nodded to Raker and left the room, flipping open his cell phone as he went. The hospital room fell silent, Hull’s murmur cut off by the door.
Billy looked from Raker’s face to Breck’s. “What happens to me now?”
Breck shrugged. He didn’t give a damn. “Not my problem.” He could still feel Kit’s trembling as they huddled together in the dark of the parking garage, tensing for the next blow. Billy Kerr could go to hell.
“Why did Tania contact my parents?” he asked, before he could stuff the words back into his mouth.
“Your
parents
?” Billy’s incredulous tone said it all. Another one of Tania’s little schemes that her cohort had no idea about.
“I’m more interested in why you went to the preschool center last night.” Hull had come back into the room.
Billy opened his mouth, and then shut it again.
Hull raised a supercilious eyebrow. “Suddenly you’ve gone silent. Why?”
“She hated that preschool teacher,” Billy burst out as if the words had been yanked out of him. “Really hated her. Don’t know why. And then she learned that Marchant and the woman were seeing each other.”
Breck gritted his teeth. “The woman is called Ingrid. And how could Tania have known? We didn’t exactly advertize it.”
Billy shrugged again. “She’s been watching you for ages. Knows all about you.”
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