The Baby's Bodyguard (14 page)

“Just like I thought. She’s lying. And you can’t prove anything she says. I helped girls who needed jobs get to the United States, to work in the tourist industry. If there really was an adoption scam, then she’s the one who ran it.”

In his earpiece, Nolan said, “I’ve inserted a looped piece of tape of Viktoria looking around the room, but when we go back to the questions, there will be a blip. You’ll have to distract him.”

Ethan leaned forward. “We’re recording Ms. Arsov now. Everything she says is being saved.” He slammed his hands on the table and the picture on the screen jumped. “So, Ms. Arsov, Cantori here, he says he got the women legitimate travel documents, but what you’re saying is that they traveled here under false pretenses—fraudulent circumstances, in other words.”

She nodded again. “Yes. He told them they would be able to make money working here to support their babies. When they got here, he held them captive until they had their babies, then he sold the babies to adoptive parents.”

Before Cantori could interrupt again, Ethan said,
“Ms. Arsov, what happened to the women after they gave birth?”

She swallowed hard. “After they signed the papers for the adoption, he didn’t need them anymore. So, the girls … he sold them, too.”

He turned off the screen. “I’ve heard enough. I think she can be very damaging to you on the stand, Cantori. She’s very well spoken.”

“She’s a liar.” Cantori crossed his arms, staring at the screen, as if he could reach into it and throttle Viktoria Arsov.

“Oh, I don’t think she’s lying. I do think you’ll be willing to pay to get her off my hands. To keep her from telling the truth to the authorities.” Ethan walked to the other side of Cantori and leaned close to his ear. “You forget just how much I know about you,
Tony.”

“All you want is the money.” The disbelief in Cantori’s voice was enough to make Ethan question whether this was going to work or not.

“I want the money and I want the truth. You knew me as a man named Sam Prentiss. Correct?”

Cantori shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Were you or were you not going to sell those girls to me two years ago in an operation the FBI called Operation Safe Harbor?”

The criminal looked at Tyler in the doorway. Ethan crossed to the door and closed it, giving Tyler his most reassuring look. From the look on Tyler’s face, he wasn’t buying it.

As Ethan crossed back to Cantori, he unbuttoned his shirt. “See? No wire. It’s just you and me in this room.
Tell me the truth. There was a leak in the operation and you found out I was undercover.”

“Yeah, there was a leak. I don’t know what the operation was called, but your partner Bridges told me all about you. He was running me as Boyd Macintosh. I was his confidential informant. Well, sort of.” Cantori smiled, and it chilled Ethan’s blood. This man truly had no conscience.

“What else did Bridges tell you?”

The smile never wavered. “He told me where to find your baby boy at Mother’s Morning Out. And Bridges built the bomb, but it was my idea to get rid of your wife to get rid of you. And it worked.”

Ethan stood and buttoned his shirt, one deliberate button at a time. “Did you get that, Nolan?”

Nolan said, the glee evident in his voice, “Every word, every nuance, every facial expression.”

Cantori looked confused. “What? Who’s Nolan?”

“My video tech, the one who played that video of Viktoria for you, is watching through hidden cameras. He recorded every word you said.”

Tony Cantori lunged for Ethan, and in the split second it took him to cross the room, Ethan had his weapon drawn and cocked. “Please. I’m looking for an excuse.”

Ethan backed him up, one careful step at a time until the trafficker sat down heavily in the chair. Ethan locked Cantori’s wrists to the arms of the chair with plastic restraints. “You’re about to start a new life, Cantori.”

The door swung open.

Ethan’s former partner, Booth Bridges, stood in the doorway. He held Kelsey in a headlock, and had his own service weapon tucked under her chin.

K
elsey’s pulse slammed in her throat. She knew Bridges had killed before and wouldn’t hesitate to kill again to protect what he’d built.

Yet, her fear wasn’t for her. Her heart went out to Ethan. She looked at his face, expecting shock and pain. And for just a second, she saw it. Every emotion that he must’ve felt losing his wife, grieving her, raced across his face in a time-lapsed slide show. She couldn’t hear what was being said in the earpiece, but she prayed that Nolan had gotten to Janie and she was safe.

Ethan’s eyes left hers and slowly raised to meet Bridges’s.

He smiled.

“I guess you think you won, Booth.” He let go of his weapon, letting it dangle from his thumb as he held his arms out and stooped to the floor to put it down. She jerked a breath in as Bridges eased up on the pressure under her chin.

As Ethan stood, still with the same peaceful expression on his face, Bridges once again jabbed the gun farther into the soft skin under Kelsey’s chin.

He shouted at Ethan, “Why are you smiling?”

Ethan just smiled some more. “Because I’ve won and you don’t even know it yet.”

“What are you talking about?” Bridges was physically upset, his muscles jerking as he tried to maintain control over her. He didn’t have to worry. She wasn’t going anywhere. She couldn’t risk it.

From behind Ethan, Cantori screamed, “Just shoot him, Bridges.”

Booth Bridges edged closer, his face twitching. “What do you know, Clark?”

“Pull the trigger, you moron!” Cantori shouted.

The look on Bridges’s face was pure, unadulterated hate as he slowly turned the gun from her to Ethan.

The shot took them all by surprise.

To Kelsey, the moment happened almost in slow motion. Bridges’s head snapped back.

She dropped to the floor. Bridges fell beside her.

Cantori was screeching from his position in the library. No one moved to stop him.

U.S. Marshal Jason Reeves stepped out of the pantry, a serious expression on his face. Into his mic, he said to the Crisis Response Team, who would’ve heard the gunshot and would be responding, “We’re clear inside.”

Tyler had been knocked out by Bridges. He slowly sat up from the position where he’d fallen by the staircase. He groaned and gingerly tested the back of his head for a cut.

Ethan lifted Kelsey from the floor, cradling her in his arms. “Hey, Kels—you okay?”

“I think so.” She looked up as Gracie stormed down the stairs toward Tyler.

“Oh, babe. I’m so sorry. We couldn’t check on you, not without blowing the whole thing.” Gracie threw herself at Tyler, who closed his arms around her.

“I’m fine.” He winced. “Ow. I think.”

An angry cry sounded from upstairs, but just as quickly, Nolan called down. “It’s okay, I’ve got her. Just a momentary blip with Tickle Me Elmo.”

Kelsey laughed, full and long, letting her head fall against Ethan’s chest.

He sighed against her hair. “We’ve got some angles to finish up, like Cantori in there, but all in all, I think it’s over.”

“What about the girls? If they haven’t been sold, we can still save them.”

Ethan whipped his head up at Kelsey’s words. He’d been unable to save the girls two years ago, but he had a new chance to finish what he’d started, to give those young women a chance at a real new start.

“Cantori!” He lifted Kelsey to her feet and strode back into the library as the local cops came in the front door. “Where are the girls?”

Tony Cantori didn’t speak, just maintained the smug look he’d worn since Ethan came back into the room.

“Where are the girls being held, Cantori?” Ethan leaned forward and got into Cantori’s face. “We will find them. And I will testify that you hid their location from me. If you cooperate it will go better for you.”

Cantori gave Ethan a look reminiscent of rolling eyes. “It doesn’t matter whether I cooperate or not. I’m
going to jail. And it doesn’t matter what you do to me now because I can’t help you. Bridges called me two days ago and told me he was moving the whole operation.”

“What?” Ethan took a step back.

“I don’t have any idea where they are. You just killed the only person who does.” Cantori laughed. “It’s pretty ironic, isn’t it?”

Ethan stalked out of the room, slamming his fingers through his hair in frustration.

Kelsey met him at the stairs. “What’s going on?”

He shook his head.
Later.
“Where’s Janie?”

“In her crib. I just got her to sleep. Now tell me what’s going on.”

The place was crawling with cops. People. He was about to go stir-crazy. He needed his boat, the wide-open water, where it was him against the ocean. And win or lose, his life was the only one on the line.

He couldn’t take this. Couldn’t take Kelsey looking at him with that look on her face. “We’ve lost the girls. Bridges moved them two days ago when he decided I might get too close.”

“Cantori doesn’t know where they are?” She followed him out the back door onto the terrace.

“We’ll give Gracie a shot at him, but I don’t think he knows. He’s gloating like crazy that we killed Bridges and now we can’t get to them.” He looked out, down the long backyard, past the terrace, past the pool and pool house to the bay where his boat sat at the end of the pier.

But he’d run away once. For two years he’d run from
the pain and the responsibility and left Bridges to finish the job. And look how that had turned out. He wasn’t narcissistic enough to believe he was the only man for the job, but he knew himself well enough to know he’d never be able to look in the mirror if he didn’t finish this now.

He slowly turned to face Kelsey. “Where’s the car Bridges drove in? Maybe there’s something in there we can use.”

“Nolan has his ear out for the baby in the room next door, so she’ll be fine. Let’s take the golf cart and drive out to the main street. If he walked in, it should be parked somewhere along there.”

She was right. The car was parked about five hundred yards down Bay Street, tucked into an indentation in the woods. Ethan parked the golf cart and walked to it, dry grass crunching under his boots.

“Technically we should let an evidence team process the car.” Ethan battled with himself over whether to even open the door. But if there were something in there that could help him find the girls and he didn’t look …

A car whizzed by on the street. Kelsey opened the door on her side. The backseat was filled with fast-food bags and take-out coffee cups. “Ew.”

“It’s about four and a half hours from Jacksonville to Sea Breeze. Maybe we can find the room where he stayed while he was here.” Ethan looked at the car, his hands on his hips.

“If he stayed in one. This is disgusting, but I guess
we can sift through all that garbage to find out where he went. It’s like an evidence map all on its own.”

“Or we could just look on the GPS.” Ethan’s eyes were on the small dash-mounted machine. He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed. “Nolan, can you figure out a GPS?”

Nolan bit off a response.

“Okay, stupid question. Next stupid question. How do I get it out of the car?”

Kelsey watched Ethan get more and more involved in the chase for information. She knew that suggesting they find the young women was the right thing, but he was almost obsessed with it, as if he could make up for the past by accomplishing this one thing. She just hoped he wouldn’t be disappointed.

Sometimes things don’t work out the way you plan. And in that case, she’d learned, you have to go on and accept things the way they are, not the way you hope they will be.

But in this case they were talking about human lives. Would the girls figure out they could escape?
Could
they even escape? She had no idea what kind of living conditions they were in or if they were guarded or locked in. All she could do was pray while the real experts did everything they could to find the girls.

Ethan had dispatched a cop to guard the car until the FBI could send a team to pick it up to be processed at their big lab in Quantico. He was currently hovering over Nolan, watching as the computer guru downloaded the information from the GPS.

If this didn’t work, she didn’t know what they would do. She heard a faint noise from the bedroom next door and stepped closer to listen to see if Janie’s nap was over already.

Nolan let out a triumphant yell as he finally got the right connection and data poured onto the screen. Ethan was right back over his shoulder. Nolan turned around. “You know if I find something, I’ll let you know.”

Ethan backed away, hands up. “Okay. We’re just in a little bit of a time crunch here, but no worries.”

“I’m going to do a data search. If he’s been to any place more than twice, it will pop up. We’ll exclude restaurants and coffee shops. It’ll still leave a lot of places, but …” Three names popped up on the list.

“Wow. Looks like we’ve got something.” Kelsey could hear the suppressed excitement in Nolan’s voice. “He must not’ve had this GPS very long.”

Ethan looked at the screen. “Check them out.”

“Okay, running checks on these properties now. If there’s anything on them, we’ll see—okay. There’s one house, one business, and this one looks like an apartment building. It’s in red here. Let me click and see …”

He hummed to himself for a second or two. “Oh. This could be something, Ethan. The apartment building is scheduled for demolition, but crews aren’t set to begin work until the first of next month.”

Ethan had his hand on his phone already. “We need to get units out there to check it out.” He closed his eyes. “Dear God, please let this be it.”

An hour later, while they waited for word from the Jacksonville Police Department, they gathered again around Tyler’s dining room table. The master of the bed-and-breakfast sat at the end of the table with an ice pack on the back of his head. “Remind me again how this guy got through our security?”

Nolan shrugged and stuffed a chocolate chip cookie in his mouth. “It’s a big property. We had to reassign some assets to make sure we had everything covered in here. And even then we had some blind spots. I knew that if he got through one of the holes, there were enough of us in position to take care of him.”

“Thanks for telling me that.” Tyler scowled at Nolan.

Ethan walked into the room with Janie in his arms. “It could’ve been bad. It definitely could’ve been worse than it was.”

“But it wasn’t. We’re all okay.” Kelsey reminded him. She couldn’t eat. Not yet. Not until they heard that the girls were safe. Ethan was smiling, but the tension in his shoulders told her he hadn’t heard anything.

“Almost all okay,” Tyler muttered, then looked up at Janie. “Janie, do you want a cookie?”

He curled his finger at Ethan to get him to bring the baby over. So far Tyler’d had no luck getting her to come to him. But he kept trying.

“Cookie!” She lunged forward, nearly plunging to the floor until Tyler dropped his ice pack and snagged her from midair.

“Huh. Wonders never cease.” Ethan nudged his
brother in the shoulder. His phone rang. He went completely still.

Kelsey stood, walking over to him, just to let him know she was there. He’d faced so much alone. Not because other people weren’t willing to stand with him, but because he’d pushed them away.

She wasn’t going to let him push her away.

“Ethan Clark.” He listened. “Yes. Okay, I appreciate you calling to let us know.” He was quiet again. “Thank you, sir.”

He hung up the phone and stared at it.

“What?” Nolan wasn’t waiting any longer. He’d apparently gotten every bit as invested in the outcome of this case as the rest of them. “What happened?”

Ethan looked from each one to the next, then his face broke into the most beautiful smile. “They got them.”

He lifted Kelsey and swung her around, shouting. “They got to them in time.”

“Sweet!” Nolan fist-punched the air and grabbed another cookie. “I’m going to take a nap.”

Gracie laughed as she picked up the ice pack her husband dropped again as he danced around the room with Janie. “We all need a nap. Except Tyler. He can’t go to sleep with that concussion.”

“Drat.” He stopped dancing. “But that’s okay. Janie and I will eat cookies, won’t we, precious?”

“Cookie!” Janie beamed at her new friend.

Ethan grabbed Kelsey’s face and kissed her. She widened her eyes to look at his face and caught a glimpse at the rest of the room as they all stared.

Ethan let her go, glanced around, grinned, then kissed her again. “We did good.”

She smiled. “Yes, we did. Although I can’t imagine all the investigating the FBI will have to do to figure out what happened with all those adoptions.”

Ethan shook his head, but he smiled again. “But those girls aren’t going to be trapped in that life. And that, my girl, is a win.”

His happiness was infectious. She was happy, so happy, that he had finally closed the case he had started two and a half years ago, but she knew things weren’t over yet.

Ethan’s phone beeped in his hand. He looked at her and swallowed hard, the room going quiet around them. “It’s the field office in Mobile. They’re the ones who’ve been guarding Charlie.”

He stepped out of the room to talk on the phone, his body a straight arrow of tension. He’d been waiting for this moment.

Her heart ached for him, for having to come to grips with missing two years of his son’s life.

And it broke for the adoptive parents. It was little comfort that they had been scammed by some of the best in the business.

Ethan walked back into the room, his face white. “They’ve released Charlie and his family from protective custody. The parents want him to meet me.” His eyebrows drew together, his throat working. “Tomorrow at ten.”

She gripped his hand, held it tight in hers.

A half smile tipped the corner of his mouth. “Do
you think your experience at handling awkward family situations might come in handy?”

“It sure couldn’t hurt. I’ll be happy to go with you.” In a way, he was right. She was used to dealing with tense and difficult family situations.

Ethan’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.