Hush (37 page)

He watched the Acura drive across the road, past the TV trucks—no problem, thank God; they didn't appear to recognize her—and up to the front gate, watched it stop while Riley got checked off the list by the guard, then watched her drive on in and park. He watched Riley get out and walk inside the visitors' center.

The only part of the short journey where she'd been at physical risk was from the point where she'd let him out to the moment she'd driven through the prison gates. And he'd been close enough that entire time to intervene if needed.

Now, though, she was out of sight. Some activity in the shopping center, but no one observing him particularly as far as he could tell, Finn concluded after giving his surroundings a quick but thorough survey. Turning away from the coffee-­and-doughnut shop—it was called Auntie Sue's—he walked to the dark blue van with Hall's Plumbing emblazoned in bold white letters on the sides.

Bax must have seen him coming, because the back door swung open as he approached.

“Yo,” Finn said by way of greeting, and climbed in. He glanced around and, as Bax closed the door behind him, took
in the array of computer monitors, all with various views from the prison's front gate to different points inside. “These all live feeds?”

“Yep.” Bax sat back down in the chair he'd vacated to get the door.

Finn took the other vacant chair and settled in to watch Riley walk through a metal detector, then hand over her purse to be searched.

T
he smell was what hit Riley first. As she walked into the hospital ward, she was assaulted by a pungent mix of aromas that included urine, vomit, and some kind of strong disinfectant, like Lysol. The walls were cement block, painted pale gray. The floor was concrete, also gray. Big, barred windows let in plenty of light. Men lay in metal-framed hospital beds beneath thin blue blankets. Two orderlies or male nurses, she didn't know which, in blue scrubs tended to patients. A guard sat in a plastic chair against the far wall. The big guard who had escorted her from the visitors' center was just ahead of her as he led her through an aisle between rows of beds. He was as tall as Finn but paunchy, with a sallow, acne-scarred face. His name was Kevin Brown, and he was a sergeant: it said so on his plastic name tag.

Riley was so tense her jaw ached, and that's when she realized she was clenching it. She had to consciously force herself to relax.

“Prett-eee lad-eee,” one of the patients crooned upon catching sight of her.

“Hey, baby, do me, do me, do me, do me, do me.”

“Come on over
here
.”

Wolf whistle.

The guards paid no attention to the catcalls that followed her. Riley ignored them, too. She'd already been told that George had been put in a private room for his own safety, and when Brown stopped in front of a closed door with a guard sitting in another plastic chair beside it, Riley assumed this was that room.

She was right.

“Knock on the door when you're ready to come out, Mrs. Cowan,” Brown said, as the other guard stood up and pushed open the door for her. That's when she understood that while she was in the room with George the door would be locked from the outside.

Of course. It was a prison, after all.

Riley nodded, and walked into the room. It was small and, like the ward itself, mostly gray. The shade had been pulled down over the single window blocking any view of the outside, but still there was plenty of light, both natural and from the overhead fixture, which was on. The smell was not as pronounced in here, possibly because this small room was cooler than the ward.

As the door closed behind her, her gaze immediately went to the man in the bed. The last time she'd seen George, she'd been in a courtroom sitting with Margaret, Emma, and Jeff as George, having just been sentenced to seventy-five years in prison, was
handcuffed and led away. Margaret and Emma had been in tears, and Jeff had been white and sick with distress over his father's fate. The pillar that the other three leaned on, Riley had been angry at George then for causing them all so much pain, and she had expected to be even more angry now.

But she didn't feel angry.

The man in the bed barely resembled George. The burly bully with the perpetual tan and the carefully kept mane of black hair was gone. In his place was a thin, pale old man with age spots and dry lips and gray hair cut so short he might as well have been bald. He wore a blue hospital gown with some kind of print on it. An IV was in his arm, he was hooked up to a monitor that stood next to the IV stand beside the bed and beeped intermittently, and his right hand was bandaged. A blue blanket covered him to midchest.

“Hello, George,” Riley greeted him.

George said, “They told me you were coming to see me. Why you? Where's Margaret? What do you want?”

His voice was thinner than before, and it had a rasp. But the attitude: that was the George she knew.

“Margaret couldn't come. She's fine, by the way, thanks for asking.” Riley advanced to stand beside the bed. She could feel her old dislike for him bubbling to the surface. George looked up at her, his expression unwelcoming. His eyes were small and blue. Faded now. But still cold.

He was a shell of his former self. She did not feel sorry for him.

“You've heard about Jeff.” Her tone didn't make it a question, because she was sure he had. What she wanted to know
was, did he feel any guilt? Any remorse? Any awareness that Jeff would be alive right now if it wasn't for him?

Her anger was back, building up inside like a rising tide.

“They told me.” If he felt any emotion at all, he wasn't showing it. “So if that's what you're here about, you can just go away.”

Riley's eyes narrowed. She'd thought to break it to him gently, but . . .
mean old man.
Jeff's words. Remembering, Riley felt a shiver of grief pierce the anger.

“Emma's been kidnapped.” She laid it on the line, flatly, and watched his face. It seemed to freeze. His eyes were suddenly riveted to hers. “The kidnappers told me I should ask you where the money is. If you don't tell me, they're going to kill her.”

For a moment he simply stared at her. Then his mouth opened and began to work, like a fish out of water gulping air. His left hand—the uninjured one—fisted in the sheet.

“Eh-eh-Emma,” he stuttered. He licked his lips. His head moved from side to side, a negative gesture. His body twitched. His eyes filled with horror. “Not Emma. Oh, no, not Emma. Not like Jeff.”

“Where's the money? For Emma's sake, you need to tell me.”

He shook his head. “I can't. I can't.”

He almost sounded pitiful. Riley almost felt sorry for him. But see, the thing was, she
knew
he knew where the money was. She
knew
that he could tell her about Emma's painting, and the little black book, and how to access those accounts.

She
knew
he could save Emma if he wanted to.

Sweet Emma was the one person she'd always thought George truly loved.

Her anger turned to rage. She leaned over the bed, leaned
closer to him, her eyes boring into his. “I know it isn't all lost like you've been saying. You can save Emma, George. All you have to do is tell me where the money is.”

He made a sound of distress.

“It's gone,” he said, and she knew then that she would despise him forever. “All gone.” He covered his eyes with his hand.

“It's not,” Riley hissed at him, and stopped, because there was no point. He was exactly what he had always been, and she didn't need his help anyway.

George's hand dropped away from his eyes. He looked at her, and she saw he had tears brimming. “I made a deal with the devil. He came to me, and I did it. But I didn't know.
I didn't know
. If I could take it back I would, but I can't.”

That made her frown at him. “George—”

“I can't,” he repeated, and began to sob. “Jeff didn't kill himself.
They
killed him. I tried to fix this and they killed him. And now they've got Emma. And there's nothing I can do.”

George shut his eyes, drew a deep, shuddering breath.

Riley stared at him as her heart began to pound. Maybe he would tell her
this
, and maybe it would be enough to help find Emma. Her hand found his, closed around the cold dry fingers urgently. “Who are
they
? Do you know? If you do, tell me.
They've got Emma
.”

George opened his eyes. But instead of looking at her, he looked at the door. “Guard!” he yelled. “We're through.”

“George, if you know something, you have to tell me.”

He looked at her then. His eyes were full of tears.

“Go away,” he said, then looked at the door again and screamed, “Guard!”

“Jeff deserved better than you,” Riley said with quiet ferociousness as the door opened behind her. “Emma and Margaret do, too.”

“Get her out of here,” George cried to the guard who now stood in the open doorway. “We're through here! We're through.”

Riley didn't even say good-bye. Hating him so much she felt sick with it, she turned and walked out the door.

“
WELL, HELL,
there goes that.” As Riley walked out of George's room, Finn leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his neck in frustration. In the tight confines of the van, that meant his head was almost touching the opposite wall. Ordinarily he would never have said it aloud, but he'd gotten caught up in Riley's emotion, in the naked pain in her voice and her face, as he'd watched her trying to get the information they needed out of George. He'd damned well
felt
some of that emotion, which said way more than he wanted to think about at the moment about the state of his own emotions where Riley was concerned. One more topic to be pursued later; for now he had to concentrate on getting the job he'd been put on the ground to do done. Which meant, clearly, that he was going to have to go down a new path, because George either really didn't know or wasn't giving up the whereabouts of the money.

Riley had seemed to think he knew. Or else she was a hell of an actress, putting it all out there as she fought with Emma's father for a means of saving Emma.

When he got her back, they were going to have a talk. About trust, and all that.

“Now what do we do?” Bax was watching Riley's return progress through the prison, too.

“Your people got any fresh leads on Emma?” Finn asked. Riley's visit to George having been a bust, Finn wanted to get as much of a handle on the Emma situation as he could before Riley rejoined him, upset about having failed. If the girl couldn't be found before the kidnappers called Riley, maybe the best thing to do would be to fake it, lie and claim George had told them the whereabouts of the money. They could try to arrange an ambush.

Bax said, “The van was spotted on I-45 going south, was the last update I got. People are scouring surveillance video at every exit on down that highway, but it's a slow process.”

“Yeah,” Finn said, having received the same information when he'd called in to his sources last night. On one of the monitors he watched Riley walk into the back entrance of the visitors' center, then watched the guard who'd been assigned to escort her, who was walking behind her and had held the door open for her, check out her ass as she passed him. His body tensed slightly in reflexive reaction: he didn't like what he was seeing, which was another bad sign about the state of his involvement with Riley.

“If they're not going to kill Emma, if they're really intending to trade her for the money, they won't have taken her too far,” Bax offered. “The problem is, there's so much activity typically going on in an urban area that it takes a long time to single out anything that might be significant.”

“Yeah,” Finn said again. His people were also checking NSA satellite footage of the area, but following a white van on a dark night amidst a sea of other vehicles in pictures taken miles above
the earth was apparently proving problematic. He hoped they were having better luck tracking down the source of those emails Riley had pointed out to him, but so far he hadn't heard anything to indicate it.

“Here she comes.” Bax nodded at the monitor, which showed Riley walking out of the visitors' center into the parking lot. As Finn watched, his hands closed around the arms of his chair preparatory to levering himself upright. Time to get himself to Auntie Sue's.

“Okay. Get somebody analyzing the footage we just captured. A couple of the things George said—‘I made a deal with the devil and I tried to fix this' are what jumped out at me—might be worth pursuing. Check visitor logs, email logs, phone logs, everything that came to or went out from George at that prison.” Finn watched Riley get into the car. He had a problem—Eagle and the powers that be wanted him to find the money. If Riley wasn't the ticket to finding the money, then they would expect him to abandon her and pursue other leads until that money was found. He had the same problem regarding Emma—his mandate wasn't to recover the teen.

Finn discovered that he wasn't on board with abandoning either of them.

Shit
.

“You'd better get a move on. She's coming through the gate.”

“Yeah.” Finn stood up—well, as much as he could, considering that he was quite a bit taller than the van was high. “Head back for Houston. I'll give you a call—”

He broke off, his eyes on the monitor. Having made it through the gate, the gray Acura had been rolling merrily along,
until it braked beside one of the news crews she was supposed to drive right past.

“She stopped,” Bax said unnecessarily, his tone as dumbfounded as Finn felt. “What's she doing?”