Love Bats Last (The Heart of the Game) (30 page)

But as he drove down the hill toward the Center, the feeling gripping his chest told him that making the game wasn’t likely. In that moment, it wasn’t even important.

If anything happened to Jackie, he’d lose more than a batting title.

He’d lose the one woman he’d found to love.

He wasn’t sure which shocked him more; he’d never missed a game by choice and he’d sure never spent much time thinking about love.

Somehow it had stolen up on him.

Alex drove past the hospital and pulled up next to a green and white police car parked near the sea lion pens.
Park police
. A uniformed deputy was speaking with Gage. Alex could see from Gage’s stance that it wasn’t going well.

The deputy waved to Alex.

“Great game last week. You’ve got Garrett’s number.”

Alex nodded.

“I told Dr. Esmond here that Dr. Brandon might’ve just gone off somewhere.”

“She always tells me when she’s off-site—we split on-call,” Gage said.

“Well,” the deputy said, eyeing Gage, “maybe you’re just not as important as you think you are.” He turned to Alex. “We’ll check back later today, Mr. Tavonesi. Even six hours isn’t long enough to start a formal search, not without something to go on. I’m sure you understand.”

He didn’t. To Alex, six hours seemed like a lifetime.

“Did Dr. Esmond tell you the circumstances?”

Gage nodded.

“I think those facts are enough to start a search,” Alex insisted, trying to temper the impatience in his voice.

“Those aren’t what we’d call facts, Mr. Tavonesi. We can’t go running after hearsay. But we can put a bulletin out about her truck.” He eyed Gage, then Alex. “She’s not going to be a happy woman if the highway patrol pulls her over.”

The officer smiled, apparently pleased with his joke. “As I said, it’s nothing to be concerned about. No one’s going to do anything drastic because of a few dead seals. And nobody chases down scientists, at least not in my thirty years on the force.”

“I
am
concerned,” Alex said. He moved to stand between the deputy and the patrol car. “We’re talking radon here.
Radioactivity
. Possible illegal dumping. The people involved might know she’s onto something.”

The deputy was unmoved.

“They could be acting irrationally,” Alex said, running his hand through his hair, trying a different tack. “Her life could be in jeopardy—can’t you cut around protocol?”

The deputy stepped around Alex and into his patrol car. “We have our orders,” he said out the open window. “Like I said, we’ll put out a bulletin about the truck.”

The radio in the car barked out a message that sounded like gibberish.

“Copy,” the deputy answered into his hand-held mike. “Be there in ten.” He laid the microphone onto the seat beside him, grabbed his sunglasses from the dash and slid them on.

“Look, I understand that you’re worried, Mr. Tavonesi. But if I had a dollar for every guy concerned about a girlfriend who’s not where she’s supposed to be, I’d be a very rich man.” He tapped his fingers on the dash and tilted his head. “Don’t you have a pivotal game today?”

It wasn’t a pivotal game. Not for the team. But it was for Alex, a fact that the man smiling at him probably didn’t know. After all these years, it still irritated him when members of the public acted like they knew more than the players.

“You take care of your business”—Alex tried to keep the irritation out of his voice—“and I’ll do mine.”

The deputy smiled, but not a friendly one this time. Hell, no badge liked to have his authority challenged.

But Alex would challenge any man and any badge if it meant seeing Jackie safe.

Chapter Twenty-three

Jackie came to and squinted into the bright light bouncing off the ocean. It didn’t take her more than a few seconds to recognize the bunker tunnel and its position on the coast. This was her favorite place to climb. It was remote, challenging, and in several areas the cliffs dropped down to beautiful secluded beaches at low tide. Hardly anyone came here. The irony struck her: she was only about five miles from home as the crow flies.

To her amazement, she saw that she was roped into her climbing harness.

Her hands ached. The ropes slowed her circulation. Tape clamped over her mouth stung, and the bindings chafed her wrists and ankles.

She shook her head, tried to clear it. She remembered the man—Darron Bennett—pulling her from her truck. He’d tossed her over his shoulder with an ease that made her heart sink. When she’d bucked and tried to ram him in the head with her shoulder, he’d dumped her to the ground, pulled out the stun gun and shocked her with it again.

She wriggled her hands to see if she could reach her feet by arching back. All she managed was a rough fall to her side.

Frustrated, she lay there a moment, and the events of the past hours came into focus. Oddly, more than anything, she felt a driving desire to apologize to Alex. Though his response to her revelation had shaken her, she shouldn’t have doubted him. Skepticism was part of her nature; she couldn’t help it. But her skepticism had been ill placed. And though this was a hell of a time to admit it, in the deep place that she’d sworn to never again visit, that place beyond the force of will, beyond any ability to deny, she knew she loved him. Her heart had already laid out its cards, and rational thought and argument had proven very poor trump against its flush.

Footsteps echoed in the tunnel. She tried again to reach her feet and undo the ropes. As she struggled, a pair of boots came into view inches from her face. They were very expensive-looking boots.

“Getting some exercise?” The toying timbre of Bennett’s voice made her skin crawl.

He hauled her upright and propped her back against the bunker wall. He stroked her cheek and then sat back on his haunches. The hard look in his eyes spoiled what could’ve been a handsome face with its creepy stare. His scar now looked not only poorly stitched, but sinister.

He stood. She watched him pull something out of a bag. Climbing ropes.
Her
ropes.

“You’ve probably guessed that this isn’t about seals or even grapes.” He said it like he was reading a bedtime story. “You called too much attention to a project that has been running along sweetly.”

He looped one of her ropes over his hand.

“Money like ours doesn’t like being messed with.” He slowed his fingers to focus on her face. “Heroin’s the game you walked into, Doctor,” he said. “Volkov's little project at the vineyard is just a cover.”

Heroin
.
Volkov
. The revelations sank in.

She should’ve known. She’d looked into what Volkov had said about the dredging—there hadn’t been any dredging in the river, not in the previous two years. He’d been trying to pull her off course. Right now she was wishing she’d believed his misdirection.

Bennett leaned forward and ran his fingers along the rope that stretched the length of her body.

“Volkov’s crazy, you know. Got a thing about you. You got under his collar good when you started seeing that ballplayer. But I told him he’d just have to forget about you.”

He appeared to be enjoying telling his story, almost boasting. He clipped on a carabiner and grunted as he executed a knot with a deft move. His eyes narrowed.

“I took care of the rest of the samples you stashed at your house; they’re in good hands.”

He was definitely boasting, and nausea soaked through her. She was part of his twisted game.

She wasn’t sure if they knew about the samples she’d driven up to Davis. It was a small consolation, but a true one. The study could be finished, the results made public. These people could be stopped.

But every cell in her body was on alert to preserve her life, not her work. It was a peculiar feeling, like floating between two worlds, with each calling to her, but one screaming so loudly that it commandeered her every breath.

He traced his fingers along her collarbone. She tried to pull away, but only drove the wall harder against her already aching back.

“I followed you last night from your place. Thought you’d spotted me when you went down to the kayaks, but you seemed to have other things on your mind. I rather liked watching you.”

He kicked back onto his heels and watched her eyes. He seemed pleased by the reaction he saw in them.

“I’ll miss that part. I didn’t particularly like listening to you yak on your phone—who the hell cares about seals—but watching you undress? Yeah, that I liked.”

He grinned, and nausea roiled in Jackie’s belly.

“A strip show for me every night, gettin’ me off—what could be better than that?”

Jackie’s nausea took an instant back seat to fear.

He kneeled at her side and snapped a carabiner to her harness. She watched his every move, hoping for inspiration.

“When you ended next door to the Di Salvo place last night, you got too close. You see, wine barrels are a great place to store smack until we can move it. I nearly froze my ass off waiting for you to leave that damn castle.”

A steely look came into his eyes.

“While I waited, I decided that arranging a little accident would be the best thing. But have to do it on my own. Volkov's soft; he doesn’t like snuffing women. It’s a weakness of his.”

She recoiled at his words. He looked at his watch and made a clicking sound of disapproval.

“Too bad there’s no time for me to have a taste of what that ballplayer got.”

He didn’t smile, only stared into her eyes again. She hoped that her urge to vomit didn’t show.

She swallowed hard, concentrating on not letting revulsion and fear cloud her mind.

She’d seen sequences like this play out in movies, never believed them to be realistic. She’d always thought the victims could’ve done more to save themselves, to turn the tide, to escape. But hunched and roped and taped, she now understood the odds. And she didn’t like them.

There was scarce affect in Bennett’s voice, but Jackie knew he was enjoying himself. Something told her that as long as he enjoyed taunting her, got a thrill from her torment, he wouldn’t rush to his next step.

Right now, delay seemed like a very good thing.

She searched her memory for anything she knew about captors and captives and what gave the latter the best chance. Not much came to mind. Then she remembered that in the wild, some prey animals could entrance predators, confuse them and escape being eaten.

Sometimes they could. But only some animals.

And she’d heard stories of kidnapping victims wooing their captors and gaining release. She decided to try a gaze of interest, of engagement, to lure his energy, even though every bit of her screamed not to.

She looked up at him from under her lashes and held his gaze, saw it engage.

“Ah, so we’re going to play that game? Okay, I’ll play.”

He wrapped one hand around her jaw, squeezed her breast with the other. She recoiled.

And he laughed.

“Giving in already, Doctor? Too bad.”

She wanted to curse him, but the tape across her mouth kept the words unspoken.

He slid both hands down her body and loosened the waist belt of her harness, releasing the clips securing it to her legs. But that wasn’t right; climbers wanted the waist belt snug. It was... She stopped midthought.

Safer
.

But he wasn’t interested in safe.

He grabbed her by the harness and hauled her to her feet. He smiled again, the curve of his mouth just as much a scar as was the physical blemish that ran alongside it.

She wished she’d never seen that smile. If she lived through this, the memory of it would haunt her, she was sure.

“You see,” he said as he ran his hand between her thighs. “We could’ve had such fun.”

He used his hand to grab her bottom and then half hauled, half dragged her out of the bunker and toward the cliff. Resisting him was all she could think of, so she dropped her weight and fell to the ground.

“
Such
an effort,” he said. “You might as well enjoy these next few minutes. Just a little rope slip, a harness not quite secured—it’ll look like you were distracted.”

He tugged the harness loose and rewound the end of her rappelling rope into a shape she knew too well—she’d tied many a quick-release knot. It would fail as soon as her body weight bore down on it.

“Since you’re known as a lady of daredevil risks, no one will question what you were doing out here, climbing alone. That is, if anyone finds you. I myself have a bet on the sharks having a good dinner.”

He studied the tape covering her mouth, then leaned down and pulled a cloth from the bag. He used the string attached to it to fasten the cloth to the rope that ran along the length of her body.

With a flash move he ripped the tape from her face. She screamed with the pain. He winced and smiled at her at the same time. Before she could move, he gagged her with the cloth, stuffing it into her mouth so tight that her tongue started to numb and the stinging around her lips built to a frenzy. He stared at her lips and ran his fingers over his own. His eyes dilated, and Jackie recognized the signs of arousal. Just the thought of him being turned on made her feel sick.