Nanny 911 (7 page)

Miranda Murdock was a baffling conundrum he wanted to figure out.

But analyzing that fascination was a distraction he didn’t need right now.

The clock is ticking.
The text he’d received while watching Fiona open up her gifts this morning had been perfectly clear.

“The only way an enemy could get under my skin
is
to threaten my daughter.” Quinn took his eyes off the distraction in the room and paced off the walls of books surrounding them. “The question is why? Who did I step on? What offense did I commit? I paid the money he wanted.”

“Into a Swiss account we’re working on tracing,” David reported. “Thus far, we’ve dead-ended at a dummy corporation called United Lithographers of Southern Europe.”

“U LOSE?” Miranda’s eyes went dark again as she pieced together the acronym that was a mocking message in itself. “That’s cold.”

David’s expression was almost a sneer as he glanced down at her. “We’re still investigating.”

“Have you found out where the text messages are coming from?”

The follow-up question didn’t improve David’s mood. “Disposable cell phones. A different one each time. Impossible to trace.”

“Apparently, I’ve really ticked someone off.” Quinn didn’t need bickering children in the room right now, each trying to prove he or she was the better security expert. “I spent today updating that old patent of mine, which is still practically worthless on the market, and I sent it to the generic email account specified. Now I have to run a simulation to prove that it works by noon tomorrow. I’ve got a couple of techs in the GSS lab working to trace it in the meantime.” He sank onto a black leather sofa, then shot to his feet again. He wasn’t used to being a man without answers. He didn’t like it. “What is it I have to ‘make right’ by the start of the New Year?”

“That could be a long list,” Michael suggested. Add guilt to the list of problems Quinn needed to fix. He’d taken his friend from his new wife and baby, and teenage son, on their first Christmas together as a family. But Michael hadn’t complained. “You don’t become as rich as you are without someone else being jealous of what you have. A competitor might think he got the short end of a business deal. You fired an employee who feels he or she didn’t deserve it. Someone thinks you took credit for an invention he or she worked on.”

“I didn’t,” Quinn argued. “I came from nothing. I worked hard and used my brains to earn every last penny I have.”

Michael shrugged. “This perp we’re looking for doesn’t have to think logically, the way you do, Quinn. He may be fueled by emotions and misconceptions. What matters is that, in his mind—or hers—you’ve done him wrong.”

“So this guy could just be some lunatic?” Nobody in the room argued the possibility. Quinn raked his fingers through his hair. “Ah, hell.”

“Could it be something personal?” David asked.

Quinn stopped at the mantel over the empty fireplace and studied the collection of family pictures there. Growing up, he and his mother had had so little. Now he had so much. But none of it mattered. Only one thing mattered. “I have no personal life beyond Fiona.”

“What about Valeska?”

Quinn’s gaze snapped across the room to David’s dark eyes at the mention of his late wife. “Val worked her way up through my company. She earned her vice presidency before I ever married her. If somebody resents that…”

David averted his gaze for a moment, knowing he’d hit a hot button. But Quinn hadn’t hired the former military man because he shied away from a potential confrontation. The GSS security chief crossed the study to meet him at the fireplace. “What about Valeska’s father? Vasily Gordeeva? He spent a lot of years in that political prison. Supposedly, the U.S. was supposed to be a safe place for his family. Does he blame you for Valeska’s murder?”

“Three years after the fact?” Tilting his head to the ceiling, Quinn vented his frustration on a sigh before answering. “The Rich Girl Killer murdered my wife in the backyard of our own house that day—leaving my infant daughter in the stroller right beside her. And this bastard thinks I need to pay a higher price than that?”

Miranda’s soft gasp reminded him that not everyone knew the story as well as he did. She turned away when he tried to meet her stricken stare and apologize for his bluntness. But he could flush the anger and grief from his voice. That was a skill he’d learned long ago, back with the bullies in the Shoemaker Trailer Court. “I’ve never even met my father-in-law. Val grew up here in the States without him. Even when I did business in St. Feodor, she never went there. It wasn’t safe for her to return to the country. How could Vasily hold me responsible for her murder if the two of them never had a relationship? And now the plant in St. Feodor is closed. Other than a few investors there—who made a tidy profit through GSS, I might add—I have no ties.”

He was surprisingly relieved to see Miranda face him again. “Your father-in-law is in prison?”

“In the Eastern European country of Lukinburg.” Quinn scratched his fingers through his hair and moved back toward his desk. “He’s a political dissident, accused of financing a failed rebellion there. I don’t know much more of the story than that. For their own protection, he severed his relationship to Valeska and her mother, and they emigrated to the U.S. She never talked about him.”

“That sounds like heavy stuff.”

“We’re talking about
my
enemies here, Miranda. Not Vasily Gordeeva’s. This enemy is right here at home.”

“With all due respect, sir, we don’t know where your enemy is.”

Why was she arguing this? “This isn’t about politics in a foreign country. This is about greed or payback or both.” Quinn stopped and turned right in front of her. “I’m guessing I’ll receive another task to complete tomorrow—something every day until the end of the year. Let’s try to get some answers sooner rather than later, shall we?”

She propped her hands at her hips and tilted her eyes up to his. “Well, I think you’re asking the wrong question.”

He opened his mouth to reply to the provocative taunt, but for once in his life, the right words wouldn’t come to him. He had to move away before he could speak again. “Michael, isn’t there some chain of command you teach your people to follow?”

“I also teach them to think on their feet.” Not a yes man in the room tonight. “What is it, Randy?”

Her cheeks heated with color and her expression animated at her captain’s encouragement to share her opinion. “Why drug the guards? Why not kill them outright? They didn’t hesitate to kill those men at the plant overseas. If you’re going to take the risk of them being able to identify you, why give them the chance to wake up and point a finger?”

Sound reasoning. Hell, why hadn’t he thought of that? More irritatingly, Quinn wondered why he hadn’t expected that from her. Why couldn’t he get a read on Miranda Murdock? She was antagonistic yet insecure. She was a physical woman, yet she also showed a keen intellect.

Michael, fortunately, wasn’t wasting any time of the puzzle of Miranda Murdock. “So whoever served them that coffee is either someone they know and trust, or it was done by someone they never saw at all.”

David thundered back across the room. “If you’re suggesting that one of my men is behind this—”

“Check them out,” Quinn ordered.

“—after I’ve personally and thoroughly screened every last one of them.”

Damn it, this was
his
company,
his
family that was being threatened. He paid Damiani a lot of money to follow his commands. “Screen them again.”

Michael was a little more diplomatic. “It’d narrow down our list of suspects. Your men were drugged outside the gate because the perp couldn’t get inside. Security’s still good here.”

No wonder he was one of KCPD’s top negotiators. A deep breath heaved through David’s barrel chest and his burst of defensive temper dissipated. “But if they can figure out how to get to them out there, it’s only a matter of time before they figure out how to get past my men and the protocols here. I’d better not have a mole on my team.”

“Let’s change up the protocols,” Quinn suggested, thankful that someone in the room could keep his head. “I want your best men on this, David. And find out who the hell drugged those guards.”

“Daddy?” A soft voice from the hallway turned all four adults toward the open door. Fiona hugged her doll against her chest, her blue eyes wide as they sought out Quinn’s. “Why you angwy?”

Quinn glared at the guard lurking behind her in the hallway. A grown man couldn’t keep a little girl in her room for an hour?

“She insisted we come down here,” the man apologized.

Condemning his own raised voice, Quinn dismissed the guard and scooped Fiona up into his arms, turning her so she wouldn’t get a glimpse of the mutilated doll on his desk. “What are you doing here, sweetie? I thought you were watching the new movie Santa brought you up in your room.”

Her small fingers splayed across his cheek. “Petwa wants more cookies.”

Quinn shifted his gaze to the fraying embroidery of the doll’s blue eyes. “I think Petra has had enough sweets for one day.” He pressed a kiss against the delicate fingers on his cheek. “So have you, young lady.”

Her tiny mouth stretched with a yawn and Quinn checked his watch. As much as he loved the sweet weight of her in his arms, he had work to do. Above anything else, it was his job to protect her. And that required changing security codes and talking revised strategies with David Damiani and Michael.

So he handed Fiona over to the new nanny. “It’s after seven now. It’s time to get Fiona to bed.”

“Wha—?” Quinn held on a moment longer, worried for a moment that she wasn’t even going to wrap her arms around his daughter. “But we haven’t finished debriefing. What’s our next plan of action? I won’t know the new security protocols. I don’t know the old ones yet.” Miranda’s hands finally closed around Fiona’s back and thigh, and she shifted her onto one hip. “I don’t even know where her bedroom is.”

Miranda’s eyes were dark like a pine forest now, yet wide with panic. The woman should never play poker. Definitely a puzzle.

“Fiona can show you.”

Given a mission to do, Fiona sat up straight, excitement chasing away her fatigue. “I know.” She squiggled down to the floor, catching Miranda’s hand along the way. “Come on.”

Quinn exchanged a glance with Miranda as Fiona led her out of the room.
Do your job,
he warned silently.

If he wasn’t mistaken, Miranda’s arched brow read something like
What do you think I’ve been doing?
Or maybe it was
Help!
as she disappeared around the corner.

The need to go after them, to make sure his decision to hire Miranda to protect his daughter wasn’t a mistake, jolted through his legs. But what harm could come to a three-year-old and an armed SWAT cop going upstairs to Fiona’s bedroom?

Ignoring the tension that refused to go away, Quinn forced himself to return to the two men at his desk. “Do we have any leads at all on who took out the guards and left this vile message?”

David shook his head. “Holmes and Rowley couldn’t have been out for too long because they made their thirty-minute check-in.”

“Increase it to fifteen-minute reports. Go through the security camera footage to find out when they got that coffee, if they stopped anyone at the gate, or if anyone walked up to the car.” Quinn pulled off his glasses to rub at his tired eyes. “We need to find out who’s behind this. First, a foreign base of operation. Then the GSS offices here in KC. Now my home. He’s getting way too close for my comfort.”

“Permission to speak freely, sir?”

Quinn put his glasses back on to bring the security chief into focus. “Of course.”

“I know your judgment is a little skewed right now with the threat against Fiona.” David thumbed over his shoulder toward the empty doorway. “But Dirty Harriet there is a loose cannon. She pulled a gun on my men.”

“They were unconscious.”

“What if they weren’t? We’d have had a fire fight in the middle of the street on Christmas night.” He pulled back the front of his jacket to prop his hands near the holster at his waist. “Do you really want someone like that around your daughter?”

“Considering
she
detected the threat against this home when your men couldn’t, yes.”

Chapter Five

“Is that choking you, sweetie?” Miranda frowned at the neckline of the long pink underwear-looking pajamas she’d put on Fiona as she tucked the quilt around her in the canopy bed. She’d spent too much time familiarizing herself with the layout of the bedroom suite, complete with retractable steel window shields and a panic room she could access inside the walk-in closet. She should have given a little more thought to pajama etiquette. “Maybe they snap in the front.” She tossed the covers back and smiled an apology to the little girl. “Will you stand up for me?”

They ought to put directions on these things for first-timers like her. But Fiona was more than happy to jump to her feet on the bed. She weighed next to nothing as she braced a hand on Miranda’s shoulder and dutifully picked up each foot so that she could turn the pajamas around and get them back on the right way.

Miranda fastened the last snap up beneath the girl’s chin and slid her fingers inside the neckline to make sure they fit more comfortably this time. “All righty. Down you go.”

With a giggle that made Miranda smile, Fiona plopped down on her bottom and then leaned back into the pillows.

“Good night, Fiona.”

But a small hand grabbed the cover before she could pull it up to her young charge’s chin. The quizzical narrowing of Fiona’s round blue eyes reminded Miranda of another Gallagher who seemed to find fault with a lot of the things she said or did. “We didn’t bwush my teeth.”

“Oh.” Duh. Even though she wasn’t familiar with the needs of three-year-old girls, at the very least Miranda should have been thinking about her own nighttime routine. “We’d better go take care of that. We don’t want all your teeth to fall out of your head.”

The joke must have needed an older audience.