ZERO HERO (The Kate Huntington Mystery series) (37 page)

            Actually he felt numb physically. They must have him on the good drugs. Emotionally he was downright euphoric. Was that the drugs too? He was trying to lasso a thought that was skittering around the edge of his brain.

            “They did a CAT scan. That thick head of yours is okay.” Kate gave him a mock scowl, but her voice was gentle. “You lost a lot of blood though. That was pretty damn dumb of you to refuse to go to the hospital.”

            “I was pissed. I just wanted to...” The thought pranced by again.
Damn!

            She was frowning for real now, her eyes worried.

            This time he caught hold of the thought as it flitted by. “Darlin’, can anger cancel out fear?”

            Her eyebrows shot up. “Yeah. Well, I don’t know if I’d use the words
cancel out
. But when we’re angry, we don’t care so much about the consequences. Anger can make us brave.”

            “Today, I was afraid but then I got pissed, when those...” He caught himself. He’d been about to tell her about the two thugs he’d faced down. No need to worry her.

           
Wait!
He wasn’t supposed to be thinking like that now. But he couldn’t remember why not.

            “Did you freak out when you heard?” He gestured toward his injured arm.

            “I was scared but Dolph told me you were stable.”

            “Will you be freaked out, if I keep doing this?”

            “Well, I’d prefer that you try a bit harder to stay out of the way of knives and bullets in the future. But no, I won’t freak out if you stay in detective work. If anything, I’m less scared now than I used to be.”

            He snorted. “You’re less scared and I’m more scared. Kickass Kate and Scared Shitless Skip. We’re quite a team.”

            She laughed out loud. “It doesn’t sound like you were scared shitless today, just appropriately nervous. Enough to make you cautious.”

            He picked up her hand in his good one and brought it to his lips. Turning it over, he kissed her palm.

            Kate sucked in her breath.

            “Ahem.”

            Dolph, Judith and Tyrell Cooper were crowded in the doorway.

            “Well if it isn’t the legal beagles triumpherant.”

            Kate laughed again. “I think you mean
triumvirate
. Come on in, guys. If you’ve got questions, you probably need to keep them simple. He’s a little loopy.”

            They gathered around the bed.

            “I’ll need an official statement when you’re up for it,” Tyrell said. “For now I just want to ask how you knew about the stepfather.”

            Skip shrugged with his good shoulder. “Something Roxie said, about showing him in the end. What’d you find out?”

            “Took some doing since everything about her was a lie. She’d established a whole new identity with forged birth certificate and all. But we finally connected her to a case from last year. Small town in Indiana. Man was found in his stepdaughter’s bed, stabbed to death. No knife, no stepdaughter.”

            “Lemme guess. The stepdaughter’s description matches Roxie.”

            “Yeah, except for the hair color. Real name’s Roseanne Brown.”

            “Did you find out what was in that box?” Kate asked. “What was she so bent on covering up?”

            Judith nodded. “She hadn’t gotten rid of the box but there was nothing all that incriminating in it. The dumpster behind her building was another story. It gets emptied on Tuesdays and Fridays.” She gave Tyrell a wicked grin.

            “She made me do the dumpster diving since it’s in my jurisdiction.” Tyrell directed a mock glare at Judith. “And after all the unofficial help I gave you on this case.”

            “Come on, so what’d you find?” Skip asked.

            “Two DVDs,” Tyrell said. “One starring Roxie and Paul Polinski as we’d suspected. And one with her and Jimmy Matthews. Looked like the camera had been set up on a tripod. They started out just playing around, mock S and M. Then Matthews called her pathetic and Roxie went ballistic. She almost strangled him before he finally got her off of him.”

            “She and I had another little chat,” Judith said. “Seems Jimmy didn’t threaten her or come at her. He was lying on his bed laughing at her, called her pathetic and she shot him.”

            “You’re the shrink, Kate,” Tyrell said. “Could one word really be that big a deal?”

            Skip jumped in before she could answer. “She said her stepfather used to call her that after he’d beaten and molested her.”

            Kate nodded. “Yes, then that word could definitely be a trigger for extreme rage, all the anger that had built up over years of abuse.”

            “Did you catch up with Polinski?” Skip asked.

            “Oh, yeah.” Judith grinned at him. “He squealed like a stuck pig. He really was working late. Roxie called him after she shot Matthews. He went to a car rental place and rented an SUV, then helped her move the body and get rid of the bloody bedding. They knew enough from watching CSI on TV to know they had to keep the body in the same position, so it wouldn’t be obvious it had been moved.

            “He helped on Saturday too, to drag Jamieson back behind the storage area. But he swears he was just knocked out when he left and he knows nothing about any drug overdose.”

            Skip opened his mouth to ask another question. But his eyes were drooping shut. He fought to keep them open.

            “He’s fading, you all,” Kate said from a distance. “Best we call it a night.”

~~~~~~~~

            Kate was struggling to stay awake. Which was not a good thing when one is driving a car. She turned on the radio, hoping that would help.

            She hadn’t wanted to leave the hospital, especially since Mac and Rose had volunteered to go to the house to help Maria with the kids. She’d been contemplating sleeping in the bedside chair when one of the nurses came in to check Skip’s IV. “You go on home, hon. With the pain meds he’s on, he’ll be out ’til morning.”

            Kate pulled up in front of her house. A faint light came from the living room window. She had told Rose to feel free to use the guest bedroom upstairs. Mac would be on the sofa since he still wasn’t supposed to climb stairs. She hoped she could sneak in without disturbing him, but somehow she doubted it.

            Reaching for the radio to turn it off, she paused when a male voice abruptly broke into the middle of a song. “Sorry to interrupt, folks, but we have a special bulletin. Earlier this evening, a prisoner escaped after being transported to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Phillip Murrell, who was awaiting trial for assault and attempted murder, complained of abdominal pains earlier this evening. He and his guards had just arrived at the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital in–”

            Kate pushed the button. It wasn’t the hospital where Skip was. That’s all she cared about.

            She got out of the car and started toward the porch, fumbling in her purse for her house keys.

           
Man, am I tired.

            Finally her fingers connected with the desired object, just as she felt more than saw movement on the path in front of her.

            She looked up. Her feet and her heart froze.

            The grin on David Samuelson’s face looked quite macabre in the dull light from a nearby streetlamp. “Good evening, Mrs. Huntington-Canfield. Such a pleasure to see you again.”

            Kate shook her head.
I’m hallucinating.

            She willed her knees not to give out on her. She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Swallowing hard, she tried again. “I thought you were in jail.”

            “I was until just a few hours ago. I’ll tell you all about it once we’re settled in the car.”

            “I’m not going anywhere with you.” It registered that he was wearing a white jacket over dark pants. He held his left arm tightly against his ribcage.

           
It was him! The guy who escaped from the hospital.

            “Who’s Phillip Murrell?”

            “Me, of course. That’s my real name.” He raised his right arm. In his hand was a gun. “If you scream or do anything other than exactly what I tell you, I’ll shoot you right here. Then I’ll go in your house and kill your children.”

            Kate hadn’t thought her mouth could get any drier. She nodded mutely.

            He gestured toward her car. She turned and started walking, her mind racing. She knew she shouldn’t get in the car with him. From that point on, he would have the complete upper hand.

            But what was she to do against a gun? She couldn’t fight him and risk failure. He’d break into the house, and this time Mac and Rose wouldn’t be expecting trouble. He’d kill them and her babies. She choked back a sob.

           
This can’t be happening.

            “Gimme your purse.”

            She slid the strap from her shoulder and handed it over. He fumbled in it without taking his eyes off of her. He found the key fob and clicked the doors open.

            “Get in the back seat, passenger side, and put your seat belt on.”

            After a moment’s hesitation, she complied.

            He held out a hand to stop her from closing the door. Squatting down, he looked at the lever that engaged the childproof mode so the door couldn’t be opened from the inside. He nodded, then manually locked her door and closed it.

            Walking around the back of the car, he paused to open the trunk and toss her purse inside. After checking that the other back door was also set to childproof mode, he slid behind the wheel.

            He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Put your hands in your lap, clasped together. You move them and I’ll come back for the kids.” He started the car.

            “Where are we going?” She was surprised at how calm she sounded.

            “West.”

            He negotiated his way through the streets of Towson, glancing frequently in the mirror. Then he turned onto the ramp for the Beltway.

            Kate’s mind was racing, grasping for a plan. It wouldn’t be enough to get out of the car. She had to be able to get to a phone before he could get back to the house. She’d have to wait until they got off the Beltway. There were bound to be stores still open on any of the major roads that had exits off the highway. She prayed they were headed to someplace far away from Towson.

            “So David, or should I call you Phil? How’d you get away from your guards at the hospital?”

            “Call me Dave. I never cared for Phillip.”

            She suppressed the urge to call him Phil. She’d never hated anybody in her life quite like she hated this man.

            He glanced in the mirror again. “To answer your question, the dumb doctor asked the guards to step outside. When he leaned over to examine me, I grabbed him around the neck with my good arm and gave it a twist.”

            Kate cringed, but a seed was planted in her mind.

            “Then I borrowed his clothes. After a bit, one of the guards got curious.” He held her eyes in the mirror for a long moment. “Scalpels are incredibly sharp.” He picked the gun up out of his lap and waved it in the air. “This was his.”

            “Why didn’t you just take off? Why come back after me? I’m not the only one who can identify you now, and even if you kill me, the cops know what you did.”

            He made eye contact with her in the mirror. “I don’t care about the dumb cops. But I’ve got a reputation to protect. I’m gonna set myself up as a hit man. Hit men don’t leave witnesses, ever.” He looked back at the road. “It’s a shame really. I kinda liked you, ’til you broke my arm.” His tone was conversational.

            She drew in a deep breath, trying to calm herself so she could think. Once they were off the highway, she’d look for her chance. They were already quite a ways from Towson. The exit for Reisterstown Road had gone by and now they were at Liberty Road.

            When he pulled off onto the ramp for I-70, another limited-access highway, her heart sank. He was headed for western Maryland.

            Bile rose in the back of her throat. She swallowed hard.

            The leaving witnesses made no sense. He’d no doubt left some at the hospital. “I can’t imagine your future customers would find out that you’d left witnesses behind. I’m assuming you’ll be changing your identity and appearance.”

            He glanced at her in the mirror. “Of course. I have my emergency kit stashed in a safe place.” He looked back at the road before adding, “I’m going back for your buddy and the spic chick too, but I’ll get my back-up gun first.”

            She caught the scream before it left her mouth. It came out as a whimper.

            He chuckled. “Don’t worry. That gun’s got a silencer. I won’t hurt the kids or the nanny, not unless they wake up. I’m not into offing kids.”

            Despite herself, tears streamed down Kate’s cheeks. The knuckles of her hands, gripped together in her lap, had turned white. A blast of red hot rage shot through her. She could easily kill this man with her bare hands.

           
Anger can make us brave.

            The seed in the back of her mind germinated.

            “Tell you what.” Dave/Phil glanced in the mirror again. “You’re a good-looking woman and I haven’t had any in, let’s see, about a week. If you lie still and let me do you, I won’t shoot your kids even if they do wake up. Won’t really matter if they see me, since I won’t look the same by morning.” He chuckled.

            For a moment, Kate’s vision blurred. Fury and nauseating terror waged a war inside her body. Fury won. “Let me get this straight.” Her voice was low and even.

           
No, it would be better if I sound scared.

            “If I let you... r-rape me, you’ll spare my children?”