“You need to keep your shit together,” Asher coached.
“Where’s Cullen? Shouldn’t he be here?”
“He went over to your house as soon as we disembarked. He has Jill covered.”
“Well, la-dee-da. She’s at work. So you all screwed the pooch on that one. Explain this to me again. In words small enough for me to understand, because this is some convoluted fucked-up shit.” Then he yanked his cell phone out of fatigues. “Scratch that,” he said as he held up his index finger and pressed in Jill’s number.
Dammit, it went to voice mail.
“Honey, it’s Law. Call me immediately. It’s important.”
He glared at the two men in front of him. “Continue.”
“At long last, Jamison tracked down Angela. She’d quit waitressing. She’s been working as a cook out on a ranch and taking care of a widower’s two kids. He knew that she wanted to stay hidden, so nobody on his ranch let out a peep that she was there. It took Jamison the last four weeks to find her. When he did, he almost got the shit beat out of him for his trouble.” Kane and Asher laughed.
“Okay, so there’s a funny story somewhere,” Law growled. “Get to the point, besides the fact that Angela now seems to have a protector.”
“The point is,” Asher drawled, “that Angela finally feels safe enough to talk. She told Jamison some interesting shit. The night her son died, her husband came to see her in the Detroit hospital. He said, that he had always wanted her all to himself, and now she belonged just to him.”
Law felt his blood run cold.
“She can’t possibly think that her husband purposely killed his own child.”
“It gets worse,” Asher said. “Angela told Jamison that there was always something odd about the way her former fiancé died. It was a boating accident with his best friend, who was…” Asher let his voice drift to a stop.
“Wanna guess?” Kane asked.
“Tim Goshen?” Law asked.
“Give the man a cigar,” Kane nodded. “Yep. Then Tim goes in and comforts Angela over her fiancé’s death, and two months later, they’re married. She told Jamison she had always felt rushed into the wedding. And she knew for sure that Tim had been mad about her getting pregnant.”
“But still, killing your own child?”
“The last thing Tim said to Angela at the hospital, right before he left, is that if she didn’t want something to ever happen to another child, she better have her tubes tied while she was in the hospital.”
“Fuck,” Law hissed.
“Exactly.”
“No wonder she ran. The man is a psychopath.”
“And he wants her back. He’s obsessed. So far, he’s only tracked her to Southern California and to Jill. He went back to Detroit after the whole break-in attempt at Jill’s house, but there was some mismanagement of funds at his law firm recently. Tim’s under investigation. He was due to be deposed four days ago. He didn’t show.”
Law’s phone rang. It was Jill.
“Baby, where are you?” he demanded.
There was a pause before she answered. “I’m here at the office, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine. What’s wrong?”
Law scrubbed the back of his neck. “Stay there, I’m going to come pick you up.” He forced a smile into his voice. “I have two pieces of good news. First, you get to meet my brother Ash in person, he’s in town.”
“And the second?”
“Cullen’s friend found Angela. She’s okay. I should be at your office in about a half-hour. Will you be ready to leave by then?”
“Will you be ready to tell me the bad news then?” she countered.
“I’ll lay out everything as soon as we all get home,” he sighed.
Again, there was a pause. “It’s going to be all right, Law,” she said. God, there she was trying to comfort him. What was this world coming to?
“That’s my line, Honey. And yes, it will be.”
Chapter 13
Since the three Navy SEALs from the Night Storm team were near San Diego, they had to report into Coronado. Kane and Cullen did some training with the Midnight Delta team, but Asher just took some leave to spend with Law and to get to know Jill. That lasted for a week, before the three men had to head back to Virginia. Even after Kane had left, he and Law’s teammate, Clancy, had worked together remotely and they still couldn’t find hide nor hair of Tim Goshen. It was eerie.
Law wanted to bring Angela back to San Diego to act as bait, but her Wyoming rancher wasn’t about to allow that. All and all, he couldn’t blame him. He was going crazy at the thought of Jill being in danger.
The one good thing in all of this? He’d heard stories about some of the women that his SEAL friends had gotten involved with, and many of them had not stayed put when they should have. Meanwhile, Jill had allowed him to put a tracking device on her phone, in her laptop bag, and on her car. She might be just going to and from work and waiting for him so that they could go to the grocery store together, but she was taking this shit seriously. It gave him a lot of peace of mind. Still, when he got called for another set of war games, he desperately wished that he could put her in a steel vault somewhere, only not like the one in Caracas where Eden and Ash had been trapped in.
“Law, I promise to stay locked up behind your Uber Cyber Spyware Security. I refuse to be a redshirt.”
He laughed out loud at that. They watched the original Star Trek with him and knew that the guys in
