born. Already out of the house, in college. Planning on medical school. Even Patrick was thirteen years older than Lucy. She was practically an only child. She’d grown up fast-not only because of her older brothers and sisters, but because she’d seen death at an early age. She’d been seven when Justin-her seven-year-old nephew-was killed. They’d shielded her to some extent, but it had affected all of them.
“Smart and sassy and spoiled,” Dillon said, his voice cracking.
Kate reached up and touched his shoulders. “Lucy is lucky to have family who loves her so much,” she said quietly.
Dillon took Kate’s hand. “You didn’t.”
She shook her head. “Maybe that’s why I fight for the underdog. I’m okay, Dillon. I know you think I’m this fly-off-the-handle maverick, but I
“You don’t have a job. You’re doing this for revenge.” Or was she? Maybe not revenge so much as justice. He began to see and admire Kate in a whole different light.
“Maybe. But I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. Trask will kill Lucy without a second thought if the feds swarm the island. She won’t have a chance. Either the house is rigged to explode or he’ll put a bullet in her head. He doesn’t want to be caught, but more than that he doesn’t want her to live.”
“You and Jack seem to agree on this.”
“Jack’s seen a hell of a lot more than I have.” She searched his eyes. “So have you. You’ve been inside the criminal minds of sadistic men and women like Trask. You try to make sense of it to stop it. To be honest, I’d rather take my chances face-to-face than look inside their heads to figure out what makes them tick. But without men like you, we’d never be able to learn why. And maybe stop it from happening in the future.”
Dillon touched Kate’s cheek. She leaned into his hand and closed her eyes. For a brief moment, he felt her strength and vulnerability. Saw her loneliness, how weary she was of this hunt. But it was her vocation; she would not give up.
Dillon’s phone vibrated and he pulled it from his pocket. A picture came in with a message from Quinn Peterson.
He turned the image to show Kate. “Know him?”
She stared, her face going white. “Trask.” She swallowed. “Where did you get that?”
“Peterson.” He was about to call.
“Don’t. Text him. It’ll take him longer to trace it, and we should be gone by then.”
“I thought we agreed that Peterson needs to be clued into the two sets of coordinates.” But he sent the text message. “He’s not coming after you.”
“Maybe not, but others will.”
“Who?”
“Jeff Merritt, for one.”
“Who’s he?”
“He used to be my direct supervisor, Paige’s as well. He and Paige were also…involved.”
“Isn’t that a conflict?”
She shrugged. “It happens. It wasn’t a problem until he started pulling us off the Trask Enterprises investigation. It caused a huge problem between him and Paige and we-Paige and I-got reckless.”
Kate sighed, ran a hand through her short blond hair. “Merritt was worried about her safety, and because of that pulled us instead of giving us backup. We were pissed. Paige went to him, and I thought she had gotten sanction, but…”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me, Kate.”
She was obviously torn. “When we stormed the warehouse after getting the tip from Denise about the Russian girls being illegally brought in, I thought we had backup. Paige said-implied-that we were covered. But…” She shrugged.
“She lied.”
“No,” Kate said emphatically. “She didn’t. I just didn’t understand what she had planned.”
“She lied to you.”
“No, dammit!”
“She lied and died and you’ve been blaming yourself because you can’t blame your dead friend.”
“Paige was the closest thing I had to family! Mine was nonexistent. A mother who couldn’t look at me, elderly grandparents who didn’t talk to me, and when they died, I was shuffled from stranger to stranger. Paige…she was closer than blood. I’m not going to taint her name.”
Kate’s eyes were red, sweat glistened on her brow. “You don’t know how she died. How she was brutalized. You didn’t see her body, shredded. Blood everywhere. Her eyes-”
Dillon pulled Kate to him, held her while her body shook with soundless sobs.
The truth, at last.
His phone vibrated and Kate jumped back. She gave him an odd half-smile, embarrassed. He touched her cheek. “It’s okay, Kate. I don’t think you’re weak. It takes a strong person to be honest with others, but the strongest people are honest with themselves.”
He looked at the phone, showed Peterson’s message to Kate.
“Mallory,” Kate muttered.
“Know him?”
“No, but I’ve heard of him. And he and Jeff Merritt were close. Merritt must have sent him in.” She frowned. “I don’t understand why. How do we have someone on the inside, but Trask-Adam Scott-still got to Lucy?”
“Good question,” Dillon said.
“Give Peterson the coordinates. But,” Kate implored him, “make him understand that they must use extreme caution. Not just for their safety, but for Lucy’s.” She didn’t know if she was doing the right thing, but she’d agreed when they left Mexico that they would tell the FBI what they’d learned. She had to live up to her word. She wanted Dillon to trust her. To believe in her.
Dillon nodded, typed in the message.
Kate glanced at her watch, started pacing again. “It’s been thirty minutes. They should be done.”
“Impatient, impatient.” Jack sauntered into the room. “We’re fueled up and I downloaded some maps of the area. It’s just shy of nine hundred miles to a small airstrip outside Bellingham. It’ll take me forty-five minutes to get from the base of Mount Baker to the campground. I also have a copter on alert. A pal of mine in Canada. He’s going to meet us at the airstrip, take you to an island near the one you think Lucy is on.”
“Why do we need a helicopter?” Dillon asked.
“I pulled down a map of the island Kate thinks Lucy is on. No way to land anything, even a copter-”
“We can’t hit the island from above,” Kate interrupted. “They’ll hear. We need to take a boat and-”
Jack held his hands up. “Do I look stupid? I have a safe landing spot and a boat ready for you ten miles from the island. Hank will land the copter and get you situated. You’ll be in communication with him, and if you need an emergency pickup he’ll be there. I trust him.”
Dillon raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. Jack didn’t seem like the type of man to trust anyone, yet he had this mercenary base-which might or might not be run by the U.S. military-in the middle of the Nevada desert, and a convenient pal up in the Pacific Northwest who just happened to have a helicopter.
“And you’re going to take my plane?” Kate said.
“You mean Professor Fox’s plane?”
She glared at him.
“It sounds like a good plan,” Dillon intervened. “Let’s go.”
Dillon watched as Jack and Kate bickered about the plan. He held back and looked at the message from
