A Billionaire's Redemption (18 page)

But then guilt at the notion of abandoning Melinda, who’d been through an obviously terrible experience, assailed him, and the cycle of relief, fretting, worry and guilt repeated itself. He felt like he was being torn in two, and it sucked.

The weird part was that he didn’t even particularly like Melinda. She was charismatic, though, and once she had her claws in someone’s head, she didn’t let go. It had taken Willa coming along for him to realize how psychologically tied he still was to Melinda.

An urge to turn around and walk out of the emergency room came over him. To hell with Melinda. She was a grown woman and could take care of herself. Lord knew she’d never needed him or anyone else over the years. Willa, on the other hand, could use a friend. Her life had gone to hell in a handbasket, and not one bit of it had been her doing.

He stood up, determined to follow his heart and go find Willa when a male voice said from behind him, “Mr. Dawson?”

He turned to face a physician in a white lab coat. Spatters of blood on the coat sent a hot wave of guilt through Gabe’s gut. “How is she?” he asked quickly.

“Come with me.”

Agent Delaney fell in beside the two men as they strode through a pair of swinging doors. A brightly lit hallway with all the usual medical clutter lining it stretched away from them. The doctor led Gabe to the first door on the left.

Gabe stepped inside, his heart in his throat.

Melinda was sitting up in bed, her arms speckled by Band-Aids, a small piece of tape across her right cheekbone and a bandage around her right knuckles. She had a fading black eye and a little puffiness along her jaw. But all in all, she didn’t look half-bad. She did, however, look royally pissed off. He knew that narrow-eyed glare she was firing at the nurse all too well.

She looked up at the visitors, spotted Gabe and burst into tears. Honest-to-God wetness issuing from her eyes and running down her cheeks. Never, ever had he seen Melinda Grayson shed a tear before. The woman had sat stony-faced through her own father’s funeral, for God’s sake. Yet here she was, bawling theatrically.

She held both hands out to him in a gesture reminiscent of a toddler, and he lurched forward, shaken. Melinda Grayson wanted to be held? The end of the world must be upon them!

He perched on the edge of the high bed and gathered her into his arms. She stiffened against him, but her arms still went jerkily around him. Frankly, after the way Willa cuddled against him all soft and sweet, this was like hugging a cold, wet fish.

But as soon as the thought crossed his mind, he banished it. Melinda was hurt and scared and probably exhausted, and she surely deserved better from him.

“Dr. Grayson, what can you tell me about your kidnapper?” Agent Delaney asked.

Gabe looked up sharply. “You didn’t catch the bastard?”

“Please don’t interrupt, sir, or I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

Melinda’s arms tightened hard around him. Damn, that woman was strong for someone who’d been tied to a chair for the past few weeks. “I never saw him. He kept me blindfolded all the time.”

“What about when that video of you was filmed? Did you see him then? Or even a silhouette? How tall was he? What kind of build did he have? Race? Coloring? Anything?” the agent persisted.

Melinda shook her head. “There was just the camera on a tripod. He told me what to say from another room.”

Agent Delaney pounced on that. “So he
did
script that video for you.”

Melinda’s gaze narrowed fractionally. Had Gabe not been inches away from her and not been so very familiar with her, he probably wouldn’t have seen it. Now why did the agent’s statement irritate Melinda like that?

“No, no. He just told me when to talk.”

“Did he ever say anything about Senator John Merris, Sheriff Burris or a young man named David Reed?”

“No. Why?”

“All three men were murdered at about the same time you were kidnapped, ma’am.”

Melinda did the strangest thing then. She burst into tears. No kidding. Wet stuff on her cheeks, sobbing hysterically, tears. Gabe was flabbergasted. The Iron Maiden knew how to cry? Wow. She must be a whole lot more messed up than she’d been showing initially.

The questioning paused until she could collect herself, but then continued onward, albeit more gently after Melinda’s breakdown. And so it went. Agent Delaney pressed for details, and Melinda steadfastly denied knowing anything significant about the kidnapper. No matter what questions the FBI agent asked, no useful information was forthcoming from his ex-wife.

Although, every now and then, Melinda would tense slightly or give away some tiny facial expression of anger. But all the while, she clung to him like a pitifully scared child. When the agent suggested a polygraph test, Melinda burst into loud tears once more and buried her face against his chest. He’d never seen her act even remotely like this before. She was definitely a lot more rattled than he’d expected.

When Melinda’s crying bout refused to wind down, Agent Delaney gave up with a visible sigh, and retreated from the room. The moment she left, Melinda’s tantrum eased.

“It’s okay, Mel,” he soothed her. “No one’s going to make you take a polygraph. You’re the victim here. They’re just trying to catch your kidnapper and were hoping you could help.”

“Well, I can’t!” she exclaimed, pushing away from him. She turned her ire on the nurse. “Get me some damned painkillers, already.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. The doctor will have to prescribe those.”

“Well, what’s he waiting for? The Second Coming?” Melinda snapped.

This was more like her. Funny how he’d forgotten how nasty Melinda could be. Maybe he’d been around it for so long he’d gotten numb to it. Willa would never dream of being so mean to anyone—
Stop it. Stop comparing the two women!

The nurse answered Melinda with thin patience, “The FBI asked that you not be medicated until they’d had a chance to speak with you.”

“Clearly, they’ve spoken with me. So get that damned doctor in here to do his damned job.”

Yup. Melinda was back to her usual bitchy, domineering self.

Agent Delaney poked her head back into the room just then. “Oh. I forgot to ask earlier. Did your captor have any sort of an accent in his voice?”

Melinda sagged against Gabe immediately. He caught her weight in surprise as she answered tiredly, “No. None. Midwest neutral.”

“Thanks.” Agent Delaney smiled pleasantly as she backed out of the room.

Melinda sat back up and snapped at the nurse. “Now, get me that doctor.”

Thoroughly confused, Gabe stood up. “Let me go see if I can find him for you.” The nurse threw him a grateful look. Little did she know he was escaping as much as he was trying to help out.

Agent Delaney was lounging against the opposite wall of the hallway, and straightened up to walk beside him as he headed for the nurses’ station. “Interesting woman, your wife.”

“
Ex-
wife.”

“She always that big a drama queen?”

Gabe stopped and turned to face the agent as he considered her question. He answered slowly, “Yes. But not in that way. I’ve never seen her cry in all the years I’ve known her. And she’s not usually so...”

“Erratic?” Agent Delaney supplied.

“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of touchy-feely.”

“She’s quite an actress, your
ex-
wife. What drew you to her in the first place?”

An actress? That was an interesting observation. But it hadn’t been what attracted him to Melinda. He explained, “She’s shockingly charismatic. Tends to disapprove of you when you meet her. Makes you want to earn her approval.”

“Which she always withholds just a little,” the agent added blandly.

He nodded. “I suppose it’s her way of tying people to her. I always figured she was more insecure than she wanted to let on. Afraid people would abandon her. Her mother abandoned the family. She’s pretty estranged from her siblings.”

“Mmm,” Agent Delaney said noncommittally.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” he asked her, impatient to get back to the business of finding Willa.

“Not right now. You’ve been more helpful than you know,” the FBI analyst replied. “I’ll call you if I have any more questions.”

He stopped briefly at the nurses’ station to relay Melinda’s request that the doctor prescribe her some painkillers, and then he headed out quickly. Whether he was running from Melinda or toward Willa, he couldn’t rightly tell. Both, maybe.

It was fully dark by the time he got back to the last known location of Willa’s GPS. The spot was just inside the rim of the main canyon of the complex of gullies and valleys. His geologist’s eye envisioned the ancient earthquake that had torn this series of giant cracks in the generally flat landscape. Probably a secondary fault related to the massive New Madrid fault that had created the Mississippi River basin.

Willa had been heading west the last time her signal pinged off a cell tower. He thought about what lay west of him. The network of narrow, winding roads that would be treacherous after dark. Willa had been in her little car, which meant she wouldn’t have ventured onto the more isolated tracks that crisscrossed these valleys. Most of them led to deer hunting stands and took a high-clearance, four-wheel drive truck to traverse. She had to have stuck to the main roads...of which there weren’t many out here.

About a mile ahead, this particular road forked. The right branch went due west up over the next ridge, and the left one turned south and wound up to the top of a high bluff overlooking the entire canyon complex. It was a hangout for teens to drink and make out.

Abrupt memory jogged his brain. Willa had commented once that she was the only person who went up to Lover’s Point for the view. Was it possible? Had she gone up there to be alone and think? He vaguely recalled it being a beautiful spot; although, unlike Willa, his reasons for going up there as a teen had never included the view.

He guided his SUV over the ridge and toward the fork in the road. He veered left and started up the winding asphalt strip. He slowed cautiously as the curves became sharper, the road became steeper and the drop-offs grew steeper and closer to the edge of the road.

A cloud bank drifted over the new moon and darkness pressed in on him and his SUV. All that existed was a short strip of asphalt in his headlights. He turned on the Cadillac’s snazzy halogen high beams to better illuminate the road ahead. And that was probably why he spotted the faint skid marks, black slashed on the dark gray pavement.

A little voice in the back of his head shouted,
no no no no no!
He stopped the SUV and jumped out, his heart in his throat. He approached the precipice cautiously, and nothing but air stretched away from him. But when he reached the edge and peered down, he saw that the broken limestone cliff wasn’t completely vertical. Not far below the road, a stand of scrubby saplings clung to the steep slope. And wedged among them was a small car, resting on its side.

He almost leaped down the slope before his brain kicked in. Rope. He needed rope. Racing back to the Escalade, he set its emergency brake and fished in the back of the SUV for the tow rope he had stowed somewhere. He spotted the bright yellow nylon as thick around as his thumb and snatched it out. Quickly, he lashed one end of it to the hitch in the rear bumper and looped the other end around his body.

Using the rope to slow his descent, he slipped and slid down the nasty incline.
Please be alive. Please, please be alive,
he begged Willa silently.

He groaned as he made out a white face through the spiderweb of cracked glass that was the windshield. “Willa!” he shouted.

The figure inside the car didn’t move. Horrendous dread clutched at him. She couldn’t be dead. He’d just found her, dammit! He couldn’t lose her!

He slipped and slid to the car, which actually was resting mostly on all four tires. It was tilted onto its side by the severity of the slope. Tree branches poked through the passenger window and roof, skewering the tiny car like a shish kebab. A deflated air bag hung from the steering wheel, and another smaller one from over the driver’s side door, partially obscuring Willa. He yanked at the door, but it didn’t open. Given how badly the entire frame of the car was bent, he doubted it would budge.

In through the windshield, then. He eased left toward the hood of the car. Bracing himself on a tree trunk, he kicked at the windshield. As badly damaged as the tempered glass was, it bent inward but didn’t give way. He jammed his heel into the thing again, and this time it shattered into millions of little pieces. Using his bare hands, he ripped away the remaining bits of glass.

His heart stopped as he glimpsed Willa. She was as white as a ghost and slumped in her seat belt like a rag doll.
Oh, God.
He lunged forward, reaching for her throat.
Have a pulse. Have a pulse. Have a pulse.

There. A faint bump against his fingertip under her skin.
Alive!

He put his weight on the edge of the window frame to reach for the seat belt release and the entire car lurched ominously. He froze, swearing. The trees that her car rested upon were perilously small saplings, and they were bent over badly under the weight of the car. He noted with dread that there were no more trees beyond them. The cliff dropped off more sharply beyond this one spot that the tree roots held tenuously in place.

He eased his weight more gently onto the car frame and the trees creaked ominously. Swearing, he reached under Willa for her seat belt. It was twisted, and with her entire body weight resting on it, not about to release. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his trusty Swiss Army knife. Opening the main blade quickly, he sawed at the nylon webbing holding Willa in place.

While he did so, he visually checked her for obvious wounds or broken bones. There was a fair bit of dried blood on her face, but he’d seen enough facial cuts around the oil rigs to know they bled a lot. None of her limbs looked to be lying unnaturally, or bent where they shouldn’t be. Internal injuries would be the real killer, of course. But a tiny spark of hope lit in his gut.