Debra Burroughs - Paradise Valley 06 - The Harbor of Lies (23 page)

Within minutes, everyone congregated around the fireplace and Isabel explained the situation—Emily and Colin had gotten into an argument and she took off to get some air. With the storm getting worse, they thought it was best to go find her and bring her back to the inn.

“That must have been some argument,” Camille said glibly, staring at Colin’s split lip.

He touched a finger to his lip, but did not reply. What could he say?

“Alex and I will scour the shops and restaurants up and down Main Street,” Isabel stated.

Camille would go with her husband and daughter to search the streets, shooting off to the west from Main Street, which also housed a few shops and eateries.

Colin and Peter would search the shoreline and the wharf area, after Colin checked in with the police chief and asked him to have his patrolmen keep an eye out for Emily.

Maggie agreed to stay at the inn, in case Emily came back.

“I don’t want to alarm you all,” Isabel said, “but we have a wedding tomorrow and we can’t have the bride catching her death of cold.” Her gaze shifted to Colin and she gave him a little encouraging grin.

Colin breathed a laugh. He appreciated her trying to lighten the serious situation, but it did nothing to calm his nerves. Trying to get Emily to the altar felt like playing that silly Whack-A-Mole game. No sooner did he overcome one hurdle than another would pop up.

The small crowd began to disperse into their respective groups and Isabel moved next to Colin. She whispered to him that she was going to take Evan with them as soon as the others left, including him and Peter. “I’ll explain what’s happening to my husband first, then go and get him.”

“You might as well,” he muttered. He knew Evan was probably climbing the walls being stuck in the room, because that’s exactly what Colin himself would be doing in the same situation—that is if Evan had stayed there, as he was asked.

“Let’s go, Peter,” he hollered across the lobby.

Peter and Colin stepped outside and headed down the driveway to the street. The wind was blowing and the rain had lightened to a sprinkle. Now, if it would only hold.

“Where to, boss?” Peter asked.

~*~

“You should have known better than to be poking your nose where it don’t belong,” Rosco barked at Emily, a scowl twisting on his face as he waved his gun at her. Apparently he preferred the real thing. “There’s a lot of ocean between here and Boston. They’ll never find your body.”

Emily drew in a shuddering breath and her chest tightened. He was right. She’d be making her way to the bottom of the cold Atlantic Ocean before anyone even knew she was gone from Rock Harbor.

Eric stepped closer to Rosco. “Let’s think about this, man. We may be a lot of things, but we’re not killers.”

“That’s not true, is it, Caleb?” Rosco arched a questioning brow at the young man.

Caleb’s green eyes rounded. He tugged his ball cap off and raked his fingers through his shaggy brown hair. “Well, I…I had no choice. He would have ruined everything.”

Just like I’m doing?

She scooted backward a few inches and rested against the side of the banquette, wishing she could crawl under the table and disappear.

“Who are you talking about?” Eric demanded.

The hairs on the back of Emily’s neck stood up and an army of chills marched down her back. If Caleb had killed before, he easily could kill again. She could be next.

“Ben Kinney,” Caleb mumbled.

Chapter 22

“Caleb, are you admitting you killed Ben Kinney?” Eric glared at him and the blood seemed to drain from his face.

“Hey, keep it down,” Caleb warned in a low voice, leaning closer to the other men. “Not in front of the hostage.”

Even as fearful as Emily was, folded almost into a fetal position on the floor, her attention was riveted to the conversation.

Eric and Rosco both turned their gaze on her. “She’s not telling anyone,” Rosco ground out.

“Tell me it wasn’t you,” Eric groaned.

“Well, what did you want me to do?” Caleb shot back. “He found out what we were doing.”

Eric grabbed Caleb by the arm. “But how could he have?”

“I don’t know how, but he did.”

If these guys knew it was Whitley who told Ben, would Caleb step in and protect his sister?

“He came to me at the inn one day,” Caleb explained, “while I was working. He said I had to cut him in on our business, or else.”

“The night he died?” Eric asked, jerking Caleb’s arm.

Caleb yanked free. “No, the day before. I tried to act like I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he wouldn’t let up. He came back again the next night.”

“What did you do?” Eric growled, worry lines forming around his eyes. He stepped closer to Caleb, speaking low, between clenched teeth. “Transporting drugs is bad enough, I didn’t sign up for murder.”

Emily listened intently to Caleb’s confession, her heart pounding so hard she was afraid she would faint. Would she ever be able to tell anyone what she had heard? Not according to Rosco. And the fact that they were talking so freely in front of her confirmed they didn’t plan to let her make it to shore.

“Hell, I didn’t mean to do it, he just wouldn’t leave me alone.” Caleb scrubbed his fingers through his hair again and pulled his cap back on as his eyes nervously darted around. “Like I said, he kept pressing me about cutting him in on our business. I knew you guys wouldn’t go for it.”

“That’s for sure,” Rosco shot back. “I’m not splitting the haul with anyone else.”

“Then he started in about my sister—how he was going to tell her what I was doing, how she followed him around like a lovesick puppy and he could get her to do whatever he wanted. He said he’d already gotten to second base with her and getting her in his bed wasn’t far away.”

Poor Whitley.

The movement of the boat on the waves was making Emily a bit nauseous. She raised her head and pulled in a deep breath. Her stomach settled a little as she blew it out slowly.

“He said if I didn’t get him in with us, he’d have her any which way he wanted. Ughhh! When he started going on about my sister, I just lost it. I picked up the nearest thing I could get my hands on and smacked him upside the head.”

Eric shook his head sadly. “Oh, man. This is going to come back on all of us—you know that, don’t you?”

“Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist,” Rosco uttered with a smirk. “The boy didn’t kill Ben—I did.”

Rosco did it?

“You?” Eric gasped. His look turned from angry to nervous. Was he afraid of Rosco?

“I just let the boy think he did it, to toughen him up a bit,” Rosco said with a rough laugh.

“I’m not a boy,” Caleb bit back. “I’m almost thirty. And I did do it.”

“Shut up about that!” Rosco snarled. “I can’t have you going around telling people you killed Ben.”

“Why not?” Caleb asked. “It’s true.”

“It’s not true and if you say that it will screw everything up. I’m the one who did the deed, so I’m the one that earned the reward money. Don’t get the idea we’re gonna split it.”

“What reward money?” Caleb asked.

Rosco narrowed his eyes. “You really don’t know? Or are you just playing dumb?”

“What are you talking about?” Caleb’s eyebrows grew together into a nervous frown. “What money?”

“All right, all right, don’t wet yourself. I believe you,” Rosco said. “I’ve got this cousin in New York, see. He told me someone put a big bounty on that guy’s head, fifty thousand
G
s. I thought you might’ve heard.”

Fifty thousand?
Was Rosco’s cousin planning to keep the rest of it for himself or was Rosco trying to pull one over on Caleb?

“He sent me Ben’s picture on my phone and told me if I saw him I could make some real money,” Rosco continued. “I guess someone else found him before me and tried to kill him but screwed it up.”

The car crash?

“No, man,” Caleb argued, shaking his head, “I don’t know nothing about the money, but I am the one who hit him in the head with the side of my hammer, and he dropped like a ton of bricks.”

“Naw. You might have knocked him out, boy,” Rosco said, “but I stuck him with my knife, right in the heart.”

That’s what the medical examiner reported. The thought sent a wave of chills over Emily’s body and she couldn’t help but shiver. She pulled her knees up closer to her body and clasped her hands around them.

“I guess I should thank you for making my job so easy, boy.”

“What do you mean by that?” Caleb asked.

Rosco turned toward him. “I followed the guy that night from the place where he was staying, then I saw him talking to you by those bushes next to the pool. I watched you clobber him and he went down, and I thought I’d lost my chance at the bounty money. But after you ran off, I watched him for a while, trying to figure out how I could spin it in my direction, somehow make it look like I’d done it before anyone else came wandering through there. Then he staggered to his feet and that’s when I saw my opportunity to make that easy fifty thousand.”

Caleb let out a sigh of relief and his shoulders dropped, seeming comforted at Rosco’s statement, assuring him he wasn’t a murderer after all.

Rosco’s gaze turned hard on Caleb, his thick black eyebrows hovering over his dark brooding eyes. “So don’t be getting no ideas about taking any share of that money.”

“But how did he get on the deck to my room?” Emily blurted out before she thought it through.

Suddenly, all eyes were on her again. She cowered against the side of one of the benches and tried to wrap her hands around the table’s leg to steady herself as the boat continued to bob.

“No one’s talking to you,” Rosco growled, wagging the gun at her.

“Yeah, Rosco,” Eric said, eyeing him suspiciously. “I was kinda wondering about that myself.”

“Jeez, that’s simple. After I stuck him, I heard someone coming. So I dragged him over to the nearest deck and dumped him in the chair. Then I hid in the bushes ’til it was all clear.”

“I wondered what happened.” Caleb looked down at Emily. “So what are we going to do about the girl?”

“Emily,” she squeaked, trying her best not to sound frightened, but her high-pitched tone betrayed her.

Caleb frowned at her and tilted his head. “Huh?”

She drew a deep breath to relax her throat and glared at him square in the eye. “As long as you’re going to kill me, you might as well know who I am.” If she made some kind of connection with at least one of them, maybe she’d have a chance of getting out of this thing alive. What other options did she have? It was three men against her, and one had a gun.

The men shot questioning stares at each other, which did nothing to convince her she had succeeded to connect. She tried again.

“I’m Emily Parker.” She forced herself to hold Caleb’s gaze and her voice to stay calm, even though her heart was thudding hard and fast. “I’m getting married tomorrow—or, at least, I was.”

“You shut up, woman, if you know what’s good for you,” Rosco said, his gun still on her.

She ignored him. How could things get much worse? She worked up a bit of a smile and turned her attention to Eric. “You met my fiancé, the police detective, didn’t you, Mr. Malone? And my maid of honor, the FBI agent?”

“Police detective?” Eric mumbled. “FBI agent?”

“I told you to shut up,” Rosco barked. “Boss, don’t let her rattle you. Let’s cast off before someone comes looking for her. We’ve been jawing long enough.” Rosco turned his attention to Caleb. “You get us untied, boy, and I’ll start the engines.”

“No,” Eric said sternly. “I want to know what you have planned for this woman first.”

“That’s easy. Wait ’til we’re far enough out to sea,” Rosco replied flatly, “then we’ll dump her body.” He said it like she was chum to be thrown overboard to feed the sharks.

Eric stepped closer to Rosco. “We’re not killers.” His voice sounded strained.

“You let her live, boss, and we’ll all be spending the rest of our lives in prison,” Rosco shot back with a snarl. “Is that what you want?”

“Of course not, but—”

“Well, if we don’t get rid of her, that’s exactly what you’ll get. I ain’t going to prison because of some skirt.”

Chapter 23

Curled up on the floor, Emily was paralyzed with fear as she listened to them quarrel, hardly noticing the motion of the boat now. She had never been this close to death with so little chance of being rescued.

“But her friends—” Caleb started to question.

“We don’t have time to argue,” Rosco growled. “We’ve got to get going before we draw those people down here looking for her. Otherwise, we won’t make it to Boston on time, and you know what that means. The people we’re working for don’t accept lame excuses.”

Eric cast a pitiful glance at Emily as the boat rocked. “It sounds like the wind is picking up and the rain is starting to come down. Are you sure you checked the weather report, Rosco?”

“I checked it—I ain’t stupid. It said we were just getting the edge of that big storm. It’s turning eastward, out to sea.”

“Maybe we should find shelter until the storm passes.” Eric peered down at Emily. “We can take her with us until we decide what to do.”

Rosco shook his head angrily. “No. We need to shove off now. You know they’ll be expecting us in Boston just before sunrise. We have to board the passengers at nine, so we’ve got to get the cargo loaded while it’s still dark. If we delay, we won’t make it in time.”

“Besides, it’s too early in the season for a really bad storm,” Caleb added, rubbing his arms nervously. “Isn’t it, Rosco?”

“That’s right.”

Eric eyed Caleb, whose face had gone pale and uncertain, then he glanced up the stairs again, toward the stormy darkness. Eric laid a hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “We’ll be fine.” His confident words did not match the expression on his face.

“I’ve got bills to pay, boss,” Caleb muttered. “If we don’t get this load, I’m gonna be in trouble, big time.”

Emily thought of what Whitley had said about their mother living in a home and the expenses of that, for which Caleb was largely responsible. Was that what he was worried about? Or did he have other debt? Alimony or child support? She didn’t really know much about his life.