Killing Secrets (34 page)

She hadn’t felt this much desolation about losing someone since her father left her behind in that motel room. For ten years, she’d believed her father never really loved her. She knew differently now, but the painful loss she’d felt then was still a sharp memory.

It was a good thing she’d come to her senses and never admitted her love to Patrick. He’d never know he had the power to hurt her. She might leave a large portion of her heart behind in Denver, but she could still slink back to Texas with her pride intact. Anger and pride. They’d sustained her more than once in the past. The only thing that mattered was the love she had for her daughter.

She glanced into the rear view mirror at Amanda sitting in her car seat, a teddy bear she’d found stuffed in a door pocket clutched in her arms to replace her doll left behind in Suze’s playroom. Lightning flashed through the stormy darkness and gilded Amanda’s honey blond hair. The loud boom of thunder that immediately followed made her little girl jerk in her seat. Her brown eyes widened with fright as she stared back at her mama.

Rachel didn’t have time to reassure her because, just then, a full sheet of plywood came out of nowhere and smashed into their left front fender. She gasped. Her heart thundered as she watched it flip over the hood into the field beyond.

Something her father once said jumped into her mind.
Distractions are a killer in the arena, little chickadee. Give that ol’ bull a chance to get into your head and he’ll run you straight through.

Evidently, Cook agreed. “That was close,” he said. “You might think about pulling over until the worst passes.”

“Easier said than done,” she muttered. Driving rain made it difficult to gauge where the shoulder began or ended. There was a four-foot drop into a drainage ditch on both sides of this stretch of road. The last thing she wanted to do was to misjudge the distance and drive off the edge.

Suddenly, it began to hail. Hard. Visibility ahead of the truck’s front bumper shrank from a quarter mile down to ten or twelve feet. A deluge of ice pounded the metal hood and roof, the noise in the cab a relentless din in her ears. A golf-ball-sized chunk of ice struck the upper right hand corner of the windshield launching a spidery series of cracks. One raced from the impact point across the top of the windshield just above her line of sight.

Her nerves bounced with each impact. “What kind of tornado activity do you have here?” she asked Cook.

“We’ve been known to have them,” he said, his gaze darting back and forth across the road, like he was searching for a funnel. “Especially out here on the plains.”

A small gasp from the back seat made her look in the rearview mirror again. “It’s okay, honey,” she said, her voice shakier than she liked. “We’re almost there.”

They could be five minutes away or completely turned around. Rachel knew they weren’t okay. Hail blanketed the road like snow, at least an inch thick, and it didn’t show signs of easing. She’d lived all over the country and never experienced a storm like this!

Slowing until her speedometer hovered below ten miles per hour, she checked the headlights reflected in her rearview mirror the last fifteen minutes. Thank God, they weren’t completely alone on this stretch of open prairie. The lights drew closer as if the other driver, too, felt less intimidated by the storm with her taillights guiding his way. In the next instant, they disappeared.

She didn’t have time to do more than decide the other vehicle must have turned into a driveway she’d missed before she spotted
Stirling Stables
. Slowing further, she prepared to pull off the road. “We’re less than a mile away from the turn into the Colbert estate,” she said, “but we can wait out the storm here.”

“Good i—” Bright lights abruptly filled the truck cab, cutting Cook off.

Startled, she risked a glance over her shoulder and saw a large vehicle close in with terrifying speed. High beams flashed, blinding her before the driver lost traction on the slick road and his headlights slid to the open prairie on her left. She registered a quick impression of a dark truck, the silhouette of one occupant in the cab, before he straightened and she was again pinned under the glare of his headlights.

Greg! His truck was a smoky gray color, wasn’t it?

Alarmed, she automatically pushed her foot harder on the accelerator. But, it was too little, too late.

Cook shouted a warning. “Hang on! He’s right on our tail!” His voice was obliterated by the sound of metal grinding metal when the other truck struck.

Her head snapped forward. The steering wheel shuddered beneath her hands. Fishtailing on the carpet of hail covering the road, the truck skated sidewise for an unbearable few seconds. Rachel held on for dear life. Throat tight with stress, she somehow regained control.

Her gaze immediately shot to Amanda’s reflection in the mirror. She seemed okay in her car seat, if Rachel discounted her small fingers pinched so deep in the teddy’s head they almost touched in the middle. She looked like Rachel felt. Unhinged. Terrified. Did she know it was her father trying to kill them?

Greg came in for another attack. Rachel applied more pressure to the gas pedal.

“Don’t speed up,” Cook instructed tersely, pulling his gun from the holster beneath his jacket as he began to turn in his seat.

Clamping down on her urge to run, Rachel eased her foot off the pedal. But, before Cook could take aim, Greg smashed into them again. Harder than before.

Hit from an angle this time, Cook was knocked off balance, directly into Rachel. His momentum slammed her sideways. Her head smacked the driver’s side window with a sickening crunch. Pain exploded in her left temple and cheek. Her fingers slipped on the wheel. The pickup lost traction. Headlights tracking her path, she watched in horror as the edge of the road rushed toward them at breakneck speed.

In that moment, she knew they were going to die. “Patrick!” she cried his name as they went over the edge.

The truck dropped sideways into the drainage ditch. Without thinking, she turned the wheel and the truck rolled. Her body slammed into her seat belt, and then hit the door frame. Agony ripped through her shoulder. Her left hip. Her head snapped forward when Cook’s shoulder clipped her before he catapulted through the windshield. Eyes squeezed tight, the squeal of twisting metal and the breaking of glass assaulted her ears. Dozens of knives jabbed her face and hands. Pain. Terror. More wrenching pain. The truck was still rolling when Rachel heard Amanda scream.

“Mamaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

~~~

“I’m going to kill her,” Patrick muttered, his fingers white-knuckled on the steering wheel as he struggled to keep the truck and his temper under control. When he’d left the office to chase after Rachel he’d been worried about her. Now he wanted to strangle her when he found her.

What was she thinking driving all the way out here in the “worst storm in twenty years” according to the gleeful weatherman on the radio? She hadn’t bothered to stop long enough at Southgate to call ahead to see if her client was home, as he’d done when one of her landscapers told him where she’d gone.

No. The bull-headed woman just pointed her sexy backside toward an empty house in the middle of nowhere in a hailstorm. He’d wring her neck. Then he’d tie her to his bedposts so he could sleep at night. That way he could fire Larsen Cook, who obviously couldn’t protect the woman from herself.

He increased his speed. He was pushing his luck considering the road conditions, but he couldn’t dispel the worry that lay beneath his anger. “You’d better be sitting on Colbert’s doorstep,” he muttered half threatening, half praying.

The hail quit as abruptly as it started, which improved visibility considerably. A few minutes later, he spotted the first set of skid tracks in the two-inch mat of hail and ice. His heart stopped, and then started again when he traced the skid back into a straight line. His hands tightened on the steering wheel when he saw another series of erratic tracks thirty feet further. These disappeared off the shoulder and included a reddish trail of transmission fluid that looked too much like blood staining the stark white blanket of ice.

Skidding to a standstill in the middle of the road, he threw his truck into Park, pushed his door open, and ran toward the point where the tracks disappeared. He faltered when he spotted his crew cab pickup, a twisted heap of scrap metal resting upright at the bottom of the ditch fifty yards away.
No! No! No!
“Rachel! Amanda!”

Patrick scrambled down the icy incline to the center of the ditch, dodging bits and pieces of his truck. Skirting his cross-bed toolbox ripped from its moorings, he ran to the left side of the truck where the cab roof had caved in. He tried to yank the driver’s door open. It was jammed. All he could see of the unmoving figure slumped over the steering wheel was a head of honey blond curls matted with blood and glass. “Rachel! Rachel, honey…oh, God!”

He clambered onto the battered hood of the truck, reached through the missing windshield, and searched for a pulse on her exposed neck. He let out a ragged groan when he found a slow, steady, rhythm. Peering beyond Rachel into the back seat, he checked on Amanda. Like her mother, the little girl was covered with hail, glass, and blood. Unlike her mother, she was wide awake and staring back at him with big brown eyes. Then, like she’d only been waiting for him to appear and take over her watch, a tear ran down her cheek and her eyes fluttered closed.

Croaking her name, Patrick scrambled through the gaping windshield over the dash into the cab. Kneeling on the bench seat, he leaned over it and called Amanda’s name again. When she didn’t respond, he cursed and took her pulse. Weak. Thready. His first impulse was to pull her from her car seat. He didn’t dare. She might have internal injuries. Both Amanda and Rachel had to get help…fast.

Where was Cook?
The thought had barely formed when he looked out the passenger window and saw a massive, dark form lying in the hail twenty feet away, unmoving.

Kicking the passenger door open, Patrick jumped from the truck and ran toward the bodyguard, all the while dialing 911 on his cell. He reached Cook before he connected with the police dispatcher. “Cook,” he said, kneeling at the man’s side, “how bad are you hurt?”

The man didn’t respond.

Staring into his open eyes, Patrick could see that he was dead. But he checked his pulse anyway. When he didn’t find one, he pushed the man’s jacket aside so he could administer CPR. That’s when he saw the large piece of jagged metal imbedded in the middle of his chest, right through his heart. Cook was beyond anyone’s help.

“Please state your emergency,” the police dispatcher connected forcing Patrick to pull himself together. After giving the woman the general location of the accident and telling her Cook was dead, he described Rachel’s and Amanda’s injuries.

Leaving the phone line open, he jammed the cell phone in his jacket pocket and rushed back to his truck still idling in the middle of the road. Moving the vehicle closer to the scene, he turned off the engine and pushed the emergency flasher button so first responders could find the accident more easily. Grabbing all of his emergency gear, he ran back down into the ditch to triage Rachel and Amanda until paramedics arrived.

When he reached the truck, he re-entered the cab through the open passenger door. Scraping as much hail and glass off Amanda as he dared, he draped a couple of warm blankets around her and her car seat. Her skin had developed a grayish pallor that terrified him. “Hang on, baby,” he whispered brokenly. With a gentle touch of his hand, he tucked a wisp of baby fine hair under the hood he’d created over her head with the blanket.

Then, he slid across the front seat toward Rachel and leaned down to examine the way she was pinned beneath the buckled dash and steering wheel. He couldn’t see much of her legs below the dash, but he wouldn’t allow himself to think they might be as twisted as the wreckage of his truck. It was bad enough to see how hard the steering wheel cut into her thighs, holding her in place. It was going to be a bitch to extricate her even if, by some miracle, she didn’t have any broken bones he couldn’t see.

He tucked the last two blankets around her the best he could before he pulled the cell phone from his pocket and updated the dispatcher. The ice melting into his jeans made him shiver. “We have to get them out of here,” he said to the woman. “Where’s that ambulance?”

Rachel groaned and he dropped the phone on the seat without responding to the dispatcher’s assurances help was on its way. He placed his warm hand over Rachel’s cheek. Rach,” he called gently, then louder. “Rachel! Honey, can you hear me?”

With another groan, she opened her eyes. They were glazed, unfocused, and he was never so glad to see anything in his life.

“G-Greg?” she stammered.

He frowned. The knot on Rachel’s forehead told him it was likely she had another concussion and was confused. “Patrick,” he said gently. “It’s Patrick, honey.”

“No. Where is—” She shuddered. Her eyelids closed half way.

For a moment, he was afraid she’d passed out again. But then, she rallied. “Greg,” she murmured. “Ran us…off road.”

Bishop did this?
He searched the immediate area but they were too low in the ditch for him to see far, and he couldn’t see the road at all from this position. He hadn’t seen another vehicle when he arrived. He was so fixed on locating Rachel and Amanda he might have missed it. He pulled the Glock he’d been carrying since the incident with the councilman from his shoulder holster. “I’ll be right back, Rach.”