Release (34 page)

Sean found himself staring unseeingly at his computer, seeing another screen in his mind’s eye.

“Carol,”
he shouted.

“What?”
Carol asked a second later as she poked her head in the door, a harried look on her face.

“Call our contact over at WGN News. Ask him to send over the footage of the Sauren mansion fire—the same clip they broadcast on the news.”

“What?
Now?
”

“Ten minutes ago,” Sean muttered at the same time he hit some keys on his computer.

Maybe they had the news clip on the Internet . . .

 

 

 

A little over an hour later, Sean rushed into the penthouse, adrenaline pumping through his veins. He hadn’t been able to find the news clip on the Internet, and their contact at WGN hadn’t returned from lunch until a half an hour ago. He’d sent over the video attached to an e-mail. Sean had just finished watching the clip on his computer minutes ago. After a few terse phone calls, Sean’d hurried up to the penthouse, eager to see Genny.

Anxious to see that she was okay.

“Genny?”

Silence.

“Genny?” he called more insistently. He strained his hearing for the sound of the shower running, but the penthouse was quiet.

He stalked into the living room, then down the hallway. Of
course
the penthouse wasn’t empty. Hadn’t he just talked to Genny? Hadn’t her voice gone all sexy and husky with need when she’d told him to
come quicker
?

Where else would she be but right here, waiting for him just like she said she would be?

“Genny?” he bellowed loud enough to startle her if she was anywhere on the entire floor of the high-rise.

The guest bedroom door bounced against the doorjamb when he opened it. He checked in there, the master bedroom, and both bathrooms. Her purse, clothing, and toiletries were nowhere to be found. Neither was Genny.

Not believing his eyes, he checked again.

He experienced a profound sense of incredulity when he walked back out to the empty living room.

How the hell could she have
left
? After everything?

After he’d just come to understand the threat against her with perfect clarity?

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and speed-dialed Carol. She picked up on the second ring.

“Is Genny with you?”

“What? No. I haven’t seen her since I was up at the penthouse.”

Sean started to say something when he noticed the television. It was a blue, blank screen. The television was turned on, but the DVD player had been switched off.

“Okay, Carol,” he mumbled before he disconnected. He lunged toward the remote control that lay on the coffee table next to what appeared to be Genevieve’s cooled cup of coffee.

He switched it on and stared, his incredulity mounting.

She straddled him, her bottom in the air, wearing nothing but a pair of thigh-highs and ivory-colored leather pumps, her pale, bare breasts crushed to his chest. He held her jaw and kissed her like she supplied him with the breath he required to survive.

A naked man moved behind her. He gave the two of them a slow, knowing grin before he pushed back one of the woman’s ass cheek and slid his cock into her slit.

His harsh groan of arousal tore Sean out of his stunned trance.

How the hell had that volatile video of the New Year’s Eve ménage à trois gotten
up here
?

Jesus.

Is
that
what Genny had seen before she’d raced out of here?

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

S
ean gripped the remote control so hard in his hand the plastic made a cracking noise.

He clenched his eyelids when he recalled his suggestion to Carol to have some videos delivered to keep Genny entertained. Obviously Albert Rook had intercepted the delivery boy and inserted his own movie. It’d been the bastard’s subtle way of informing Sean that he couldn’t keep Genny completely off limits.

But Rook’s gambit had gone one better than that. It’d driven Genny out in the open.

She was exposed.

A profound sense of frustration and helplessness went through him when he realized he didn’t even have Genny’s newest cell phone number. For the past three years, she’d insisted upon any communications with him going through her lawyer.

He’d just have to call her attorney on the way to his car.

He rapidly rolled down a list of names on his phone and pressed the number of one of his top operatives—a man he knew was doing surveillance in the Loop that afternoon.

“Mike? Kennedy. I’ve got another job for you. Yeah, right this second. The Misseli case is going to have to wait.”

A minute later, he grabbed his coat and rushed out the door.

The unexpected site of the video must have sent Genny spinning in a cyclone of emotion. Where would she have gone in her anguished flight?

Minutes later he barreled west on Madison Street, his attention divided as he tried to find Genny’s attorney’s phone number on his cell phone and maneuver through a traffic-laden street that had been narrowed by snow piled six feet high on each side. The ramps to the Kennedy Expressway were approaching, but Sean couldn’t decide whether to go east or west.

One of his operatives, Mike Butler, was checking out the Sauren property in Lake Forest. Paul Dershiwitz would probably be arriving at her Oak Street boutique any minute now. For the life of him, Sean couldn’t recall any of Genny’s old friends’ names.

One question kept plaguing him. How long would it take Rook to catch up with her, now that she was exposed? He must have been in the proximity at around the time she’d left, or else how could he have interfered with the video delivery? Surely he’d seen her as she pulled out of the garage.

He jerked left on the wheel in a spur of the moment decision to head east toward Indiana—Genny might have fled to her mother’s—when his cell phone rang. His forehead crinkled when he glanced at the number at the same moment that he had to merge into traffic. Hope flickered through him when no caller identification showed. Maybe it was Genny?

“Hello?” His desperate bark was almost drowned out by a loud horn. Apparently he’d cut somebody off.

“Kennedy? Sean Kennedy?”

He recognized that mellow, Southern-accented baritone.

“Right. I wasn’t sure who else to call, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try you. The station got a call from a squad car about a half an hour ago. Currently, that same officer is on the 31st Street ramp on the Dan Ryan headed eastbound, pulled up behind a dark blue BMW sedan.”

“Genny?” Sean croaked as he rapidly switched three lanes and pressed his foot to the accelerator.

“That’s right,” Franklin said.

“I’m on my way. I’m not far from there.”

“No—
wait
, Kennedy. That’s not why I was calling. Ms. Bujold has been taken to Northwestern Memorial. I’m almost to the hospital as we speak. I was calling to see if you’d meet me there.”

Sean cursed under his breath and zipped back through the three packed lanes he’d just maneuvered out of, barely making the Roosevelt Road exit.

“Is she hurt?” he shouted as he flew up the ramp.

“I can’t say for sure,” Detective Franklin rumbled, not unkindly. “All the officer said is that she was dazed and unsteady, possibly sustained a head injury. Doesn’t look like her air bag deployed like it should have when the guy rammed her car, both from the side and the rear. Her car had been searched, and whoever forced her off the road also stole her purse. Bit strange he didn’t just take the entire car, seeing as he searched everywhere, including the trunk. Not your typical carjacker, it would seem.”

Sean grunted, not really paying attention as his mind churned and he navigated traffic.

“You think you know who might have attacked her, Kennedy?”

Sean blinked, his focus narrowing once again to Franklin’s mellow voice. He hesitated only for a few seconds before he chose the lesser of two evils. Franklin might pose a threat to Genevieve, but Albert Rook was a greater one at the moment. He was certainly the more
immediate
of the two. Sean required that the entire Chicago Police Department look out for Rook, not just a handful of very skilled operatives.

“I have reason to think it might have been an ex-Sauren-Kennedy Solutions operative named Albert Rook,” Sean began at the same time that he turned down Jefferson Street and zoomed northbound.

 

 

 

A woman’s screams in the distance seemed to cleave right through Genevieve’s head like an ax.

“You want to sit back here, Ms. Bujold?” a heavyset nurse in her sixties asked. She had a square, stern face and short, dyed blonde hair. Despite her no-nonsense manner, she’d been nothing but kind and solicitous to Genevieve from the moment she’d entered the emergency room.

The nurse nodded toward a relatively secluded alcove that had been separated by a filing cabinet and several heavy curtains. Genevieve doubted the curtains would serve as much of a barrier to the poor woman’s screams, but it afforded her a measure of privacy that the bustling emergency room couldn’t. She was feeling dazed and vulnerable enough without sitting in the midst of a public arena with a bandage on her forehead.

She followed the nurse into what looked like someone’s makeshift office, given the desk piled with papers, the man’s pair of shoes beneath the desk, and the disposable food container on top of the filing cabinet.

“The attending still needs to examine you,” the nurse explained amiably. She nodded in the direction of the screaming woman. “As you can hear, he’s a little preoccupied at the moment, though. Chances are, the doctor will want you to stay overnight for observation, given that bump on your head.”

Panic and irritation flared in Genevieve’s gut in equal measure. The last thing she needed was yet another medical professional asking her how many fingers they were holding up and who the president of the United States was.

“I can’t stay here! No one even knows what happened to me. The man who robbed me took my cell phone.”

The nurse glanced around cautiously and nodded at the phone on the desk. “Go ahead and use that phone after I leave, but don’t let on I said it was okay. We’re not even supposed to let people back here—it’s the psychiatrist’s office, and he gets furious when we let people use it—but Lord knows he’s busy enough today. These big snowstorms bring out all the crazies.” She glanced at Genevieve’s head wryly. “Not that I have to tell you that, of course.”

The nurse had helped the resident dress the wound Genevieve had received when her head had become very familiar with her steering wheel, so she’d heard the skeletal explanation Genevieve had given during the examination.

Not that Genevieve really
had
any more than a skeletal explanation. The whole incident seemed as bizarre and surreal as the experience of sitting on the couch in the penthouse and seeing the images of Sean, Max, and herself on the television screen.

She’d already wondered a dozen times if she was dreaming. She sunk into the chair in front of the metal desk, wondering who she should call. The simple question should have been easy to answer.

In fact, it was so complex that she began to shake with the receiver clutched in her hand, frozen by indecision.

She knew who she
wanted
to call. She wanted to call Sean more than anything. But as that flagrant display on the video screen earlier stated loud and clear, what she wanted when it came to Sean and what she allowed herself to have should be two very,
very
different things.

Who had sent it to her, and why? The same person who had been breaking into her property? The same person who had run her off the road?

Genevieve didn’t have the answers to those questions, but if there was one thing she understood, it was that this whole fiasco was somehow associated with Max’s murder. Sean thought so. Detective Franklin did as well.

She herself was starting to believe it, although she was stumped as to
how
it was all related.

She sat in the grubby office chair, immobilized by doubt and fear. The nurse suddenly stuck her face around the curtain.

“Miss? There’s a Detective Franklin here to see you. He says it’s important.”

Genevieve felt as if her head had been slammed into the steering wheel all over again.

“Ms. Bujold,” Franklin greeted her in his deep voice. He parted the curtain and joined her in the cubbyhole, a concerned expression on his round face. He looked enormous in the tiny space.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him shakily. When he opened his mouth to explain, Genevieve interrupted him. “Oh. Right. Following the tracks.”

He shrugged his wide shoulders and gave her an apologetic look.

“Sometimes a detective’s got so little to go on, he’s got to hover and try to see the lay of the land, if you know what I mean, Ms. Bujold.”

She smiled grimly and set the phone receiver back in the cradle. “Like a vulture?”

His white teeth flashed in his dark face. “Well, that doesn’t make it sound too pretty, but we’ve all got to get our supper somehow. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m ready to go, but they want the attending physician to look at me first. I suppose you heard about what happened? From the police officer that found me?”

Franklin nodded. “Did you get a look at the man who did this to you?”

“He was wearing a black ski mask. He drove an older model, white SUV. I never got the license plate. I was too busy trying to keep my car from wrecking when he forced me off the road.”

“Do you know who it was?”

Genevieve glanced up at the blunt question. “I’d be the first to tell you if I knew who had just run me off the road, threatened to shoot me if I didn’t unlock the door, and then slammed my head into the steering wheel before robbing me. Unfortunately, I don’t have a clue.”