Royal Rescue (21 page)

“That—that was you?” she asked.

He nodded his head. “And the other so-called orderly was at O’Hannigan’s place, setting up the backup plan.”

She glanced again at CJ and whispered, “The bomb?”

“But you were just so quick,” he murmured regretfully. “Too quick.”

“And Brendan’s apartment?”

“I have a friend with the Bureau, one who knew that your little mob friend is really an agent, so he knew where his safe house is.”

The guy had gotten to another marshal and an agent. Which agent? Were Brendan and his mother safe?

“Is—is this agent going to hurt Brendan?”

He chuckled. “He thinks O’Hannigan walks on water. He didn’t realize why I was asking about the guy.”

“He’ll put it together now,” she warned him. “Since the bomb and the shooting.”

The man shook his head. “No. No one would ever consider me capable of what I’ve done and what I’m about to do.”

“Because you’re a U.S. marshal?”

“Because I’m a good marshal,” he said, “and I’ve always been a good man.”

Then maybe he would change his mind. Maybe he wouldn’t shoot her and her son....

“But you and your father changed all that,” he said. “That’s why you have to pay. You and your father took everything from me, everything that mattered. So now I’m going to do that to your father. I’m going to take away what matters most to him. Again.”

So even four years ago, this man had been the one—the one who’d cut her brakes and set up the bomb. All of it had been because of him.

“Mr. Peterson,” she murmured as recognition dawned. How had she not remembered that Donny Peterson’s father was a U.S. marshal? Her former college classmate had brought it up enough, using it as a threat against whoever challenged him. She hadn’t heeded that threat, though; she’d continued to pursue the story that had led to Donny’s destruction. So all of it had been because of
her
.

Neither of the bombs or the shootings at the hospital and the apartment complex had had anything to do with Brendan’s job, his family or his relationship with her.

It was all her fault and she was about to pay for that with her life. But Brendan, who’d had nothing to do with it, would pay, too—when he lost his son.

“Now you know who I am.”

If only she’d realized it earlier...

If only she and CJ hadn’t gotten inside the SUV with him.

“I understand why you’re upset,” she assured him, hoping to reason with him. “But you should be upset with me. Not with my son. Not with my father.”

“You fed him the information, but he wrote the damn story.” He snorted derisively. “Jess Ley.”

“I’m Jess Ley,” she corrected him. “I wrote the story.”

He sucked in a breath as if she’d struck him. He hadn’t known. “But if your father hadn’t printed it and broadcast it everywhere...”

His son might still be alive.

“That was my fault,” she said.

She alone had caused this man’s pain—as she was about to cause Brendan’s. Because this man must have originally planned to take her from her father in his quest for an eye for an eye. Now he would also take her son from her.

Chapter Eighteen

“I think you should have gone with them to the hospital,” his mother chastised Brendan.

While other agents slapped him on the back to express their approval, his mother leaned against her minivan with her arms crossed. Her brown eyes, which were usually so warm and crinkled at the corners with a smile, were dark and narrowed with disapproval.

“I have to talk to Margaret,” he said.

“Why?” she asked with a glance at the car in which her husband’s killer sat. “She confessed, right?”

“To killing my father,” Brendan said.

“Isn’t that all you need?” she asked. “It’s not like there’s any mystery as to why.”

He shook his head. “No, she explained that, too. Dad was going to divorce her and leave her with nothing. She wanted it all. That must be why she wanted to hurt Josie and my son, why she wanted to kill them, too—to make sure there were no more O’Hannigans.”

“Your father’s damn codicil,” she remarked.

He grinned as his mother and stepmother glared at each other through the back window of the police car. “She didn’t know about you.”

His mother shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not an O’Hannigan anymore.”

No. She’d dropped her married name when the marshals had moved her. To the runaways she’d fostered, she’d been just Roma. Perhaps they’d all known the Jones surname was an alias.

“She thought you were dead,” Brendan remarked as he opened the back door to the police car.

“What the hell is it with you people?” Margaret asked. “Is anyone really dead?” She turned her glare on Brendan. “First you come back from the dead and show up to claim what was mine. And then your nosy girlfriend comes back from the dead with a kid. And now her...” She curled her thin lips in disgust.

He’d been so scared that Josie had been alone with a suspected killer that he hadn’t been paying much attention to the conversation coming through the mike. But now he remembered Margaret’s surprise that Josie wasn’t dead. He’d thought it was because she’d incorrectly assumed Josie had been killed with him from the bomb set at his house, but he realized now that she’d never admitted to planting it.

But why? When she had confessed to murder, why would she bother denying attempted murder?

“You didn’t know Josie was alive?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I didn’t care whether she was or not until she showed up here with pictures of your damn kid in her purse and all those damn questions of hers. How could you have not realized she was a reporter?”

Especially given who her father was. Brendan had been a fool to not realize it. But then he hadn’t been thinking clearly. He never did around her.

He had just let Josie walk off with their son before he’d confirmed that she was safe. Hell, he’d told her she was—that Margaret wouldn’t be a threat anymore. But had Margaret ever been the threat to Josie?

“You didn’t know Josie was in witness relocation?”

“I didn’t know that anybody was in witness relocation,” the woman replied. A calculating look came over her face. “But perhaps I should talk to the marshals, let them know what I know about your father’s business and his associates.”

Despite foreboding clutching his stomach muscles into tight knots, he managed a short chuckle. “I gave them everything there was to know.” Along with the men who’d disappeared—either into prisons or the program.

“You have nothing to offer anyone anymore, Margaret,” he said as he slammed the door. Then he pounded on the roof, giving the go-ahead for the driver to pull away and take her to jail. He couldn’t hear her as the car drove off, but he could read her lips and realized she was cursing him.

But he was already cursing himself. “Where did Josie go?” he asked his mother.

“To see her father,” she said, as if he were being stupid again. “You and I should have gone along. I could have talked to her father and prepared him for seeing his daughter again after he spent the past four years believing she was dead.”

“Yeah, because you prepared
me
so well,” he said. He nearly hadn’t gone to the address his father had given him. But after he’d gotten off the bus, he’d been scared and hungry and cold. So he’d gone to the house and knocked on the door. And when she’d opened it, he’d passed out. Later he’d blamed the hunger and the cold, but it was probably because he’d thought he’d seen a ghost.

It had taken him years to live down the razzing from Roma’s other runaways.

“You’re right,” he said. “I should have gone with her.”

“Do you know which hospital?”

He nodded. He knew the hospital well. He just didn’t know how she’d gotten there. “What vehicle did she take?”

Roma shook her head. “She got a ride in a black SUV.”

“With whom?”

“A marshal, I think. The guy had his badge on a chain around his neck.” That was how the men who’d taken her into the program had worn theirs, or so she’d told him when she’d explained how she had disappeared. “He offered to drive her and CJ to see her father.”

How had the man known that her father was in the hospital? And why had a marshal walked into the middle of an FBI investigation? The two agencies worked together, but usually not willingly and not without withholding more information than they shared.

Brendan had become an FBI agent instead of a marshal because he’d resented the marshals for not letting his mother take him along—for making him mourn her for years, as he’d mourned Josie.

He had a bad feeling that he might be mourning her again. And CJ, too, if he didn’t find her. Charlotte wouldn’t have sent another marshal; she had trusted Brendan to keep Josie and their son safe.

And he had a horrible feeling, as his heart ached with the force of its frantic pounding, that he had failed.

* * *

“
W
HY—WHY DID
you bring us here?” Josie asked as she rode up in the hospital elevator with her son and a madman.

Before Donald Peterson could reply, CJ answered, “We came to see Grampa.” He’d even pushed the button to the sixth floor. “We shoulda brought Gramma.”

No. Brendan was already going to lose one person he loved—if Josie didn’t think of something to at least save their son. She didn’t want him to lose his mother, too.

She looked up at their captor. “We should have left him with his grandmother,” she said. “And his father. He isn’t part of this.”

“He’s your son,” Peterson said. “Your father’s grandson. He’s very much a part of this.”

She shook her head. “He’s a three-year-old child. He has nothing to do with any of this.”

The elevator lurched to a halt on the sixth floor, nearly making her stomach lurch, too, with nerves and fear. With a gun shoved in the middle of her back, the U.S. marshal pushed her out the open doors. She held tight to CJ’s hand.

He kept digging the gun deeper, pushing her down the hall toward her father’s room. A man waited outside. He was dressed like an orderly, as he’d been dressed the night he’d held Brendan back from getting on the elevator with her and CJ. She’d been grateful for his intervention then.

He wasn’t going to intervene tonight—just as his partners in crime had refused to be swayed from the U.S. marshal’s nefarious plan. But still she had to try. “Please,” she said, “you don’t want to be part of this.”

“He’s already part of it,” Peterson replied. “Even before he set the bomb, he was already wanted for other crimes.”

She understood now. “You tracked them down on their outstanding warrants but you worked out a deal for not bringing them in.”

Peterson chuckled. “You can’t stop asking questions, can’t stop trying to ferret out all the information you can.”

She shuddered, remembering that Brendan had accused her of the same thing. No wonder he hadn’t been able to trust her.

“But you and your father won’t be able to broadcast this story,” he said.

“You’re not going to get away,” she warned him.

“I know. But it’s better this way—better to see his face and yours than have someone else take the pleasure for me.” He pushed the barrel deeper into her back and ordered, “Open the door.”

“I—I think someone should warn him first,” she said. “Let him know that I’m alive so that he doesn’t have another heart attack.”

“It was unfortunate that he had the first one,” Peterson agreed. “He was only supposed to be hurt, not killed.” He glanced at the orderly as he said that, as if the man had not followed orders. “But the doctors have put him on medication to regulate his heart. He’s probably stronger now than he was when he thought you died four years ago. That didn’t kill him.”

His mouth tightened. “It would be easier to die,” he said, “than to lose a child and have to live.”

He wasn’t worried about getting away anymore, because he had obviously decided to end his life, too.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“Not yet,” he replied, “but you will be.” He pushed her through the door to her father’s room.

“Stop shoving my mommy!” CJ yelled at him. “You’re a bad man!”

“What—what’s going on?” asked the gray-haired man in the room. He was sitting up as if he’d been about to get out of bed. He was bruised, but he wasn’t broken. “Who are you all? Are you in the right room?”

“Yes,” CJ replied. “This is my grampa’s room number. Are you my grampa?”

Stanley Jessup looked at his grandson through narrowed eyes. Then he lifted his gaze and looked at Josie. At first he didn’t recognize her; his brow furrowed as if he tried to place her, though.

“You don’t know your own daughter?” the U.S. marshal berated him. “I would know my son anywhere. No matter what he may have done to his face, I would recognize his soul. That’s how I knew he couldn’t have done the things that article and those news reports said.” He raised the gun and pointed it at Josie’s head. “The things—the lies—your friend told you, claiming that my Donny had tried to hurt her.”

“Donald Peterson,” her father murmured. He recognized her attempted killer but not his own daughter.

“Your son told me, too,” Josie said. “He had once been my friend, too.”

“Until you betrayed him.”

“Until he tried to rape my roommate,” she said. If not for her coming to her father with the article, he might have gotten away with it—just as he’d gotten away with his drug use—but the athletic director hadn’t wanted to lose their star player from the football team. So they’d tried paying off the girl. When she’d refused money, they’d expelled her and labeled her crazy. So just as she had done with Margaret O’Hannigan today, Josie had gotten Donny Peterson to confess.

“Josie...” Her father whispered her name, as if unable to believe it. Then he looked down at the little boy, who stared up at him in puzzlement.

Poor CJ had been through so much the past few days. He’d met so many people and had been in so much danger, he had to be thoroughly confused and exhausted. He whispered, too, to his grandfather, “He’s a bad man, Grampa.”

“Your mama and grandpa are the bad ones,” Donald Peterson insisted. “My Donny was a star, and they couldn’t handle it. They had to bring him down, had to destroy him.”