Unleashed (5 page)

“We’ll check her out, make sure everything’s okay to go, and you’ll get the rest in a week,” she heard the man say.

Her vision tunneled but she held on to consciousness long enough to see her “friend” accept a fat wad of bills.

Kaylee didn’t know how long she’d been out when the sound of crying finally woke her. Her eyelids felt like anvils as she dragged them open. The room was nearly dark. The only source of light was a strip of daylight shining weakly through the gap where the curtains didn’t quite meet over a window. It was several seconds before she could fully focus on the huddled form quietly sobbing on the bed across from her.

Her stomach soured and her heart thudded as the details of the day slowly slipped into place. Ericka, offering her a shower and a place to stay. Ericka, offering to set Kaylee up with her manager. Ericka, driving her out to the middle of bumfuck nowhere and selling her to some creep.

“Where am I?”

The only answer was more sobs, and Kaylee pried her head off the pillow to look around. Her head throbbed, making her squint as she took in the small, sparsely furnished room. She was on the bottom of a set of bunk beds, lying on top of a scratchy blanket. The room had two more sets of bunk beds, but only one other bed was occupied. A small form huddled on the top bunk across the room. The source of the sobbing.

The girl was curled up into a ball, her face hidden, and Kaylee could see nothing but a dark, scraggly ponytail hanging down her back.

“Hey, you,” she yelled and threw her pillow at the girl in case there was any mistaking who she was talking to. “Where are we?”

The girl started and lifted her tear-stained face. She was Asian, her narrow eyes nearly swollen shut, her round face blotchy and wet.

“What the hell is going on here?” Kaylee snapped.

The girl started bawling all over again, babbling in some language Kaylee couldn’t understand.

“English?” Kaylee tried. “You speak English?”

“No good,” the girl said. “Me Thailand.” She moved her hand in an up and down motion that Kaylee finally got was supposed to be a boat. “I come here, work. Tell me, good job, much money to have.” Then her mouth trembled and she said, “Me here. Many men. Many men.” She wrapped her arms around her waist and started to sob again.

Kaylee had a pretty good idea what they had planned for her, and she swallowed back a surge of nausea as panic swelled in her chest. She wasn’t a virgin, not by a long shot, but that didn’t mean she wanted to give it up for sweaty old men so desperate they needed to pay for it.

“Where are we?” she asked the girl, not really surprised when her only answer was more sobbing.

She needed to think. There had to be a way out of there, even if her Thai roommate hadn’t found it yet. She sat up, pausing when it felt like her brain smacked into the side of her skull, and took stock of herself.

Oh, God, had the creepy guy raped her while she was out?

Tears stung her eyes as she took careful stock of all of her sexual parts. When she and her best friend Kristin were freshmen in high school, they’d gone to a senior party. Kristin had gotten so drunk she’d passed out, and when she’d woken up her pants were gone and she hurt between her legs.

Kaylee hadn’t understood why she was so upset. If she couldn’t remember it, it was like it never even happened. Nothing to freak out about.

Now as she tugged her shirt and bra aside and tried to focus to see if she was sore between her legs, Kaylee wished she’d been a little nicer to Kristin. No wonder she took her off as a faceplace friend.

There was nothing. No marks. No come stains. And it had been awhile so she was pretty sure she would be sore if she’d had sex.

Kaylee shuffled to the door and tried the knob. The door didn’t budge. There was a shiny round knob with a flat surface, almost like where a deadbolt would be but there was no keyhole.

Right. Because if there was a keyhole someone might be able to pick a lock.

The Thai girl’s sobs raked down Kaylee’s spine, pulling at the skin of her neck and shoulders until Kaylee wanted to scream. She moved across the room to the single small window and pulled back the curtains. It didn’t matter that the window was locked and painted shut. There was no way she or anyone would be able to squeeze past the bars covering the glass from the outside.

Fear clutched her chest, choking her, making her thoughts swim as she tried to shake off the effects of the drug. She dropped to the floor and looked under the beds, scoured every corner for something, anything that might be used for a weapon.

The creepy guy might not have raped her while she was drugged, but Kaylee knew it was only a matter of time. If she didn’t get out of there, she would be sold, used up, as good as dead.

“S
o are you going to help her?” Derek asked as they waited for the paper targets to make their way back on the line. He snapped another ammo clip into his Sig Sauer 45.

“Did someone from Alyssa’s Hollywood crowd slip you some dope? No fucking way.” Danny yanked the target off the line and held it to the light, slipping his glasses down under his chin for a better look, then moved around to Derek’s side of the particle board partition to look over Derek’s shoulder. Derek’s target showed only two big holes. One in the center of the outline’s forehead, one in the center of its chest. He’d neatly divided his shots between the two kill zones and hadn’t missed a single one by so much as a millimeter.

Showoff. There was a good reason Derek had become a sniper for the Seventy-fifth Regiment of Army Rangers.

Danny’s shots, in contrast, were all over the fucking place, as scattered as his brain had been ever since Caroline Palomares—no
Medford
—had dropped in on his mother’s memorial service and dropped a great big nuke all over his day.

“And that’s why you’ve spent the past two days digging up everything you can find about James Medford’s murder?”

Danny didn’t answer right away. As far as his brothers knew, Caroline had made a surprise appearance to pay her respects to the dead and try to hire him to help her find the “real” killer. He hadn’t told anyone—not even his brothers—what Caroline had said about finding evidence linking her dead husband to his dead mom. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to give anyone false hope or waste their time chasing false leads—Christ knew they’d done enough of that for the past eighteen years. He didn’t want to get anyone else involved until he had something solid.

Yeah, that was what he told himself, but as much as he hated to admit it, that wasn’t even close to the truth.

The truth lay in the middle of a convoluted mess of emotions he didn’t even want to try to unravel. Starting with the one-two punch of ball tightening, knee weakening lust he’d experienced at the first sight of her, immediately followed by an upsurge of anger he would have sworn was dead and buried.

“Seeing her again sparked my curiosity.”

He didn’t have to look at Derek to know he didn’t believe him for a second. To avoid any more prying questions, Danny pushed the button to set another target and slipped his safety glasses and ear protectors back into place.

Curiosity. Yeah, Danny was pretty fucking curious about a lot of things having to do with Caroline Medford. Starting with how she’d ended up married to the old fart in the first place. Never mind that Medford was good looking—for an old raisin anyway—a successful attorney, prominent on the San Francisco social scene and rich enough to have a mansion in one of the East Bay’s wealthiest communities.

But he’d never pegged Caroline for a gold digger or a status seeker, even when she’d questioned his choice of West Point for college and his determination to join the Army like his father before him.

Guys like you don’t join the army. Guys from my neighborhood join the army so they can go to school. Your dad has money. You can do whatever you want
.

She hadn’t understood, at first, his desire to fulfill the family legacy. Four generations of Taggarts, including his father, had served in the military. To him, joining the military wasn’t a last resort, something a man did because his choices were limited. It was the choice of a man who knew exactly what he was getting into and chose to face the challenge to be all he could be.

Yeah, he’d quoted the Army recruiting poster back to her. So what?

Caroline still hadn’t understood that—not completely—but she had understood his need to feel like he was doing something useful, worthwhile, on behalf of a cause greater than him, instead of being stuck at home spinning his wheels as his father fell apart in the wake of his mother’s disappearance. She also knew, even though Danny had never voiced it out loud, Danny’s hope that if he went to West Point, followed in Joe Taggart’s footsteps, his Dad might notice something else in his life other than his single-minded drive to find his missing wife.

But even if Caroline claimed to understand Danny’s decision, she’d never accepted the reality of what it would be like to be an army spouse, especially the wife of someone in the Special Forces. The long absences where she didn’t have any idea where he was or when he’d be back. His need for periods of quiet and decompression when he came back so he could deal with the blood, the violence, and the death on both sides he faced every time he was sent on a mission.

In the end, no matter what she said about love and loyalty and their plans for the future, Caroline couldn’t hack it. And just like his mother, when the going got tough, Caroline had turned her back on him and walked away for good.

Good thing she’d done it before they did something really stupid, like actually marry each other.

Danny leveled his Glock at the target, took aim and squeezed the trigger. The target shuddered on impact and he squeezed again.

Derek fired off three rounds, paused, and emptied the rest of his clip.

“Did you find anything good?” Derek asked after they both removed their ear protectors and Danny punched the buttons to retrieve the targets.

“You know, if I wanted to chitchat, I would have suggested coffee instead of the firing range,” Danny snapped.

So much for keeping his cool. But Derek’s question picked at a raw spot. Despite all of his research into James Medford’s murder and a careful dissection of his own mother’s life before she disappeared, he couldn’t find a single shred of information or evidence that indicated they’d ever been in the same room together, much less crossed paths in any meaningful way.

Then again, there was a lot they didn’t know about the last weeks and months in his mother’s life. Gaps of time when they didn’t know what she was doing while they were at school and their father was at work. Mundane details they’d pieced together from bits of information provided by friends and acquaintances, because none of them paid much attention at all to how Anne Taggart was living her life.

Danny shoved aside the surge of guilt that came with that reminder. He wasn’t going to waste time wallowing, not when there was a chance to redeem himself for every cruel word and thought he’d had for his mother since she’d disappeared.

“I still think you should help her.” Derek unloaded his gun and packed it in a locking gun case while Danny did the same. Though they both had conceal and carry permits, neither wore their sidearms unless the job called for it.

“What the fuck. Just because you and Ethan jacked off to visions of Carrie in a bikini before you could get pussy of your own, you have a soft spot for her.”

“Ethan and I did just fine on our own without having to spank it to images of your girlfriend,” Derek replied in his annoyingly calm voice. “But I think we should help her out. For old time’s sake. Shit, she was going to be part of our family. That should count for something.”

Danny slammed his guncase on the ground and threw his ear protectors so hard a piece of plastic casing went pinging through the air. He was sick of his brothers pushing, sorry he’d told them even half of what she wanted. “Yeah, and the only reason she didn’t marry in was because she found out I wasn’t the trust fund kid she thought I was. As soon as she realized she’d have to live on my military pay, she said fuck you to the six years we were together, turned around and found herself a sugar daddy to shack up with. So I don’t owe her shit for old time’s sake, and neither do you.”

Derek opened his mouth to protest but Danny cut him off. “And another thing. She didn’t show up at Mom’s memorial service out of some long lost affection for Mom or for us. She was there because she’s a user, and she wants to use us to help her beat a murder rap.”

“You don’t really think she did it.”

“Even if she did, it’s not like she won’t get off, not with Rachael Weller covering her ass. That woman could get Pontius Pilot acquitted.”

“Which brings me back to my earlier question. If you really don’t give a shit about all this, why have you pulled up every piece of information you can find on James Medford?”

The truth surged, clamoring to break free. He and his brothers were tight; they never kept things from each other, especially something as big as this. But something held his tongue. He didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, not even his own, until he knew whether Caroline was really on to something.

He refused to think that it had anything to do with protecting Caroline. Or protecting himself. Because he knew the second he let them in on it, they wouldn’t let up on him until he gave in, or they’d go behind his back to help her themselves. Either way Danny would be smack back where he didn’t want to be: way too close to Caroline. “Morbid curiosity,” he said.

Derek finished packing his Sig away and leveled Danny with a stare that made him want to squirm. Instead Danny turned away and headed for his Jeep.

Danny slid into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition.

“For someone so dead set against helping her, you’re sure doing a lot of due diligence.”

Danny didn’t say anything, and it stuck in his craw not to tell Derek the truth. Maybe he should just call the cops, tip them off that Caroline might have some information. But he knew what would happen. Whatever the cops found would disappear into a black hole of an evidence closet, and Danny wanted to know exactly what Caroline had before it got mired in the legal system.

That was the real reason he wasn’t going to the cops, and why he wasn’t letting anyone else in on the information. It had nothing to do with the fact that something inside him physically recoiled at the thought of siccing the cops on Caroline again. At the thought of cops showing up at her house, questioning her, maybe even getting a search warrant to tear her place apart. Her face would be all over the news, the new sensational angle putting her right back on the front page.

But he didn’t care about protecting her from that, not at all. The only reason he was keeping Caroline’s revelation to himself was because it was best for everyone involved.

Derek was silent the rest of the way back to the office. They entered the building and Derek started down the hall to his office, then paused as though reminded of something. “Don’t forget dinner at our place tonight.”

Danny feigned a look of regret. “Can’t. I have some stuff I need to take care of. Moreno’s helping me with the postmortem on the GeneCor case.”

Derek glared at him.

“I wouldn’t miss Alyssa’s lasagne if it weren’t important. They need the report by tomorrow.” Total lie. Danny planned to be working on a case all right, but it had nothing to do with the biotech company that had been a Gemini client for the past two years. He planned to recruit Moreno—the one man in their organization guaranteed to keep his mouth shut and ask no questions—and they were going to start some heavy surveillance and figure out exactly what Caroline Medford had to hide.

“Garage light just came on.” Ben Moreno’s low voice whispered through Danny’s earpiece. At five-thirty in the morning, the moon was still peeking through wisps of clouds as the sun struggled up over the bay. For the last several days Danny and Moreno had staked out Caroline’s house, familiarizing themselves with her routine. While Danny slouched low in the Lexus he’d borrowed from his dad, Moreno had posed as a member of the gardening crew. He’d managed to get into her garage and put a tracking device on her car.

Not that they needed it. If the last few days were any indication, Caroline didn’t get out much. She left briefly one afternoon when a cleaning crew arrived. They’d tailed her to a coffee shop where she’d sipped a cappuccino and pretended not to notice the speculative stares and whispers as the other patrons recognized her. She didn’t lead the trophy wife life he’d imagined. No long lunches with friends. No leisurely afternoons at the spa.

The Caroline he’d known had been outgoing, social, the kind of woman who made a new friend everywhere she went.

Now it seemed she was a virtual shut-in.

Danny shoved aside the involuntary tug of sympathy. Caroline had made her choice when she married a much older, wealthy man. If that left her with few friends to rally around her while the DA built his case against her, that was her own damn problem.

Other than the cleaning crew, her only visitor was a young, pretty redhead who showed up with a little boy in tow and stayed for several hours. Danny knew the young woman was Caroline’s stepdaughter, Kate, and the little boy her son, Michael. Evidently Kate had had no issue with her father marrying a woman who was closer to her own age than to her father’s. Not only did Kate visit two of the four days Danny and Moreno watched the house, she’d been all over the press voicing her support for Caroline. In one of her more memorable quotes she’d said, “Only a complete retard would believe Caroline was capable of killing my father.”

Despite her homebody ways that made it difficult for Danny to get a good look around and bug her house, she had one regularly scheduled outing they could count on. One they would have missed had Danny not idly checked the tracking device a few days ago before his morning run. Everyday for the past three days Caroline left the house at five-thirty a.m. and went to the Piedmont Hills Fitness Club, where she worked out with a private trainer for at least an hour. She didn’t arrive back home until at least seven-thirty or eight, leaving Danny plenty of time to get inside and look around.

He stood on the side of the house that faced the neighbor who didn’t have any motion detector lights on his house—he’d already disabled Caroline’s switch yesterday. It was the kind of neighborhood where the houses were big but the lots were small, leaving a narrow gap that provided plenty of shadows for concealment.

He caught a glimpse of Caroline as she backed the silver Mercedes out of the garage. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her face pale and strained in the glow of the streetlamps. Nothing like the siren in black who’d shown up at the church nearly a week ago.