Baby Breakout (6 page)

She had never been able to truly tell what Jed had been thinking or feeling. So it wasn’t fair if he could read her that easily…

“I figured you would start doubting my innocence again,” Jed said. “After all, it would be easier for you if I was guilty.”

“Easier?” Then she had willingly gone off alone with a killer. At least she had drawn him away from Isobel, though. At least she had kept her daughter safe…

But she remembered the look on Jed’s face as he had stared down at their sleeping daughter. His jaw hadn’t been rigid then. His dark eyes hadn’t been hard. They had been soft and warm with awe and affection. He would never hurt Isobel.

“If I was really the killer, your conscience would be clear,” he replied. “You wouldn’t feel guilty for doing nothing while I was sent to prison.”

“I explained why I did nothing.” Except for the reasons she’d kept to herself, except for her personal baggage. She had never admitted to him that her parents had abandoned her with her great aunt. He had probably assumed she’d been an orphan—not unwanted.

A muscle twitched along his cheek. “Because of Marcus’s lies.”

He turned the van onto a cobblestone street and parked at the curb. At this hour there was no fight to get a meter. Every one of the metal meters stood guard over an empty parking spot.

“Are you sure this is the place?” he asked as he gazed up at the brick building, which was sandwiched between a restaurant and a bookstore.

“Yes,” she confirmed, as she located the address on the building. The numbers on the brass plate matched the address she had found online.

A couple of lights glowed in the two stories above the ground-floor office. But lights glowed in the office windows, as well. At three o’clock in the morning, it was the only building with more illumination than just security lights.

“He was even written up in the Grand Rapids magazine about his renovation of this historic building,” she said, remembering the article she had found online when looking for his address.

“He must have been more successful with other cases than he was mine,” Jed murmured, “because it seems that since my incarceration, he certainly moved up in the world.”

Erica hadn’t found much else online about Marcus Leighton except his address and articles about his representing the cop killer, Jedidiah Kleyn. “I don’t think he had any other high-profile cases, or they would have come up when I searched for his name on Google.”

“If losing my case or, hell, just representing me, hurt his career, he didn’t pay for this place with what I paid him.” That look was back on Jed’s handsome face, the intense rage that he was barely managing to control with a clenched jaw and flared nostrils.

Afghanistan may not have made him a violent man, but surely surviving three years in a prison as dangerous as Blackwoods Penitentiary had. If she hadn’t insisted on coming along with him, she could not imagine what Jed might have done to Marcus Leighton to get the answers he wanted.

Erica wanted those answers, too. She reached for the door handle, but he leaned over and covered her hand with his. His skin was rough and warm against hers. Since it was spring, she had already packed away her gloves and winter gear. She wished she was wearing gloves now, not because of the unseasonable cold but because of how Jed’s touch affected her. It brought all those images—of the two of them making love—rushing back to her.

“You should stay in the van,” he said, leaning closer to her—so close that only inches separated his head from hers.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t come with you to just sit in the van.”

She wasn’t sure she would mind if he stayed in it with her, sitting so close that she could feel the heat of his heavily muscled body. But he didn’t intend to stay with her; he was going to leave to go after his lawyer. She wasn’t certain what his intentions were when confronting Marcus Leighton. And that was why she had insisted on coming along, to stop him from really becoming a killer.

“If he set me up for the reason I think he did, it’s too dangerous for you to go in there with me.” He glanced at the building. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Because of the lights?” She wondered herself why so many of them were burning.

“Yeah, what’s he doing up at this hour?” Jed asked, his eyes narrowed in suspicion as he stared up at the building. “It’s almost like he knew I was coming. We could be walking into a trap.”

She sucked in a breath as fear squeezed her lungs. But maybe he was just trying to scare her…

Jed turned back to her, his face still close as he leaned across her, his hand covering hers on the door handle. His eyes were so dark that she couldn’t read the emotions swirling in them. But she almost believed one of them could be genuine concern for her safety.

Then she remembered where they were. “We’re only a couple of blocks from the police department. Surely, no one would be bold enough to set up a trap here—where they could so easily be caught.”

Or where Jed could so easily be caught. Maybe it was a trap.

“Erica…” He lifted his hand from hers to cup her cheek.

His touch had her skin tingling and nerves jangling. She had to get away from him and from all those feelings his touch brought back, so she pushed open the door and jumped out of the minivan. Before he could get around the front of the van, she was at the door to the office. It stood open, as if Marcus really had been expecting them.

Jed cursed beneath his breath as he joined her at the open door. “I don’t have a weapon,” he said, as he reached into his pocket. Instead of a gun, he drew out gloves and pulled them on, stretching the leather taut over his big hands. The gloves obviously weren’t his any more than the wool jacket, which was too tight in the shoulders, was. “So I can’t protect you.”

She doubted that Jed really needed a weapon to protect himself or her. All he needed was his size and his muscle. But then that wouldn’t be very effective against bullets.

“You have to stay out here,” he insisted.

Maybe he was right. She had no protection against bullets, either. And she trusted that he wouldn’t let her get hurt. If he had wanted her dead, he could have killed her at any point in the past few hours. If she went inside with him, though, and he lost control of the rage that boiled within him, she wanted to calm him and prevent the lawyer from getting hurt.

There was no telling what he might do if she let him go inside alone.

And if something had already happened inside, wouldn’t the lights be off? Would a killer wait for them with all the lights burning?

She shook her head, unwilling to be left behind. “Jed—”

But he had his own argument for her to stay outside, one she couldn’t fight. “Our daughter needs her mother.”

She shivered as snow began to whirl around them, a cold wind whipping up the powder that already lay on the ground, and tossing around the falling flakes. She nodded, as if she intended to wait.

But he was inside for only a minute or two when she slipped through that open door and down the hall to where the lights burned on the first floor. She passed through a dark reception area to the open door to what must have been Leighton’s office.

She followed him because their daughter needed her father, too. The little girl had already been denied him too long.

But it wasn’t just for Isobel that Erica had gone after Jed. Like Jed, Erica wanted to know why he had been framed. Actually, she wanted to know if he had been framed. But she didn’t intend to use violence to find the answers to all her questions and doubts.

Her muscles paralyzed with horror, she froze in the doorway—unable to move, unable to believe what she was seeing. She hadn’t seen anything as gruesome since the lawyer had showed her those crime-scene photos.

Marcus Leighton was already dead. He was slumped in his chair, his shirt red with his own blood—his eyes open in shock.

* * *

O
NE
MAN
DEAD
.
O
NE
TO
GO
.

He had no illusions that Jedidiah Kleyn would be as easy to kill as Marcus Leighton had been. If Kleyn was that vulnerable, he would have already been dead. He wouldn’t have survived Afghanistan.

And he damn well wouldn’t have survived Blackwoods Penitentiary. But he was in more danger out here, especially if he showed up at Leighton’s office and stepped into the trap left for him.

While he had left the door open, he had reengaged the alarm. Once someone crossed the threshold, a call would be placed to the local police department.

As close as the office was to the police station, there was no way Jed would escape if he were the one to trip the alarm. Once police officers discovered the escaped convict standing over a dead body, they would assume the worst, and they would react accordingly—with bullets.

But if Jed hadn’t yet figured out Marcus’s betrayal and someone else set off the alarm, a contingency plan was already in place—thanks to what he’d discovered in Marcus’s files.

He actually hoped that Jed didn’t spring the trap he had set at Marcus’s office. Because the contingency plan would be a much more painful end to Jedidiah Kleyn than going out in a blaze of gunfire.

Chapter Five

A gasp had Jed’s muscles
tightening in apprehension. That breath hadn’t come from the body; Marcus Leighton was dead. Jed had checked his pulse to confirm death. The man’s skin was already cold. And so was Jed’s blood—cold with dread.

He turned toward the door and found Erica watching him—her eyes as wide with shock and horror as Marcus’s. She obviously thought Jed had killed his lawyer. He shook his head in denial of the question she hadn’t even bothered to ask. She had just assumed his guilt, not even looking around as he had, for the real killer.

No one else was inside the building; it was just the two of them. And the dead man.

“He was shot.” Jed pointed to the hole in Leighton’s chest, burned through his blood-soaked shirt. He lifted his palms. “I don’t have a gun.”

With a trembling hand, Erica pointed to the one sitting across the desk from the body. Leighton must have been visiting with someone who’d pulled the Glock 9 mm gun on him, shot him and then left it on the desk next to the half-empty glass of liquor. So whoever had shot the lawyer was someone he had known well enough to drink around. Back in the frat house, Marcus had discovered that he was a cheap and sloppy drunk, and so he’d learned to only imbibe around people he could trust.

“You think Marcus handed me the gun to shoot him with?” He snorted at her suspicion. “Touch him. He’s already cold. I did not kill him.”

But the fact that she automatically thought he had shot Marcus told him what he needed to know: Erica would never trust that he wasn’t a killer. Maybe not even after he found the real killer…

It wasn’t Marcus.

He hadn’t sold out Jed to hide his own guilt. He’d just sold him out for money.

Jed gazed around the office with its mahogany paneled walls. Filing cabinets had been built right into the walls, beneath rows of shelves. Jed reached for one of the handles, grateful that he wore gloves—ones he’d found in the guard’s vehicle. He closed his fingers around a brass handle, pulling open a drawer to search for his records.

He pulled open drawer after drawer until he found the
K
section—or where the
K
section should have been. All the records under
K
were gone. Before he could search elsewhere in the office, a noise caught his attention.

His muscles tightened at the distant wail of a police car. Just like the last murder, this one was probably also a setup.

If the killer had called the police to report his crime, he hadn’t left any evidence for Jed to find. Undoubtedly there was nothing in the office that would lead back to the real culprit. Like last time, it would probably all lead to Jed.

He hurried toward the door where Erica had stayed in fear, probably of him more than the corpse. “We have to get out of here.”

Her hand still trembling, she gestured toward the body this time.

“He’s dead. He’s been dead for a while,” he reminded her. “We can’t help him.”

“But we can’t just leave him here like that,” she said, her voice cracking.“We can’t just leave. We need to call the police.”

“Someone’s already done that for us,” he pointed out as the sirens grew louder. And his heart pounded faster with fear and dread.

“If the cops catch us here, I’ll be a dead man, too,” he said. And he couldn’t promise that Erica wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire. “There’s a shoot-on-sight order out on me.”

* * *

S
HOOT
ON
SIGHT
…

The words echoed in Erica’s head. The police would kill Jed rather than try to apprehend him? They considered him that dangerous a criminal?

“Did you touch anything?” he asked, his hand gripping her arm as he pulled her through the reception area toward the front door.

She had left it open behind her, just as she had found it. “I didn’t touch anything…”

Because she’d had a bad feeling over all those lights being on at three in the morning. How long had Marcus been dead? Hours? Minutes?

She hadn’t checked the body to see if it was as cold as he had told her it was. She glanced back toward Marcus Leighton’s office, but it was too far away and Jed’s hand too tight around her arm for her to escape him and go back to check now.

Then he ushered her through the front door and into the passenger’s side of the van. He turned his head back and forth, his gaze scanning the street before he hurried around to the driver’s side. He opened the door and jammed the key in the ignition just as he settled onto the seat. “They’re getting close.”

Erica glanced back and noticed lights flickering in their rear window. Her neck snapped as Jed pressed hard on the accelerator and swerved around a corner. “You’re sure we shouldn’t have stayed, that we shouldn’t have explained what happened…”

He emitted a bitter chuckle. “I told you—shoot-on-sight. That doesn’t give a person any time for explanations.”

“But I could—”

“Either get shot with me,” he said, as he maneuvered the van around the tight curve of the freeway on-ramp, “or go to jail for aiding and abetting a fugitive.”

“Aiding and abetting?” The words chilled Erica’s blood, so that she was probably as cold as Marcus Leighton. And of course he would have been cold since his door had been left open, probably when his killer had fled.

“You aided and abetted because you didn’t call the police the minute I showed up at your apartment,” Jed explained.

With a shudder, she relived that first flash of terror and panic she’d had when she’d realized she had opened her door to Jedidiah Kleyn. “Like you would have let me reach for the phone…”

“It wasn’t as if I bound and gagged you,” he said. “You had access to your phone. You called your neighbor.”

“But you had convinced me of your innocence by then.” And it hadn’t even occurred to her to call the police when he had been standing over their daughter’s bed, watching her sleep. He had looked like a devoted father, not a dangerous escaped convict.

“You’re not so convinced anymore,” he said, and the bitter expression on his handsome face turned to one of hurt and disappointment.

Regret clutched at her. “Jed…”

“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought you along,” he said, his voice gruff now with self-condemnation even though she hadn’t given him a choice.

But he could have driven off without her when he had gone out the fire escape. His van had been parked in the alley behind her house. Instead, he had waited for her and maybe not just for the lawyer’s address. Maybe he had wanted her to be there when Marcus Leighton took back all those things he’d told her that had convinced Erica of Jed’s guilt.

A dead man couldn’t take back his lies…

“But if I hadn’t brought you along,” Jed said, “and you heard about his murder, you would have been certain I’d done it.” He sighed. “So now you only have suspicions…”

She shook her head, finally pushing aside those initial knee-jerk doubts to make room for common sense. “I know you didn’t do it. I was only outside a few minutes before I followed you in, and I didn’t hear a shot.”

“The gun could have had a silencer,” he said, almost as if he wanted to keep her suspicious and fearful of him.

She didn’t have any more experience with guns than she did drugs. “Did it?”

“No,” he replied. “But I don’t think it matters much to you what I say. You can’t quite bring yourself to trust me.”

“Jed, I spent all these years thinking you were guilty of horrible crimes.” The murders had been the worst, but she had felt like a victim, too. She had loved him and believed he’d only used her to provide him with a false alibi.

“You spent all these years thinking that only because Marcus convinced you of my guilt,” he said, his voice so gruff with anger that she wondered, if Marcus hadn’t already been dead, would Jed have killed him?

She shuddered at the thought. “And now he’s dead and we’re fleeing the scene of the crime.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror. “I don’t think the police saw us pulling away. At least they’re not following us now.”

She turned toward the back window and checked for herself. There were no lights flashing behind them. At this hour, there weren’t any other vehicles on the highway. She expelled a breath of relief.

“Or they did see us and noted the plate number and they’ll be waiting for us when we go back to your place,” he warned her, stealing away her brief moment of relief. “Maybe we should go someplace else until we know for certain.”

Erica shuddered again at the thought of armed policemen waiting outside her building or, worse yet, inside her home. “I don’t care. I have to go home—to Isobel.”

She rarely left her daughter at all and only ever with Mrs. Osborn. If she didn’t return, her little girl might feel like Erica had as a child…abandoned and unwanted. Panic clutched at her lungs, stealing away her breath. “I—I have to see my daughter.”

Now
.

“If they catch us together, you’ll lose her,” he said. “You’ll go to jail for aiding and abetting me, and she’ll go to whoever you appointed her guardian—”

“There’s no one…”

She had no idea where her parents were now or even if they were still alive. Until she’d had her daughter, the only real family she’d ever had was Aunt Eleanor. But the elderly woman had died just a few months after Isobel had been born, and she’d left Erica the modest estate in Miller’s Valley.

“Then child protective services will take Isobel and place her in a foster home,” he said, a muscle twitching in his cheek as he clenched his jaw—as if he battled his own concerns for a daughter he hadn’t even known he had.

Erica trembled with nerves, realizing her stubbornness could have cost her little girl the chance at any relationship with her father, as well as the relationship Isobel already had with her mother. Panic gripped her, and she fumbled inside her purse for her cell phone. She should have called the police right away.

Maybe if she called them now, they wouldn’t press charges against her. Maybe she wouldn’t lose her little girl.

But if she called them and gave up his whereabouts, would they do as Jed had claimed—would they shoot on sight?

* * *

S
HERIFF
G
RIFFIN
Y
ORK
STARED
through the bars at him with suspicion hardening eyes that were already shadowed with fatigue. “I don’t like that you got a call from your lawyer at this hour,” he said as he tested the cell door, as if to make certain that Jefferson James was really locked up.

“Breuker is working hard to represent me,” Jefferson replied with satisfaction. Of course, with what he was paying the man, Rick Breuker damn well better be working his ass off. But his attorney might not be the only person Jefferson needed to pay.