Unintended Target (Unintended Series Book 1) (29 page)

With his focus still on Korrigan, DiMeico pulled his cell from his pocket and pressed the voice activation button. “Call Metzger—”

And in that one-second distraction, when DiMeico’s eyes flicked to the phone out of habit, Korrigan directed every last bit of strength into his right hand, tilted his gun up and fired.

Another bullet from DiMeico’s gun ripped through Korrigan, but it made no difference. Korrigan had been dying anyway. But he had done what he’d wanted to do. Though Korrigan couldn’t see DiMeico’s face, he could see the dark hole beneath the man’s chin bleeding onto the Persian rug where his boss lay in a crumpled heap.

Korrigan choked, struggling for air that just wouldn’t come as he slipped further down the desk. As the edges of his vision darkened, he gleaned a twisted satisfaction from the knowledge that, wherever he was going, he had taken DiMeico with him.

FORTY-SIX

It was her turn to watch over him now.

He looked smaller somehow in the bed with the IV and monitor attached. But he was out of the woods. Still weak, still sleeping a lot, but out of the woods.

The bullet
had
nicked an artery. Not only had it nearly killed Jack, but it had slowed Riley down, too. Thankfully, that morning before they’d left for Bio-Tite, Jack had convinced Chloe to take his GPS tracker. With that, Riley had been able to find her where Vargas had left her—parked under a shed on some remote property west of Doral, not too far from the Everglades. Riley had driven her straight to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, because, come what may, she was done with running.

It had been a struggle to get anyone there to take them seriously at first. But when the name DiMeico came up, they’d been shuffled onto a higher floor and then into an interview room. She spent the next two hours telling their story to a riveted audience, but not before demanding protection for Jack, who’d been taken to the closest hospital by paramedics called to the scene at Bio-Tite. That hadn’t been a problem, and, after assuring her that the hospital reported Jack was in stable condition, Chloe had told them everything. By the end, she was sapped of every last bit of energy she had. But she was done. Done with running. Done with lying. Done with carrying this burden and endangering people she cared about. If this meant extradition to St. Gideon or jail, she didn’t care anymore. All that mattered was that she—and Jack—were done hiding. That they were free. And if this was what she had to do to get there, then so be it.

They’d wanted to put her up in a hotel, under a protection detail, but she’d insisted on going to the hospital, where she’d stayed at Jack’s bedside for nearly eight hours, waiting for him to wake up. Once he did, they had explained as much as they could about what had happened before he drifted off again.

That had been at ten o’clock last night. She’d stayed over, as had Riley, who slept in a chair in the corner of the little room. He’d refused to leave, insisting he watch over them both. She knew he felt guilty about losing her and how everything had gone south—he’d apologized over and over—but she assured him it wasn’t his fault. It was no one’s fault. Well, no one except Tate.

She sighed and wondered how long it would be before she could really, truly forgive him. Or if she ever would. She liked to think that maybe, someday . . .

Jack stirred. For a moment, she wasn’t sure it had been him. But then he shifted, groaning softly, and she bent over him, her ear close to his face.

“Jack?” she asked hopefully.

He rolled his head towards her and opened his eyes. “Hey you,” he croaked.

“Hey you,” she whispered back and dropped her forehead to his cheek.

“Miss me?” he said softly, still weak.

She lifted her head and smiled. “Just a little. It’s good to see you up again.”

“You okay?”

She nodded.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Just after noon.”

Jack’s eyes flicked to the corner where Riley sat. “I see he’s still here.”

Their voices had apparently roused Riley, because he twisted in the chair and stretched. “Hey brother,” he said. “How you feeling?”

“Like somebody tried to kill me.”

“Yeah, well,” Riley said, prodding Jack’s good leg, “Pretty sad, really. Seem to remember that I got shot in the leg a couple nights ago. As I recall I just got up and walked away.”

“Grazed,” Jack emphasized. “Grazed a couple nights ago.”

“To-may-to, to-mah-to,” Riley grinned. “Look, I’m going to get some coffee—give you guys a minute. I’ll be right outside if you need me, annoying that U.S. Marshall on your door.”

“Thanks, Riley,” Chloe offered.

“No problem. I’ll let ‘em know you’re up, too,” he said, nodding at Jack.

“He’s really worried about you, you know. Won’t leave,” Chloe said, as the door closed behind Riley.

“It’s not his fault.”

“It’s his fault you’re still alive. Slipping that belt around your leg? It kept you from bleeding out.”

“It also almost kept him from getting to you.”

Chloe shook her head, no. “I told you. I was only in that trunk about twenty minutes before your tracker led Riley to me.” She heaved a grateful sigh. “Thank God for Manny and his toys.”

“Thank God you finally took mine, like I told you to.”

Chloe rolled her eyes playfully. “Yeah, yeah. You were right.
Again.
”

Jack grinned. “So, have you heard anything new from the Feds?”

“No,” Chloe replied, dissatisfaction in her voice. “Still nothing since yesterday. They said they’d know more today. Someone is actually supposed to stop by sometime soon.” As she spoke, the lunch tray that food services had brought in earlier caught her eye. “You hungry?” Chloe asked, motioning to the food.

He said he was, so she set the tray out for him and helped him raise the bed to sit up. They talked while he ate, and by the time he was done, they had just about covered everything that had happened at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“But you gave them proof—you actually
had
something,” Jack said, just before taking the last bite of his dessert brownie.

“Sort of.”

“That account number, even if the account was empty, is still something. Maybe they can trace the cash.”

“Good thing they found your phone on you. Without those photos—”

A knock on the door silenced her.

“Mr. Bartholomew? Ms. McConnaughey?” a tentative female voice asked as the door opened a crack. “It’s Assistant U.S. Attorney Christa Langley. You met me yesterday.”

Chloe nodded at Jack, who called, “Come in.”

The woman, in her early forties, was sharply dressed in a charcoal-on-black pinstriped pants suit. She extended a hand to Chloe.

“Nice to see you again.”

“You too,” Chloe replied, glad it was someone she recognized. They had promised not to send anyone Chloe hadn’t personally met at their offices the day before.

Langley eyed Jack. “And you’re up. That’s good.”

Jack nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“So what’s happening?” Jack asked.

“Sorry about that,” she said, setting down her shoulder carryall and crossing her arms. “We’ve been busy the last twenty-four hours. You gave us a lot to wade through.”

“And?” Chloe asked, her eyebrows raised.

“We looked into the St. Gideon murder investigation. There’s been no extradition request, and we don’t think there will be.” She eyed them, gauging their reaction. “Pete Sampson is missing. They haven’t seen him since shortly after you left the island. After he disappeared, his office started raising questions about the Kreinberg murder investigation—seems he’d made some pretty odd decisions about how to run it.”

“Like what?” Jack asked.

“For one, he kept the entire department out of the details. Second, he explicitly ordered what passes for a Crime Scene Unit there to conduct no DNA testing on evidence found on the corpse or in her house, no fingerprint matching—other than the murder weapon, which was apparently a knife from your house. And he told his people not to contact the States to alert us to Kreinberg’s murder, or to your suspected involvement, which is usually done as a matter of courtesy when Americans are murdered on foreign soil. Then there’s the cash—when Sampson went AWOL, his department tried to find him, and took a look at his finances. He’d received more than $50,000 over the last few months from untraceable sources.”

“DiMeico,” Chloe muttered.

“That’s what we’re thinking,” agreed Langley.

“So then maybe they’ll find Sampson washed up on shore next,” Chloe proposed.

Langley shook her head, the tight, brunette bun at the base of her neck not budging. “Doubt it. If it was DiMeico, and he wanted Sampson gone, that body’ll stay gone.”

“But they found Ruby,” Chloe said.

“Ruby they wanted found,” Jack countered, receiving a nod of agreement from Langley. “To frame us.”

“It definitely looks that way. From what we can tell, the only concrete thing linking you to Ruby’s murder is that knife from Chloe’s house. But when you consider the whole story, the whole conspiracy, it’s easy to explain how that could happen—why they’d use your knife and how they’d get it. And then there’s the matter of the missing motive. You just don’t have one. And none of the stolen items are traceable to you. The jewelry never turned up and as for the money, there was a deposit of around $1,000 made into one of Sampson’s accounts the day after Ruby was found—”

“The cash stolen from her house?”

“Maybe. And then there’s Sampson’s suspicious activity, which even his own department admits is against standard procedure. We’re communicating with their police about the whole conspiracy angle. I don’t think it’ll be long before you’re dismissed from the investigation. You might have to have a phone conversation with their police, but that should be it. And you can do that from our offices. Their governor is mortified. This whole thing is terrible for their U.S. tourist business. I think it’ll go away fairly quickly.”

“What about the account? Tate’s account?”

Langley nodded and ran a hand over her still perfectly pinned hair. “The money’s gone. Bounced to another account we could trace, and then on to ones we couldn’t. The first account was linked to the name ‘Korrigan.’”

“The man Vargas was concerned about,” Chloe offered.

“Exactly.”

“So where is Korrigan?” Jack asked.

“There’s been a development on that front, too. This morning DiMeico and Korrigan were found dead, apparently shot by each other, in DiMeico’s private office. His secretary found him. Looks like somebody else was injured, too, but there’s no sign of him. There’s all kinds of evidence there proving Korrigan was trying to make off with money from the account, including a laptop that apparently belonged to Korrigan containing some pretty incriminating emails. Looks like he’d been planning this for a while. Maybe even with Tate. It’s consistent with everything you told us about Vargas’s phone call to Korrigan while he had you in the trunk. It appears Vargas just got in Korrigan’s way.

“We also checked out Korrigan’s apartment. There’s enough blood—seems Korrigan tried to clean it up quickly, but not well enough to hide it from our lights—to suggest someone was killed there very recently. We’re testing it against Vargas’s DNA now. And, thanks to that double homicide, now we’ve got access to the records at Inverse. We’re mining their computer files now, but they’re encrypted—”

“I’ll bet they are,” Chloe said regretfully. “Probably Tate’s doing.”

“Could be,” Langley offered with a sympathetic smile. “But we’ll get there. Even the unencrypted stuff will be enough to do what we’ve been trying to do for years. Not just with Inverse, but maybe with some of its nastier clients, too. This could potentially put a lot of bad people out of business, or at least make it harder for them for a while. The good news for you is that with DiMeico and Korrigan dead, and Inverse telling on itself—”

“You’re safe,” Jack declared, and Chloe looked down to see his eyes fixed on hers. “There’s no one left to come after you, and no reason for them to try.”

“He’s right,” Langley confirmed. “Anything you might know will be superseded by the records there. We even found a copy of Tate’s video in DiMeico’s desk. And you don’t have any information on the clients of Inverse, so you can’t help us there. They won’t consider you a threat if we don’t need you two to testify.”

“But the clients don’t know that. What if they think we could hurt them—or that we have their money?”

“We’re planning on giving a press conference this morning highlighting just enough to get you in the clear, but not enough to compromise the investigation. They’ll know you don’t have any damaging information on Inverse’s business to share, that you don’t have the cash, and that you won’t be on any witness list if and when we make a case.”

“Do you have to give our names?”

“We don’t have to, but, unfortunately, we can’t guarantee that your names won’t eventually be leaked. And, if we don’t say something now, it looks like we’re keeping you secret because we still need you. DiMeico’s death forced the investigation into the open much earlier than we would have liked. You should know that apparently someone leaked Tate’s name to the press. About half an hour ago CNN covered the story—what they know of it anyway—and released his name. You weren’t mentioned, of course, but still . . . Given the way this is coming out, a finely tuned statement from our office is the best way to take care of you both.”

“So that’s it?” Chloe asked, disbelief edging her voice.

Langley smiled. “A few more days and you’ll be free to head back to your life. We’ll keep in touch, despite what we’ve said publicly, just to make sure you’re okay. But you’re done running. Nobody is targeting you anymore.”