WAR: Intrusion (13 page)

She’d also lost the fight as to who would drive her SUV. Lachlan had pointed out that given his defensive driving training, he was the better choice. Even though Helen was more familiar with the roads.

“All I want is for you two to keep an open mind,” Helen said. “Just because Kwesi named Mr. Natchaba as his partner doesn’t mean that he planned the attack. Perhaps he was framed.” Mr. Natchaba had been nothing but polite and respectful to her. Not to mention financially generous. “Speaking from personal experience, it’s all too easy to twist facts to support a guilty verdict. That doesn’t mean the person truly is guilty.”

“You don’t find it even a little suspicious that he never planned to attend the festivities?” Lachlan asked. “After all he did to assist you in recovering from the vandalism?”

“No. He’s a very private man. He prefers to work behind the scenes, with no public acknowledgment.”

Lachlan only grunted in reply.

“Yet the regional governor announced his name,” Jacobs pointed out. “If he’s truly so opposed to publicity, wouldn’t he have asked to remain anonymous?”

“Perhaps the regional governor acted against Mr. Natchaba’s wishes,” Helen countered. “If Mr. Natchaba was framed, isn’t it likely that the real person behind the attack arranged for Mr. Natchaba’s name to be used?”

“Or Natchaba could have wanted his name to finally go public as a way to announce to the rebels the level of destruction he is capable of.”

“You’re assuming that the MP3 players were the original gift Mr. Natchaba intended,” Helen shot back. “Maybe someone swapped out the real gifts with the explosive ones.”

“Why do you insist on Natchaba’s innocence?” Lachlan asked. “Did you have a special relationship with him? Were you lovers?”

“What? No. Don’t be ridiculous. As I said, I know what it’s like to be falsely accused.” She gave Lachlan a pointed look.

He just shrugged. “It’s my job to investigate all possible leads so that we can prevent another attack. Everyone must be considered guilty until proven otherwise. And at this point, Natchaba is our primary suspect.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake. I give up. You’re obviously convinced he’s guilty. But I’m telling you, he’s a nice man. You’ll see. There will be nothing at his house pointing to his guilt.”

“Lack of evidence doesn’t mean he’s innocent, lass. It just means we haven’t located it yet.”

Helen shot him a look out of the corner of her eye. Did he realize that he’d slipped and called her lass? He hadn’t done so since he kissed her. Perhaps he truly had meant his apology the other night.

“There. Turn left at the yellow flowering plant.”

Lachlan slowed the vehicle and followed the winding side road up to the top of a small ridge. The road swung out of the jungle, providing a view of the crescent moon rising over the shallow valley. Helen took a moment to absorb the beauty of the scene, hoping to dull some of the jagged edges of grief inside her. Then the road curved again, revealing the long expanse of carefully tended lawn in front of Mr. Natchaba’s house.

Jacobs whistled appreciatively. “That’s no house. That’s a bloomin’ mansion.”

“Aye. A regular Taj Mahal,” Lachlan commented. “There’s no lack of ego on Natchaba’s part, now is there?”

“Yeah, it is rather…uh…tacky,” Helen admitted. The mansion stood in the middle of a clearing that could have easily accommodated an entire village. A white, shining driveway of crushed shells curved to either side of a fountain where a giant fish spouted water into a long reflecting pool. To the left, the driveway led to a four-car garage designed as a gabled barn. To the right, the driveway led to the front door.

“Last time I was here,” she added, “there were lights lining the driveway and illuminating the fountain. And lights on inside the house.”

Lachlan drove along the right side of the reflecting pool and parked parallel to the front steps with the nose of the SUV pointed back down the driveway.

“Would they already be in bed?” Jacobs asked.

“No. I had the impression Mr. Natchaba kept city hours.”

Helen hopped out. “Let me go first. I don’t want you scaring the housekeeper.” She hurried toward the door. Helen rang the bell and heard it echo hollowly inside. After three more tries, she turned to Lachlan and Jacobs. “No one’s home.” Which was odd, because Mr. Natchaba’s wife and young son rarely left the house. Even when they’d accompanied Mr. Natchaba on his business trips, there were always at least a couple of members of staff on the premises.

Jacobs slipped past her and tried the latch. “Door’s open.”

“No. That can’t be right.” But the door swung open at his touch.

Jacobs took a step into the front hall and flicked on the lights. Helen caught a glimpse of dead flowers in a vase and a scattering of petals around the base of a table positioned on the other side of the white marble entry. To their right, the white wall that curved along the staircase was marred by what Helen realized in shock was the arc of blood splatters. At the top of the stairs, a bare, bloody foot dangled in between two railings.

“Oh, God.” Someone was hurt. The panicked flutter of her heart was becoming all too familiar, but training urged her forward.

Jacobs blocked her with his arm. “This is a crime scene, doctor. Stay put.”

Helen gestured toward the foot. “What if that person is alive? I have to check.”

Jacobs glanced over her head at Lachlan. “The doctor is right,” Lachlan said. “We have to investigate if there’s a chance someone still lives.”

Jacobs nodded.

“Let me get my kit.” Helen raced back to the SUV and returned a moment later with her medical bag.

“All right, doctor,” Jacobs said. “Step where I step.”

With Lachlan at her back, Helen followed Jacobs into the hall. With her senses on alert, she noticed that what she’d initially thought were dead flower petals were actually splashes of blood. Bloody footprints led from the front parlor and up the marble stairs.

Helen’s imagination conjured up screams and the frantic pants of a person being chased. She felt their panic and their desperate hope that safety lay on the upper level. No. She couldn’t afford to be caught up in emotion. Yet her defenses were weakened by the events of the past few days and her attempt to block out her empathy, as she normally did before surgery, proved more difficult than usual.

As they moved across the hall and up the stairs, Jacobs photographed the scene. She wondered if it helped him distance himself from the horror of what appeared to have been a violent attack. Or were Jacobs and Lachlan so used to death that it didn’t bother them?

When they reached the body at the top of the stairs, one look at the flesh gaping from the slice across the housekeeper’s neck and the size of the puddle of blood beneath her, and Helen knew there was no possibility of life. Still, she pulled on a pair of gloves and crouched down. The woman had been stabbed multiple times before having her throat cut. Based on the state of the body, she’d probably been killed yesterday.

Helen bowed her head and said a local prayer for the woman, then stood up. She kept her gloves on, afraid that they’d find more corpses.

She was right.

By following the trail of blood, they found three other bodies. All of them members of the household staff. Each one had been stabbed multiple times before having their throats cut.

But there was no sign of Mr. Natchaba or his family.

“Why would someone do this?” Helen asked. “These people never harmed anyone. They were just regular, hard-working people.”

Lachlan and Jacobs exchanged a solemn glance and didn’t answer. But she realized that at some point they’d each drawn their weapons. The black pistols in their hands were just another sign of how off-course her life had become.

“What now?” she asked.

“We finish searching the premises for any sign that Natchaba or his family are hiding in a secret room, or that they were here and have been kidnapped,” Lachlan said. “And we also look for evidence of the weapons smuggling. Natchaba has plenty of space here to hide weapons. When we’re done searching, we’ll call the regional police.”

“All right.” She followed the men through the house as they conducted a room-to-room search. Since they’d found the final victim in the kitchen, they started there. Nothing was out of place in the downstairs rooms or in the rooms at the front of the second level, if you didn’t count the bloodstains from the victims being chased through the house. Nor was there any sign of Mr. Natchaba or his family. When they entered the private wing, they discovered that everything personal had been removed.

“It appears as if your good friend Mr. Natchaba never intended to return,” Lachlan said, nodding at the empty closet in the master bedroom. “When is the last time you saw him face-to-face?”

Helen thought back. “The day we signed the loan papers. I went down to the regional capital to his lawyer’s office. After that, I dealt with the lawyer.”

“And his wife and child?”

“Um… A few weeks before that. She brought the boy in for another round of vaccinations. But she was always a nervous, shy woman. We only exchanged small talk.” As they walked through the rooms that held furniture but no clothing, no children’s toys, no personal items of any kind, dread settled in Helen’s stomach. Had Mr. Natchaba left because he was under threat? Or because he needed to be long gone before the attacks took place?

She hated the fact that she even had to consider the second possibility. With one last glance around the empty room, she followed Lachlan out into the corridor.

“Found the office,” Jacobs said, toeing open the door of the room that ran across the end of the hallway.

Helen heard a loud click.

“Get down!” Jacobs shouted. He turned and dove toward them.

Lachlan tackled Helen. She had only a moment to register the impact of his body against hers and the sensation of falling before they hit the floor. Lachlan covered her body with his as behind him, the office exploded. The heat and noise roared over them, hurting Helen’s ears and making her skin feel painfully taut and dry.

The sound abruptly cut off and Helen’s pulse spiked. She couldn’t hear. Her ears felt plugged up, as if they needed to pop. The loss of hearing made her feel incredibly vulnerable.

Lachlan rolled off her and yanked her to her feet. Halfway between their position and the smoking office, Jacobs lay facedown on the runner carpet. Pieces of metal stuck out from his back and legs and littered the floor around him.

She stepped toward him, but Lachlan grabbed her arm. His lips moved, but she waved her hands at her ears to indicate that the explosion had made her temporarily deaf. He nodded and indicated he had the same issue. The nonchalance with which he dismissed that as unimportant reassured her.

He gestured urgently toward the servants’ stairs, indicating that she should escape. She shook her head, broke free of his hold, and hurried over to Jacobs.

He was conscious, but a shard of metal the length of her forearm pinned his left leg to the floor. She glanced from the wound to the burning office, wondering what had broken apart to form such a deadly projectile. Knowing they had to get out of here in case there was another explosion, she performed a quick visual examination. Luckily, the shard hadn’t penetrated close to a major artery.

Helen’s ears popped and her hearing returned.

“How can I help?” Lachlan asked, kneeling beside her.

Holding her hand near the metal, she felt the heat coming off it. “You can pull out the metal using these.” She handed him a pair of forceps. “Be careful, it’s still hot. Then I’ll quickly irrigate the wounds.”

Lachlan gave her a tight nod.

“Okay, then, on three. One… Two… Three!”

Lachlan yanked the metal out of the floor. Jacobs flinched and groaned. Once the metal was free, Helen poured saline into the wounds—both front and back. As she replaced the cap on the bottle of saline solution, the floor quaked and there was a deep rumbling from somewhere beneath them.

She glanced at Lachlan in alarm. He shoved her medical kit at her, then pulled her to her feet. “Run for the door to the servants’ stairs!”

He picked up Jacobs and pushed her down the hallway. The entire house was now vibrating. Helen stumbled down the corridor, around the corner, then slid open the pocket door that led to the narrow, enclosed servants’ stairs. The house shuddered with increasing force and Helen half-slid, half-fell down the stairs, using the railing for support.

At the bottom of the stairs, the door into the kitchen swung wildly back and forth on its hinges. She pushed through, ran past the dead body of the cook and raced out the back door just as the house twisted violently. She was thrown off her feet and landed hard on her side on the marble porch. Hearing a crack, she glanced up. One of the columns holding up the porch roof had broken free.

She flung herself off the side of the porch and rolled onto the lawn. A second later, the column crashed down beside her.

“Helen, look out!” Lachlan cried.

She turned her head to see a piece from one of the gargoyles on the roofline plunging toward her. She tried to move out of the way, but her hands slipped on the grass and the piece of stone glanced off her skull.

The world went black.

CHAPTER NINE

A
CLOUD OF dust and smoke rose into the night sky.

Bloody hell.

Lachlan set Tony safely on the lawn out of range of the debris raining down, then dragged Helen away from the collapsing mansion. He checked her pulse, then applied a field bandage to the bloody gash on the back of her head. Next, he confirmed that Tony was still alive but unconscious before yanking the shrapnel out of his own legs and back—he couldn’t drive with pieces of metal sticking out of him—bandaged his wounds as best he could, then raced for the front. The SUV had a few dents and was covered in dust, but it started.

He loaded Tony and Helen into the cargo compartment, then on instinct drove across the lawn in case the driveway was booby-trapped.

“What…where…” Helen moaned from the back.

Lachlan turned on the overhead light and glanced in the mirror to find her trying to sit up. “Lie still, doctor. A chunk of stone knocked you out. I’m taking us back to the clinic.”