Lethal Ransom

“I am.”

Despite all his responsibilities, Nick’s boss remembered this was Monday night, the night Nick ate dinner with his eldest sister’s family. Unlike Wednesday night when he joined his younger brother and sister-in-law, and Friday nights, when the entire clan gathered at their parents’ house for Mom’s great cooking and terrible attempts to get her last unmarried child to commit to someone—again—no matter how many times Nick told her he wasn’t ready to put his fiancée’s death behind him.

“She’s in her daughter’s car,” Callahan continued with his deliberately slow explanation. “It’s a silver Camry.”

“That should be easy to spot. There must only be a hundred within a mile.”

Despite his sardonic response, Nick’s instincts for trouble tingled up his spine as his eyes fell on the slowed traffic ahead.

“Got to go, sir. Something up ahead.” Still hearing his boss’s voice squawking from the speaker, Nick tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. He needed both hands on the wheel, and his vintage Mustang didn’t possess anything as fancy as a Bluetooth connection to the car speakers.

Sirens wailed in the distance, audible above the rain drumming on the Mustang’s roof and roar of surrounding traffic. Cops were on their way, but Nick wanted to get to the scene first if it involved the judge. Protecting federal judges was his primary duty.

An accident involving the judge would be worse than a carjacking. Oddly enough, the latter were usually peaceful with drivers forced off the road, removed from their vehicles, left stranded while the crooks took off in the vehicle to commit a crime, such as a robbery or drive-by shooting, and then abandon the car, usually wrecked, somewhere else. In that scenario, the car might be a loss, but the judge and her daughter would be safe. Wet. Cold. Probably frightened, but unharmed.

His gaze swept the traffic and his mind touched on the idea that if this was a carjacking, it wasn’t like those that went down in the city so often they rarely made the news anymore.

Maybe the traffic jam had nothing to do with Her Honor. Nick couldn’t risk picking up his phone to call Callahan to ask if or what he had heard. Neither had the phone rung. A good sign, surely.

An opening in the right lane was another good sign. Nick punched the accelerator and surged into the gap seconds before everyone’s brake lights flared on and the lane screeched to a complete halt—a defining characteristic of an accident, not a carjacking.

Unless...

Nick cut the wheel right and, half a dozen horns honking in his wake, plowed onto the shoulder of the road.

He spied what lay ahead now. An accident for sure. A crash between a dark gray SUV and a silver Camry, the former idling with emergency flashers engaged, the latter with doors wide-open.

And from the vehicles raced a tall woman in a flowing summer dress and long, blond hair, with a man in hot pursuit.

Nick flung himself from his car and raced for the woman. The daughter? Not the judge. Where was Her Honor? His gaze flicked to the Camry, to the SUV. Rescue the daughter? Go look for the judge? His duty was to the judge, but the daughter was in imminent danger.

Wishing he wore his running shoes, Nick sprinted along the side of the road. Cars honked. People shouted, words indistinct above the rumble of engines and approaching sirens. His feet slipped on wet gravel.

A hundred yards ahead of him, the woman stumbled, started to pitch forward. The man in pursuit grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked her upright. Her mouth opened. If she cried out, ambient noise drowned the sound.

Nick pushed himself to greater speed. The man was dragging the woman backward, closer to him. She struck out with one hand. The man caught her wrist, spun her around toward the idling SUV nosed against the Camry.

That SUV was involved in more than having wrecked the Camry. Nick knew it with all his law enforcement instincts for trouble. On foot, even in his Mustang, he couldn’t stop the owners of the SUV if it took off. From its angle, he could read the license plate. Police were on their way but taking too long. Minutes when Nick needed seconds, wedged into traffic as he had been despite their sirens.

But he could stop that man from taking the judge’s daughter. A dozen drivers and their passengers could stop the man from taking her. Not one person got out of their vehicle. Scared. The man could be armed. Nick was armed. Still, if anyone simply tossed something in the way to trip the man Nick would catch them before they reached that SUV.

“Seconds. I only need seconds to gain.”

Half prayer, half plea to anyone who might be willing, Nick spoke the words aloud, though he barely heard them. Ten yards. Three yards.

Nick lunged and grasped the daughter’s captor. “I’m a deputy US marshal. Let her go.”

The man tried to keep running, hold firm on the judge’s daughter. But she stopped, dropped to her knees, an anchor to her captor.

“Get up.” The man aimed a kick in the young woman’s direction.

Nick hooked the man’s raised leg with his own foot and threw him off balance. “Now stay down.” He placed his foot in the center of the man’s chest. “If you can, get up and head for my car behind me.”

“I can’t. My mom—” She spoke between gasps for breath, then leaped up and began running toward the SUV.

“Stop,” Nick shouted.

She kept running.

Nick’s prisoner laughed and tried to grasp his ankle.

Nick grabbed the man’s wrists and hauled him to his feet. “Who are you?”

“Who are you?” Four cops from the nearest suburban town surrounded Nick.

“Deputy US Marshal Nick Sandoval. Please take this man into custody. I need to go after the judge’s daughter.”

And the judge? Of course. The young woman was running toward her mother.

“Credentials?” the police sergeant demanded.

“Later.” Nick thrust the prisoner, a man nearly half his size, toward the waiting police officers. “I’m responsible for those ladies.”

An officer caught hold of the prisoner, and Nick raced after the judge’s daughter. It took mere seconds to catch up with her—seconds in which the flashers on the SUV ceased, the tires spun, and the monstrous vehicle roared to life. One officer raised his weapon as though intending to shoot out the tires.

“No,” Nick shouted, as another officer pushed his colleague’s arm down.

They couldn’t fire at a vehicle containing a federal judge. They could miss the tires and strike her through the rear of the vehicle. They could hit a tire and send the SUV spinning or rolling into the heavy traffic—traffic unable to stop because of the rain-slick road.

Two officers ran for their cruisers to give chase, but the SUV swept past the wrecked Camry and sped along a suddenly clear shoulder, pickup and stalled vehicles gone. Before the police reached their car, the SUV was lost in traffic.

“Nooo.” The daughter’s cry was long and painful like a wounded animal.

She took a few stumbling steps in the direction the SUV, then dropped to her knees, her hands to her cheeks.

“It’s all right—” Nick hesitated, not sure of her name, as he crouched beside her. “You’re safe with me.”

“But they have my mother.” She was gasping as though still running. “They took my mother.”

“We’ll find her. We caught the man who grabbed you. He’ll tell us something.”

Not at all guaranteed, but she needed reassurance.

“Let’s get you to my car and out of the rain.”

“We need to go after that SUV. They have my mom.”

The judge, Nick’s responsibility.

The minute he helped the woman to her feet and turned toward his vehicle, he knew her assailant had slipped the officers’ custody. The officers were scattered, running into the now halted traffic, and the wiry kidnapper darted between cars and under the elevated train tracks to the eastbound lane.

No one would blame Nick for the vehicle getting away. He could not have caught up with it.

But they might blame him for the prisoner escaping.

TWO

Kristen fell more than sat in the deputy marshal’s low-slung car and covered her face with her hands. She should lock the doors, make herself safe. But she couldn’t in such a small space. Only the rain-washed air, however choked with exhaust fumes, kept her from hyperventilating.

Her feet throbbed from running barefoot along the highway. Her head ached from where the man had grabbed her by the hair. Her shoulder hurt from how he tried to drag her away until the deputy US marshal arrived to rescue her, too late for her mother.

She began to shake from the cold of being soaked through, from the accident and near capture, from knowing her mother was tossed into a car and speeding away somewhere. Nightmare seemed too tame a word to describe the events of the past fifteen minutes.

Her mother had been kidnapped, and her father was thousands of miles away, probably out of cell phone range.

With two parents who worked so much that nannies had raised their daughter more than them, Kristen understood feeling alone. But nothing, not all the school plays and choir concerts Mom or Dad or both of them had been unable to attend, left her as hollow as knowing men had taken her mother by force and she had been unable to stop them. On the contrary, her mother had stopped them from taking Kristen.

She slumped forward so her forehead rested on the dashboard. “If I had made different driving choices... If I had told a marshal at the courthouse about the SUV following me... If I thought faster during the accident—”

More police cars arrived. Blaring sirens ceased, though lights flashed in an eye-searing strobe behind her. The police were here, while her mother was somewhere else. She was here, while her mother was somewhere else. Her mother was in the hands of a criminal, while she would soon be in the hands of the police or US Marshals Service. Whoever it was would be questioning her like she was a suspect. They might send her a victim’s advocate.

A bubble of hysterical laughter rose in her throat. After the hundreds of crime victims she had helped in her job as a social worker, she was now one herself. She should know exactly what to expect.

But she doubted anyone could prepare for such an eventuality. None of her training had taught her about the slicing depth of the guilt, the anguish, the grief of being captured even for a few minutes.

And her mother could be captured for hours or days, or—

She wouldn’t think about the worst-case scenario.

A groan escaped Kristen’s lips. “Mom, why do you stay in this job?”

Threats had been nothing before, but that didn’t mean someone wouldn’t end up following through. Except Mom hadn’t mentioned any threats. Surely she wouldn’t keep such information from the marshals who were assigned to protect the judges, even if she might keep it from her daughter.

And her husband?

Kristen should have asked, would have, if she hadn’t been so wrapped up in looking for that SUV—the vehicle now speeding away with her mother inside alone because she had helped Kristen escape.

Sick with guilt, Kristen reached for the marshal’s phone. Her own remained in her purse in her car a quarter mile ahead on the side of the road. Abandoned. Wrecked.

“Siri, call—” Kristen stopped. She couldn’t remember her father’s number. She didn’t know her mother’s number. She never bothered to remember telephone numbers anymore. They were programmed into her phone.

She needed it—now.

She slid out of the sports car and took a step toward her bashed-in car. Gravel cut into her feet, and she cried out in pain. It was foolish to have kicked off her shoes to run faster.

She had run away while that man stole her mother.

Every time she turned around, she was disappointing her mother. She wouldn’t take the right sort of job. She wouldn’t drive a better car. She wouldn’t date the right class of men. Kristen was happier at home with a good movie and a bowl of popcorn than she was at a black-tie affair or any sort of gathering where people’s worth seemed to be measured in the cost of their ensembles rather than their character.

Letting her mother get kidnapped was one more huge disappointment, one more misstep to letting her parent down.

“If she dies, it’ll be my fault.” Kristen wiped her eyes.

This was no time to give in to tears or panic or anything else...weak. She must be strong, think what to do.

She needed to start doing something now, not simply stand by the side of the expressway and whine about her feet. She should go answer questions. The sooner the authorities got information, the sooner they could rescue her mother.

She took a step forward, and the marshal’s phone rang. Wincing, she turned toward the car again and bent down to grab the cell phone from the console. Then, phone in hand, she trudged, wincing, toward the marshal and a policeman talking beside the road. The man who chased her was gone and more emergency vehicles had arrived, an ambulance among them. Traffic crawled, partly from a blocked lane, partly from the gapers.

“Halt right there, miss,” the policeman called when Kristen was barely a dozen feet away from the Mustang.

Kristen held up the phone. “He got a phone call.”

The deputy marshal spoke to the cop, who frowned, but nodded and started toward Kristen, the marshal beside him.

“This is the judge’s daughter,” the marshal spoke to the policeman.

“Kristen Lang,” she supplied.

The cop’s grass-green eyes, in a face pale enough to not have been exposed to the sun for the past year, raked over Kristen. “We need to talk to you.”

“She’s getting checked out by the paramedics first, then coming to the marshal’s office,” the deputy marshal said. “This is our jurisdiction.”

“Then where are your men?” the cop demanded.

“On their way.” The marshal looked at Kristen.

She ducked her head, feeling the revolting tangle of wet hair slap against her cheeks.

“Why don’t you come to the ambulance?” the deputy marshal said. “I’ll be right with you.”

Apparently expecting her and the policeman to go along with this plan, he began to text on his phone.

Kristen hesitated. “I’d like to get my purse and phone out of my car.”

“We need an accident report from her at the least,” the policeman said.

“Since it was part of the kidnapping, we’ll get it and pass it along.”

Officer Green Eyes scowled but nodded and strode back toward one of the vehicles with flashing lights, each footfall looking hard enough to shake the earth.

“He doesn’t know how to play with others.” The deputy marshal smiled at Kristen.

She blinked. The grin transformed his face from hard authority, to boyish charm in a flash. An attractive flash.

“Now,” he continued, “let’s get you back out of the rain. You must be freezing.” He hesitated, then held out his hand. “I’m Nick Sandoval, by the way.”

She touched the tips of her fingers to his palm, finding it broad and firm, calloused as though he labored to earn his muscular frame rather than worked out in a gym. It was a hand one could hold onto and know one was safe.

She snapped her thoughts back to what was important. “I would like my phone, please.” She sounded like a little girl asking for her favorite toy, not a grown woman with a master’s degree in social work and a responsible job.

“I’ll get it for you as soon as the crime scene techs release it. Her Honor may try to call it.”

“With what? Her phone’s still in the Camry.” Tears stung Kristen’s eyes. “I told her to put it down so it wouldn’t knock her in the face when we crashed. It’s my fault she doesn’t have it.”

“Her kidnappers would probably have taken it away from her anyway, Kristen.” His tone was gentle, but his eyes were cold. She hadn’t thought brown eyes could hold no warmth, but his looked like frozen Fudgsicles, nice on a hot day but uncomfortable in the chill of a summer storm.

“How will she call us if she doesn’t have a phone?” Kristen asked.

“She’ll find a way if anyone can.” Nick touched her elbow. “Come on. You’re not doing her any good standing here in the rain. The sooner we make sure you’re all right and then get a statement from you, the sooner we can find her.”

Kristen shook her head. “No paramedics. I’m just fine.”

Except for her bruised and aching feet.

“You were in a crash bad enough for your air bags to deploy.”

“The air bags going off is why I’m fine.” She shifted from one foot to the other to ease pressure on her battered soles. “Please. I want to make my statement. I don’t know much, but the sooner I tell you what I do know, the sooner you can find my mother.”

* * *

Nick had no idea how the daughter of such a confident, powerful woman as Judge Julia Lang could walk as though she carried a hundred pound pack up a mountain, talk like the sound of her own voice frightened her and think she was to blame for that day’s events. But she did look a body in the eye. Every time those lake-blue eyes of hers met his, he felt like someone Tasered him. Zing. Zing. Zap. The electric energy flowed from his neck to his toes.

In the office of the marshal service, Kristen Lang looked at him a great deal. Every time, she answered his questions precisely and concisely before she answered anyone else’s, so much so that US Marshal Tom Callahan, his boss, sent him out of the room “So you’ll stop being a distraction.”

Nick didn’t argue, but he figured he was a help, not a hindrance, and someone’s ego was taking a hit at a time when egos over authority shouldn’t matter. With a reassuring smile for Kristen, Nick left the room at a snail’s pace and went into the hall.

Where he noticed the blood on the floor.

He shoved the door open. “Kristen, are you bleeding?”

She didn’t meet his eyes this time. “Am I?” She glanced down, and her face whitened. “My feet. I knew they hurt, but—”

“Why didn’t you tell the paramedics?” Callahan asked before Nick got the question out.

“This interview is far more important.” If she was trying to smile, she failed. Her lips twisted, but more in a grimace of pain.

“Enough questions,” Nick declared. “She needs to go to the hospital and have her feet seen to.”

“My feet can wait. I need to answer all the questions I can to help find my mother.” Her hands gripped the edge of the table, the short, polished nails digging into the fake wood, the knuckles white. “Even if it’s my fault she was taken, it won’t be my fault she isn’t found.”

“How many times do we have to tell you it’s not your fault, Kristen?” Callahan sounded impatient. “From what you’ve said and what Her Honor texted, we know that you took every precautionary action you could under the circumstances.”

“But I should never have been under the circumstances.” This time, she focused those blue eyes on Callahan.

He didn’t so much as blink at their impact.

“May I take her to get her feet seen to, sir?” Nick asked.

“Please do. And then drive her home and stay with her. Where is Her Honor’s husband?”

“My father is in Switzerland,” Kristen said.

“Business?” Nick asked, figuring on Zurich and Swiss bank accounts and all those things far above his touch or interest.

She shook her head. “Mountain climbing or something like that.”

“Your father’s on vacation without your mother?” Nick couldn’t keep the astonishment from his tone.

He couldn’t imagine his parents going on more than a weekend retreat without each other.

“Is that normal?”

“Abnormal would be if he did take a vacation with her.” Her voice was flat as she looked at the table. “Has anyone called him?”

“We left a voice mail,” Callahan said. “It’s the middle of the night there, though.”

Kristen nodded, then tried to stand. With a little cry, she fell back into her chair.

Callahan surged to his feet. “We’ll call an ambulance. I’m so sorry we didn’t realize sooner you were injured.”

But they should have realized it. Nick should have. Someone, the paramedics if no one else, should have noticed she wore no shoes. His mother would have his hide for not being more careful with a lady who’d been in an accident and then run for her life down the side of the expressway.

“Please don’t fuss over me.’” Her face was as white as the institutional walls around them. “I can walk.”

“I don’t think so.” Nick glanced from his boss to Kristen. “With your permission, I’ll carry you.”

“You can’t do that, Sandoval,” Callahan protested.

“It’s better than wasting resources others may need instead.” Kristen offered the older man a tight smile, though her cheeks had flushed to the color of the strawberry Jell-O with whipped topping blended into it Nick’s aunt Maggie insisted on bringing to every family gathering. “Just don’t carry me over your shoulder. That’s how that man...how he carried...me.”

She pressed her hand to her mouth. For a moment, Nick feared she would be sick. Then he saw the tears welling in her eyes and realized she was holding back a sob.

If she were one of his sisters, he would pick her up and let her cry on his shoulder. She was, however, the daughter of a judge and the main witness to a serious crime perpetrated against that judge. He must maintain a professional demeanor which, sadly, included no comforting the victim.

Maybe he could take her home and let his mom do that.

Pretending he didn’t see the tears, he picked her up from the chair, glad he worked out regularly. She was a big girl, not overweight, just tall and not model thin. She was just right in her proportions, as far as he was concerned.

“Is it all right if I put my arm around your neck?” she asked barely above a whisper.

He’d be flirting inappropriately if he gave the answer that sprang to mind—A lady as pretty as you doesn’t need permission to put her arm around me—so he merely nodded and carried her outside to his car.

The rain had stopped. With rush hour passed, the streets were emptier, the office buildings and most of the restaurants except those around the theaters having closed for the night. Nothing was quiet, though. Buses still roared up the streets and the “L” trains rattled overhead. The sharp tang of wet pavement filled the air along with exhaust and cooking odors.

Nick was suddenly filled with a longing for the clean sweetness of rain-washed grass and dirt, his mother’s roses fragrant from their bath, and even the earthy notes of wet dog. Wanting these scents in his nostrils meant he wanted to be home or visiting his parents, anywhere but facing the sort of trouble this night was still bound to bring, especially not an urgent care or hospital emergency room facility and the tedium of waiting in either.

He didn’t realize he sighed until Kristen removed her arm from around his neck and spoke. “I’m sure I can walk now.”

“No way. It’s just a few more feet to my car.”

As in a half block to the parking garage, but he could manage, even if she was half again as heavy as his fiancée. His deceased fiancée. She’d been small-boned and fragile in too many ways, beyond his ability to save.

“I should have let your boss call an ambulance,” Kristen said. “You don’t need to go to all this trouble for me.”

“I have orders to stay with you no matter what.” Nick entered the parking garage and his Mustang was not far from the door.

The advantage of returning to work after most people had gone home.

“I have to set you down for a minute. Try to stand on your heels. I don’t want oil or anything in those cuts.” He released her from his hold.

“I think it’s too late to worry about that now.” Her tone was sharp. He didn’t blame her. She was their only witness, their only hope at the moment of finding the judge, and they weren’t taking care of her.

Despite her prickly response, she balanced on her heels, one hand resting on the black vinyl top of his convertible, her gaze focused on the street.