Hush: A Thriller Part 28

Riley nodded, and walked into the room. It was small and, like the ward itself, mostly gray. The shade had been pulled down over the single window blocking any view of the outside, but still there was plenty of light, both natural and from the overhead fixture, which was on. The smell was not as p.r.o.nounced in here, possibly because this small room was cooler than the ward.

As the door closed behind her, her gaze immediately went to the man in the bed. The last time she'd seen George, she'd been in a courtroom sitting with Margaret, Emma, and Jeff as George, having just been sentenced to seventy-five years in prison, was handcuffed and led away. Margaret and Emma had been in tears, and Jeff had been white and sick with distress over his father's fate. The pillar that the other three leaned on, Riley had been angry at George then for causing them all so much pain, and she had expected to be even more angry now.

But she didn't feel angry.

The man in the bed barely resembled George. The burly bully with the perpetual tan and the carefully kept mane of black hair was gone. In his place was a thin, pale old man with age spots and dry lips and gray hair cut so short he might as well have been bald. He wore a blue hospital gown with some kind of print on it. An IV was in his arm, he was hooked up to a monitor that stood next to the IV stand beside the bed and beeped intermittently, and his right hand was bandaged. A blue blanket covered him to midchest.

"h.e.l.lo, George," Riley greeted him.

George said, "They told me you were coming to see me. Why you? Where's Margaret? What do you want?"

His voice was thinner than before, and it had a rasp. But the att.i.tude: that was the George she knew.

"Margaret couldn't come. She's fine, by the way, thanks for asking." Riley advanced to stand beside the bed. She could feel her old dislike for him bubbling to the surface. George looked up at her, his expression unwelcoming. His eyes were small and blue. Faded now. But still cold.

He was a sh.e.l.l of his former self. She did not feel sorry for him.

"You've heard about Jeff." Her tone didn't make it a question, because she was sure he had. What she wanted to know was, did he feel any guilt? Any remorse? Any awareness that Jeff would be alive right now if it wasn't for him?

Her anger was back, building up inside like a rising tide.

"They told me." If he felt any emotion at all, he wasn't showing it. "So if that's what you're here about, you can just go away."

Riley's eyes narrowed. She'd thought to break it to him gently, but... mean old man. Jeff's words. Remembering, Riley felt a shiver of grief pierce the anger.

"Emma's been kidnapped." She laid it on the line, flatly, and watched his face. It seemed to freeze. His eyes were suddenly riveted to hers. "The kidnappers told me I should ask you where the money is. If you don't tell me, they're going to kill her."

For a moment he simply stared at her. Then his mouth opened and began to work, like a fish out of water gulping air. His left hand-the uninjured one-fisted in the sheet.

"Eh-eh-Emma," he stuttered. He licked his lips. His head moved from side to side, a negative gesture. His body twitched. His eyes filled with horror. "Not Emma. Oh, no, not Emma. Not like Jeff."

"Where's the money? For Emma's sake, you need to tell me."

He shook his head. "I can't. I can't."

He almost sounded pitiful. Riley almost felt sorry for him. But see, the thing was, she knew he knew where the money was. She knew that he could tell her about Emma's painting, and the little black book, and how to access those accounts.

She knew he could save Emma if he wanted to.

Sweet Emma was the one person she'd always thought George truly loved.

Her anger turned to rage. She leaned over the bed, leaned closer to him, her eyes boring into his. "I know it isn't all lost like you've been saying. You can save Emma, George. All you have to do is tell me where the money is."

He made a sound of distress.

"It's gone," he said, and she knew then that she would despise him forever. "All gone." He covered his eyes with his hand.

"It's not," Riley hissed at him, and stopped, because there was no point. He was exactly what he had always been, and she didn't need his help anyway.

George's hand dropped away from his eyes. He looked at her, and she saw he had tears br.i.m.m.i.n.g. "I made a deal with the devil. He came to me, and I did it. But I didn't know. I didn't know. If I could take it back I would, but I can't."

That made her frown at him. "George-"

"I can't," he repeated, and began to sob. "Jeff didn't kill himself. They killed him. I tried to fix this and they killed him. And now they've got Emma. And there's nothing I can do."

George shut his eyes, drew a deep, shuddering breath.

Riley stared at him as her heart began to pound. Maybe he would tell her this, and maybe it would be enough to help find Emma. Her hand found his, closed around the cold dry fingers urgently. "Who are they? Do you know? If you do, tell me. They've got Emma."

George opened his eyes. But instead of looking at her, he looked at the door. "Guard!" he yelled. "We're through."

"George, if you know something, you have to tell me."

He looked at her then. His eyes were full of tears.

"Go away," he said, then looked at the door again and screamed, "Guard!"

"Jeff deserved better than you," Riley said with quiet ferociousness as the door opened behind her. "Emma and Margaret do, too."

"Get her out of here," George cried to the guard who now stood in the open doorway. "We're through here! We're through."

Riley didn't even say good-bye. Hating him so much she felt sick with it, she turned and walked out the door.

"WELL, h.e.l.l, there goes that." As Riley walked out of George's room, Finn leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his neck in frustration. In the tight confines of the van, that meant his head was almost touching the opposite wall. Ordinarily he would never have said it aloud, but he'd gotten caught up in Riley's emotion, in the naked pain in her voice and her face, as he'd watched her trying to get the information they needed out of George. He'd d.a.m.ned well felt some of that emotion, which said way more than he wanted to think about at the moment about the state of his own emotions where Riley was concerned. One more topic to be pursued later; for now he had to concentrate on getting the job he'd been put on the ground to do done. Which meant, clearly, that he was going to have to go down a new path, because George either really didn't know or wasn't giving up the whereabouts of the money.

Riley had seemed to think he knew. Or else she was a h.e.l.l of an actress, putting it all out there as she fought with Emma's father for a means of saving Emma.

When he got her back, they were going to have a talk. About trust, and all that.

"Now what do we do?" Bax was watching Riley's return progress through the prison, too.

"Your people got any fresh leads on Emma?" Finn asked. Riley's visit to George having been a bust, Finn wanted to get as much of a handle on the Emma situation as he could before Riley rejoined him, upset about having failed. If the girl couldn't be found before the kidnappers called Riley, maybe the best thing to do would be to fake it, lie and claim George had told them the whereabouts of the money. They could try to arrange an ambush.

Bax said, "The van was spotted on I-45 going south, was the last update I got. People are scouring surveillance video at every exit on down that highway, but it's a slow process."

"Yeah," Finn said, having received the same information when he'd called in to his sources last night. On one of the monitors he watched Riley walk into the back entrance of the visitors' center, then watched the guard who'd been a.s.signed to escort her, who was walking behind her and had held the door open for her, check out her a.s.s as she pa.s.sed him. His body tensed slightly in reflexive reaction: he didn't like what he was seeing, which was another bad sign about the state of his involvement with Riley.

"If they're not going to kill Emma, if they're really intending to trade her for the money, they won't have taken her too far," Bax offered. "The problem is, there's so much activity typically going on in an urban area that it takes a long time to single out anything that might be significant."

"Yeah," Finn said again. His people were also checking NSA satellite footage of the area, but following a white van on a dark night amidst a sea of other vehicles in pictures taken miles above the earth was apparently proving problematic. He hoped they were having better luck tracking down the source of those emails Riley had pointed out to him, but so far he hadn't heard anything to indicate it.

"Here she comes." Bax nodded at the monitor, which showed Riley walking out of the visitors' center into the parking lot. As Finn watched, his hands closed around the arms of his chair preparatory to levering himself upright. Time to get himself to Auntie Sue's.

"Okay. Get somebody a.n.a.lyzing the footage we just captured. A couple of the things George said-'I made a deal with the devil and I tried to fix this' are what jumped out at me-might be worth pursuing. Check visitor logs, email logs, phone logs, everything that came to or went out from George at that prison." Finn watched Riley get into the car. He had a problem-Eagle and the powers that be wanted him to find the money. If Riley wasn't the ticket to finding the money, then they would expect him to abandon her and pursue other leads until that money was found. He had the same problem regarding Emma-his mandate wasn't to recover the teen.

Finn discovered that he wasn't on board with abandoning either of them.

s.h.i.t.

"You'd better get a move on. She's coming through the gate."

"Yeah." Finn stood up-well, as much as he could, considering that he was quite a bit taller than the van was high. "Head back for Houston. I'll give you a call-"

He broke off, his eyes on the monitor. Having made it through the gate, the gray Acura had been rolling merrily along, until it braked beside one of the news crews she was supposed to drive right past.

"She stopped," Bax said unnecessarily, his tone as dumbfounded as Finn felt. "What's she doing?"

Good question. Finn, for one, didn't know.

He watched as Riley got out of the car. The news crews spotted her, practically dropped their cameras in shock, and rushed her en ma.s.se.

"Any way to zoom in on that?" he asked, because this particular camera they were watching her on was capturing her from across the street. The sound wasn't there, either. From the angle of that vantage point, he guessed the camera might be concealed in the front of the van. His chest was heavy with foreboding.

"Oh. Sure." Bax jumped up, banged his head on the roof, said "ouch," and rubbed the injury even as he did something with a computer mouse that brought Riley front and center on that monitor-and upped the volume to where they could hear her.

"-visiting your ex-father-in-law, George Cowan?" the reporter asked. She was a young blonde, smiling brightly while holding the microphone in Riley's face. "Can you give us any details about what happened?"

"I only know that he was stabbed yesterday," Riley said. She looked into the camera, and Finn was struck once again by how pretty she was. He was also struck by something in the determined set of her jawline. He remembered the last time she had talked to the media, and his sense of foreboding morphed into flat-out alarm. "I spoke to him, and he's recovering. In fact, I had a question to ask him, and he was able to tell me everything I needed to know."

"My G.o.d, does she mean what I think she means?" Bax gasped, while Finn stared stonily at the monitor. "Did George tell her where the money is?"

"You heard what I heard," Finn responded.

"Can you share with us what you asked him?" the reporter said to Riley.

Riley shook her head. "No, I can't. It's personal." Then she looked directly into the camera again. "But I got the answer I wanted, and I'll share it with the people it concerns." While Finn felt his blood run cold, she glanced at the reporter, and smiled. "Thanks for your concern."

Then she waved, and walked away from the camera, ignoring the questions that were called after her.

The reporter said into the camera, "That was an exclusive with Riley-"

Finn missed the rest of it. Heart thumping like it hadn't in years, he was already striding for the rear of the van and jumping out onto the pavement.

Glancing toward the prison, he could see the Acura coming.

- CHAPTER -

TWENTY-NINE.

Riley's pulse pounded. Her stomach was in a knot. Her mind, however, was crystal clear. By telling the media, and through them the world, that she had asked George a question and he had told her everything she needed to know, she hoped to get the word to Emma's kidnappers that she knew where the money was and she was willing to trade.

She was going to pretend to Finn and everybody else in officialdom that George had told her where it was. And she wasn't going to tell Finn and everybody else in officialdom where that was until Emma was free and safe.

She was prepared to give the location of the money to whoever gave her Emma.

Finn, Bax, the FBI, the CIA, and every other agency and government group involved were there for the money. Once someone got it, they might very well pull the plug and all go away.

Without making sure Emma was safe.

She didn't trust any of them.

Finn jogged through the center of the parking lot toward her. Riley spotted him as soon as she pulled into the strip mall. His suit today was a paler gray, and his coat and dark blue tie flapped as he ran. He looked completely masculine, slightly disheveled, and s.e.xy as h.e.l.l. Also, big and tough enough to handle anything. Her instant reaction upon seeing him was that he was her very own port in the storm, and she wanted to park the car and run into his arms. Then she remembered why that wasn't going to happen, and at the same time got close enough to see his expression. She was instantly alarmed by the look on his face.

Grim didn't begin to cover it.

She braked beside him, put the car in park. He jerked open her door even as she started to roll down her window.

"Get in the pa.s.senger seat," he barked, reaching around her to unbuckle her seat belt, grabbing her arm to pull her out. She'd stopped in the middle of the parking lot, which, since it was almost noon, was busier than it had been earlier, with maybe two dozen cars and trucks and vans in it now. A woman was walking into Auntie Sue's, and another woman and a little girl were coming out of Stringtown Souvenirs. n.o.body seemed to be paying attention to her or Finn. A quick glance across the four-lane road at the satellite trucks parked down the long driveway in front of the prison gate told her that the news crews were nowhere in sight. She presumed that they were either in or in front of one of the vans.

"What is it?" she asked. Anxiety made her throat tight. Sudden dread gripped her. "Is it Emma?"

"No, it's not Emma." He looked grimmer than ever as he hauled her around the hood of the car.

"Oh, G.o.d." Riley felt a flood of relief. "Finn-he told me where the money is."

"What?" He snapped a frowning look at her.

"I know where the money is. George told me."

"What?"

His eyes bored into hers, and for a moment they blazed with some emotion she couldn't identify. Then they shut down as completely as if a curtain had dropped, and became absolutely unreadable.

"Get in the car." He opened the pa.s.senger door. She got in. A moment later he slid behind the wheel.

"George told you where the money is?" He put the car in gear, and they started to move. "Where is it? What did he say?"

The tension in his face hadn't eased. If anything, the muscles around his eyes and mouth looked tighter than before.

"What's happened?" she asked instead of answering, her anxiety skyrocketing again as he drove maybe a dozen yards before swinging into a parking s.p.a.ce beside a blue van. "Finn?"

"In a minute." He slammed the car into park, turned it off, grabbed the keys, and said, "Don't move."