Ghostly Game, page 22
He tilted his head to one side, studying her face. “I heard about the break-ins at the apartments.”
“I thought you might be behind that.” She knew she didn’t sound accusing, only wary. She didn’t want to make him angry. She was alone on the trail, and as far as she knew, no one was close by. She didn’t want to have to kill him, but she would if she had no other choice.
He shook his head. “No. I don’t know who did it or why.”
He looked and sounded sincere enough that she believed him despite everything Gideon had told her about him.
“They didn’t take anything from any of us, and they didn’t bother to make it look like a robbery.”
“That’s what’s worrisome.” He even sounded worried. “I didn’t kill that cop. They’re trying to pin his death on me. I’m hearing rumors that they’re trying to say it was my gun. I didn’t have a gun. And I didn’t kill Ret or Dustin. They were my friends and had been for years. Jarrod is missing. If he were alive, I would know it, but he hasn’t contacted me or any of our trusted allies.”
“Is it possible Jarrod killed Ramsey, Dustin and Ret, and is trying to frame you? He could have been the one to break into our apartments. He would have known which ones we occupied.”
Harvey scratched the bridge of his nose. “I’ve known Jarrod since we were kids.”
That wasn’t an answer. People betrayed friends. Lovers. They broke hearts. Grief nearly overwhelmed her.
“Why were you at the apartments, Harvey?”
She shouldn’t ask. She had no business asking. It was stupid. She’d just told him she wanted nothing to do with him, but she asked anyway. What was the old saying? Curiosity killed the cat? If what Gideon told her about him was the truth, it made no sense that Harvey would be in the lower-rent apartments. He supposedly owned estates worth millions.
“Someone’s been methodically killing key people in our organizations. We never meet in person, and we thought if we did meet somewhere no one would ever consider we would go, we could figure it out. We didn’t want to use phones or email. Nothing traceable. Nowhere we could be overheard.”
“Were you able to figure out who was killing off your people?”
“Not who was doing the killing. But we began to suspect who was providing the information where our people were going to be so they could be killed. Movement was always a closely guarded secret, and few people knew.”
“Someone close had to betray all of you.”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Usually a woman. Someone close. Someone you love and trust.” He looked sad. “That’s why I told the others not to take that chance. Not to fall. Betrayal is the worst pill to swallow.”
To her horror, for one terrible moment, tears burned and shimmered in her eyes. She swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded. “Sadly, I do have to agree, although I’ll say men are just as capable of betrayal as women. Don’t put your trust in them either.”
There was a long silence. Harvey turned away from her to look out over the flowers lining both sides of the path before he spoke again. “That man is an idiot for letting someone like you go.”
“I’m not such a prize, but thank you, Harvey. You know who betrayed all of you?”
“Jarrod had a woman living with him. Met her a few years ago and fell hard. She was in it for his money, but he couldn’t see it. She cheated on him with a cop. Ret, Dustin and I had her tailed after we started losing our key people and had narrowed our suspects. Unfortunately, Jarrod wouldn’t believe us. I think he confronted her.”
Rory’s heart stuttered. “Please tell me she wasn’t seeing Ramsey.”
Harvey shook his head. “Not Ramsey. We didn’t know who she was seeing. Ramsey was a good cop.”
Rory had the distinct impression that Harvey might have been working with Ramsey to uncover who had been murdering the key people in his organization. Would a criminal do that? Could he do that and not incriminate himself?
“Can’t you just ask her? Did Jarrod ask her?”
“She’s dead. And no, Jarrod didn’t kill her. We believe her lover did.”
Icy fingers trailed down her spine. Harvey was telling her the woman’s cop lover had murdered her. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want the cops or anyone else to see us talking together. The police already suspect I work for you.”
“No one knows you’re here. My men ran interference to keep you from being followed. The cops are a little thin to keep twenty-four-hour surveillance on you. Carver and Westlake are usually the ones to follow you, but they’re busy a lot of the time. They have two friends, retired cops now, Bill Morris and Jerome Michigan, who take turns keeping an eye on you for them when they can’t. None of them can stay on you all the time. Most of the time it’s your man’s friends. They’re harder to spot. We tried investigating them, but they’re ghosts. That means they’re government. Or CIA. Or worse.”
“He’s not my man anymore. I told you, I’m leaving. I’m putting in my notice tonight, and once I work that out, I’ll be gone. Why did you tell me all this?”
“Because I think you’re being set up right along with me. Everything is pointing in that direction. You’re the logical choice. The more knowledge you have, the better the chance you have of protecting yourself. I’m worried about you and your friends staying at the apartments. Particularly the two with the kids. I know you don’t like me or what I do, Rory, but sometimes you need a safe place to go. I’m going to give you a key and a number. That’s it. If you and the women and kids need to get away and hide somewhere, just call the number, get into a car and start driving north. You’ll get instructions on where a safe house is. My people will run interference. The house will be stocked with everything you need for a couple of weeks. Think of it as a vacation.”
“If I’m not with them, can my friends still use the house?” She did her best to keep the challenge from her voice.
“Of course.”
“Thank you, Harvey. I don’t know why you’d help us, but I appreciate it.” She didn’t trust him any more than she trusted Gideon, but she took the key and card with the single phone number on it. Everything was so uncertain, she had no idea what might happen.
“I was the one who chose those apartments. It didn’t occur to me that any of this would happen, but it did. It’s my mess and I need to clean it up.”
He was right. It was his mess, but at the same time, someone was framing him if he was telling the truth. She wasn’t so sure her lie detector wasn’t faulty after her encounters with Gideon, but Harvey appeared sincere. People weren’t all bad or all good.
She pressed her fingers to her temple where the headache had fully formed from all the crying. At no time did she reveal the knife she held. She had learned not to trust years earlier, and Gideon had only reinforced that lesson.
“Harvey, were you ever married? In a relationship?” She should keep her mouth shut, let him go. He was a stranger, and she had no one to ask questions of. She wanted answers.
“I’ve never married. Too many women made it easy for me to find another one.”
She frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”
He gave her a half smile, one that didn’t reach his eyes, very reminiscent of Gideon. “You wouldn’t know what that means, Rory, because you aren’t the kind of woman to go after a man for his money. If you decide on a man, you’re going to be loyal to him, and you’ll be with him for all the right reasons.”
“What if I don’t know what the right reasons are?”
“Rory, you aren’t the one at fault.”
“You don’t know that. I don’t know the first thing about relationships. I’ve never been in one. I’ve never seen one that worked. I never even wanted to be in one until I was with Gideon. I fell so hard and fast for him, it was crazy. I didn’t even think. I didn’t have time to think. It was the dumbest thing I ever did.”
“Not that you ever did. That he ever did,” Harvey corrected. “When a man is in his twenties, and he acts the fool, he can be forgiven because he doesn’t know better. But by the time he’s that man’s age, he should know a good thing when he has it. He should have been treating you with love and concern. Watching over you. Putting you first. That’s a relationship. And that’s his failing, not yours.”
“I don’t even know why I’m asking you these questions, Harvey.”
“I’m not a good man, and I’m lonely for a reason. You’re a good woman, and you don’t deserve to be lonely. That doesn’t mean you aren’t. We just happen to be in the same place at a bad time for both of us.”
Rory knew he was right, and she couldn’t tempt fate any longer. Someone was bound to come along the trail soon. In any case, Harvey had said his men had run interference to keep Gideon’s people from following her car, but she wouldn’t put it past Javier to have her vehicle bugged. For all she knew, Gideon might even have put a tracking device on her phone. She was going to look the second Harvey was gone. She should have considered that right away. She’d been too upset to reason everything out.
“You’d better go before someone comes along and sees us together,” she told him. “But thank you for talking to me.”
“Keep that card with the number on it for emergencies. If you call it, someone will answer and help you.” Harvey lifted a hand, turned away from her and walked up the trail leading toward the lake.
Rory watched him go until he disappeared around a bend. She turned back toward the parking lot, sliding the knife back into the small sheath inside her jacket. She had a long walk and a lot to think about.
Taking out her phone, she permanently deleted the screenshot of the message Gideon had taken that Tinsdale had sent to Harvey. Maybe she should have told Harvey about unsealing the message and how Gideon had taken a screenshot. She didn’t know if he had duplicated the message before he had deleted it or sent it to someone else. He could have. She didn’t trust him anymore. But she wasn’t taking any chances with Harvey going from being nice to pulling out a gun and shooting her.
She took her time walking back, turning over the things Gideon had told her about GhostWalkers. She realized her nightmares fit with everything he’d said. Or maybe he’d taken her nightmares into account so she would have reason to recognize pieces of what he told her. As much as she wanted that to be the truth, in her gut, she knew it wasn’t.
By the time she reached her car, she’d concluded that Gideon had been telling her the truth, and she most likely had been bought by Dr. Peter Whitney from an orphanage to be experimented on. What that meant in terms of what she was now, she had no idea, but she wasn’t going to take any chances with anyone’s life. She was the same person she’d always been before she came to San Francisco. She was intelligent. Self-reliant. She could manage even with the new knowledge she had. It was frightening to think that Whitney—and she kept repeating the name in the hopes she’d stop having such a visceral reaction to it—planted something in her that might harm others.
She drove back to the apartment building and parked in her usual spot. Each tenant had a parking place specifically for them. She was grateful no one had taken hers, which was sometimes the case. She didn’t want to drive around the parking garage looking for a new parking place. She was exhausted. Part of her problem was she needed to use her regular nebulizer. It was in Lydia’s apartment.
The moment she entered, Lydia jumped up, ran to her, threw her arms around her and hugged her tight. “I was worried.”
“Didn’t you get my note?”
“Yes. But you didn’t sleep all night. Something clearly went wrong. You didn’t stay at Gideon’s, and you didn’t stay here. You should have woken me up, Rory.”
“You have a three-year-old and you work long hours, Lydia.”
“That doesn’t matter. You matter more to me than sleep. Seriously, Rory, tell me what you need right now.”
“My nebulizer first. I can barely breathe. It’s in the guest room by the bed.”
“You sit down and I’ll get it for you.” Lydia rushed off.
Rory sank into one of the two nice chairs Lydia had in her living room. Ellen was playing with her dolls on the floor, and she immediately crawled up on Rory’s lap and pressed a kiss onto her cheek. Rory kissed her back.
“Good morning, Miss Ellie May Rider.”
“Morning.”
Rory’s heart melted. That was the first time Ellen had spoken without an elaborate go-between. She kissed her several more times, making her squeal the way her momma did, grateful she’d made such good friends. Gideon might have made her feel broken and shattered, but friends went a long way to comfort her.
13
Gideon stood on the very edge of his rooftop, facing the bar. “There’s no recovery from this one, Javier. I sold her out and she called me on it. I told her she could tell me anything and she’d be safe. I meant it too. I had no idea she was a GhostWalker. I knew she was afraid of a relationship, but I didn’t have a clue why. I wanted her to know she was safe with me.”
“I heard the resolve in her voice,” Javier confirmed.
“I can’t blame her. Everything she said was true. I didn’t tell any of you the things she said to me in confidence to save her. I told them to you to save you.”
“Gideon. You had no choice.”
“There’s always another choice. I should have thought it through. Taken a couple more days. I could have kept her away from all of you and then talked it over with her.”
“You know better.”
“She’s in trouble, Javier. I know she is. I can feel it. She’s cut herself off from me, but I can still feel the danger to her, and that means it’s growing, getting worse. It’s bad. I don’t know where it’s coming from. She won’t let me in.”
“She doesn’t know all of us.”
Gideon turned to look at Javier over his shoulder. “Rory isn’t going to be so easy to fool now. She’ll be looking. And now she’ll think about the things I told her, and she’ll be afraid she might harm someone. That’s going to be uppermost in her mind. I didn’t blow my chance with the only woman I’ll ever want to be with so Whitney can run his program on one of you.”
“You’re not killing yourself over this, Gideon. Sending out your spies to watch over her is too dangerous for you.”
Gideon turned back to look at the building several blocks down where the bar was located. With his superior eyesight and hearing, he could see the strobing colored lights and hear the music and conversations flowing. He zeroed in on Rory’s voice immediately. She wasn’t laughing the way she normally did. She talked with customers. He was certain no one would notice the difference in her voice but him.
He’d hurt her. No, it was far worse than that. He’d devastated her. She’d cut all ties with him—blocked him from communicating with her. Blocked him from being able to touch her mind. He was a very strong telepath, and when it came to Rory, he had developed an even stronger connection than he normally would have with others. When Rory was concentrating on her work, she forgot to keep the shields in her mind strong, and he caught glimpses of images of what she was thinking or doing. None of it was good. Not when it came to him.
“I’m not leaving her unprotected, Javier. I did this to us. She’s alone because of me. Something or someone is after her. If I hadn’t betrayed her, she’d be safe with me right now.”
“I can agree with that, Gideon. But you tearing open that wound and bleeding to death isn’t going to save her life. Watch and listen, fine. Give me some time to figure this out. You know I’m going to help whether you give me the okay or not.”
Gideon glanced over his shoulder again, his piercing eyes ringed with silver, never a good sign. “She knows what you look like, Javier,” he repeated.
“She’ll never see me. And in case you’re wondering, I like her. I’m not just doing this for you. Whether Whitney programmed her or not, she’s a good person and she deserves better than she got.”
“She has no idea about her past. Whitney was very successful in erasing it. She isn’t a part of whatever plan he’s conceived.”
Javier nodded. “I’m very aware of that. Don’t send your spies, Gideon. Let me work on this. You keep watch yourself. She’s safe while she’s working. It’s been a couple of days. She’s staying with Lydia. Her friends are keeping close to her.”
“She gave her notice to her boss.”
“Yeah.”
“He was upset. Tried to talk her out of leaving. She was adamant that she has to go.” Gideon turned back to look at the bar. “When she goes, I have this really bad feeling I won’t be able to stop myself from following her.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Javier glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to handle something. I’m going to keep an eye on her though. She’s not going to just be hanging out there alone. Don’t do anything stupid, Gideon.”
Javier made his way down the stairs and back out onto the street. Rhianna was draped in her usual sexy fashion against the wall outside Gideon’s home. She couldn’t help the way she looked, with her thick curly black hair and incredibly blue eyes. Every movement she made was enticing and sexy. Beside her was Ethan Meyers. He was Gideon’s friend, a very hard man to spot in the shadows.
“How is he?” Rhianna asked.
Javier knew Gideon better than any of the others in their close-knit family of GhostWalkers, and by the concern in Rhianna’s voice, she was aware of it.
“Not good. We’re going to lose him if we don’t find a way to fix this.”
They fell into step with him as he started toward the warehouse Mack and Kane called home. “Can you talk to her?” Ethan asked.
