Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(107)

I backed away fast. Last time Joseph had walked into a room with me, his pale eyes had been flat and empty. Eyes that said he was utterly indifferent to my fate. No longer. Now, his eyes surged with hatred. “You,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about everything I want to do to you.” He gestured significantly with the bolt cutters, raising the black stainless steel jaws toward me. “I’m going to make sure that it’s a very long night, and I’m going to keep you alive to the very end.”





45


“How’d you get in, Joseph?”

His voice was thick with animosity. “You think I can’t cut a lock with one arm?”

“I hope that’s on your résumé.”

He called me a couple of names that no newspaper in the country would have printed. He was holding the gun in his right hand, even with the sling. I wondered what Joseph would do if he decided to use it. Whether he’d switch hands so he could bring it up and sight, or if he’d stick to the right hand and shoot from the hip. He might still be a good shot. He might not be. “I can kill you and be out of the country long before they find your body,” he finished.

“Sure,” I said. I nodded toward Oliver. “But can he?”

Maybe the antianxiety pills were kicking in, but Oliver didn’t seem so nervous anymore. He didn’t seem so surprised to see Joseph here either. In fact, he hadn’t even seemed to wonder who Joseph was. “I thought you were helping me, Oliver,” I said. “Disappointing.”

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“It’s okay. You can drop the guardian angel bit. We’re past that.”

“I am helping you, Nikki,” he insisted. “Of course I am.”

I nodded at Joseph. “And I’m supposed to believe that he just took a wrong turn and ended up here? Come on, why keep lying? What’s the point?”

Eyes on the ground, Oliver considered this in silence. “I was helping you at first,” he finally said, looking up. “But you were too good. You started finding out too much.”

“Why help me at all?”

He didn’t hesitate. “An insurance policy.”

“Insurance?”

“Greggory had a fairly low opinion of your abilities. He didn’t think you’d get anywhere—except where we wanted you to get. Out of the two of us, I’ve always tended toward caution. I wasn’t sure where you’d end up after Greggory first approached you. I thought it would be better to know your thought process. I didn’t give you any information or idea you weren’t going to reach eventually on your own. We didn’t know if you’d ever get to In Retentis, but if you did, we wanted to know about it—and the more convinced you were that terrorism was the answer, the less you’d be thinking about it being anything else.”

I sat again on the file cabinet, next to the open book folded spine-up. “Why me?” There was a gun in the top drawer. A .357 stainless-steel revolver with a big four-inch barrel. I had left it loaded and cocked. “Why come to me in the first place? Why risk getting an outsider involved?”

He shrugged. “We needed someone like you. You were perfect.”

“Perfect how?”

“We needed someone who actually did this kind of work for it to be plausible, but the true ideal was a loner with proven antisocial tendencies. Someone without close friends or family. Without a big network of people who would come asking questions if anything happened to her. As far as your established record of violence, the anger management therapy, the arrest for assault—well, we couldn’t have asked for anything better. For anyone better. We spent a long time searching carefully for potential candidates, and you, Nikki, were the very best.”

I didn’t much like hearing that. “The plan was to frame me for Karen’s murder?”

“We needed to establish causality. We’d hired you to follow her, but you became fixated, got out of control. When she learned you were following her and demanded you keep away, you grew angry, issued threats. You had become paranoid, obsessed with the idea of protecting her from unknown enemies. And then, finally, when she refused to accept your help, you became frustrated and lost your temper.”

I nodded, remembering the bloodstained crowbar Joseph had brought to my brother’s apartment. “So with the police right on my heels, I would have been found as a suicide, right next to the murder weapon, everything tied up nice and neat. And killing Karen, rather than…”

I didn’t need to finish my sentence. “You were right,” he agreed readily. “We agonized over the decision. It was a radical new step for us, and it was the last thing we wanted. Well, almost the last thing,” he modified. “If there had been any other way to get her to be quiet or just go away, we would have gladly taken it. We were shocked by the woman’s stubbornness, her refusal to listen to reason. We couldn’t understand that—but of course, we didn’t know about her parents. That obviously left her less willing to compromise. Karen Li needed to be out of the picture, but we couldn’t just have the police pursuing an open-ended murder, especially with the FBI already suspicious. We needed a why, and most of all we needed a who.”

I took that in. “That was why Gunn had me start following her on that particular day. You knew she was meeting the FBI. You didn’t need me to follow her. You needed them to see me following her. To set me up for later.”