Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(69)

White closed his eyes, his face like paper. “It was for his own good.”

“Frankie confessed to me about killing those women. He said he couldn’t control the anger. He wished you’d sent him away, like you did Madeleine. He said Madeleine was the lucky one to get away from you.”

Madeleine stared at Ralph. White’s guards all wore the same expression—as if they’d just stepped into a nest of rattlesnakes.

“Frankie wanted out,” Ralph said. “He was going to keep killing until somebody killed him or you were forced to send him away. And you know what the worst is? I thought about doing it. About killing him. After he told me about the women . . . I was thinking to myself: I might have to do it. I even thought Mission Road would be the best place.”

Ralph looked at Madeleine, his eyes full of sympathy, as if she were the one with the terminal disease. “I’m sorry, chica. Some people can’t be saved. I’ve kept that in mind ever since Frankie died. Every time I had to hurt somebody, kill somebody—I pictured Frankie. And I pictured your father. I imagine you felt the same way.”

The specks of paint on Madeleine’s face, the streak in her hair, made me think of the portrait in Frankie’s closet—a twelve-year-old girl, composed entirely from shades of blue.

The sirens got closer. We were losing too much time. Even if I left right now, I wasn’t sure I could make it to Maia.

“I should kill you,” Mr. White said. With his translucent skin and the air tube around his nose, he looked like some sort of ancient, disoriented catfish, brought to the surface for the first time in its long life.

“Not going to solve anything, patrón,” Ralph said. “Let us go. Let us help Maia.”

Alex raised his rifle. “Let me, sir.”

White said nothing. His eyes were colorless in the morning light.

At that moment, I knew Alex would make the call for him. We would die. As soon as he shot Ralph and me, Alex Cole would come into his inheritance. He would become Guy White’s willpower, his voice, his decision-maker.

I was bracing to charge—to risk pushing Alex down and making a break for it—when Madeleine said, “Alex, put down the gun.”

Guy White had trouble focusing on his daughter. “Madeleine?” he said hazily. “Go to your room.”

“My room is on fire, Daddy.”

It was the first time I’d heard her call him anything but sir.

She took a set of car keys out of her pocket, threw them to Ralph. “Go on. Help your friend.”

“What?” Alex protested.

“Madeleine.” Mr. White’s face was weary and pale. “You have no right—”

She wheeled on him so fast his voice faltered.

“I—have—every—right.” She turned toward the guards. “My father isn’t well. I’ll watch after him. You two go to the front yard. Wait for the police.”

One of them said, “But—”

“He isn’t well,” Madeleine repeated, “so you’re going to listen to me. I am his daughter. I am responsible. Understand?”

“These men,” Mr. White said, staring at Ralph and me. His tone sounded watery, petulant. “They burned my house, they killed my son . . .”

He seemed to be trying to summon up his anger, but he couldn’t do it. His thoughts trailed off, lost in the smoke. He gazed at his mansion, now burning with an audible roar.

Madeleine raised an eyebrow at the guards. They got the message. They made a wide arc around Guy White’s daughter and left the gazebo, heading toward the front yard.

“The keys are for the white Lexus,” Madeleine told us. “Hurry.”

“This is bullshit,” Alex growled. “They move an inch—”

“Alex,” Madeleine said, “you will stand down. Arguello, Navarre—go.”

Emergency lights flashed against the trees, maybe a block away.

We had no more time.

We left the gazebo, jogged over the frozen grass. Every step, I expected to be shot between my shoulder blades. I knew the only thing keeping us alive was Madeleine’s sheer force of will.

Somehow, her willpower held. We made it to the corner of the house. We found the white Lexus. By the time the police vehicles and the fire truck came screaming up Contour Drive, we were a block away, a column of smoke rising behind us from what used to be the White kingdom.

Chapter 19

HERNANDEZ AND MAIA WERE WAITING on the shoulder of Mission Road.

Hernandez sat on the hood of Maia’s car. He was immaculate as always in a chocolate-colored suit. No anger in his eyes—just a chill, dangerous calm.

Maia stood two feet in front of him. She wore her black wool pantsuit, a Band-Aid on the cut under her eye. Hernandez and she might have been mistaken for a rich couple, broken down on the side of the road on their way home from church.

I didn’t see a gun on Hernandez, but that meant nothing. Maia wouldn’t be standing there if she saw any chance of overpowering him.

“Plan?” Ralph asked me.

My throat felt raw. Neither of us was armed. Madeleine’s charity had not extended as far as providing firearms.

We were dealing with a killer, in a place where he had killed before.

“It’s you he wants,” I told Ralph. “Stay in the car. Let me talk to him.”