Marc (Bowen Boys, #4)(36)

“Maybe. When they brought me there, every time I was drugged. Then when I left, it wasn’t usually by the front door. But it had a pool. I could smell the chlorine, so I always thought it was inside. And when I left, I could see that there were two other buildings behind the house. One of them looked like a barn, but I can’t be sure. But it was large and maybe a couple of stories.” She came around him when he asked her to look. “I don’t…is there any way you can get to this part here? That’s where I left from if this is the house.”

Sebastian zoomed in on the left side of the house. He could make out a trellis as well as several small round little bushes under a large door. The decking that had come from the back extended just to the door.

“That’s it. See this right here?” She pointed out the long white vine-covered trellis. “I used it to climb down. This room here is where he supposedly killed Anita. And those bushes are much larger.”

Marc took the address and left to go to his computer. Jonny started clearing up the dishes. Sebastian watched her for several minutes before he spoke.

“You said every time. How many times did they take you?” She moved to the dishwasher with another load. “Jonny, please help me understand what we’re going to be up against.”

“Seven times. I got to be really good at getting away after the second time. It took me until then to realize they weren’t very smart. I could stay on the property for hours at a time before I left. Usually they were all gone when I started off. But their way to keep me was getting to be much better, not the people holding me. The last time they captured me I was….” Marc sat down and told her to go on. “The last time they captured me I was leaving my job. Wasn’t much of one, but it paid for my gas. Anyway, Roy walks up to me with Anita in his arms and a gun to her head. She was begging me not to let him kill her. As I tried to think what to do, I heard this other person—Henchman is what I’d begun to call Harris—he came around to my left with a gun. It wasn’t until the first dart hit me that I realized it wasn’t a regular gun. I didn’t go down at first, but my cat sort of got pissed.”

She stopped talking and looked out the window. He started to ask her what was wrong when Marc touched his arm. He put his finger to his lips and shook his head.

She seems to think things through better when she does that. It’s kind of freaky, but it works for her. And what she said about being on the property for hours without them finding her is probably more than likely because she has a natural ability to stalk and hide. Last night and the night before, I couldn’t find her in the woods no matter how much I tried. And let me tell you, I wanted to find her. She was like a f*cking ghost. If she hadn’t walked by me so that I could see her, I’d still be looking.

Sebastian looked at her with admiration. Marc was the best tracker of all of them, and if she outmaneuvered him then Sebastian was impressed. She turned to look at Marc, and Sebastian could see what Marc had meant. She got it. Whatever it had been, she got it.

“She said ‘she’ll pay now.’ I just remembered that. ‘She’ll pay now,’ then she said something about her brother was going to be avenged. I didn’t know what that meant then or now, but she was in on it from the very beginning.” Sebastian asked her who the woman was. “Anita Kidd. We met when I escaped a few years ago. She’d moved into the building I was living in about a week later. She seemed so nice and friendly at first. Then as the weeks went by I realized she’s nuts.”

“Christ.” Sebastian looked at them both. “She’s none other than Anthony Kidd’s daughter. You know who he is, the mob boss out of Jersey. She’s reported to be worth millions and is….”

He read through the rest of the article, then stopped. This was not good. Not good at all. He clicked onto a few more pages before he spoke, no longer thinking about the couple in the room with him. When he was finished, he noticed first that he was in the kitchen alone and that it was nearly six hours later. He rubbed his hand over his face and went to find his brother and his mate. They were in the office going over something from Marc’s investigative office.

“She really is nuts. According to some files I found, she’s been in and out of asylums for years. Only until the past few years she hasn’t. And it’s more than likely because her father has stated that he’s washed his hands of her. According to this report, she tried to kill him in a drunken rage and he was hospitalized for a month. She’s not been able to see or be near him in almost four years. Her files say that she is bent on killing the one person who ruined her life.”

“My mother, and since she can’t find her, she’s focused on me.” Jonny started pacing again. “So Roy hooked up with her somehow, and now that they’re partners, he and she both are trying to get me. I wonder if he knows what sort of person she is.” Marc nodded. “She attacked him as well, right?”

“Not him but his office. He filed a claim that she’d went ‘a little mad with grief’ over something and had torn his office up. The insurance company didn’t pay because it was dropped by Dawson a few days later. Probably because her dad found out and paid up.” Sebastian pointed to the printer as he continued. “I sent some stuff to that one. If you had it on, you’d have been reading it by now.”

“It turns off when I’m not using it. I asked you three times to fix that, and you kept telling me you’d get around to it.” Marc turned on the printer and stood there as several sheets started spitting out. “Is this going to be more than five hundred sheets?”