Relentless

Chapter 3

3

Anna

I was able to hold it together until I returned to the hotel, taxi paid for with trembling fingers, and into the shower before my legs gave out. I started shaking and couldn’t stop, my muscles quivering and spasming, even huddled on the slick tile floor. I couldn’t get warm even beneath the hot spray, couldn’t get the smell, the feel, of the police station out of my head. I bent my knees and hugged my arms around them tightly as if it would keep me from flying apart. No amount of soap and scrubbing was going to wash away the day’s events. Nor keep the past from coming back. I could wash the dirt from my body, but never the searing thoughts from my mind.

When I saw the body in the trunk earlier, I’d thought Todd had found me. Had found a way to make me pay. To bring my worst nightmare back to reality.

No one is going to help you. You’re going to rot in jail like all of the other murderers. Self-defense? You really think the police will believe you? You’re nothing. Nothing.

I forced the words down, forced the feelings of loneliness, desperation and fear that had gripped me. It was the past. Over. They hadn’t found me. Just like at the police station earlier, I focused on my breathing. In. Out. In. Out. I couldn’t stay in the shower forever. I couldn’t hide, no matter how much I wanted to just stay in my room until it was time to go to the airport for the return flight. I’d tried getting out, going someplace new, something fun…freedom. It hadn’t worked. But Zach needed me and I’d rather go with him to the rehearsal dinner than explain why I wanted to hide. Once I got back to New York on Sunday I could hide again. I was good at hiding.

Tugging the belt on the soft hotel robe tightly about me, I wiped my hand on the mirror to clear the damp fog. My face was pale, dark circles smudged beneath my eyes. My hair hung in wet clumps around my face and down my back. I plugged in the straightening iron for it to warm, picked up my brush and began to comb the tangles from my hair.

Thirty minutes later, I zipped up my pale blue silk dress. It had a slim bodice with a high, straight neckline, sleeveless, with satin ribbons in the same soft color tied at each shoulder that held the front and back together. The skirt was a slight A-line, flaring at the hips and falling to mid-knee. Slingback pumps gave me a few inches of lift. My makeup was soft, my lips a pale pink. The top of my hair was pulled back in a clip, leaving the bottom long and sleek down my back. Small diamonds glinted at my ears.

Picking up my slim watch on the counter, I saw I had twenty minutes before meeting Zach in the lobby. I clipped it on my wrist as I walked over to check my email on my tablet while I waited. I clicked through and deleted the spam, sent a quick note to a client before I pulled up my news feed. I’d set my browser to pull up any information, updates or news with the keywords Todd Lawton and Grayson Edwards. Every time I checked, my nerves fluttered in tense and unpleasant anticipation. I usually received a few bits of news a week, mostly about their attending a dinner, a philanthropic donation or a boost in Edwards Enterprises stock shares. I didn’t expect the news that came through this time from the San Francisco paper, however.

Elizabeth Edwards, daughter of Mr. Grayson Edwards and his wife Victoria, became engaged to Mr. Todd Lawton over the weekend. Elizabeth recently graduated from the prestigious Montworth Academy and Mr. Lawton is Vice President of Operations with Edwards Enterprises. A Christmas wedding is planned.

Along with the text was a photo of the happy couple. I’d never seen a picture of my half-sister before, my father and his second wife sheltered her, and took a moment to stare at her. We looked nothing alike. While my hair was dark, hers was blond. She appeared to have a taller, slimmer build, similar to her mother’s. It had been over twenty years since I’d seen my stepmother in person, but I remembered her well. I only hoped Elizabeth inherited her good looks, not her personality. On the surface, she was really lovely. Young. Innocent.

Todd looked the same. Attractive in a tanned, tennis player sort of way. Groomed impeccably, indicative of his wealth and power handed to him by my father. At forty-five, his hair had receded a little, although I had no doubt that was a battle fought hard with medical intervention. He wore a blue suit and a tie that matched Elizabeth’s pale yellow dress. His hand rested on her shoulder. The background was out of focus, but appeared to have been taken outdoors. To anyone else, they looked like a happy couple, much in love. To me, knowing the real Todd, I could see the cold gleam in his eye, hidden until after the nuptials.

I remember posing for a similar photo, Todd’s hand placed identically on my shoulder, too. A chill ran through me remembering the feel of it. My dress had been a soft pink. Floral. I’d worn my hair differently then, letting the natural curl have its way across my shoulders, the color a few shades lighter. I’d been so excited, so enchanted that a man had been interested in me, found me desirable. Wanted me. I’d been shamefully wrong. Naïve.

I’d been so silly to consider Todd had anything to do with the dead body in the trunk of the rental car. While I’d been thinking he’d hatched a plan to ruin my life once again, he’d been busy in San Francisco becoming engaged to my half-sister. Why would he waste his time on me? He had a new victim.

I knew all too well what that meant. A loveless marriage, abuse, unhappiness, solely for money. Money for Todd. I’d survived his plans with my father, barely. I was older and wiser now because of it. But so were they. Elizabeth, the half-sister I’d never met, who probably hadn’t even been told of my existence, wasn’t as well versed in deceit. She was going to be the unwitting pawn and would be crushed. Ruined, then tossed away. Or worse, trapped. I’d managed to escape, but I had no doubt Todd and my father had learned from the experience and wouldn’t let it happen again.

I had to help Elizabeth, had to warn her. Save her. But how? The very idea of going back to San Francisco made me feel panicked, my heart beating frantically, my palms damp. I couldn’t do it. I’d gotten away. Changed my name, changed my look, made a new life. In hiding. There was no way I could go back. I’d bested Todd once. He’d kill me before he let me do it again.

Even if I did show up on my father’s doorstep and ring the bell, Elizabeth probably didn’t know who I was. She wouldn’t just go off with a stranger, nor believe one telling evil tales about her father and fiancé. If she’d been told anything about me, whatever she’d heard couldn’t have been good. They’d surely invented stories about how bad I was for never coming to the house. s*x, drugs, addiction, felony, p**********n. I didn’t doubt they’d used any of those words to describe me in harsh light.

How could I help her? I couldn’t just leave her to a similar fate, or worse. This was something I couldn’t do alone. I needed help. I just had to figure out who. And fast.

Glancing at my watch, I knew now wasn’t the time. I had to be in the lobby. Zach was waiting. Zach. Could he help me? No. Too nice, too sweet to deal with men like Todd and my father. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. It was time to go. To pretend once again.

Grif

It was ten and the nightclub was just starting to fill up. Friday nights were the busiest, the line to get in wrapping down the block and around the corner. The bouncer at the door was selective, letting in only those deemed worthy. To keep the high-profile members of society in, the VIP section full, Scorch made entrance a privilege to the masses, not a guarantee.

With the sleek polished chrome and leather interior, a large dance floor and intimate booths, it epitomized everything the owner, Paul Moretti, was not. He’d come from an impoverished family, a rough life built by the rules of the street, his mother giving up the fight for control in his rearing when he was a boy. Amassing his fortune was done punch by punch as a youth, then hit by bloody hit as an adult, Moretti was known in Denver and throughout the West as a man not to f**k with. Businessmen didn’t defy him. Women didn’t deny him. He got what he wanted and nothing—or no one—else mattered. The longer I stayed undercover, the more stories I heard. And none of them were good.

I knew it was only a matter of time before I got the call. I’d been waiting for it. Word of Bobby Lane’s murder had spread swiftly, as only bad news did. All of the employees of Scorch, from the newly hired server to the seasoned bartender, wondered who’d done it. And why. Had it been a hit? Payback for something, or someone, Bobby had done? He’d been a ladies’ man, even married, so if he dipped his wick in the wrong woman, a husband had a right to retribution. That was the way it worked. And that was just one reason among many that I didn’t dip my wick at all. Not while undercover. Not with a married woman, or any woman who worked, lived, or breathed near anything that belonged to Moretti. That kind of woman was dangerous beneath the covers. One slip-up and pillow talk could turn deadly. If I was going to be shot in the head and left in the trunk of a car, I wanted to be found by my colleagues on the force with my pants on.

That was why, when the bartender gave me the phone call hand sign from across the jammed dance floor, I knew who’d be on the line.

After battling my way through the throng to my office at the back of the building and shutting the door on the techno music—the beat still strumming along the floor—I picked up the line.

“You’ve heard, I’m sure,” Moretti said, his voice deep and gravelly like only a pack-a-day smoker could manage. He didn’t do social niceties like hello.

“Who hasn’t?” I dropped down into the desk chair, swiveled it so I could put my leather boots up on the cluttered surface. It would most likely be the only time I’d sit before closing. I rested my head against the high back, closed my eyes. “Should I offer my condolences?”

“I don’t know what my daughter Ginny ever saw in that bastard. He did good on the job, the girls have brought in more money since my son-in-law took over that racket.” He coughed. “But he sampled the merchandise more than he should’ve. I’m surprised his d**k didn’t fall off.”

I didn’t want to even guess what Bobby’d shared with Ginny. I knew Moretti would say that was her mother’s problem, so I didn’t ask.

I gave a noncommittal grunt in reply. There wasn’t anything to say. I was just relieved my assignment was to bust the old man on money laundering, not p**********n. No way could I send women out on the streets like Bobby did night after night to line Moretti’s pockets.

“Regardless, someone whacked him. I want to know who.”

I waited a beat. “And?”

Moretti sighed. “I know your past. I know everything about everybody who works for me. You used to be on the force. Use that angle to find out what’s going on.”

My cover story was a mixture of fact and fiction. We knew going in Moretti would dig up what he could about me before being let into his inner circle. I had to have the right qualifications—in Moretti’s eyes—for the job. That included being dishonorably discharged from the Army for being tried for killing a fellow soldier, but acquitted on lack of evidence. I’d moved from the Army to a stint with the Denver PD where I was again removed from duty because of tampered evidence in a murder trial, although I couldn’t officially be pinned for the crime. Moretti looked on these imaginary, and very questionable, acts as a Human Resources department would an MBA from Harvard.

I really had been in the Army, doing two stints in Afghanistan before being medically discharged because of a bullet to the knee. I was still with the force, but making me look rogue, look like I could have accusations and even a murder slide off me like water from a duck’s back, made me a prime candidate for hire in Moretti’s eyes. It had worked.

“No problem. I have a few favors I can call in.”

“Good. Good.”

“And the girl?” No way would I let an innocent get hurt. Especially Anna Scott. Why I felt I had to protect her, I had no clue. I just did. And that meant keeping Moretti’s hands off her.

He chuckled. “She’s certainly a loose thread.”

I faked a laugh. “Whoever did the hit better get a lottery ticket. And send the girl some flowers.”

Moretti chuckled. “No kidding. They lost their body, then realized they could dump the whole problem on some unwitting schmuck. What are the chances? I couldn’t have done it better myself.”

“Did you? Did you do it yourself?”

“What the f**k do you think?”

I didn’t put it past the man to kill his own son-in-law. He probably did. They hadn’t been close. No one was close in this business. Moretti’s question was like a live grenade. I needed to put the pin back so it didn’t blow up in my face.

“So, the girl?” I repeated. If Moretti had killed Bobby, he might put a hit out on her since she most likely messed up his plans. She might be in danger. She might be heading back to New York on Sunday, but the man’s reach easily extended that far. Or, he could just forget about her since the heat was off. It was a toss-up to which way Moretti’d go with her.

“The cops know she’s innocent. Wrong place, wrong time. Think she’ll be a problem for us?” he wondered. Meaning, would the cops knock on Moretti’s door to help some random woman?

The bastard valued my opinion, which meant the months of work were paying off. I paused as if considering. “Bobby Lane is the one wronged here. You’re the grieving father-in-law. I doubt the police are going to look at you for this hit. I’d say you’re free and clear.”

“True. Still, I should have someone check on her. Discreetly. Confirm what we’re saying.”

“Your goons don’t do discreet.” It was a fact and Moretti knew it.

Moretti coughed long and hard, forcing me to remove the phone from my ear. “You do it. You’ve got finesse. A way with the ladies.”

My eyebrows went up even though Moretti couldn’t see. “I haven’t had my way with any of the ladies. None that you know about, at least.”

“See? Discreet.” He paused. “She’s yours. Check her out. Do her, f**k her. Whatever. Get her to talk using that finesse. See if she knows more than she’s letting on. Just make sure she’s not a problem.”

“Done.”