You Can't Escape (9781420134650) Read online

  A KILLER’S PLAYGROUND

  Jordanna walked to the side of the plot. With the toe of her sneaker, she pressed into the deeper brown dirt. Was something there? Carefully, she leaned closer. Reluctantly, wishing she had gloves, she reached a hand forward and lightly scraped at the edge of the soil.

  Shoulders tense, she made a hole about six inches deep and started widening it. There was no marker here. No grave. No casket. But somebody had disturbed the earth and then raked over it, trying to make it appear like the rest. At least that’s what she thought.

  When the hole was about a foot deep and the size and shape of a large book, she stopped. There was nothing here and it was someone’s property. Maybe she was disturbing seeds of some kind, flowers planted for the dead.

  Sitting back on her haunches, she dusted her hands. It was then she saw the tiny, pearlescent oval. A fingernail. Horror-struck, she nevertheless reached forward and plucked at the nail. Her hand felt a finger and she jerked back on instinct.

  The hand that came free was a young woman’s, the painted white fingernails, broken.

  A scream bubbled up inside her . . .

  Books by Nancy Bush

  CANDY APPLE RED

  ELECTRIC BLUE

  ULTRAVIOLET

  WICKED GAME

  WICKED LIES

  SOMETHING WICKED

  WICKED WAYS

  UNSEEN

  BLIND SPOT

  HUSH

  NOWHERE TO RUN

  NOWHERE TO HIDE

  NOWHERE SAFE

  SINISTER

  I’LL FIND YOU

  YOU CAN’T ESCAPE

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  You Can’t Escape

  NANCY BUSH

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  A KILLER’S PLAYGROUND

  Books by Nancy Bush

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  The sleeping girl lay on her back, her hands folded over her chest. She was in her late teens; young to be displaying the affliction, but old enough. She would die soon enough. Peacefully, from the overdose he’d given her. He’d stripped her of her clothes and her unblemished skin shone dove gray in the moonlight filtering through the open barn door.

  Glancing outside, he considered how many hours there were till daylight. Not many. He jumped down from the tractor bed and went to the brazier, pulling out the branding iron from white hot coals. The glowing tip drew a bright ribbon of orange through the air as he hurried back and clambered onto the truck bed. Standing above her, he raised up her left hip with the toe of his boot. He wasn’t supposed to touch her more than he had to, even though her flesh called to him. As soon as her buttock was exposed, he pressed the searing metal to her skin and smelled the scent of charred flesh.

  Had to make sure she had the devil’s mark.

  Jumping back down, he slammed the back of the truck closed, put the branding iron back in the brazier, then doused the coals with a bucket of water. Steam rose in a hiss, clouding his vision for a moment. Of their own volition, his eyes moved to the door at the back of the barn, the one he’d locked with the wooden bar. For a moment he imagined movement behind it, but he knew that was a lie. The devil, teasing him again. He reminded himself not to think about what he’d had to do, but the enormity of everything overcame him and suddenly he was openly crying. Angrily, he swiped at the tears. Sometimes the hard choices had to be made.

  Quickly, he returned to the truck’s cab. Firing the engine, he threw the vehicle into gear and it lurched forward. Once outside the barn, he slammed the truck into park, leapt out, then hurried back to pull the barn doors tightly shut before returning to the cab and pressing a toe to the accelerator. The cab jostled and swayed as he bumped over the open field, guided by a path of moonlight that would take her to her final resting place.

  Rest in peace, he thought darkly, knowing there was no hope for those Satan had chosen.

  Chapter One

  The man in the hospital bed came back to consciousness slowly, aware that he’d been cocooned from sensation for some reason, yet also aware that he could feel a heavy weight of worry bearing down on him. Where is Maxwell? Where am I? The question had plagued him, circling his brain and disturbing his sleep, though without any meaning he could understand.

  There were voices around him. They rose and fell sporadically. People coming and going, he realized at the same moment he understood he was in a hospital. Nurses, doctors, friends . . . ?

  Where is Maxwell?

  The explosion, he remembered suddenly, then realized at the same moment that he’d lost hearing for a while. His ears still rang a little, but at least the problem had apparently been temporary because he could make out words.

  He was injured. Numb and dull-feeling. Painkillers, most likely. He’d gone to find . . . Maxwell . . . but his brother-in-law hadn’t been there.

  The explosion was meant to kill Maxwell, he thought dully, sorting through the flotsam and jetsam left in his shaken brain. Maxwell, his confidant and informant. His friend. Except Max wasn’t there.

  “Mr. Danziger?” A woman’s voice. One of the nursing staff?

  And then another woman, loudly, “Can you hear me?”

  Maxwell hadn’t been there because he’d known about the bomb, or whatever it was, and stayed away. It hadn’t been meant for Maxwell, he thought with a jolt. It had been meant for him.

  And Maxwell had known and had purposely been gone.

  “You’re sure he was waking up?” the first woman asked skeptically.

  “Yes. His wife wants to see him.”

  “Took her long enough to get here.”

  Wife? Carmen? They’d been emotionally separated for years . . . divorced for months . . . though they’d kept the same residence, mainly so that people—people like Maxwell—wouldn’t know that their marriage had crumbled. Carmen’s idea, not his, but he’d been happy to play the charade—anything she wanted—because he just wanted out.

  “Mr. Danziger?” the second nurse asked, a bit more urgently. “Your wife’s here to see you.”

  “He’s not waking up,” the first said in a superior tone.

  Jay Danziger felt himself start to fade away again. Good. He didn’t want to think too much. Where’s Max? his mind asked again, but this time he answered himself: Far away from the accident that was meant to kill you.

  When he resurfaced again—opening his eyes before he was awake enough to remind himself he should keep them closed—he didn’t know how much time had passed. A while, for sure. Hazily, he realized a woman was seated beside him, holding his hand. Her palm wa
s sweating.

  “Mr. Danziger,” a man’s voice greeted him. With effort, he zeroed in on the voice, moving his eyes carefully, as there was a dull ache in his head, to take in a man in a white lab coat who stood at the foot of the bed, holding a manila file. “We wondered when you would return.”

  The man’s name tag read DR. WILLIAM COCHRAN. Again, carefully, he swiveled his eyes from the doctor back to the woman seated beside his bed. She was somewhere in her late twenties, he thought, with dark brown hair in a loose bun and tendrils escaping to curl slightly at her temples. It was the same style Carmen wore hers in, most times. No wonder they thought she was his wife. He was pretty sure he’d never laid eyes on her until this moment.

  She murmured, “So glad you’re okay, Jay. You had us all worried.”

  He thought about saying something, calling her out as a fraud, but held his tongue. Worry was exactly the emotion filling her hazel eyes just now. She was petrified of something, most likely that he would blow her cover because she sure as hell wasn’t Carmen. He didn’t know her from Adam, and the fact that she was impersonating his ex-wife was disturbing, though not full-out alarming, which said something about his confused mental state, he supposed. He should have been thoroughly concerned, especially with the new and ugly realization that Max had meant for him to die. Or had he been warned away? Was that why he wasn’t there? No . . . it didn’t feel like it. Dance sensed he knew something in the deep recesses of his mind, some hidden nugget of truth that escaped him now yet made him question Maxwell’s motives. And if the bomb, or whatever had caused the explosion, hadn’t been meant for him . . . if it had just been some kind of terrible accident that had gone off and sliced up his leg—

  Immediately, he glanced down to his left leg. It was wrapped from hip to below his knee. A thigh injury. He had no sensation of pain, though; the meds must be good.

  “Max has been asking about you,” the woman holding his hand said, a current of urgency running beneath the words.

  Maxwell Saldano. She knows about Max.

  Jay “Dance” Danziger had trusted his instincts on numerous occasions and that trust had saved him from all kinds of trauma during the last ten years that he’d worked as an investigative journalist. He trusted them now, so he looked “Carmen” straight in the eye and croaked out, “Take me home.”

  Her lips parted. Before she could answer, the doctor inserted, “We need to check some tests. Make sure you’re all right. Surgery went well. A lot of muscle damage that was repaired. As long as there’s nothing unexpected on your MRI, you could get out of here as early as tomorrow.”

  “Today,” Dance muttered.

  “Well . . . maybe . . .”

  “I’m leaving today,” he said positively.

  “I’ll check the tests.” The doctor left them, and as soon as Dance was alone with his hand holder, he slid her a silent look.

  “Home might not be the safest place,” she said carefully.

  She was warning him, in her way, that it wasn’t safe to speak freely. Though they were alone in the room, her gaze shifted toward the open doorway. Maybe there were listening ears just outside the door.

  “Where should I go?” he forced out with an effort.

  She glanced at him, then down at their still-clasped hands, and shot a quick, darting look back at his eyes before letting her gaze wander away. “I know a place . . .”

  “Where?”

  “Just somewhere I know.”

  “What do I call you?”

  She flicked another look toward the outer hallway. “What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.

  The meds were fading a little, he thought. He could feel pain knocking at the door, eager to remind him that his leg was in bad shape and his head could hurt a lot more, too. “Well . . . not . . . Carmen . . .”

  He sensed, then, too, that he was fading out himself. Blessed twilight was coming to take him into oblivion for a while longer. So softly he almost missed it, she said, “Jordanna.”

  “Jordanna,” he repeated, unaware that his voice was inaudible as he succumbed to unconsciousness.

  Jordanna Winters had always had a healthy disrespect for the police.

  At age fourteen, she shot her father with a .22 rifle when he was attempting to have sex with her older sister and learned the hard way that the law enforcement types in Rock Springs, Oregon, were chauvinistic, repellant, and inclined to believe an upstanding citizen like Dr. Dayton Winters over his unstable middle daughter, who, let’s face it, was half-wild from growing up on a farm with a mother whose own mental state had always been in question. There was a rogue gene lying in wait in Gayle Treadwell Winters’s family that popped up randomly and had brought dubious behavior, suicides, horrific accidents, and even murder over the years to the unlucky Treadwells—or so the people of Rock Springs were wont to believe. Jordanna, they collectively decided after the shooting that grazed her father’s shoulder, was clearly an unhappy recipient of that gene, which was undoubtedly the reason for her erratic behavior. The good Dr. Winters was above reproach, so Jordanna’s behavior had to be from something else . . . something vile and difficult, maybe impossible, to control . . . the Treadwell Curse.

  Bull. Shit. All of it.

  From Jordanna’s point of view, dear old Dad was a lech, and a pedophile, and a whole host of other things that forced Jordanna to move away from home as soon as possible. She’d learned from an early age that she couldn’t count on anyone other than herself. Even her older sister, Emily, had insisted it was her own fault she had been in their father’s bed. Emily had assured her that she was sleepwalking again, and had just wandered into Dad’s bedroom. She’d insisted that she’d just been dreaming about their mother and had climbed into the bed, looking for her. When Jordanna had objected, Emily had then accused Jordanna of being just as screwed up as everyone thought she was. She was the one who needed help.

  Jordanna had stubbornly kept to her story. She’d heard Emily scream out Dayton as if she were scared—but Jordanna’s insistence did no good. No one had believed her, and less than a year later Emily had lost her life in an automobile accident along the treacherous switchback roads above Rock Springs on a particularly cold and icy day. Her car slid over a steep ridge and tumbled down a cliff side. Heartbroken, Jordanna had stood as far away from her father and the rest of her family as possible at the funeral. She’d felt like a pariah, and why not? Everyone thought she bore the Treadwell Curse, though they wouldn’t say so to her face.

  And then while a cold, January rain beat down on them, her younger sister, Kara, had moved up next to her and whispered in a strained voice, “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “What do you mean?” Jordanna demanded.

  “Somebody killed Emily,” Kara had responded.

  “Our father?” Jordanna suggested. But Kara had merely shrugged and shaken her head. They had both gazed across the plot where the pallbearers were laying their sister to rest, and, feeling her father’s eyes on her, Jordanna had set her jaw and vowed to get to the truth someday . . . when she was stronger and the time was right.

  She’d moved out of the house at seventeen and ended up rooming with a group of students who attended Portland State. She’d then worked her way through night classes at the university as well, majoring in journalism and communications. She’d also taken courses in criminal investigation and spent her days working at coffee shops and restaurants. Eventually, under a pseudonym, she began a blog that was a newsletter about victims of crimes, what happened to them afterward, and maybe what caused the crime in the first place, and had managed to turn her work into various newspapers. To date, she’d been published in both the Laurelton Register and the Lake Chinook Review, and it was her dream to hit the big leagues. She’d been working toward that end for ten years, spurred by the ill treatment she’d received in her own hometown, bent on proving herself free of the “crazy” Treadwell Curse. So far, she’d done a fairly decent job of it, ignoring or flouting rules along the way. Her onl
y hiccup had been her own hero worship of another investigative reporter, Jay Danziger, a man she’d literally followed for his insight, acumen, and success in digging into the truth. Tracking him had led to the madness of her current situation: breezing into Laurelton General and passing herself off as his wife. It was the reason for her thumping heart and sweating palms when she’d stated in a low, fast voice to the receptionist, “Tell Officer McDermott that Carmen Danziger is here.”

  “Ma’am?” the receptionist had asked blankly.

  “Jay Danziger’s my husband.” She’d uttered the lie quick and sharp. No gatekeeper was going to stop her. “One of the bombing victims. I was called.” She was amped enough by her charade not to have to manufacture the trembling of her lower jaw.

  “Uh . . . yes . . .” The receptionist looked around for help. Chaos surrounded them. Though the bombing had been over twenty-four hours earlier, Laurelton General had received the bulk of the casualties and was swarming with extra medical staff and, of course, the police. Jordanna had made an educated guess that Jay Danziger had been brought here. She’d known he had been at the explosion of the building in downtown Laurelton that had sent the community scrambling while wailing sirens and dust and debris filled the air. She’d known because she’d seen him there, had been across the street when the bomb had blown. The concussion of the blast had knocked her off her feet, but she’d managed to pick herself up. She’d fumbled for her phone, her ears still ringing, poised to call 9-1-1, but then realized she could already hear the wail of distant sirens. Instead, she’d staggered to her Toyota RAV4 and driven to her apartment.

  After cleaning herself up, she’d stared into the bathroom mirror and asked herself what had happened. She hoped to God Jay Danziger was still alive. The shudders that racked her body at the thought had brought her to her knees. Those goddamn Saldanos! she’d thought, filled with fury. And that’s when she’d hatched her crazy plan. If Danziger was still alive, and she fervently hoped to hell he was, she was going to find him, interview him, and convince him of the Saldanos’ evil. She’d been casually following . . . okay, half stalking . . . the man around for weeks, catching him outside the gates of his home or tooling after him as he met with members of the Saldano family, the corporate crime family with tendrils in more businesses and government offices than a haystack had pieces of straw. Until Danziger had gotten swept up in the Saldano net of greed, Jordanna had admired the man. Dreamed about him a little, if the truth be known, as he was damned attractive. But his biggest appeal was his freewheeling investigative style and the results he produced. That was number one.