SEALs of Honor: Baylor Read online

  “About what?”

  “That you guys would come rescue us,” she said quietly. “It happened before the yacht was even taken over.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, there was a conversation about, if anything happened to us out there, not to worry, that you guys would come rescue us.”

  “Did he make it sound like there was a plan for something like that?”

  She looked up at him, and her eyes widened. “What do you mean?” she asked, but Dane just stared at her steadily. She enunciated very carefully to ensure there was no misunderstanding of the implication. “Are you asking if I think he planned this?”

  “I’m not asking that,” he said quietly. “I’m asking if you felt, at any point in time, that he might have been part of this.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, as she stared off in the distance. “But, even if he was, why? That would make no sense at all. It was his wife and daughter.”

  “And his wife was dying,” he said. “Correct?”

  She nodded.

  “Any idea how the life insurance stands?”

  Her eyes widened at that. “Oh, that’s an ugly thought,” she said.

  “Ugly thoughts come with ugly actions,” he said. “So, forget about the thought, let’s deal with what else might be happening.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Do you know anything about the will?”

  “No, not at all,” she said. “It never occurred to me. I’m an only child. So my assumption, though it could be wrong, is that everything comes to me.”

  “How much of it is actually left? They went through a divorce, right?”

  “I don’t know if they ever finalized it. I thought they were in the process, when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and, besides, if she had cancer,” she said, “the life insurance wouldn’t matter.” He just looked at her steadily, and she winced. “Okay, that’s an even uglier thought.”

  “You want to tell me what it is you’re thinking?”

  “Well, I hope I’m not thinking anything,” she said, “but the fact of the matter is, there’s probably no life insurance on Mom because she had cancer, and that would be a disqualifying preexisting condition, in my opinion.”

  “Unless your father stopped paying on any existing insurance policy for your mom because they were separating.”

  “My mother was paying,” she said, “though she might have stopped it because, after the separation, there was no money.”

  “Interesting,” he said. Then he made a few notes on the side.

  “So maybe there’s no life insurance. I don’t know.”

  “Unless there’s one that your father is holding on her.”

  “But again, it wouldn’t make any difference. Because of the cancer, it might not even exist. Although the cancer wasn’t preexisting for long, as she was only diagnosed four to five years ago.” He just nodded and didn’t say anything. “But there’s no reason for my father to have set up insurance on my mom in recent years,” she said forcibly.

  Again he just nodded. “Is there?”

  “I don’t know.” She hated that her voice sounded thin and tinny.

  He looked at her with those deep dark eyes and asked, “Is there?”

  “No,” she said adamantly. “He was an asshole, but he wasn’t that kind of an asshole.”

  He chuckled at that. “I guess there are different kinds of assholes, aren’t there?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, feeling a little more secure. “Besides,” she added, “there’s nothing in it for him. This kidnapping was purely politically motivated.”

  “What makes you think so?” he asked.

  She frowned. “Because that’s the most likely explanation.”

  “Maybe not. Is that what your parents told you?”

  She frowned, and she thought about it. “Somebody did, but I don’t know if it was my father.”

  “Did you find anything on his person or in any of his personal effects?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if anybody’s checked.” She frowned, then reached for her phone and called the hospital. When they answered, she asked about the personal effects of her father. After a brief delay, she slowly nodded and hung up. “There weren’t any. It makes sense because we were searched pretty fast when we were kidnapped,” she said. “I woke up with none of my belongings, and I would assume it was the same for him and my mother.”

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “Yeah.” She thought about it. “The bullet wasn’t fatal, was it?”

  “No,” he said, readily enough.

  “And that just makes me—I hate that you even put that suspicion in my head,” she cried out.

  “I didn’t put any suspicion in your head,” he said calmly. Just then, an incoming call came on his phone. He answered it.

  “We’re on the way home.”

  Gizella heard Baylor’s voice through the phone.

  “No sign of anyone.”

  “What about the apartment of this guy Horton?” Dane asked.

  “It belongs to somebody else,” Baylor said, “unless you have a different address.”

  “Give me five and let me see if I can roust up a new address.” He hung up the phone and turned to his computer.

  Gizella was left sitting here, stunned at the treacherous pitfalls of this kind of thinking. She didn’t want to think that her father had anything to do with it all, as it made no logical sense.

  Soon Dane looked up and then responded to Baylor by texting an address.

  “Did you find a place?”

  “Yes. His family home is around the same corner.”

  “Does everybody own two homes here?” she cried out.

  “It’s not all that unusual,” he said, “particularly if there’s a death in the family. Speaking of that, you probably haven’t had a chance to deal with anything from home regarding your family and all,” Dane said.

  “I guess not,” she said. After a few minutes went by, she said, “I don’t suppose I could use a laptop, could I?”

  “Sure, grab that one over there,” he said. He got up and walked over and closed the browser and showed her the one that Baylor had been using earlier.

  “Do you think he’ll mind?” she asked.

  “No, not at all,” he said. “What will you do?”

  “Check my email,” she said. “It seems foolish, given where I’m at, but I just wanted to do something normal and be connected to the world again.”

  “If you find anything interesting,” he said, “let me know,” as he sat back down at the table.

  She sat down in front of the laptop in the living room and turned it on. Soon enough, with a full cup of tea beside her, now comfortably settled on the couch, she brought up her emails. When she got toward the bottom, she froze. “There’s one from my mother,” she cried out. He turned and looked at her. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Is that so shocking?”

  “Well, yeah, considering she’s dead and all.”

  “Of course,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean she didn’t send it before, like while you’re on the yacht maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Have you opened it?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m too scared.”

  “Scared about what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve made me paranoid.”

  He smiled at her. “Maybe you should open it before you panic.”

  “I’m not panicking,” she said, finding just enough resentment in her voice to give it some strength.

  He chuckled. “You’ll be good for Baylor,” he said.

  Just as she went to open the message, she heard his comment, then stared at him in shock. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, it’s obvious that the two of you have a thing going on,” he said dismissively.

  “It’s not obvious at all,” she said, “because w
e have no such thing. Where are you even getting that from?”

  He looked at her and said, “Didn’t you write the Help note to him?”

  She frowned. “Yes, but that’s because he’s the only person I knew in this entire field. Hell, most people don’t even know anybody who does this kind of work.”

  “Now that is very true,” he said, “so you didn’t actually think about him during your time there?”

  “Well, sure I did,” she said, with a lopsided smile. “I was scared and upset, crying out for anybody to come and rescue us. Having someone to focus on made me feel a tiny bit hopeful.”

  “Well, it worked,” he said with a big grin.

  “Not fair,” she said, “and it makes it sound like he actually responded to my Help note or something. They were already coming to get us, although I didn’t know it at the time,” she said. “Well, not before I left that sketch behind.”

  “And I do love the sketch you did. It was really good,” he said. “You should do more with your art.”

  “Well, I would if I could,” she said, “but I don’t have anything I can really do with it.”

  “In what way?”

  “It’s just a hobby.”

  “Well, you could do something much more serious,” he said. “You’re very talented.”

  She thought about it, shrugged, and said, “Then I started doing the freedom work, and that seemed to be more rewarding.”

  “So maybe you should consider doing artistic drawings of the people you’re setting free.”

  She stared at him in shock, loving the idea. “Seriously,” she said, “I never thought of that. It’s a wonderful idea.”

  “Well, it would combine both passions, wouldn’t it?” he said in that reasonable tone that she’d come to associate with him.

  Slowly, her mind buzzing with all kinds of thoughts, she clicked on her mom’s email and brought it up, then sucked back her breath.

  “What is it?” he asked quietly.

  She looked up at him, her eyes stricken. “She starts off with an apology.”

  “And that could be for not telling you that she wouldn’t survive,” he reminded her gently.

  She nodded quietly, then started to read aloud. “I’m sorry. I know you want to understand this, and I know you don’t agree with anything that your father does these days, but I have to tell you this is important. It’s important on so many levels. So please just accept that I’m gone one way or another. By the time you come home from this trip, I will not be here.”

  Her voice fell silent as she looked up at Dane. “My God,” she whispered. “How is it that she knew?”

  “Did you think she had less than a week?” he asked.

  “No,” she cried out. “She was supposed to have multiple weeks. But then she did say something about not feeling very strong and being at the end of it all. At the hospital she said more as well, but it’s all a jumble in my head.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “Can you forward that to me?” She looked at him in surprise and then quickly nodded. Just then came another phone call from Baylor.

  “Hey, Dane, we’re outside the newest address, and I need you to run a license plate.”

  Gizella heard the conversation through Dane’s phone.

  “Give it to me,” Dane said, and he quickly typed in a series of numbers.

  She got up and moved toward Dane, getting away from the email from her mother. She sat down at the kitchen table. “What did they find?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” he said. When the registration came up, he whistled. “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “What is?” Baylor and Gizella asked at the same time.

  “That vehicle is registered to your father.”

  *

  Baylor heard the words from Dane with a shock and also heard Gizella gasp. “Gizella, any idea what this is about?”

  “No,” she cried out in shock. “Why would my father have a vehicle registered here?”

  “I don’t know,” Baylor said. “You tell me. Does he travel a lot as a governor?”

  “Yes, but I’ve barely had anything to do with him for the last few years,” she said.

  “Interesting. It’s also got a company name beside it.”

  “He doesn’t have a company,” she said, bewildered. He heard it in her tone of voice, and this was adding so much more stress. She also added, “I checked at the hospital, and no personal belongings are there for Dad.”

  “Do you have access to his emails or anything else?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “His lawyer is stateside too.”

  “We’ll contact him and see what’s going on,” Baylor said.

  “I also just downloaded an email from my mother,” she said. “She made it clear that she wouldn’t make it through this trip.”

  He didn’t even know what to think about that.

  “I just read that, but I haven’t looked for more.”

  “See if anything is attached to it, will you?”

  “Hang on a minute,” she said.

  Baylor stood outside their vehicle, studying the surrounding area. It was a bright and clear day, and he was casually leaning up against a wall. He and Hudson were watching for any traffic going in and out of Horton’s apartment. This was now the family apartment. It was in a much older district, more for families. As a stranger, Baylor stood out, but then so did this vehicle.

  As Gizella came back on the line, he heard tapping on the laptop. “There is an attachment,” she said, “on my mother’s email.” He waited while she brought it up, then gasped again. “It’s life insurance,” she said.

  “And who’s the payee?”

  “Well, it’s to my father, I’m sure,” she said, bewildered.

  “And is it? Read through and double-check.”

  She kept reading and said, “That’s it,” she said very quietly. “He is the beneficiary. I think Dane may be right. My father may have done this.”

  As Baylor stood here, studying the world around him, his mind tried to formulate a response. “Done what?”

  “Dane and I were just wondering if my father had a hand in this whole kidnapping thing.”

  “Why would he?”

  “There’s a five-million-dollar life insurance policy on her, but it covers any cancer, as she didn’t have it when she set up the policy, but it pays out double if not from the cancer, like if death is accidental …” she said, reading parts of the policy out loud to him.

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, it does talk about other types of death, such as murder.”

  “But she wasn’t murdered though,” he said quietly. “She died in the hospital.”

  “Right,” she said, frustration in her voice.

  And he could understand that.

  “But maybe it was intended that she would die, at the hands of the kidnappers.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, since she was clearly so sick anyway and had such few days to live.”

  “Except for doubling the payout, so some greedy person might find that compelling. I know I’m going off the deep end here. For all his shortcomings, I really don’t think my father had anything to do with the kidnapping. And Mom attached this to my email, so she knew about it. And he is her beneficiary. And she wanted me to know that too.”

  At that, Dane asked to see it. “If it’s okay, I’ll open the attachment from the copy you sent.”

  “Of course,” she said. “No secrets here.”

  “Okay, thanks. Oh boy. You still there, Baylor? Gizella, look carefully, and you’ll see that it also says, in lieu of your father being alive, that you are the recipient.” She stared at him in shock, then scrolled down to where it said, in case beneficiary was deceased, and a second beneficiary was named, and she was it.

  “So, he dies five minutes before Mom, so now I’m the beneficiary?”

  “Yes,” Dane said. At that, Baylor chimed in from the other end of the pho
ne and said, “Okay, we need to make even more of a point to be sure you stay safe.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” she cried out.

  “And it could also be that it’s not related in any way,” he said. “Maybe she’s asking you to forgive her because she left life insurance to him, realizing he would be in trouble financially in some way.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I have no idea.”

  “Baylor, take a second to scan the note that just came,” Dane said.

  After a few moments, Baylor came back on the line. “Gizella, apparently your father was in danger of losing his job. There was a corruption scandal gaining steam, and there was talk of him not being able to continue.”

  “And, if my mother would have known that,” she said, with a note of understanding, “she would have set up the life insurance to save him,” she said, blinking back tears. “Jesus,” she said. “The things that we do for the people we love.”

  “And remember,” Baylor said into the phone, “love takes many forms and is very enduring in some cases. She loved him right to the end, and that was one of the last gifts she could give him.”

  “Right,” she said, “but it didn’t work out that way.”

  “No, but she would be okay with the way it is anyway,” he said, “because you were the next person that she loved the most.”

  “She also knew that I would not have been on board with her giving him money,” she said. “He didn’t treat her well during the marriage, much less during the divorce,” she said. “So I was against anything she had to do with him.”

  “Well, now it’s not an issue, but we’ll have to find out if your father had anything else going on in his world.”

  “If he would put his position as governor in jepordy, I can see that he would have been extremely persuasive in trying to get her to do something for him. And they would have done it without contacting me,” she confirmed.

  “Which is why she didn’t ask for your opinion or for your approval, and likely why, now that she’s gone, she’s asking your permission in a way.”