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  At that, Kano said, “We’ll go look.”

  “You call us if you find her. We’ll work on him for more details,” the cop called out.

  “Yep. Make sure you got an ambulance handy because I can’t guarantee this guy had been honest at any point in time.”

  “No, looks like his honesty seems to waver,” the cop said, studying the father.

  “Yeah, he’s honest only when it serves his purpose,” Kano said. “You’ve got to watch him. He literally stole his son from the hospital and beat the crap out of his wife.”

  “He’s not getting loose,” the cop said. “We’ll also send out a team to start looking for the mother.”

  As the guys walked back to their vehicle, their footsteps hurried, Kano said, “What do you want to bet we find her first?”

  “Let’s hope so,” Fallon replied, “because we’ll be there in like ten minutes.”

  “We got several blocks to check though,” he said.

  “We do, but, at the same time, not too many blocks are between her work and the women’s home, so I suggest we check there first.”

  As it was, it took them another fifteen minutes to find the right Dumpster, and, when they opened it, Kano heard an ever-so-slight moaning inside. Bags of trash had been thrown in on top of her, and it took the two of them to get it cleaned out to the point of find her lying in the middle. Kano jumped in beside her and checked her over. “Get an ambulance,” he said. “She’s got several broken bones, and her face is pretty battered up.”

  Immediately Fallon stepped back and contacted the police and an ambulance.

  She opened her eyes, looked at Kano and cried out.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Help is on the way. We’ll get you out of here in a minute.”

  She reached out, grabbed his hand, and said, “My son, Angus is after my son.”

  “We have your son,” he said reassuringly. “He’s in safe hands. It’ll be okay now. Angus has already been picked up by the cops.”

  She sank back, her eyes closed with relief. Then she said quietly, “It won’t be enough. He’ll just find another way to get after us.”

  “Let’s hope not,” he said. “He’s headed for jail right now. The farther we can get you away from this and can get your son back to having a decent life again, the better.”

  Chapter 9

  Back at the hospital, it didn’t take long for Catherine to understand what had happened and to find a trainee nurse, who had allowed the father to sign Jeremy out. But when the trainee realized what she’d done and that the father had been arrested for abuse, the young nurse had been devastated.

  Just dealing with people, and the mistakes that could happen anywhere at any time, still made Catherine feel terrible, especially when she got the report from Kano, saying that they were looking for the mother and that she had been beaten up and left in a Dumpster somewhere. She walked to the office that she and other doctors used at the hospital and sat down and cried for a few minutes.

  Pulling herself together, she went outside and stood in the fresh air. She knew that the men would find Samantha as soon as they could and would bring her in. Whether it would be soon enough to save her, Catherine didn’t know. The fact of the matter was that Jeremy was on his way right now, and, for that, she was grateful. All of it sucked though.

  As she sat here on the bench outside, well within reach of the security guard, who had been prepped on the prior attempt to kidnap her, she got a phone call.

  It was her mother.

  “Hello,” she said, the fatigue evident in her voice.

  “What happened?”

  “What hasn’t happened?” she said. “It’s been a busy night.”

  “All that just because of Kano?”

  “And the attempt on my life earlier, followed by a problem with a client,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “Did you have a reason for calling?”

  “Yes. I don’t want you involved with him.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, “but I will be if I want to.”

  “No,” her mother snapped. “You won’t.”

  “Mom, you don’t rule me anymore. I’m an adult. You can’t order me around.”

  “I can,” she said, “but apparently you don’t listen anymore.”

  “Nope, I don’t,” she said, “not any more than you listen to me.”

  “You’ve never said anything that I needed to listen to,” her mom said.

  “I need to know what you know about Bullard,” she snapped, “and, until you come clean on that, we have nothing to talk about.”

  “What have you got to do with it anyway?” she said. “You’ve always stayed out of my business.”

  “And is Bullard your business?”

  “He’s a friend of mine,” she said stiffly. “You know how I feel about him.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t really. I only know how you feel about yourself. Everything else is a mystery.”

  “It’s not a hard mystery,” she snapped.

  “Maybe it is,” she said. “You’ve always been a mystery to me.”

  “No,” she said, “you just have a hard time accepting who I am.”

  “That could be true. I’m not sure that I’m ready to accept a mother who has potentially killed two husbands.”

  “And telling you the truth won’t make any difference,” her mother snapped.

  “Yet it would, if you were to tell me the truth … about Bullard.”

  “The truth in the matter is, I don’t know what happened,” she said, “and I’m trying to find out.”

  “I wonder about that too,” she said.

  “See? You don’t trust anything I say anyway, so what difference does it make?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, with a weary sigh. “I’m too tired for all this anyway.”

  “That’s probably from having Kano back in your life. I told you to get rid of him.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if that was an option?” she said. “But it’s not.”

  “It should be,” she said. “You didn’t do well with him last time.”

  “No,” she said, “I was naïve. I was willing to stay sucked into all the lies you told me. Once I realized the truth, it wasn’t Kano I blamed. It was me.”

  And that was a truth she didn’t talk about either.

  “Why you?” her mother asked curiously. “What a waste of time that is!”

  “To you, all I do is waste time anyway,” she said. “Just like my degree and the work that I do.”

  “Who cares about all those losers?” she said. “Any woman who lets herself get beaten up deserves to get beaten up.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she said.

  “It is. You’re just making it complicated by getting emotions messed up in it.”

  “Just like you have emotions messed up in your reaction to Bullard?”

  “Not likely,” she said. “He’s a good prospect.”

  “Is that all he is?” she asked. “Because that’s not a very good basis for a relationship.”

  “It’s the only one I know,” her mother snapped, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings.”

  “Yes, but you utilize your feelings as weapons,” she said, “to get what you want out of life.”

  “He gets me what I want,” she said in exasperation. “I don’t understand why that’s so bad.”

  The trouble was, her mom truly didn’t understand. Like something was lacking in her makeup. Catherine had done an awful lot of studies on children and sociopaths, and she understood that her mother was missing some really basic human parts to her personality. That didn’t make it any easier to live with her, but it helped Catherine to understand. Just some things in life were a little harder to deal with. “Whatever,” she said, “I don’t want to find out later that you had something to do with Bullard’s crash.”

  “I already told you that I didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t use to call me a liar.”

  “I’m not cal
ling you a liar now,” she said gently, as she realized genuine hurt seemed to be in her mother’s voice. “But somebody is targeting the team. And I don’t want Kano hurt either.”

  “Like I said, you should probably get out of that one. It’s one thing that I didn’t have anything to do with Bullard, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have something to do with Kano,” she snapped. “I’ve always hated him.”

  “You’ve only hated him because you saw him as a threat to our relationship,” she said. “And, if you hadn’t seen him as a threat, I probably wouldn’t have had the awakening I did. Who knows? Maybe I’d still be stupid and believe every story you told me.”

  “And again, we’re back to that—you calling me a liar.”

  “And again, we’re back to the fact that you fed me a bunch of lines while I was growing up. I never did know who and what you really were inside.”

  “And when you found out, you didn’t like it,” she said. “That’s your problem. I didn’t change. I’m just the same as I always was.”

  “Maybe,” she said. This was a conversation they’d gone over and over again. “It’s one of the reasons we live and let live in our separate lives.”

  “And yet you want something from me that I can’t give you,” DeeDee said bitterly.

  “And what is that, Mother?” she asked curiously.

  “You want me to change,” she said, “and that I won’t do.”

  “Ah, but you see? That’s a won’t, not a can’t.”

  At that, her mom said, “Don’t start playing mind games with me.”

  “Not planning on it,” she said gently. “But, at some point in time, you have to realize that the games were just that—games. And the truth is whatever you want to make it in your world, but, for me, the truth is just about facts, which are pretty black-and-white.”

  “And I don’t know how you got that mind-set because, for anybody in my world,” her mom said, “the truth is what it needs to be on any given day.”

  “No, Mom,” she said, “it really isn’t. There’s a lot more to life than cheating.”

  “I don’t cheat,” her mom said testily. “You may not like the methods I use to get the job done or the people I use to make it happen. But you wouldn’t like the jobs either. I fill a necessary void in this world.”

  “And that’s quite possibly the truth,” she said. “I’ve come to realize that a little more as I understand Kano.”

  “Him again,” she spat in disgust. “I don’t understand what you see in him.”

  “I didn’t say I see anything,” she said, “but he was a big part of my life and a massive part of my growth, so he’s not somebody I can ignore.”

  “You’d be better off if you did.”

  “And again, we’re back to something that I won’t do. Look. I like the work I’m doing, and you like the work you’re doing. Maybe that’s all we can ask of each other.”

  “You mean that ‘be happy’ crap?”

  “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I presume, at one point in time, you believed in happiness. You had me, for one thing.”

  “Yes, I did because I didn’t dare go through the physical trauma of getting rid of you,” she snapped, a truth laid bare that made Catherine wince.

  “Great, so because you couldn’t go through with an abortion, figuring it would probably hurt you physically, you decided to keep me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I didn’t expect to experience the emotions of having you, but it was something I quickly learned to alleviate.”

  Catherine stared off into the darkness of the night. Only her mother would talk about the need to alleviate feelings. “We are very different,” she said quietly.

  “I don’t know if that’s good or not,” her mom said. “Your life would be a lot easier if you would get rid of all that emotional stuff.”

  “Not sure I can,” she said. “I think it’s probably a pretty big part of my makeup.”

  “And that is something else I don’t understand,” her mom said in frustration. “I thought I taught you better than that.”

  “Yes, but in my case,” she said, “I think it’s part of my basic makeup to feel.”

  “What a waste,” she said. “I probably should have taken away a lot more things that you loved.”

  “What, like puppies and kittens and dolls?”

  “Exactly. Once you learn that people and things like that are only there to hurt you, it’s pretty easy to shut down your heart.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t talk about it,” she said, “because it was so long ago. Way too long for me to even bring back the memory.”

  “If you wanted to, you could.”

  “Which brings us back to the fact that I don’t want to.”

  “Right. Because then you would have to actually admit that you got hurt,” she said, with a smile.

  “And I’m not doing that anymore.” And, with that, her mom hung up.

  Catherine sat here, staring at the phone, considering the facts she had gained and the elements of her mother that she’d understood in that call. Her mother had been badly hurt at one point in time, and she had weaponized that hurt to block out any other feelings. It was an interesting conundrum because, of course, to deny feelings was to actually acknowledge that they existed in the first place. But nobody wanted to, and her mom was no exception. She was also not lying about not having had anything to do with Bullard. But she was also unwilling to say that Kano was safe. She looked at her phone and quickly dialed Kano. When he answered, she asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Hey, Catherine. We found your missing woman. She’s alive, but she’s badly hurt. The ambulance has just taken her and is heading to the hospital.”

  “I’m sitting outside the hospital—”

  “Alone?” he interrupted.

  “The security guard is a ways away, but he’s keeping an eye on me.”

  “Good,” he murmured. “And why did you call?”

  “I just got off the phone with my mom,” she said. “Honestly I don’t believe she had anything to do with Bullard’s crash. However, she also said that she couldn’t guarantee that you were safe and insinuated that the source of the danger was her.”

  “Oh, lovely,” he said in disgust. “She’ll never quit, will she?”

  “She warned me off you,” she said. “Something about how it’d be better if I wasn’t around for it and weren’t a part of this.”

  “Again, how nice,” he said.

  “But that won’t chase you away, will it?”

  “Nope, it sure won’t,” he said. “It just means that I’m exactly where I need to be because, as soon as somebody does attack, I’ll get more information out of them.”

  “Says you,” she said.

  “Absolutely. Because doing what we’re doing isn’t working, and we can’t shake anything loose. But we need to. I don’t want to be over here, wasting my time, if I’m not getting somewhere.”

  “Well,” she said, “maybe I’ll get kidnapped again to give you something to do.”

  “Don’t even joke about it,” he said. “And that security guard isn’t close enough to make a difference if somebody really wanted to take you out.”

  “How would you know?” she asked, and then she stiffened and turned around to see Kano walking toward her. She stood and put away her phone. “You could have just told me that you were right here.”

  *

  “I could have,” Kano said, with a smile. Just then they heard the ambulance arriving. “That should be your lady,” he said.

  She nodded and stepped back out of the way.

  “You won’t go say hi?”

  “No. They need to look after her right now,” she said. “They’ll deal with the physical, and I’ll help heal the mental.”

  “If you can do that,” he said, “you’re a miracle worker.”

  “How bad is she?”

  “Bad,” he said, “but hopefully she�
��ll make it. Her first thought was for her son though.”

  “With good reason.”

  “And she’s afraid that Angus will get out of jail and come after her.”

  “That’s also quite possible, as much as I hate to admit it. It seems like the criminals always end up wiggling out, or they get three years, do their time, and then go right back to doing evil when they get released again.”

  “That kind of sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s just so much worse than we think anything can be, and then, when you think it’s as bad as it can be, it just gets worse again,” she said in bewilderment. “It’s bad. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to change the system.”

  “I think you’re supposed to work within the system,” he said. “Trying to change it from the outside doesn’t really do the job.”

  “Neither does working from within,” she said. “At least sometimes I don’t think so.”

  “Keep the faith,” he said, “and keep doing what you can.”

  She looked around. “Where’s Fallon?”

  “He’s with me,” he said. He turned and frowned. “He was with me.”

  “Now wouldn’t that be funny if he got kidnapped,” she said.

  “Not really,” he said. “He’s part of my team, and unfortunately that’s all too possible.”

  “My mother said you weren’t safe from her.”

  “She only hates me because of you,” he said, his tone hard, as he glanced around, pulling out his phone. He quickly texted Fallon and got no response. “You stay here,” he said. “I’m retracing my steps.”

  “When I turned around, I didn’t see him,” she said. “You were talking to me at that corner, but I didn’t see him at all.”

  Kano nodded and raced to the side of the hospital and looked around. But found no sign of anyone. He dialed Ice and said, “We need the cameras at the corner of Hickory and Saint Laurent,” he said. “Fallon’s disappeared.”

  “Just a minute,” she said, and, in the background, he heard her calling out to somebody. “How long ago?”

  “Five, ten minutes max,” he said. “We were coming around the corner, talking, and then I spoke to Catherine on the phone. She was sitting outside, and I kept walking toward her and didn’t notice that all of a sudden, Fallon wasn’t there.”