we’re losing her,” Brendan said, as one of the monitors showed Josie walking inside the house with a killer. Margaret O’Hannigan held a gun, too, pointed at the woman he loved.
“We’ve got the house wired,” Martinez reminded him. “We’re going to hear everything that they say.”
“But the plan was for me to get her to talk,” he said and lowered the gun to his side. He wasn’t going to use it. Yet.
Martinez nodded in agreement. “But once she sees you’re alive, you wouldn’t get anything out of her.”
“Neither will Josie,” he argued.
“Josie Jessup is a reporter.” Martinez was the one who’d confirmed Brendan’s suspicions about it, who’d tracked her back to the stories written under the pseudonym of Jess Ley. “A damn good one. She fooled you four years ago.”
And allowing himself to be deceived and distracted had nearly gotten Brendan thrown off the case. But because he’d inherited his father’s business, he had been the only one capable of getting inside the organization and taking it apart, as the FBI had been trying to do for years.
“She won’t fool Margaret.” Because Margaret had fooled them all for years. Even his father.
Martinez shook his head. “She’s Stanley Jessup’s daughter. She has a way of making people talk. She knows what buttons to push, what questions to ask.”
That was what Brendan was afraid of—that she’d push the wrong buttons. “If Margaret admits anything to her, it’s only because she intends to kill her.”
“Then we’ll go in,” Martinez assured him. “The evidence you found got us the federal warrants for the surveillance. But there isn’t enough for an arrest. We need a confession. You were the one who pointed that out.”
And he’d intended to get the confession himself. He hadn’t intended to use Josie—to put her in danger. Their son needed his mother; Brendan needed her, too.
On the surveillance monitors, one of Margaret’s bodyguards walked into the house, something swinging from the hand that wasn’t holding a gun.
“We won’t get there fast enough to save her,” Brendan said, as foreboding and dread clutched his heart. The van was parked outside the gates. Even though they were open, thanks to the security system being dismantled, they were still too far down the driveway.
“There are guys closer,” Martinez reminded him.
But were they guys he could trust? Could he really trust anyone?
SHE SHOULD HAVE trusted Brendan. Just because he’d discovered the identity of his father’s killer didn’t mean he was going to avenge the man’s death.
But she’d thought the worst of him again. And she’d worried that CJ would lose his father before he ever got a chance to really know him. Now a gun was pointed at her, and the risk was greater that CJ would lose his mother. At least he had his godmother; Charlotte would take him. She would protect him as Josie had failed to do.
With the lights off and the draperies pulled, it was dark inside the house—nearly as dark as if night had fallen already. Except a little sliver of sunlight sneaked through a crack in the drapes and glinted off the metal of Margaret O’Hannigan’s gun.
She looked much more comfortable holding a weapon than Josie was. Maybe she should reach for hers. Her purse was on the hardwood floor next to where Margaret had pushed her down onto the couch. Even the inside of the home was a replica of Dennis O’Hanningan’s.
“Are you insinuating that I killed my husband? What the hell are you talking about?” the older woman demanded to know.
“The truth.” A concept that Josie suspected Margaret O’Hannigan was not all that familiar with. “And I’m not insinuating. I’m flat-out saying that you’re the one. You killed Brendan’s father.”
“How dare you accuse me of killing my husband!” she exclaimed, clearly offended, probably not because Josie thought her capable of murder but because she hadn’t gotten away with it.
Hell, she would still probably get away with it. Josie glanced down at her bag again. She needed to grab her gun, needed to defend herself. But then it was no longer just the two of them.
Heavy footsteps echoed on the hardwood flooring. “There was nothing in her car,” the man who had dragged Josie from the Volkswagen informed his boss as he joined them inside the house. “But this.”
Josie turned to see CJ’s booster seat dangling from his hand.
“You have a child?” Margaret asked.
She could have lied, claimed she’d borrowed a friend’s car. But she was curious. Would Margaret spare her because she was a mother? “Why does it matter that I have a son?”
“How old is he?” Margaret asked.
“Three.” Too young to lose his mother, especially as she’d been the only parent he’d ever known until a day ago.
Margaret shook her head. “No. No. No …”
“It’s okay,” Josie said. “You can let me go. I don’t really know anything. I have no proof that you killed Dennis O’Hannigan.”
The man glanced from her to Margaret and back. Had he not worked for her back then? Had he not realized his employer was a killer?
Maybe he would protect her from the madwoman.
“You have something far worse,” Margaret said. “You have Brendan O’Hannigan’s son.”
“Wh-what?”
“The last time I saw you, I suspected you were pregnant,” Margaret admitted. “You were—” her mouth twisted into a derisive smirk “—glowing.”
Josie hadn’t even known she was pregnant then. She hadn’t known until after her big fight with Brendan, until after she’d had the car accident when her brakes had given out and she’d been taken to the hospital. That was when she’d learned she carried his child.
“You—you don’t know that my son is Brendan’s,” Josie pointed out.
“All I’ll have to do is see a picture,” she said. She pointed toward Josie’s purse and ordered her employee, “Go through that.”
He upended the contents of the bag, the gun dropping with a thud to the floor.
“You should have used that while you had the chance,” Margaret said. “I didn’t waste my chance.”
“Are you talking about now?” Josie wondered. “Or when you shot your husband in the alley behind O’Hannigan’s?” She suspected this woman was cold-blooded enough to have done it personally.
The man handed over Josie’s wallet to his boss. The picture portfolio hung out of it, the series of photos a six-month progression of CJ from infancy to his birthday a couple of months ago. Usually people smiled when they saw the curly-haired boy. But his step-grandmother glowered.
