prisoner laughed and tried to grasp his ankle.
Nick grabbed the man’s wrists and hauled him to his feet. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?” Four cops from the nearest suburban town surrounded Nick.
“Deputy US Marshal Nick Sandoval. Please take this man into custody. I need to go after the judge’s daughter.”
And the judge? Of course. The young woman was running toward her mother.
“Credentials?” the police sergeant demanded.
“Later.” Nick thrust the prisoner, a man nearly half his size, toward the waiting police officers. “I’m responsible for those ladies.”
An officer caught hold of the prisoner, and Nick raced after the judge’s daughter. It took mere seconds to catch up with her—seconds in which the flashers on the SUV ceased, the tires spun, and the monstrous vehicle roared to life. One officer raised his weapon as though intending to shoot out the tires.
“No,” Nick shouted, as another officer pushed his colleague’s arm down.
They couldn’t fire at a vehicle containing a federal judge. They could miss the tires and strike her through the rear of the vehicle. They could hit a tire and send the SUV spinning or rolling into the heavy traffic—traffic unable to stop because of the rain-slick road.
Two officers ran for their cruisers to give chase, but the SUV swept past the wrecked Camry and sped along a suddenly clear shoulder, pickup and stalled vehicles gone. Before the police reached their car, the SUV was lost in traffic.
“Nooo.” The daughter’s cry was long and painful like a wounded animal.
She took a few stumbling steps in the direction the SUV, then dropped to her knees, her hands to her cheeks.
“It’s all right—” Nick hesitated, not sure of her name, as he crouched beside her. “You’re safe with me.”
“But they have my mother.” She was gasping as though still running. “They took my mother.”
“We’ll find her. We caught the man who grabbed you. He’ll tell us something.”
Not at all guaranteed, but she needed reassurance.
“Let’s get you to my car and out of the rain.”
“We need to go after that SUV. They have my mom.”
The judge, Nick’s responsibility.
The minute he helped the woman to her feet and turned toward his vehicle, he knew her assailant had slipped the officers’ custody. The officers were scattered, running into the now halted traffic, and the wiry kidnapper darted between cars and under the elevated train tracks to the eastbound lane.
No one would blame Nick for the vehicle getting away. He could not have caught up with it.
But they might blame him for the prisoner escaping.
Kristen fell more than sat in the deputy marshal’s low-slung car and covered her face with her hands. She should lock the doors, make herself safe. But she couldn’t in such a small space. Only the rain-washed air, however choked with exhaust fumes, kept her from hyperventilating.
Her feet throbbed from running barefoot along the highway. Her head ached from where the man had grabbed her by the hair. Her shoulder hurt from how he tried to drag her away until the deputy US marshal arrived to rescue her, too late for her mother.
She began to shake from the cold of being soaked through, from the accident and near capture, from knowing her mother was tossed into a car and speeding away somewhere. Nightmare seemed too tame a word to describe the events of the past fifteen minutes.
Her mother had been kidnapped, and her father was thousands of miles away, probably out of cell phone range.
With two parents who worked so much that nannies had raised their daughter more than them, Kristen understood feeling alone. But nothing, not all the school plays and choir concerts Mom or Dad or both of them had been unable to attend, left her as hollow as knowing men had taken her mother by force and she had been unable to stop them. On the contrary, her mother had stopped them from taking Kristen.
She slumped forward so her forehead rested on the dashboard. “If I had made different driving choices... If I had told a marshal at the courthouse about the SUV following me... If I thought faster during the accident—”
More police cars arrived. Blaring sirens ceased, though lights flashed in an eye-searing strobe behind her. The police were here, while her mother was somewhere else. She was here, while her mother was somewhere else. Her mother was in the hands of a criminal, while she would soon be in the hands of the police or US Marshals Service. Whoever it was would be questioning her like she was a suspect. They might send her a victim’s advocate.
A bubble of hysterical laughter rose in her throat. After the hundreds of crime victims she had helped in her job as a social worker, she was now one herself. She should know exactly what to expect.
But she doubted anyone could prepare for such an eventuality. None of her training had taught her about the slicing depth of the guilt, the anguish, the grief of being captured even for a few minutes.
And her mother could be captured for hours or days, or—
She wouldn’t think about the worst-case scenario.
A groan escaped Kristen’s lips. “Mom, why do you stay in this job?”
Threats had been nothing before, but that didn’t mean someone wouldn’t end up following through. Except Mom hadn’t mentioned any threats. Surely she wouldn’t keep such information from the marshals who were assigned to protect the judges, even if she might keep it from her daughter.
And her husband?
Kristen should have asked, would have, if she hadn’t been so wrapped up in looking for that SUV—the vehicle now speeding away with her mother inside alone because she had helped Kristen escape.
Sick with guilt, Kristen reached for the marshal’s phone. Her own remained in her purse in her car a quarter mile ahead on the side of the road. Abandoned. Wrecked.
“Siri, call—” Kristen stopped. She couldn’t remember her father’s number. She didn’t know her mother’s number. She never bothered to remember telephone numbers anymore. They were programmed into her phone.
She needed it—now.
She slid out of the sports car and took a step toward her bashed-in car. Gravel cut into her feet, and she cried out in pain. It was foolish to have kicked off her shoes to run faster.
She had run away while that man stole her mother.
Every time she turned around, she was disappointing her mother. She wouldn’t take the right sort of job. She wouldn’t drive a better car. She wouldn’t date the right class
