Chapter 9
“Laurel,” she whispered then, grabbing my sleeve. “Grant. Laurel.”
“What about her?”
“She’s the one who... found the test logs first. Gave them to me. Months ago.” Evelyn struggled to breathe. “She’s been... working against Mother. Secretly. If Mother knows... she’ll...”
I was already moving.
Laurel was the fourth sister. Thirty-one, quiet, the family accountant who served as chief financial officer at Shaw Aeronautics. At the hospital that first night, she’d stood slightly apart from the others. I’d barely noticed her.
Which, I realized, was exactly how she’d wanted it.
Finch ran her phone. It had been off for eleven hours.
Her car, a gray sedan, was found by a sheriff’s deputy parked outside the Shaw family’s lake house, an hour north on Lake Norman, the same lake where Thomas Shaw had died twelve years earlier.
Then my phone rang.
The caller ID said Margaret Shaw.
“Grant,” she said, her voice composed and cool as ever. “I think it’s time you and I spoke. Without lawyers. Without your federal friends.”
“Where’s Laurel?”
“Laurel is here with me. She’s quite safe. She’s my daughter, after all.” A pause. “Come to the lake house. Alone. Tonight. Bring nothing and no one, and perhaps we can find a way for this family to survive what you’ve started.”
The line went dead.
Reyes was already shaking her head.
“No,” she said flatly. “This is a trap.”
“Of course it’s a trap.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“Because she still thinks I’m one soldier,” I said. “And she still thinks she’s the smartest person in every room.”
The plan came together over the next three hours. FBI agents in civilian vehicles along the lake road. A tactical team staged at a marina two coves over. A wire taped to my chest beneath a flannel shirt. Finch, insisting on being there, parked in a fishing truck at the end of the gravel drive.
“If anything goes wrong,” Reyes said, “you say ‘red sky.’ We’ll be through the door in under ninety seconds.”
“Understood.”
Before I left, I went back to Evelyn’s room.
She was awake, watching the evening news with the volume off. I took her hand and told her where I was going.
Her grip tightened.
“Grant. Don’t.” Her voice was still barely there. “She’s... not just cruel. She’s patient. You’ve only seen... what she lets you see.”
“I’ll come back. I always come back.”
She looked at me for a long time.
“Ask her,” Evelyn whispered, “about my father’s boat.”
I stopped.
“What do you mean?”
“Daddy was... the best sailor I ever knew. He didn’t fall off that boat.” Tears slid down her bruised cheeks. “I was twenty-three. Nobody believed me. Mother said I was grieving. She said I was... unwell. She sent me to a clinic for a month.”
I kissed her forehead gently, careful of every wound.
“I believe you,” I said.
The lake house sat on a wooded point, three stories of glass and cedar glowing gold in the dark. As I pulled in, I saw a figure on the long dock, silhouetted against the black water.
It wasn’t Margaret.
It was Laurel.
She wasn’t tied up. She wasn’t frightened. She was standing perfectly calm, arms folded, watching me get out of the truck.
And standing beside her, his hand resting easily on the holster at his hip, was Cole Brandt.
“Major Rowan,” Brandt said. “Arms out, please.”
He patted me down. His hands were quick and professional. They went over my chest twice. I held my breath.
He found nothing. The FBI’s technician knew her job.
“Inside,” he said.
Margaret was waiting in a great room with a stone fireplace two stories high. A fire was burning. She sat in a leather armchair with a glass of white wine, her pearls glowing in the firelight. She didn’t stand.
Laurel came in behind me and took a seat on the arm of the couch, near her mother.
“Thank you for coming, Grant,” Margaret said. “Please. Sit.”
“I’ll stand.”
“Suit yourself.” She sipped her wine. “Let me be direct, since you clearly prefer it. You have caused this family a great deal of trouble. I’m prepared to make that trouble go away. For both of us.”
“I’m listening.”
“Twenty million dollars,” she said. “Deposited wherever you’d like. You resign your commission. You take Evelyn somewhere warm and quiet. She signs a simple document transferring the voting rights of her shares to the trust for a period of ten years. The federal investigation, I assure you, will find nothing worth prosecuting. And everyone goes on living.”
“And if I say no?”
May you like
Margaret smiled.
“Then Evelyn’s mental health history becomes public. Her hospitalization at twenty-three. Her ‘delusions’ about her father. A forged divorce petition becomes a genuine one, and a court discovers that your wife fabricated evidence against her own family out of spite.” She tilted her head. “And you, Major, become a disgraced officer who intimidated a grieving family. Colonel Hollister will see to that.”
