“He…he knocked me out,” Valerie murmured, awe and bewilderment ringing in her voice.
Cole choked down the lump of horror in his throat. “Who knocked you out, Val? Tell me what happened.” When she just whimpered again, he grew frantic. “Valerie, where’s Jamie?”
“He took her.” A wobbly breath left her mouth. Shaking her head as if to clear it of cobwebs, she blinked several times, then focused her silvery gaze on Cole. “That guy who works for you…your assistant…he took Agent Crawford. He took her.”
Chapter 16
“Get out of the car, Agent Crawford.”
Jamie stared at the barrel of the gun, then up at the face of the man wielding it. For the hundredth time, she had trouble accepting that this was Ian Macintosh. Ian, the young man who’d been so pleasant to her the morning after the storm.
He looked like a completely different person. Brown eyes wild, boyish features twisted in a mask of evil loathing. She resisted the urge to rub her aching right temple, fearing any sudden movements would set him off. Or the gun. Her gun, she realized as she stared at the familiar Glock with the scratch on the butt. He must have grabbed it from her purse, after he’d run Valerie’s car off the road.
She’d hit her head during the accident, and her memory was still fuzzy, but she recalled the crunching of metal, being propelled into the dashboard, then hearing muted footsteps and seeing Valerie droop forward. She remembered fumbling for her purse, and then…then Ian’s face appeared in the passenger window, the door was thrown open and everything went black.
“I said, get out of the car!”
She blinked, trying to stay alert despite the throbbing of her head. She was in a beige sedan, most likely Ian’s rental, and it was dark outside but not pitch black, which told her only a short amount of time had passed since he’d knocked her unconscious. The sun had just set when she’d gotten into Valerie’s car, so it couldn’t be later than seven o’clock, maybe eight.
“All right then, if that’s how you want to be,” Ian snapped.
The gun disappeared and he was out of the car, his footsteps thudding against the ground as he walked around to her side, opened the door and pulled her out of the sedan by her hair.
Her arm flew out in a desperate punch, but she’d instinctively used her right one, the injured one. Pain shot up to her shoulder and she sagged onto the gravel. She realized she’d landed on a driveway. Where the hell had he taken— She gasped when she caught sight of the commanding stone mansion.
She immediately figured out where they were. The house Cole had shared with Teresa.
“Why are you doing this?” she blurted out. “I thought you were loyal to Cole.”
“Loyal to that murdering bastard?” Ian smirked. “You thought wrong, luv. Now get up.”
She did as he asked, wishing she had a backup weapon right about now. She needed to neutralize this situation before Macintosh decided to pull the trigger.
He gestured her to move ahead of him. “Walk to the door.”
Jamie used the walk along the limestone path to assess the situation. Ian definitely wasn’t of sound mind, but his motive for doing this made no sense to her. Was he after Cole’s company? Was he simply crazy?
His reasoning became clear as he made her open the double doors at the mansion’s entrance, planted a hand on her back and shoved her into the house. Darkness shrouded them and then she heard a click and light flooded the impressive marble-lined parlor.
“You just couldn’t do your damn job, could you, Agent?” Ian said with contempt in his voice. “Go through the doorway to the left.”
He flicked another switch and Jamie found herself in an enormous living room with high ceilings and a gorgeous slate fireplace. Horror clogged her throat. This was the room in which Teresa Donovan had died. She glanced at the floor by the coffee table, growing sick when she saw the dark brown stain on the hardwood. Evidently the cleaning staff hadn’t been able to scrub away the bloodstain.
Ian waved the gun. “Sit down.”
When she moved to the couch, he barked at her again. “Not there. On the floor.”
Nausea knotted around her insides as she realized where he wanted her to sit. Knowing she had to cooperate until she found a way out of this mess, she slowly moved across the room and sank down on the marred hardwood. Forced herself not to think about the pool of sticky blood that had once congealed there.
“You know,” Ian said, his voice colder than a glacier, “I was quite pleased when you showed up in town. I thought, Hey, now here’s a smart woman, surely she’ll see that he’s a killer and send him to death row.” He sneered at her. “But no, you had to go and screw the guy, didn’t you, Agent?”
“Cole isn’t a killer,” she said quietly.