“So he could have known the woman was on bed rest and wouldn’t report it missing,” Jude said and glanced over at Libby’s sleeping form. “That’s definitely suspicious, but Libby would ream you a new one for calling that proof of his involvement.”
“You haven’t heard the worst of it yet,” his brother continued. “We wouldn’t have realized he was practically the woman’s neighbor if he hadn’t had the sheer ego to use the car again for K-Bar’s murder. The woman wised up and had her husband move her bed closer to the window so she could keep an eye on the car, and she saw him take it. Called the cops and described him, but by the time they tracked down the vehicle, K-Bar was dead in the backseat.”
“Damn.” Squeezing his eyes shut, Jude pinched the bridge of his nose as a tension headache started to throb in the center of his forehead. “Burke’s called me nonstop every day. I just thought he was doing it on the colonel’s behalf.”
“No, Pruitt’s been dealing directly with us,” Camden said. “The lawyer shouldn’t even be involved at this point, but his credit card shows a recent one-day trip to Key West. Best guess is he saw your iguana video online and flew down there to find Libby.”
“Does he know our cover identities?”
“He must, otherwise he wouldn’t have found you at the boat charter place on Big Pine Key.”
“Shit. Where is he now?”
“We don’t know.”
Jude groaned. “Cam, that’s not what I want to hear. Did you search his place?”
“Eva did.”
Although Cam’s former partner with the Metropolitan PD homicide division was thorough, Jude wished his brothers had conducted the search instead. “What did she find?”
Cam exhaled slowly. “Hundreds of paper dolls and a few pairs of what Eva assumes are Libby’s underwear.”
A chill scraped across the back of Jude’s neck. “Jesus Christ.”
“He has notebooks filled with letters to her and hundreds of pictures of her that date back to her law school years. Some she clearly posed for, but she didn’t realize she was being photographed in most of them.”
Jude reached over and shook Libby awake. She blinked up at him and started to smile, but the look on his face must have been grim because she bolted upright. “What’s wrong?”
“Did you know Kenneth Burke in law school?” he asked.
Her forehead wrinkled in confusion, and she fumbled for her glasses. “Yes. We hung out with the same people. Why?”
“Is he the guy you slept with?”
She wrapped her arms around herself as color filled her cheeks. “No, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to anything.”
“Did he ever show any sexual interest in you?”
She squirmed, obviously uneasy, but he couldn’t mince words to make his questions more comfortable. Not when he felt this niggling sensation of urgency.
“We went on one date my first semester of law school,” she answered at last. “I thought it was time to move on, and I chose him because he’s your opposite in almost every way. During dinner, we both realized there wasn’t anything romantic between us, and that was the end of it. We’ve been friends since.”
Uh-huh, Jude thought. More like she placed Burke in the friend category and he’d gone along with it to stay close to her. But somewhere along the way, his interest had become a very dangerous obsession.
The front gate buzzer sounded. Once. Twice. Three times. Four, five, six…nine times in total.
Libby started at the sound. “What’s that?”
“Shit,” Jude said into the phone and shot off the bed, grabbing his weapon from the bedside table. “Cam, someone’s at the gate.”
His brother echoed his curse. “Don’t answer it. Get Libby somewhere safe.”
“Call me some fucking backup.” He hung up and yanked on his basketball shorts, and then he scooped Libby into his arms, bedsheet and all, and carried her into the closet. She didn’t protest like he thought she would. She merely wrapped her arms around his neck and held on as he punched a code on a panel in the back wall.
A hidden door swooshed open with a slight breeze due to the pressure-lock, and he stepped into the twelve-by-twelve room that used to be a second bedroom. Now it rivaled any doomsday prepper’s bunker, which was one of the reasons he’d been so determined to keep Libby in this house. He had no doubt this room would survive a nuclear blast, and Seth kept it stocked with several years’ worth of supplies, including all kinds of weapons, some of which he probably shouldn’t legally own.
Jude set Libby down and studied the wall of monitors that covered every inch of the house and property. Kenneth Burke stood at the gate with Colonel Pruitt directly in front of him, both of them soaked by the drizzle of rain. Pruitt looked up and down the street, then reached out and leaned on the buzzer again. Nine times.
Short, short, short. Long, long, long. Short, short, short.
S.O.S. in Morse code.
Jude hit the switch for the intercom. “I’m not opening the gate, Pruitt.”