Unexpected Father. Delores Fossen

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СКАЧАТЬ his own breath coming out in rough, frantic gusts, he glanced down at her. Just a glance. Before he turned his attention back to the doorway. Standing guard. Protecting her. Or rather, trying to.

      “W-well?” Lilly prompted, curling up into as much of a fetal position as her stiff muscles would allow. “Don’t you have something to tell me? Wait—let me rephrase that. You have something to tell me, so do it.”

      He nodded, eventually. “Your car accident probably wasn’t an accident.”

      She watched the words form on his lips. Tried to absorb them. Couldn’t. It was next to impossible to absorb that someone wanted her dead, especially since she couldn’t recall anything about what had happened to her nineteen months ago.

      “And what about tonight?” Lilly asked, afraid to hear the answer. “What happened?”

      “This obviously wasn’t an accident, either.” Jason’s jaw muscles stirred as if they’d declared war on each other. “Whoever tried to kill you nineteen months ago—I think he’s back.”

      WHEN HE SAW the lanky, blond-haired detective making his way up the hall toward him, Jason ended the call with his lieutenant and stepped out of the doorway to Lilly’s new room. He wanted to give his fellow S.A.P.D. peace officer his undivided attention. Unfortunately, it would be next to impossible to do that because of what the lieutenant had just requested.

      Or rather, what the lieutenant had ordered him to do.

      Talk about the ultimate distraction. That order kept repeating itself through Jason’s head, and he doubted it’d go away any time soon. Especially since he had no clue as to how he could carry it out.

      “Please tell me you have answers,” he said to Detective Mack O’Reilly. Jason kept his voice low so he wouldn’t wake Lilly. To get her to fall asleep, it’d taken nearly a half hour of questions and assurances from him that she was safe. Jason didn’t want to go through that again until he could make good on those assurances.

      If that were even possible.

      O’Reilly shrugged. “I have answers, but I don’t think you’ll like them. There’s only one surveillance camera in or around this entire place. It’s in the parking lot and static, fixed in only one direction.”

      Jason tried not to curse. “Let me guess—the wrong direction?”

      “You got it. It was aimed at the center of the parking lot. Someone came up from the side and, while staying out of the line of sight, smashed the lens with a rock. All we got for a visual was a shadow. The crime-scene guys are dusting both the camera and the rock for prints, but it looks clean. Whoever it was probably had on gloves.”

      Definitely not good. Jason had hoped for a sloppy crime scene, even though deep down he’d known it wouldn’t be. Whoever was behind this was brazen. Yes. Determined—that, too. Maybe even downright desperate.

      But not sloppy.

      Jason had personally gone over every inch of Lilly’s room and hadn’t found even trace evidence.

      “How about the rookie guarding Ms. Nelson’s room?” Jason asked. “Did you find him?”

      O’Reilly nodded. “He was in the utility closet at the end of the hall. Duct tape on his mouth, hands and feet. He has a goose-egg-size lump on his head, and someone had used a stun gun on him, but he can’t remember being knocked out.”

      Probably because the guard had fallen asleep.

      This time, Jason didn’t even try to contain his profanity, but it was aimed just as much at himself as it was at the guard. When Jason had checked on him about a half hour prior to Lilly’s attack, the guy had looked a little drowsy. Jason had asked if he’d wanted to be relieved, but he’d said no, that the double espresso he was sipping would keep him awake all night.

      Yeah, right.

      Jason wanted to kick himself. Hard. How could he have let this happen?

      He’d been positive that nineteen months ago someone had tried to kill Lilly. That’s why he’d had a guard assigned to the convalescent hospital in the first place. What he should have anticipated, however, was that one guard wouldn’t be enough. After all, the person responsible for this latest attempt on Lilly’s life had no doubt been the one who’d forced her off the road and left her for dead.

      Getting past one guard in the middle of the night obviously hadn’t been much of a challenge. Murdering Lilly wouldn’t have been a challenge, either, if Jason hadn’t returned to the hospital to talk to Lilly’s doctor about additional security measures for the facility.

      Ironic.

      While he’d been discussing the need for extra security, someone had been breaching it. And Lilly had nearly paid for that breach with her life.

      “So far, no witnesses,” O’Reilly continued. “But we’re canvassing the neighborhood. Something might turn up.”

      Not likely. It was late. Midweek. The small downtown hospital was surrounded by specialty shops that mainly did business from ten to six o’clock. That meant there probably weren’t a lot of potential witnesses milling around to see someone escaping through a window.

      “I gave one of the detectives the names of two suspects, Wayne Sandling and Raymond Klein,” Jason explained. “Both are former attorneys. About two years ago, Lilly uncovered some information that caused them to be disbarred.”

      What she’d uncovered, though, wasn’t an offense that would have earned them jail time. While Sandling and Klein had been working as advisors to the city council, the two had somehow managed to get a construction company a lucrative contract to renovate historic city-owned buildings. The problem? The owners of the construction company were Sandling and Klein’s friends. A definite conflict of interest. That suspicious contract wasn’t enough for an arrest and, coupled with other similar unethical activity, it was barely enough to get them disbarred and fired as city council advisors.

      But Jason knew there was more.

      His brother, Greg, had even suspected it. After dealing with Sandling and Klein on a city contract deal, Greg too had noticed inconsistencies with bid dates and altered estimates that had ultimately cost him a contract to do auditing work for the city. Greg had been more than ready to request an investigation into the two attorneys’ dealings. It hadn’t happened, of course.

      Because Greg had died in the car accident.

      “Sandling and Klein have already been contacted,” O’Reilly assured him. “Neither seemed pleased about that.”

      “I’ll bet not. I want them questioned—hard.”

      “Absolutely.”

      Not that it would do much good. Questioning them hadn’t been effective nineteen months ago. Jason had no doubts about Sandling’s and Klein’s guilt as far as unscrupulous business practices, but what was missing was solid proof that their unscrupulousness had gone much deeper than what the police had already found. There was no remaining evidence since the files that Lilly had copied from her computer had disappeared the night she’d been run off the road.

      Jason knew that wasn’t a coincidence.

      Detective СКАЧАТЬ