Cowboy Undercover. Alice Sharpe

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      “You were gone long enough for this to happen, you nitwit.”

      “Yes, sir,” she said, looking down at the floor. She bent and picked up a piece of paper. “I didn’t see this before,” she said. “Maybe it fell when I threw back the blankets. Oh, my gosh! It says: A son for a son. White—”

      Jeremy snatched the paper from the nanny’s hand before she read another word. “Give that to me,” he said as he released Lily’s wrist.

      “What does it mean?” Lily demanded. She couldn’t believe Chance would leave a message as inflammatory as that. In fact, she knew he wouldn’t. That meant someone else had taken Charlie. But who? “Who is White?” she asked.

      Jeremy met her gaze but didn’t respond, at least not to her. Instead he turned to the nanny. “Get downstairs and tell McCord to search the grounds. I want to know exactly how my son was taken from this room.”

      She nodded nervously and began to turn. Jeremy cleared his throat. “And Janet? Don’t say a word about this to anyone else, do you understand? Not even the police. It’s your fault the child is missing. Don’t make it worse for yourself by blabbing to anyone but McCord.”

      “Yes, Mr. Block,” she said as she scurried away.

      Lily planted her fists on her hips. “What does that note mean, Jeremy? Who is White?”

      He looked at the paper again, then folded it in half. “Don’t you have enough problems of your own?”

      Had he always been this much of a nutcase? Did he really think anything that happened to her mattered in the face of what was happening to their son? “Why aren’t you calling the police? And you shouldn’t be touching that paper. There may be fingerprints—”

      “I will handle this my own way,” he interrupted.

      “You know something, don’t you?” she said in a burst of understanding. “You know who took him and why. Someone named White. Tell me.”

      The hateful look in his eyes as he raked her over went straight to her gut. He tore the note into pieces and opened his hand to let them flutter to the carpet. She wanted to catch them and paste them back together. She couldn’t understand how he could destroy the only link they had to Charlie’s abductors.

      “It’s some enemy of yours, isn’t it?” she implored. “Oh, my poor Charlie. How can you stand there and let this happen? Don’t you care anything about him? Please—”

      He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “God, you’re annoying. I’ll get Charlie back safe and sound but I’ll do it my own way in my own time. No police. Not unless you want Charlie dead.”

      Lily swallowed a lump of air. She wasn’t sure what to do except get out of that house.

      “Now I have to figure out what to do about you,” he added.

      “No, you don’t. I’m leaving.”

      He stepped in front of her. “I don’t trust you. You aren’t going anywhere.”

      “Move out of my way.”

      “So you can run to the police and in some misdirected gesture of sacrifice, tell them everything you’ve seen and heard? I’ll have to waste time quieting them down and by then it will be too late for Charlie. If you want him to live, you’ll stay out of this and you won’t involve the police. For now, I have things to do and you’re in the way.”

      His fist connected with her cheekbone and she stumbled backward. Grabbing her arm, he pulled her from the room and all but ran her down the stairs, his fingers digging into her arm. He propelled her into his office, opened the closet, tore her purse from her shoulder and pushed her inside. The door slammed in her face, encasing her in blackness. The click of the lock echoed in her ears.

      And then it was silent.

      * * *

      CHANCE WAITED UNTIL he heard the front door close behind Lily and the man she’d called McCord, then jumped over the gate. He dashed to the cover of the trees and hunkered down for a minute as his eyes adjusted to the dark. It seemed odd to him that the outside was so poorly lit but at least he didn’t think he had to worry about cameras picking up his every move.

      The gun constituted a last-resort measure not to be taken lightly. Bravado aside, he had no intention of shooting anyone if there was any other choice.

      Eventually, he knew his sight was as good as it was going to get and he made his way across the manicured lawns to the house where he carefully peered in through a low window. It turned out to be the kitchen—empty. The next window opened onto a dining room that was dominated by a black lacquer table and the most pretentious-looking candelabra he’d ever seen. For a second he stared inside, wondering what bothered him so much, and then he had it. There were two chairs at the table, one at either end, like on a movie set when they wanted you to understand that the people who dined there didn’t have much to say to one another.

      Had Lily endured dinners in this setting? Chance, who had grown up with four other men and a rotating roster of stepmothers, couldn’t imagine the numbing silence and the thought that Charlie might soon eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in this mausoleum was just flat-out depressing.

      Farther along, he found a living area that looked as though it had never been lived in, and then popped his head up to find himself peering into a smaller room that seemed to be a den or a home office. It, too, appeared empty and he was about to turn away when the chair in the corner suddenly spun around and a man appeared.

      Chance immediately ducked out of sight, but the impression of the man stayed vivid behind his eyes: late forties, stern, arrogant. Blue eyes like Charlie’s. He held a cell phone in one hand and avidly tapped a pencil against the wooden arm of the chair with another. The window was slightly open, but try as he might, Chance couldn’t make out what was being said. He scampered away, careful to keep his head down.

      That had to be Lily’s husband. But where was Lily? And where was McCord? He decided to skirt the entire perimeter of the house. The harvest moon that had seemed to illuminate the world on his ranch in the middle of the night was subdued here by the massive size of the house and the shadows it cast. Maybe in a couple of hours it would rise high enough to overcome this obstacle, but Chance fervently hoped he and Lily were back in the motel room by then.

      And maybe Charlie, too. Maybe Jeremy Block would come to his senses and be reasonable.

      Sure. And pigs could fly.

      Careful to avoid the patches of light that shone through the windows, he almost tripped when he turned the corner and came across something in the grass. He knelt down to investigate. Someone had left a metal ladder lying on the grass. By the feel and heft of it, a long one.

      Why would anyone leave a ladder lying on the grass? He looked up at the bank of windows overhead and saw two lights placed far enough away from each other to suggest two different rooms. Probably upstairs bedrooms; one of those might be Charlie’s. He played around with the possibility of raising the ladder and checking it out but decided against it.

      Besides, maybe someone had been washing second-story windows today and got lazy or put the ladder down flat so a small boy wouldn’t be tempted to climb it and fall. Who knew?

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