‘Leslie McCord.’
He grimaced. ‘Ah, the lovely Mrs McCord,’ he said sarcastically. Lovely was the last word that described the bitch. ‘Wife of Woodrow, aka Woody, aka sex-pervert-slash-high-school-teacher who downloaded kiddie porn to his personal laptop.’ It had been the last story he and his team had broken before Mikhail went missing. ‘I guess a threat from her isn’t such a huge surprise. She was extremely unhappy when her husband’s perversion came to light. Went so far as to accuse me of planting those pictures on Woody’s hard drive.’
‘She never believed he was guilty, but then again, not many loved ones do.’
‘Even when the evidence is thrown in their faces,’ Marcus said with a nod. ‘I’m guessing she blamed us for his suicide.’ The bastard had managed to hang himself in jail while awaiting arraignment. ‘What was the specific threat?’
Gayle sighed wearily. ‘She blamed Stone for writing the story and you for printing it. She blamed everyone at the Ledger. Said she hoped you and your reporters would burn in hell for ruining her husband’s good name, for ruining his life.’
‘That doesn’t sound too bad,’ he said cautiously. ‘We’ve had a lot worse.’
‘She also said she prayed to God that someday someone would show you what it was like to lose someone you loved.’ Gayle’s gaze locked on to Marcus’s face and it was all he could do not to look away. ‘She said that a person doesn’t know suffering until someone they’ve loved is tormented, their life snuffed out. She wanted you to go to your grave knowing that your loved one had cried and begged and pleaded, but were shown no mercy, just like her husband was shown none by the Ledger and by the police.’ She drew a breath, let it out. ‘I received the letter the morning after your mother learned that Mikhail was missing.’
‘Oh God.’ Marcus could only stare. ‘You thought Leslie McCord had taken Mikhail.’
‘Or that she’d paid someone else to do so. I could only think, not again, that it would kill your mother to lose Mikhail the same way she lost Matty.’
Marcus’s heart had started to pound, slowly but hard. ‘Which she did,’ he murmured. ‘Just not at the hand of Leslie McCord.’ Mikhail had simply run away from home for a few days to get the space to work through some personal problems. He’d gone to the family cabin in the forest of eastern Kentucky, thinking he’d be safe there. Instead he’d surprised a sadistic killer who’d been using the house as a hideout, and was gunned down and tossed into a shallow grave.
Gayle’s lips curved bitterly. ‘Hell of an irony, isn’t it? I got so scared, then the next thing I knew, Jill was screaming at me not to die.’
Marcus dragged the back of his hand across his mouth, trying to think past the memory of that shallow grave and what he’d seen inside. ‘Okay, fine, I get why you didn’t tell me about the threat when it happened. You ended up in the hospital that day, and so did I.’ Gayle because of her heart attack and he because he’d been shot by Mikhail’s killer.
Marcus had gone out to the family cabin to search for Stone, who’d already found Mikhail’s body. But Mikhail’s killer hadn’t stopped at murdering their brother. He’d also kidnapped a young woman and a little girl who’d managed to escape their captor’s clutches. Marcus had found them, bedraggled and exhausted but alive – only to be discovered by the psychopath, who’d been searching for them. Marcus had acted out of instinct, throwing himself over the woman’s body when the killer began shooting. One of the bullets had pierced his lung, landing him in ICU.
So yeah, he hadn’t been coherent enough to be told about Gayle’s heart attack or the threat that triggered it. Not that day or even that month. Recovery and rehab had taken weeks.
He shook his head. ‘But what about later, when you knew Mikhail hadn’t been murdered by McCord? After we’d both recovered and come back to work. Why didn’t you tell me then?’
‘There was no need,’ Gayle said.
‘How do you know? Leslie could have just waited until we all returned to the office and we’d have been completely unaware. She still might.’
Gayle shook her head. ‘Leslie McCord is no longer a threat to anyone.’
Marcus frowned. ‘How do you know that?’ he insisted.
Gayle opened her mouth, but her voice was drowned out by a clatter in the office outside.
‘What the fuck?’ It was Stone’s voice, and he sounded furious. ‘What the motherfuck are you doing here?’
‘I suggest you remove your hand from my arm.’ The woman’s voice was cool, collected, and very familiar.
She’s here. Scarlett Bishop is here.
Eleven
Cincinnati, Ohio
Tuesday 4 August, 9.35 A.M.
Ken’s anger churned as he watched Demetrius pace the floor of his office.
‘Why are you still here?’ Ken asked coldly.
‘I’m trying to figure out what to do.’
Ken lurched to his feet and leaned forward, his hands braced on the glossy wood of his desk. ‘I told you what to do. Go and kill that sonofabitch O’Bannion, just like I told you to do nine fucking months ago!’
Demetrius paused his pacing long enough to shoot Ken a glare from the corner of his eye. ‘We didn’t need to kill him nine fucking months ago! He was out of commission.’
Which they hadn’t needed to lift a finger to accomplish. A bona fide serial killer had nearly done their job for them. ‘It appears he’s no longer out of commission,’ Ken said coldly. ‘He’s out there again – and in our business. Why didn’t we know this? I thought we were watching him.’
‘We were. According to Reuben’s reports, when O’Bannion got out of the hospital, he spent a couple of months recuperating at that mausoleum of his mother’s. Since then, he’s spent most of his time at the paper.’
Ken straightened, arms crossed over his chest. ‘He wasn’t at the paper this morning. He was in an alley with one of our assets. God only knows what the little bitch told him.’
Demetrius held up his phone. ‘I just read the damn article. Maybe you should too, before you start one of your rants.’
Ken drew a deep breath. ‘I am not ranting.’
‘Fine. We’re having a rational discussion.’ Demetrius’s eye roll indicated exactly what he thought of that. ‘Look, the article says that O’Bannion got there as she was bleeding out. She didn’t say anything to him.’
Ken sat back in his chair and scanned the entire article, but he wasn’t swayed. O’Bannion was slime. Dangerous slime. ‘So he says. The man lies more easily than he breathes.’
‘He’s the goddamn media,’ Demetrius spat. ‘Of course he lies. We can listen to more of the recordings from the wearer’s ankle tracker. She might not have told O’Bannion anything in that alley, but she told someone something. Enough that he met her there.’
‘Why weren’t we watching him last night?’
‘Because Reuben was short-handed. When he lost his two people in the accident last month, he proposed transferring the person he’d had watching O’Bannion to transporting shipments. We all agreed, including you.’
Ken ground his teeth, remembering now. He had agreed, dammit. ‘It was supposed to be temporary. Reuben was supposed to hire someone new.’
‘Reuben was supposed to do a lot of things,’ Demetrius said evenly. ‘It appears he was busy doing other things. Like our suppliers’ wives and daughters.’
Ken shook his head. ‘We’ve already gone around and around about Reuben. We’ve got a plan in place for him. Now we’re talking about O’Bannion. We should have killed him as soon as he got out of the hospital.’
Demetrius rubbed his palms together. ‘Will you stop saying that? We couldn’t kill him then. Not without risking the cops connecting him to McCord and his wife. And we couldn’t do the suicide thing again. Not so soon after we staged McCord’s and his wife’s suicide.’