Page 19

Without a trace . Those words landed like blows because it was true. His parents had disappeared without a trace. Jen had committed a crime that she’d escaped for seventeen years, and Jack still wasn’t sure what had prompted Ry to find those remains—accident, on purpose, it didn’t matter.

Jen Rogers knew how to get away with murder, and he had to put that knowledge away. Set it aside so they could figure out how not to be her next victims.

Jack wondered if Jen knew they had a group of people already on-site. People who, come four o’clock, would start looking for them. And knew exactly where they’d been. Had she been watching them all this time, or had she stumbled upon them in the campground simply because of Ry?

He considered bringing it up to see if it would prompt Jen to panic, to make a mistake. That’s all he needed. One little mistake.

“Now, I want both your cell phones,” Jen said, holding out her free hand.

“What are you going to do with those? We don’t have service in a cave. Can’t ping us in here.”

“It’s called distraction , Sheriff. Now, hand them over.”

Jack reached into his pocket. He considered “accidentally” dropping the phone. Destroying it rather than have it be used against him. But Chloe was taking hers out. She looked back at him and held her hand out like she’d take his too. So he tried to give it to her.

But she didn’t take it. She put hers in his hand and gave him a look. A meaningful look.

Then he realized what she was trying to tell him. She had that damn smartwatch on her wrist. No one would be able to track them in this cave , but it was something. A potential lifeline. Without reacting, he took the two phones and walked them over to Jen. He handed them out to her.

She took them. Then she smiled at him. “You look like your dad.”

Even knowing it was meant to hurt, meant to elicit a reaction, he couldn’t stop it from landing. He did look like a carbon copy of Dean Hudson. He was reminded every time he looked in the mirror of the father he lost all too soon.

“Your mother could have survived, you know.”

Jack held Jen’s mean gaze. Inside, he was a riot of pain, but he kept his expression bland. And he said nothing.

“It could have just been your worthless father. Trying to tell me how to parent my children. Trying to get me into trouble with all those nosy family-service agents.” Jen’s self-satisfied smirk faded into an angry scowl, like she was reliving it. “I would have settled for just taking him out. She could have escaped. But she had to try and save your father.”

“It’s what people with souls do, Jen,” Jack returned, ignoring how rough his voice sounded. “Help each other. Save each other. Love each other.”

“No one’s ever done that for me!” she shouted, stomping her foot like a child. And Jack could see where Ry had gotten some of his self-victimization. It stemmed from right here. He could almost feel bad for the guy. Almost.

Jen kept on shrieking. “No one did anything for me, ever!”

Jack shrugged. “Sounds like you deserved it.”

Even in the orangish glow of the lantern light, he could see her face mottled red with rage. Her hands had curled into fists. Sarah murmured something softly to her, and Jen inhaled sharply, then let it out slowly. Calming herself, minute by minute, until she aimed one of her nasty smiles at him again.

“I want you to know, they died begging for mercy.”

He should let it go—God knew, he should let it go. But when it came to his parents, their memory, he couldn’t let her have the last word. “Sounds like they died fighting for it.”

She let out a cry of rage then, guttural and furious. She wrenched back her arm. Jack went with instinct and blocked the blow by grabbing her arm before she could slam the gun across his face like she’d done to Ry.

It was a mistake—he knew that the minute his hand had come into contact with her arm. But it was just instinct, self-preservation.

It was pure stubbornness and anger that kept his grip on her arm. Until she lifted her left hand, and there was a gun in that one too. Pointed right at his head. Then he thought better of his fury and hurt.

“No!” It was, shockingly, Sarah’s voice. She leaped off the chair, grabbed Jen’s left arm. Jack still hadn’t let go of her right. So she was now being held—on one side by her partner and on one side by her victim.

“You can’t shoot him,” Sarah said, seeming afraid. Desperate. “It’s not the plan. You said it yourself. We can’t deviate from the plan. We’ve already messed up once. We can’t mess up again. It all goes to hell. You know that.”

Jack was so surprised by the unexpected save that when Jen ripped her arm out of his grasp, he didn’t even try to hold on. He stepped back, giving the women the space for their argument, and hopefully the distraction was enough so that Jen’s anger was pointed to the woman she worked with.

Maybe that was a weakness that would allow them to escape.

“They’re my plans,” Jen said, her entire body turning toward Sarah. Her back to Jack and Chloe and Ry behind them. Like none of them even mattered. Like they couldn’t be a threat.

Could he tackle her now, Jack considered? Would Chloe be able to get to Sarah’s gun in time to take her out before retaliation? But that still left Courtney, who was presumably outside the cave.

But what if she wasn’t? Was it worth the risk? Jack kept himself ready, watching, waiting for just the right moment—and he knew Chloe beside him was doing the same exact thing. Poised and ready to lunge.

He wanted it to be now, but it wasn’t. But they would know when it was. They’d be ready. He believed that.

He had to.

“Any mistakes today have been your fault. I think you know that,” Jen was yelling at Sarah.

Sarah’s eyes widened, a mix of fear and offense. Panic, maybe. But she stood up to Jen. “I do not know that! It was your plan that was faulty. We did everything you said! Courtney got Ry to lure Mark here. I took the first shot and didn’t kill him. Just like you said. I—”

“You hesitated! You know you hesitated! If you’d taken that shot when you were supposed to, I could trust you. But now? I can’t. So I think we need to retool our plan.”

Sarah was shaking her head. “We have to stick to the plan, or we’ll get caught! I’m not getting caught!” She pointed her finger in Jen’s face, panic mounting. “I’ll tell the cops everything . I’ll tell them it was your idea, your plan. Lure Mark here. Get Chloe away from the scrapbook. I’ll tell them—”

The sound of a bullet exploding out of a gun erupted around them. Instinct had Jack jumping back toward Chloe, who’d hit the deck with her hands over her ears.

When he looked up, he saw Jen holding a gun in each hand while Sarah lay on the ground, still and lifeless. A pool of blood slowly growing bigger around her.

“You won’t be able to tell them anything now, will you?” Jen said to Sarah’s lifeless form. She blew out a breath, shrugged her shoulders a few times like she was shrugging away tension. “Man, I feel better.” She turned to face them, evil smile back in place. “Now. It’s time for a new plan.”

T HE GUNSHOT WAS still echoing in Chloe’s ears. She didn’t let herself look at the dead woman on the ground. She looked up from the defensive position she’d fallen into and focused on the woman who might kill them all.

Chloe couldn’t remember ever loving her mother. Even when she was a little girl, too young to understand her childhood was a dangerous disaster, she’d wondered why her mother had bothered to have one child, let alone two.

And still, this was all such a shock. Bits and pieces she could make sense of, but the whole of what was happening, what had happened, was just too bizarre to fully fathom.

Clearly Mom’s plan had been to kill Mark and get away with it. She was teaming up with Mark’s other victims to do it. She’d killed Jack’s parents because they’d called family services on her.

But what did it have to do with the scrapbook?

There were no answers to that yet. No answers could come if they didn’t survive.

So she focused on the one most important thing to her.

She would find a way to get Jack out of this. She certainly wasn’t about to let her mother make another Hudson a victim of her sociopathic ways. No matter what. Chloe would do anything and everything to get him out.

“Now you have more bodies to clean up,” Chloe pointed out. Her voice was steady, her tone cool. She kept her expression blank when her mother turned to sneer at her.

“It’s not about the bodies. That’s easy.” She gestured at the cave. Like...there were bodies back there, deeper in the cavern. A shudder chased down Chloe’s spine, though she ignored it.

“And some bodies, like your father’s, don’t matter. No one will care that Mark Brink was murdered in cold blood. They’ll do some cursory due diligence, then mark it down to his past.” Her lips curled back even farther. “ Hudsons and cops are different, though. We’ve got to make sure there’s no trace. It’s not about bodies , it’s about trails.”

“Forensic investigations have come a long way in seventeen years. You’d be surprised how easy it is to pin you to Mark Brink’s murder,” Jack said blandly.

Every time she poked at her mother, he did too. He took her lead and ran with it. It gave her hope that somehow they could outsmart her mother. They were good cops, a good team. They could do it. They just needed a chance.

Jen took a threatening step toward Jack, those guns in her hands making Chloe have to fight the need to step between Jack and her mother. To protect him.

It would be a death sentence for him. Chloe knew that.

“Even if they could pin it on me, even if they bothered, they couldn’t find me. Do you know how long I’ve been here? Right here. Living, loving and laughing my ass off while no one could find anything about your do-gooder parents.”

The whole time. Ever since Mom had just not come home one day and Chloe had spent the next few years struggling to keep Ry on the straight and narrow, trying to keep Dad from ruining their lives. Mom hadn’t been running away, chasing a score or a guy or whatever.

She’d been living in a cave ? “But why hide if no one knew you’d murdered the Hudsons?”

“Your father was meant to stumble over those remains and get himself into a heap of trouble. Your father was supposed to take the fall. But he never did listen, did he? He never followed through or did what he should. So I had to adjust my plans. You see, Chloe, one thing you never could understand was the beauty of patience . Always had to be going, moving, doing. Sometimes sitting and waiting is the best thing in the world. Because no one will ever know. And Mark Brink is dead. Finally.”

Chloe didn’t see how sitting and waiting had been best for her mother. Jen had always been mean, cruel, narcissistic and rotten to the core. But she had never been quite this unhinged, or so it had seemed to Chloe at the time. Chloe supposed she should be grateful because unhinged left room for error. One little mistake and Chloe or Jack would take advantage of it and get out of this.

Chloe was sure of it.

Courtney stepped through the cave entrance. She nearly stumbled when she saw the body on the floor, but aside from a wide-eyed expression, she didn’t voice any surprise. She blinked once, then turned toward Jen.

“A couple saw them running after Ry and called the police.” Her voice betrayed her a little. It shook.

“Damn interfering busybodies,” Jen said grimly. “They’ll be crawling all over now.”

“I don’t think we should do it here,” Courtney said, eyeing Chloe, Jack and Ry before turning her attention back to Jen. “We need to move.”

Chloe didn’t know what do it here meant for sure, but she had a bad feeling it meant kill them .

Jen shook her head. “Moving is too dangerous with cops crawling around. We need a distraction. Time and a distraction.” She turned to face them. “Ry, get over here.”

Chloe looked over her shoulder and watched as her brother struggled to his feet, keeping his eyes downcast and refusing to meet her gaze as he shuffled over to their mother.

“You’re going to go out to that campground. You’re going to let a cop find you—don’t you go searching them out, just let them find you. You’re going to hedge, lie a little bit, take your time, but eventually you’ll confess you saw your sister and the sheriff, and you told them where the scrapbook is.”

“They’ll arrest me if they think I had anything to do with the scrapbook!”

Jen laughed. Low and mean. “Yeah, so what? A lot worse happens if you don’t.” She jerked her gaze to Jack. “Uncuff him. And give him that backpack you’ve got on. That’ll prove he saw you guys.”

Jack didn’t respond right away. He looked at Chloe. She couldn’t think of a way to get out of this—and as much as it pained her to be thinking about Ry’s well-being after all this, Ry would be safer in jail than he was here. So she gave Jack a little nod.

He pulled the key out of his pocket and tossed it toward Jen. She didn’t catch it, but she did scowl at him. “I can’t wait to make your death slow and painful.”

“I’ve never known a drawn-out murder to work out for the murderer,” Jack replied.

Jen’s smile was pure evil . “Remind me to give you a step-by-step of how I took my sweet time with your parents.” She picked up the key he’d thrown. “But first things first.” Roughly, she jammed the key into the cuffs and released Ry.

“You tell them you sent them off to find the scrapbook. You tell them Mark told you he left it in a hotel room in Hardy. You don’t know the specifics, but that’s what he told you, so that’s what you told them. Do you understand?”

Ry nodded.

“If you don’t do exactly as I say, what happens?”

“The pit,” he said, sounding like the little boy Chloe remembered all too well. Not always sweet, but always trusting.

Chloe didn’t know what the pit was—no doubt some kind of torture. Mom was always good at that.

“You didn’t like your last stint in the pit, did you?”

Ry shook his head vehemently.

“What’s better, Rylan? The pit or getting arrested?”

“Arrested,” Ry muttered.

“That’s right. Go get the backpack off him,” she said, pointing to Jack.

Ry trudged over. He didn’t meet Chloe’s gaze or Jack’s, just kept his eyes on the ground and held out his hand. When Jack didn’t immediately hand it over, Ry slowly looked up.

Even slower, Jack shrugged the backpack off. With careful, precise movements, he held it out to Ry. When he spoke, it was low and quiet. Maybe Jen heard over by the entrance, maybe she didn’t, but Chloe figured it didn’t matter. It was only the truth.

“She deserved better, Ry.”

Ry didn’t say anything, didn’t even give her a glance. He just took the bag and scurried back over to their mother.

“Not one wrong move, Rylan. Not one ,” Jen said menacingly.

He gave a little nod. He took a step toward the cave entrance but then looked back at her and Jack. “Sorry, Chlo,” he said, before Jen pushed him out the crevice of the entrance.

It was funny. She almost believed he was.

But what she didn’t believe was that he’d help.