Justice is Coming. Delores Fossen
have two sisters,” she added. “They’re nineteen and twenty. Barely adults, and they’ve been through more than enough with my father’s arrest and disappearance. They don’t deserve to die because someone’s targeting you.”
“You could have arranged for them and you to be protected,” he pointed out.
“I did the best I could, but there’s no place to hide from these men. Eventually they’d get through any security I could set up. They proved that by hacking into my computer and leaving that bogus info.”
Declan made another sound that led her to believe he was making fun of her.
“You ever killed a man before?” he challenged, but he didn’t wait for Eden to answer. “My guess is no.”
He put his face right next to hers. So close that the brim of his midnight-black Stetson scraped against her forehead. It was hard to tell where the Stetson ended and his hair began, because they were the same color.
“And my second guess is that you can’t kill me,” he went on. “Of course, that’s not really a guess since I wouldn’t let you get the chance.”
“I wasn’t planning to kill you,” she said, but had to clear her throat and repeat it so it’d have sound. Great. She was acting like a wuss rather than a P.I. with her family’s lives, and hers, at stake.
“You’re here with a gun,” he reminded her.
“I didn’t intend to use it. Well, not to shoot you anyway. I will have to fire, though, because I want whoever’s on the other end of that camera to believe you’re dead. And to make sure that person doesn’t come in here and try to do the job himself, I need to fire soon.”
With his gaze still pinned to hers, he backed up again. “Maybe we should do just that—let the person come in here and try to kill me,” he suggested. “If he’s really out there. He won’t get far. I’m thinking a step in the house. Two at most. And I wouldn’t let him get off the first shot.”
“I don’t doubt it. But I can’t risk that. His death could start a chain reaction that’ll get my sisters killed.”
Thankfully, he didn’t disagree with that. Well, not verbally anyway. “Tell me everything you know about the person who hired you to do this.”
“There isn’t time.” Eden tried to look out the window to make sure no one was coming, but the angle was wrong. “He said I had to have the job done by seven-thirty. It’s seven-twenty now.”
“Make time,” he countered.
Eden huffed and tried to think of the fastest explanation. It wasn’t too hard because she didn’t know a lot of facts. “I don’t have a clue who he is. As I said, he used an untraceable cell phone. It’s the same with the info he emailed me about you. I tried to track down the source, but it led me to a coffee shop in San Antonio where hundreds of people use the internet each day. There aren’t any security cameras and no surveillance feed from nearby businesses.”
He gave her another hard look. “What info about me did he email you?”
“It’s on my phone.”
Eden glanced in the direction of her pocket, where his hip was still brushing against hers. She waited until he nodded before she reached between them, and the back of her hand did more than brush. She had no choice but to touch him in a place that she shouldn’t be touching.
He still didn’t back away.
But Declan did make a slight sound of discomfort.
Eden knew how he felt. This wasn’t comfortable for her, either, and it was even worse because touching him wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as it should have been. After all, he was holding her at gunpoint.
Still, it was time to poke that rattler.
She went through the emails on her phone until she reached the first one the man had sent her. It was a series of photos with just four words: Your target, Declan O’Malley.
She went through the shots, the first a recent one of him wearing his gun and badge and going into the marshals’ building in Maverick Springs. It appeared to have been taken from a camera with a long-range lens.
Eden showed Declan the photo and went to the next one, a close-up of him at the diner across the street from his office. Probably taken with the same long-range camera since it had a grainy texture.
“Did you have any idea you were being photographed?” she asked, hoping that maybe he’d seen the person who’d snapped these shots.
Declan shook his head, and while his expression didn’t change much, Eden figured that had to bother him. It was a violation, something she knew loads about since this whole computer-hacking incident.
She clicked to another photo of Declan in his truck, turning onto the road that led to his foster family’s ranch and to his own place. The next shot was of his license plate.
And then Eden got to the last one.
The puzzling one.
It was an old wedding photo of four adults and a young boy. Even though the person who’d emailed it to her hadn’t identified by name all the people in the group shot, he had said that the child was Declan. He was about four years old, dressed in his Sunday best, and the people surrounding him were his parents, an uncle and the uncle’s bride. They were all smiling. A happy-family photo.
It didn’t make Declan happy now.
He closed his eyes for just a split second, and then he cursed, using some really foul language. And Eden knew why. She, too, was personally familiar with bad memories. And despite the smiles, this photo was indeed a bad memory, because in less than twenty-four hours after it’d been taken, Declan’s life had turned on a dime.
Or rather turned on a different kind of metal.
Some bullets.
“The information this hacker gave me was that the photo was of your family in Germany,” Eden said. “They were all murdered when you were four years old.”
Declan took a moment, inhaled a slightly deeper breath. “Why the hell did he send you that?”
Eden shook her head. “I was hoping you could tell me. The person also said your name had been changed after the murders.”
“It was. Twice. But as far as I know, no other living person has that specific information. Except maybe my family’s killer.”
Was that it? Was that the connection?
“What does this photo have to do with the order the hacker gave me to kill you?” she asked.
He snatched the phone from her, backed up, but he still didn’t lower his gun. He kept it aimed right at her while he glanced out the window. Maybe to see if the camera installer was returning. He apparently wasn’t, because Declan’s attention went back to the photos. There weren’t more to see, but he paused for a long time on that last one.
The bad-memory one.
“I’ve been digging, but I don’t have many answers,” she admitted. “Still, I have to believe that picture has something to do with all of this or he wouldn’t have sent it to me.”
Eden paused, hoping Declan didn’t shoot her for asking what she had to ask. “What do you remember about your family’s murders? Who killed them? Because the person sent me links of the old crime, but all the articles said the culprit was an unknown assailant.”
A sterile term for something far from sterile.
“I don’t know who killed them.” He was in control again. The tough cowboy lawman, and he was glaring at her, maybe because he didn’t believe she was innocent in all of this.
And maybe she wasn’t.
Eden didn’t know if she was one hundred percent blameless, but