All He Has Left(10)

He quickly answered it. “Baby! Are you OK?”

There was no response. Just dead air.

“Piper, are you there?”

Again, she didn’t say anything. But Jake could suddenly hear someone else speaking, although it sounded muffled and from a distance. He cupped the phone closely to his ear, listening as carefully as he could. It sounded like a man and a woman. Was Piper in the room with them? What was going on?

Man: “What the hell was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just leave her there!”

Woman: “I told you just to scare them, you idiot. Not to shoot anyone!”

Man: “It was an accident. Stupid woman went for my gun. It just went off.”

Woman: “This is bad. So very bad.”

Man: “I knew I shouldn’t have gone over there.”

Woman: “All right, look, we just gotta calm down a second and think.”

Man: “I need to talk to Beth. Tell her what’s going on.”

Woman: “No, no . . . not yet. She’s going to completely freak out.”

Man: “We can’t just let her talk to her boss like nothing happened.”

Woman: “Let me figure out a plan.”

Man: “It’s your damn plan that got us into this mess in the first place.”

Woman: “Don’t you talk to me that way!”

Man (sighing): “What the hell do I do with the girl?”

Woman: “We keep her in the barn until we figure this out. She could provide some kind of leverage for us if this goes really bad.”

Man: “What if the police come around asking questions?”

A long pause.

Woman: “Then we do what we gotta do with her.”

Oh God. Jake could feel his heart pumping so fast.

Woman: “Hey, take your hands out of your pockets.” The woman’s voice had grown louder, as if she were getting closer to the location of Piper’s phone. “Damn it! Give me that!”

“Daddy!” Jake heard Piper yell.

Then the phone line went dead.





SIX


Jake stared wide-eyed at the phone in his shaky fingers.

What if the police come around asking questions?

Then we do what we gotta do with her.

The woman’s words sent a chill to his core. He tried to push the overwhelming panic out of his mind for a moment and replay everything he could about the brief conversation between the two people. They were holding Piper in a barn somewhere. The woman had a raspy smoker’s voice. The man sounded younger, but he couldn’t be sure—Jake hadn’t gotten a good look at the guy who’d climbed into the tow truck. The two people talked in a way that told him they were very familiar with each other. Husband and wife? Something else? They had mentioned someone’s name: Beth. But this didn’t trigger anything for him. Jake didn’t know any Beth. They couldn’t be too far away with Piper. It had been only thirty minutes since he’d watched the truck disappear.

They clearly had not known about Piper’s phone. His daughter had put it in her back pocket this morning, so they probably hadn’t noticed it. Piper must’ve somehow pulled it out, placed the call to him, and then put her hands in her hoodie’s front pockets along with the phone. That was an incredibly brave thing for her to do. This meant she was thinking on her feet—which was encouraging. Although he wished she’d called 911. But she’d put her hope in her father instead. Hearing her yell out Daddy! was a dagger straight to his heart.

Jake again thought about what Caitlin had said earlier. What happened wasn’t an accident. Was she talking about being shot? He shook his head. Clearly, that wasn’t an accident. She had to be referring to something else. Could it be connected to her job at the FBI? Caitlin had just started working there in a low-level administrative role. But if it was FBI related, then how would Piper know anything about it? The man on the phone had said it was the woman’s plan that had gotten them into this mess in the first place. That suddenly struck him a bit differently. Could Caitlin possibly have been talking about the hit-and-run accident? Did Piper know some kind of truth about that? Could these people somehow be connected to what had happened last year? His head began swirling. If the crash wasn’t an accident, who would’ve wanted to intentionally harm him and his family? Jake found himself going back to the night of the crash, something a therapist had encouraged him to stop doing in order to allow himself to start healing. But he had no choice now.

There had been a lot of people around that time who were angry at him—but one person stood out from the rest: Judd McGee, the father of Quinn McGee, the star quarterback whom Jake had kicked off the football team. Judd was a burly man who worked in an auto shop; he always had grease on his shirts and pants, and alcohol all over his breath. Judd had come to a couple of practices in the weeks after his son was removed from the team, trying to ruffle feathers with intoxicated threats, talking about how Jake was ruining his kid’s future. Jake had always kept his cool and defused each situation. But could Judd have snapped in a drunken rage a year ago? Judd likely had access to a tow truck. But then why would all this have suddenly resurfaced tonight? Why would he have taken Piper a year after the car crash?

Jake didn’t know but felt eager to talk to Judd and get some answers. However, he was in a difficult position. Should he tell the detective about this conversation? The man was clearly skeptical of everything he’d said so far. Talking to him again could waste precious time since the detective might not believe him anyway. Plus, if the police got too close, these people had made their intentions very clear—they were going to kill Piper. Jake thought he could probably track down Judd McGee quickly. That might lead him straight to Piper. He had to get the hell out of there right now. He might be Piper’s only chance. But how? He was locked in the back of a damn police car. And no one in a uniform seemed too eager to let him walk away from this crime scene anytime soon.