“He killed Roger Morton,” Kate reminded him. “We just couldn’t prove it.”
“That was personal for him. He is capable of murder, but he much prefers to build a network of like-minded people.”
“Don’t underestimate him,” Lucy said.
“I’m not. You have.”
“I have not. I know exactly who he is and what he is capable of.”
“You’ve underestimated his obsession with you.”
She frowned.
“He thinks of you as his daughter, Lucy. How many times did he call you Monique? He used to brush it off when you worked for him, but more than once after that he talked about you to other people as his daughter. Jack told me, when he was interrogating him in New York three years ago, that Paxton said he had to protect his daughter. That was you, Lucy, not a slipup. He was thinking about you, not Monique.”
“Not if you think like he does. That’s why I said you’re too close to this. You’re not in his head, Lucy, and the only way you’re going to stop him is to think like him. So, a father protects his daughter. A father might think that no man is good enough for his daughter. Sean and Paxton have butted heads from the beginning. Paxton has never thought that Sean was good enough for you.”
“But he’s not my father!” she exclaimed.
Dillon didn’t say a word. No one did.
She closed her eyes. He was right. From the beginning, Paxton had always treated her with affection—not sexual, but fatherly. They’d been friends, but she’d always kept him at arm’s length. Partly because she didn’t bring anyone into her inner circle as she still battled the trauma of being kidnapped and raped; partly because he was too nice to her. She enjoyed working for the justice committee in the Senate, but she didn’t want any special favors. And she knew from the beginning that she looked like his dead daughter. She knew from the beginning that the man who’d hurt her had killed Monique.
You should have run far away from him long ago. How can you not be partly responsible for these events?
“Okay,” she said quietly. “Think like Jonathan Paxton. He sees me as a surrogate daughter.”
“Yes. And he thinks he would be a better father to you than your own. More, he thinks you made an unwise choice in marriage, but he wasn’t around to guide you. It’s a combination of guilt and regret. He blames Sean for taking you from him—and while what happened in D.C. wasn’t Sean’s doing, you were with Sean when you cut all ties with Paxton. He could easily convince himself that Sean told you to do it. He kept tabs on you, and you walked back into his life—in his mind—when you and Noah investigated the string of prostitution murders in D.C. before you joined the academy. He blackmailed Sean into retrieving the computer chip that had been stolen from him. And then what happened? Sean kept the chip. Not only that, but Sean went undercover to take him down.”
“Many FBI agents were involved in that investigation. Noah, Rick, Suzanne—”
“But they were doing their job, right? Remember, he sees law enforcement as literal enforcers. He’s not going to fault them for investigating him. But Sean? A reformed hacker who took his daughter from him? Sean—in Paxton’s mind—is no better than any other criminal walking the streets. And yet Sean took him down. If Sean had never taken that chip, Paxton’s plan to kill all those prisoners may have worked. And then after? Sean moved to San Antonio with you. You married him.”
Dillon paused and was about to say something else when Patrick asked, “I don’t see it, Dillon. He hasn’t reached out to Lucy in all these years, he could have done a dozen other things to screw with Sean.”
“We know that he kept tabs on Lucy when she was in D.C. I think we can assume he kept tabs on her when she moved to San Antonio.”
She felt physically ill.
“Assume, Lucy, that Paxton knows what has gone on in your life—especially the high-profile situations. The situations where you were in danger.”
“I’m a federal agent. My life is sometimes going to be in danger.”
“It wasn’t because of your job that Liam kidnapped you and took you to Mexico.”
“For shit’s sake, Dillon! Sean had nothing to do with that.”