The Marshal's Hostage - By Delores Fossen Page 0,65

a high pitch to her voice. More than nerves. Her hand was shaking, too. Probably because she’d never done anything like this.

That only made the situation more dangerous.

Joelle didn’t like her odds with a shaky kidnapper who wanted to do God knows what to her.

“I’m guessing this means you killed your husband,” Joelle said, trying to keep an eye on the driver, Dallas and Sarah. The mud was slowing them down, but Dallas was quickly losing ground.

“You already knew that,” Sarah insisted.

But Joelle hadn’t. Not until now, and now seemed a little too late.

“You and Dallas put it all together.” Sarah kept glancing back at Dallas, too. “And then you found the safe beneath the floor.”

Joelle shook her head and nearly blurted out what exactly was in that safe, but she decided to go with a question instead. “What do you think the CSIs will find that will implicate you?”

“Too much.” Sarah’s mouth was shaking now. In fact, nearly every part of her was. “I threatened to kill him, and he said he’d recorded the threat. That he’d lock it away to give to the cops if I tried to do anything.”

Joelle didn’t tell her there wasn’t a tape or anything else that would incriminate the woman. She just waited, listening, and she prayed that she could figure out a way to stop all of this before Dallas got hurt.

“I need Dallas to destroy everything in that safe,” Sarah continued. “As long as I have you, Dallas will do that. He’ll do anything to protect you. I could see it in his eyes.”

Yes, Dallas would indeed do anything to protect her, and that’s what scared Joelle most. She could no longer see him on the trail behind the truck, but at the speed they were moving, he’d soon catch up. And the hired gun behind the wheel might try to shoot him even if it meant Sarah had to rely on someone else to destroy evidence she believed existed.

“You just couldn’t leave it be, could you?” Sarah grumbled.

No. Not with the governor’s inquiry and not with Dallas’s prints on the knife. Of course, they now knew how the prints had gotten there.

“Why did you kill him?” Joelle asked. Not that she had a burning desire to know, but she wanted to keep Sarah talking while Joelle tried to come up with a way out of this.

“It was a bad day,” Sarah answered. She kept her attention nailed to Joelle. “Jonah ordered me to get Declan from the infirmary, but he wasn’t there. He’d sneaked out or something.”

“Because Webb had beaten him,” Joelle provided.

Anger flashed through Sarah’s eyes. “Because he deserved it. That brat was always causing trouble, and he’d started a firestorm that day. When I told Jonah that Declan wasn’t in the infirmary, he didn’t believe me.”

Joelle glanced behind them. Still no sign of Dallas. “Webb thought you were protecting Declan?”

“Yes!” Sarah said with a curse. “I wouldn’t do that. Not for him, not for any of you. None of you ever lifted a finger to help my boy, Billy, when Jonah was beating on him.”

“We were kids,” Joelle reminded her.

“Kids having sex. You were all disgusting as far as I was concerned, and if Declan had been where he was supposed to be, I would have taken him to my husband’s office.”

For no doubt what would have been another beating.

“Jonah said if I didn’t find Declan in five minutes he was going to give me what Declan was supposed to get.” Sarah’s mouth tightened. “I couldn’t go through that again. So I pretended to look for the brat, but I put on some gloves and used the knife that I knew had Dallas’s prints.”

“You wanted to set Dallas up?” Joelle shook her head. “Why?”

“I didn’t set him up. Well, not at first. I just wanted some insurance in case the cops pointed the finger at me. I locked the knife away, and the day they found Jonah’s body, I sent the knife to Owen and told him to make up a story about how he got it.”

So Owen had known for almost two months that Sarah had killed her husband. And yet he’d withheld that and instead implicated Dallas and had tried to force her into marriage. That shouldn’t have surprised her, but Joelle felt even more disgusted with the man.

“Unlike the rest of you, Owen was always a good boy,” Sarah concluded. Her gaze slashed to the driver. “Make sure everything’s all right at the house, that