to claim what was mine. And then your nosy girlfriend comes back from the dead with a kid. And now her...” She curled her thin lips in disgust.
He’d been so scared that Josie had been alone with a suspected killer that he hadn’t been paying much attention to the conversation coming through the mike. But now he remembered Margaret’s surprise that Josie wasn’t dead. He’d thought it was because she’d incorrectly assumed Josie had been killed with him from the bomb set at his house, but he realized now that she’d never admitted to planting it.
But why? When she had confessed to murder, why would she bother denying attempted murder?
“You didn’t know Josie was alive?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I didn’t care whether she was or not until she showed up here with pictures of your damn kid in her purse and all those damn questions of hers. How could you have not realized she was a reporter?”
Especially given who her father was. Brendan had been a fool to not realize it. But then he hadn’t been thinking clearly. He never did around her.
He had just let Josie walk off with their son before he’d confirmed that she was safe. Hell, he’d told her she was—that Margaret wouldn’t be a threat anymore. But had Margaret ever been the threat to Josie?
“You didn’t know Josie was in witness relocation?”
“I didn’t know that anybody was in witness relocation,” the woman replied. A calculating look came over her face. “But perhaps I should talk to the marshals, let them know what I know about your father’s business and his associates.”
Despite foreboding clutching his stomach muscles into tight knots, he managed a short chuckle. “I gave them everything there was to know.” Along with the men who’d disappeared—either into prisons or the program.
“You have nothing to offer anyone anymore, Margaret,” he said as he slammed the door. Then he pounded on the roof, giving the go-ahead for the driver to pull away and take her to jail. He couldn’t hear her as the car drove off, but he could read her lips and realized she was cursing him.
But he was already cursing himself. “Where did Josie go?” he asked his mother.
“To see her father,” she said, as if he were being stupid again. “You and I should have gone along. I could have talked to her father and prepared him for seeing his daughter again after he spent the past four years believing she was dead.”
“Yeah, because you prepared me so well,” he said. He nearly hadn’t gone to the address his father had given him. But after he’d gotten off the bus, he’d been scared and hungry and cold. So he’d gone to the house and knocked on the door. And when she’d opened it, he’d passed out. Later he’d blamed the hunger and the cold, but it was probably because he’d thought he’d seen a ghost.
It had taken him years to live down the razzing from Roma’s other runaways.
“You’re right,” he said. “I should have gone with her.”
“Do you know which hospital?”
He nodded. He knew the hospital well. He just didn’t know how she’d gotten there. “What vehicle did she take?”
Roma shook her head. “She got a ride in a black SUV.”
“With whom?”
“A marshal, I think. The guy had his badge on a chain around his neck.” That was how the men who’d taken her into the program had worn theirs, or so she’d told him when she’d explained how she had disappeared. “He offered to drive her and CJ to see her father.”
How had the man known that her father was in the hospital? And why had a marshal walked into the middle of an FBI investigation? The two agencies worked together, but usually not willingly and not without withholding more information than they shared.
Brendan had become an FBI agent instead of a marshal because he’d resented the marshals for not letting his mother take him along—for making him mourn her for years, as he’d mourned Josie.
He had a bad feeling that he might be mourning her again. And CJ, too, if he didn’t find her. Charlotte wouldn’t have sent another marshal; she had trusted Brendan to keep Josie and their son safe.
And he had a horrible feeling, as his heart ached with the force of its frantic pounding, that he had failed.
* * *
“WHY—WHY DID you bring us here?” Josie asked as she rode up in the hospital elevator with her son and a madman.
Before Donald Peterson could reply, CJ answered,