LITMIR.BIZ

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nothing. She wanted it all. That must be why she wanted to hurt Josie and my son, why she wanted to kill them, too—to make sure there were no more O’Hannigans.”

      “Your father’s damn codicil,” she remarked.

      He grinned as his mother and stepmother glared at each other through the back window of the police car. “She didn’t know about you.”

      His mother shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not an O’Hannigan anymore.”

      No. She’d dropped her married name when the marshals had moved her. To the runaways she’d fostered, she’d been just Roma. Perhaps they’d all known the Jones surname was an alias.

      “She thought you were dead,” Brendan remarked as he opened the back door to the police car.

      “What the hell is it with you people?” Margaret asked. “Is anyone really dead?” She turned her glare on Brendan. “First you come back from the dead and show up 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, “We came to see Grampa.” He’d even pushed the button to the sixth floor. “We shoulda brought Gramma.”

      No. Brendan was already going to lose one person he loved—if Josie didn’t think of something to at least save their son. She didn’t want him to lose his mother, too.

      She looked up at their captor. “We should have left him with his grandmother,” she said. “And his father. He isn’t part of this.”

      “He’s your son,” Peterson said. “Your father’s grandson. He’s very much a part of this.”

      She shook her head. “He’s a three-year-old child. He has nothing to do with any of this.”

      The elevator lurched to a halt on the sixth floor, nearly making her stomach lurch, too, with nerves and fear. With a gun shoved in the middle of her back, the U.S. marshal pushed her out the open doors. She held tight to CJ’s hand.

      He kept digging the gun deeper, pushing her down the hall toward her father’s room. A man waited outside. He was dressed like an orderly, as he’d been dressed the night he’d held Brendan back from getting on the elevator with her and CJ. She’d been grateful for his intervention then.

      He wasn’t going to intervene tonight—just as his partners in crime had refused to be swayed from the U.S. marshal’s nefarious plan. But still she had to try. “Please,” she said, “you don’t want to be part of this.”

      “He’s already part of it,” Peterson replied. “Even before he set the bomb, he was already wanted for other crimes.”

      She understood now. “You tracked them down on their outstanding warrants but you worked out a deal for not bringing them in.”

      Peterson chuckled. “You can’t stop asking questions, can’t stop trying to ferret out all the information you can.”

      She shuddered, remembering that Brendan had accused her of the same thing. No wonder he hadn’t been able to trust her.

      “But you and your father won’t be able to broadcast this story,” he said.

      “You’re not going to get away,” she warned him.

      “I know. But it’s better this way—better to see his face and yours than have someone else take the pleasure for me.” He pushed the barrel deeper into her

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