“But Mickey said that was the plan. End of discussion. That’s when I realized that I’d be left dead, too. He’d brought me in specifically to take the fall. The clock was ticking. I had to stop it.”

“By calling her?” Hickam asked. “Why didn’t you tip the sheriff’s office, or us?”

“I’ll get to that,” Shaw said, hedging. “I went along when Mickey suggested we grab a drink at that joint before checking into a motel. Before we went inside, I excused myself and followed the arrow pointing around back to the toilet.” He looked at Jordie. “That’s when I called you.”

“How’d you know how to reach her?” Wiley asked.

“Panella had given Mickey the skinny on her, everything, including her cell number. Mickey shared it all with me ’cause he thought I would be dead in a few hours, so what did it matter?”

“So back to why you called her…” Wiley said, leading him.

“Mistakenly, I thought that crossing paths with her the night before the hit—especially with a local cop on her tail—would rattle Mickey and Panella enough to cancel it. At the very least postpone it. Which would have given me time to hang with Mickey, work from the inside, possibly track down Josh and, more particularly, Panella. But, instead of telling us to back off, Panella ordered Mickey to go ahead, to pop her then and there. I couldn’t let that happen.”

He paused and locked eyes with Jordie, willing her to remember what he’d told her before sending her out to Joe Wiley.

She said nothing for a moment, then a terse “Thank you for saving my life.”

“You’re welcome.”

But he was far from forgiven. Still seething, she grated out, “Why did you do the rest of it?”

Without excuse or qualification or missing a beat, he answered. “Because I want that goddamn fucking Panella.”

When he’d appeared in the open doorway, Jordie had barely contained a cry of joy. Now she wanted nothing more than to scratch out his damn lying eyes.

“I have nothing to do with Panella,” she said. “Since you have the skinny on me, you should know that. Once Mickey was out of commission, why didn’t you tell me you were FBI? Or just leave me there and drive away?”

“Because your brother is a friggin’ fugitive, Jordie. You’re the one and only link to him, and Panella is at the end of that chain.”

“In other words, you decided to use me as bait.”

“Okay. If you like that word better. I called you to the bar primarily to jinx the hit. But it served a dual purpose.”

“What was the other?”

“To test your loyalty to Josh. I dropped his name; you burned rubber getting there.”

“You bastard.”

He didn’t blink. “It’s been said.”

She rolled her lips inward, clinging to her temper by a thread which was unraveling a little more with each word from his mouth. Clearly, he shared Wiley and Hickam’s suspicion that she had been, and possibly was still, involved on some level in her brother’s criminal activity.

Joe Wiley said, “Ms. Bennett, did you know that Josh reneged on his deal with us and had run off?”

“No. Not until he told me.”

Shaw said, “For whatever it’s worth, Wiley, she seemed shocked when I told her that Josh had been missing for four days. I don’t think she knew. But that didn’t cancel the possibility of her knowing something. I knew she would be afraid of me because she’d seen me kill Mickey. I figured I could use that fear to get information from her.”

Hearing him admit it snapped her control. She shot from her chair and, planting her palms on the tabletop, leaned across it toward him. “You badgered me for hours about that damn phone call!”

“Only after you lied about it.”

“You terrorized me.”

“I guess. To some extent.”

“There’s no extent to terrorism.”

“You’re right,” he said, raising his voice to match hers. “I kept at you, thinking that I’d wear you down until you let something slip about Josh or Panella, which could have proved vital to their capture.”

“You browbeat me about that call, and all along it was you.”

“What matters more than who called is that you responded. You came running in record time. You made sure you weren’t followed. When your surveillance failed to show up, either inside the bar or out on the parking lot, you flunked the test.”

“To hell with you and your test!”

“You shook that tail because you expected somebody to be waiting for you in that beer joint. Who?”

She was about to fire a comeback when her attorney gave the hem of her jacket a hard tug, pulling her back into her chair. Taking the advice being urgently whispered in her ear, she fell silent.

During her shouting match with Shaw, Wiley looked like a spectator at a tennis match, his head swiveling back and forth between them. Hickam kept up the infernal pecking on the screen of his iPad. She couldn’t help but wonder what he was taking down. The session was still being video recorded. Was Hickam adding color commentary, details they would later use against her?

She strived to mask the emotions roiling inside her.

Eventually, Shaw resumed, addressing her. “When I stopped to switch license plates, I used your phone to call myself, so I could show you later that I had tried that number.”

“You’re full of clever tricks.”

He raised a shoulder.

“And bullshit.”

“Effective bullshit.”

Her face burned when reminded of how effective his words, both sinister and provocative, had been. She wanted to kill him. “You called that phantom number several times, hinting that Josh might answer, knowing full well he wouldn’t.”

“Another tactic to try and break you.”

“Well you failed, Special Agent Kinnard. You’ve got nothing to show for all your testing and clever tricks. You got nothing helpful from me.”

“You’d be surprised what I found helpful.”

“My brother is still at large.”

“Which is why you’re still in custody.”

Chapter 27

A taut silence followed that fiery exchange, which Joe and Hick had tacitly agreed to let play out without interruption. Adrian Dover softly asked Jordie if she would like to take a breather. “Maybe some water?”

She declined with a brusque no.

“I’d like some,” Kinnard said. “I’m supposed to be getting fluids.”

Joe got up and walked over to a small table stocked with bottles of water. “You should be readmitted to a hospital,” he said as he uncapped one and passed it to Kinnard. “Under an assumed name, naturally.”

“Maybe later.”

When he finished drinking, Hick asked him where he’d had his burner phone hidden. “It wasn’t on you. The barn was searched. Wasn’t in the car.”

“I left it in the woods where I stopped to switch car tags. Sealed in a ziplock and stuffed in a hole in a tree trunk. I told Morrow where he could find it. He retrieved it and brought it when he came to the hospital.”