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“She wouldn’t be the first woman to follow the money, Merino. You know that,” Jordan pointed out, clearly referring to the rich bastard his first wife had died with.
It was well known that Joe refused to touch the money his parents made available to him. He used the inheritance his grandfather had left him, but his parents’ money he had never touched. Not because of any anger or animosity toward it or his parents. There was none. He loved them, as interfering and broody as they could be. But he didn’t want their money. With the inheritance he had, and his salary, he had more than he needed. More than Bettina would have needed if she hadn’t gotten hooked on drugs.
“If Maggie wanted money, she wouldn’t help kill to get it,” he snarled. “Give me a week, maybe two. Let me see what I can learn.”
“She has to go voluntarily,” Johnson warned him. “We can’t make it official.”
“She’ll go.”
Maggie had trusted him a long time ago. Once, she might have even loved him. He accepted the guilt from the past on his shoulders. That didn’t mean he would allow more lives to be lost because of Grant’s hatred and greed.
“I’ll leave it in your hands then,” Jordan murmured.
Mark Johnson nodded then. “Keep me up to date, Joe, and hurry. We need this information now.”
* * *
Maggie had been telling herself for a week that she would wake up, that this was all a horrible dream, that any minute she was going to wake up and it was all going to be over. But, as she sat in the interrogation room and stared into Matthew Folker’s suspicious gaze, she realized she wasn’t going to wake up. It wasn’t a nightmare, it was reality.
Where was Joe? The question kept racing through her mind, tearing through her emotions. She hadn’t thought Joe would desert her, that he would allow Detective Folker to question her without his presence. They had been friends once, more than friends.
Then again, he had loved Grant like a brother, and had never realized how much Grant hated him. But Maggie had known. For two years she had listened to Grant rage about Joe. The petty jealousy and fury Grant felt toward the other man had begun frightening Maggie within months of their marriage.
“Maggie, let me help you.” Matthew leaned closer, his hazel eyes compassionate as he watched her. “We’re not interested in prosecuting you, not if we get that information. Otherwise…” Otherwise, they would hang her out to dry on whatever trumped-up evidence Grant had left.
“So, it wouldn’t matter to you if I had been a part of this?” she accused, as she waved her hand toward the pictures before her, the morgue shots of the young women who had been killed because of the horrible drug Grant had helped to distribute. “As long as you get whatever Grant had hidden, then you would just wipe the slate clean?”
“I give you my promise, Maggie. The DA will put it in writing…”
“Then you’re a fool,” she screamed, jerking to her feet as she grabbed the nearest photo and slapped it beneath his face. “You look at her, Matthew. She was savaged. And you’re willing to let go someone you suspect of being capable of helping in it?”
She was shaking so violently she could feel the very core of her threatening to shatter apart. She couldn’t fight her tears any longer, or her rage. She wanted to leave here, she wanted to go home, and then she wanted to find whatever the hell it was she was supposed to have and throw it in Folker’s face.
“Sit down, Maggie.” He sat back in his chair, calm, remote.
She had known the detective for nearly ten years now, since she had come to the station with her father when he worked with the paper. It was as much her world as the newspaper office was.
“Don’t tell me to sit down.” She shook her head furiously. “I did not do this, Matthew. Not in any part.” She pointed a shaky finger at the pictures between them. “And if you had the evidence you say you do, you and that son-of-a-bitch Jordan would have arrested me while he was spitting his accusations in my face earlier.”
The door opened at that second. Maggie jerked around, her heart exploding in her chest at the sight of the man standing there: tall, remote, his brown eyes so cold and hard they were like chips of dark ice.
“No, Maggie, they wouldn’t have arrested you,” Joe told her softly. “Because I won’t let them. Now get your stuff together and let’s get the hell out of here.”
Out of there? To where? She had thought he would be her salvation, that if anyone believed in her, Joe would. But as she stared into the cold hard depths of his eyes, she was terribly afraid that Joe didn’t believe in her any more than anyone else did.
chapter 2
one week later
maggie stared into the misty morning of the South Carolina mountains and contemplated mistakes. Past mistakes, present mistakes, and how they would lead into the future. She was twenty-eight years old, and she might not live to see twenty-nine. The choices she had made in the past two and a half years had led her to this mountain, this cabin, and the man she couldn’t forget.
She had been such a fool. Two and a half years before she had walked out of Joe Merino’s life, believing she had left in time to save her heart, to go on and to find happiness with someone else.
He hadn’t loved her. They were damned good in bed, but he had made it clear he didn’t want or need her in his life. Real clear. Another-woman-on-his-arm-type clear.
She curled her feet beneath her, tucking her body tighter in the rocking chair that sat on the weathered wood porch of the cabin Joe had brought her to a week before.
That had been the beginning of her downfall into hell. She had broken all ties to Joe Merino two years and six months before. Several months later, she had met Grant Samuels. Six months after meeting, they had married.
