The Lethal Bones Read online

  Hopefully.

  Approach directly from the back. Jab Dalton with the needle. Get the hell out of there before the poison kicked in. It was so simple it seemed like all he had to do was check a series of boxes, and it would be over.

  Ben took a glass from the server station and used the soda machine to fill it with Coke.

  Suddenly he had second thoughts. What if the needle doesn’t penetrate Dalton’s clothing? What if he’s wearing jeans, or leather, or some other thick material?

  It wouldn’t work. Ben needed to try this a different way. He took a deep breath, then removed his shoe. He pushed the needle out from the sole and set it on the tray next to the Coke, careful to not touch anywhere near its tip. He had to swallow several times to make his pulse anywhere close to normal.

  This is happening. In the next few seconds, he could take care of Dalton and end the threat.

  “Focus, Ben,” he whispered. “You can do this. You have to do this. If you do this, then everything is over. Everything goes back to normal.”

  One foot in front of the other, he opened the door to the private suite. The door pushed back, totally silent, no squeak from the hinges. First thing he saw was the enormous windows, angled down toward the field. A woman stood at the fifty-yard line, singing the national anthem — giant rippling American flags displayed on the jumbo screens.

  Ben's eyes drifted down to the interior, and it took him a second or two to adjust to the difference in brightness. There was a row of movie-theater seating, facing the window. Dalton was there, in one of those soft chairs.

  But when Ben stepped inside, there was not only Dalton but someone else, sitting next to him. Ben could see the spiky hair of Dalton immediately, but the other person was smaller. A woman, with a hoodie covering much of her face. Ben saw her at an angle, but he couldn't make out anything.

  He took a step forward and then saw the side of her face. Another step and he could see her in her entirety.

  His heart sank, then began beating rapidly.

  The woman's hands and ankles were bound with duct tape. Tears were streaming down her face. And, some thick metal collar thing sat around her neck, with beeping lights and electronics built into the side of it.

  Dalton turned in his chair. “Hello, Bennett. I was hoping you’d come.”

  28

  Two minutes earlier Dalton was shifting in his seat, growing impatient. He sighed, checked his smartwatch, looked out the massive floor-to-ceiling window, then looked down at his watch again.

  This had better not be a waste of time.

  “You can stop all that squirming,” he said when he noticed his companion doing the same thing, sitting in the leather armchair to his left. “Might as well watch the game until our friend arrives. They’re about to start the Star-Spangled Banner. You won’t want to miss this — I hear it’s supposed to be mostly in tune this time.”

  Julia, a woman Dalton had only known for a couple of hours, didn't oblige. She continued to wriggle in her seat, fighting in vain against the duct tape on her hands and legs. Her mouth moved, but no words came through the duct tape.

  “Poor Julia,” he said. She was just a pawn, a worthless nobody soccer mom who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time when Dalton needed an innocent like her to sacrifice for a worthy cause — he needed to make a point, and he needed help from someone just like her. And she would die, as soon as Harvey Bennett made an appearance and Dalton could be sure he was free and clear of the area.

  That was one thing the Club’s rule against killing civilians overlooked: how useful it could be when leverage was required for a situation. Civilians were easy to capture. Easy to kill. Easy to destroy evidence. Easy to make a pawn for a greater good, like framing Harvey Bennett for a murder.

  With Bennett in jail for Julia’s death, Dalton would have a thousand ways to take him out and make sure he could never tell anyone about what he’d seen in that alley a few days ago. And having him murdered in prison would avoid a lot of pesky questions from people in the Club. Julia’s death would be a non-issue. No one in the Club knew about her, and Dalton knew no one ever would. But if Dalton shot Bennett in the temple, people would know. They would find out, and then the wheels of bureaucracy would spin. In prison—or even in a temporary lockup awaiting arraignment—the rules were entirely different.

  “Distance and accountability,” he mused to Julia. “Accountability and distance. It’s a balancing act, really, but one I have to endure to get what I want. My father used to tell me about how anything easy isn't worth the trouble and anything hard contains the reward in the striving. Or, he said something like that. I don't remember for sure."

  The terror in her eyes excited him as she spied him from her seat. He was about to turn to her and make more conversation when the door behind him opened. Dalton turned back around, eyes front, to give Bennett a false sense of security.

  Dalton would let him come a few steps closer. He could even see Bennett’s reflection in the window, and he had no gun trained at the back of Dalton’s head. Just a tray with a soda on it.

  Dalton listened to the soft padding of Bennett’s tennis shoes against the carpet. He wondered what Ember’s plan was. A silenced bullet to the back of the head? Piano wire? No, those were too obvious. She’d recommend Ben make it look like an accident. Probably poison — a straight injection to give him a stroke or a heart attack. That’s why the cocky bastard isn’t armed.

  Dalton waited two more seconds; then he turned in his chair.

  “Hello, Harvey. I was hoping you’d come.”

  There was a total look of astonishment on Bennett’s face. He was in a ridiculous waiter getup, with a tray in his hands. The tray jiggled as Ben took a step back. After the sound of Bennett’s gasping and the echo of the crowd roaring at the conclusion of the national anthem died away, the only sound in the room was the hiss of carbonation from the soda on the tray.

  Ben reached toward the back of his waistband. Probably for a gun. Dalton didn’t give him time to draw it.

  Dalton reached over to a bowl of salt on the end table next to his seat and grabbed a handful. Then, he whisked it in Bennett’s direction. Enough of the powdery salt hit Ben’s face that he dropped the tray and wailed as his hands went to his eyes. The burning would disable him for a few seconds. Plenty of time.

  He considered hitting Bennett, kicking him or at least knocking him around a bit — he certainly wanted to — but thought better of it. He needed to keep the situation in his control, to keep his plan moving in the right direction. As much as he wanted to stay and watch Bennett suffer, he knew he couldn’t afford any deviation.

  Dalton jumped up and raced past Bennett, who was now on his knees, trying to rub the salt out of his eyes. Out the door into the antechamber, Dalton turned and locked the door from the outside and then took the small device from his pocket. He pressed a button on the side to begin the countdown.

  Two minutes.

  Two minutes until the device around Julia’s neck activated, injecting a half-dozen three-inch-long blades directly into her neck. It would be gruesome, and it wouldn’t kill her immediately, as the blades wouldn’t retract right away. She would likely bleed out, slowly, in severe pain. Removing the device would only increase the speed of her death.

  And Bennett would be wrapped up with a nice bow for the police to find while Dalton was nowhere in the area.

  Dalton ran hands down his clothes, smoothing them, giving himself a few seconds to lower his heart rate. He didn’t want security outside to notice anything strange. Then he checked his phone and sent a text message to The Chef to meet later tonight. It was time to put the endgame into motion.

  29

  As the sun set, the helicopter soared toward Fort Collins. Ember had her phone out, her fingers flying over the keyboard. It was much too loud inside the chopper to make phone calls, but she texted everyone she knew in the area. Assuming the worst-case scenario, she might find six or eight of Dalton's goons there t
o kill or kidnap Zach Bennett.

  Too many to take on by herself. She needed help. The problem was that she couldn't get anyone in the area to respond. She knew she could arrange for support from associates in Denver, but none of them could be at Fort Collins any sooner than a half hour. She couldn't wait that long. The helicopter would touch down in less than five minutes, and she could sprint to the Molecular & Radiological Biosciences Building in another five.

  If she wasn’t too late already.

  Had she made a grave error in judgment by recommending they stay away from Fort Collins and Zachary Bennett? She hadn’t thought Dalton would find him so fast. There was still supposed to be time to prevent that. She told herself this was the cost of operating at such a high level of distraction. At any other time, she would have been thinking clearly. She would have foreseen this and taken steps to prevent it.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have turned out any different, even if she had considered every possible angle. Maybe Dalton was that much smarter than her.

  Because now, if Dalton got to the kid first, he would kidnap Zach, which would lead Dalton to Ben’s mother. Dalton would certainly kill at least one of them, maybe both, if Ben didn’t surrender himself. Then, Dalton would shift tactics, using Ben as leverage against Ember.

  Worst, even if he failed in one of those areas, he was still working on something. That plan, Ember knew, was already in motion. But what was it? Why had he stocked a secret empty warehouse full of trucks?

  As much as she tried to let it go, she couldn't shake the feeling that she could have prevented all this. If she'd never involved Harvey Bennett at all, none of this would have happened. But maybe she should have gone to Fort Collins the moment Ben had lost his wallet. Maybe it would have all been worth it to involve another civilian, with the certainty she could keep him safe.

  Past choices didn’t matter now. Ember had to hope she could find a way to minimize the damage and deliver Ben’s little brother from harm.

  She held her headset’s microphone close to her mouth. “Have you seen any other air traffic in the area?”

  “No, ma’am,” the pilot said. “It’s all quiet up here.”

  Ember set her jaw as she unlocked her phone to check her messages. She’d sent Ben five texts, and he hadn’t returned any of them. No indication he had read them. That worried her even more. Her best case hope was that something had spooked him at the stadium and he had abandoned the operation. But, if that were true, why hadn’t he written back?

  She kept picturing him dead, Dalton standing over him, gloating.

  Or, worse than dead.

  “Ma’am,” the pilot said over her headset, “I need to set her down. This is as close as I can get you.”

  Ember thanked him and checked her weapons, her prize-possession Nighthawk Enforcer pistols.

  Before the landing skids had even touched down, Ember ripped off her headset and leaped from the side of the chopper. Gulping breaths of air and trying to summon whatever stores of energy she had left, she broke out into a dead sprint toward the building. Going in alone might be suicide, but she didn’t have a better option. This would either work or end in flames, with no in-between.

  She just had to hope she wasn’t too late.

  30

  As soon as he heard the door shut behind him, Ben lumbered to his feet. The salt in his eyes made streams of tears down his face. His vision was blurry and painful. He tried the door out to the antechamber, but it was locked.

  And now, he could hear the woman clearly, even though her frame was a blur across the room.

  “Help me!” she screamed, standing in front of the bay window overlooking the game. Her hands were bound as well as her feet, and she stood with her knees together, hopping over toward him. The piece of duct tape over her mouth had fallen away. It wiggled as she spoke. “Please — you have to help me. Get me out of this thing. I’m begging you. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll do whatever you say, but you have to help me.”

  Ben’s eyes had healed enough that now he could get a good look at the metal collar around the woman’s neck. He squinted, putting his face close enough to it to beat the blurriness in his vision. It was an inch thick and three inches tall, ringed with buttons and LEDs blinking various colors. And there was a number countdown on an LED panel.

  He knew for a fact that it hadn’t been lit up like that before Dalton had left.

  1:45, 1:44, 1:43. The numbers ticked down, once per second.

  She was wearing a bomb. Or a suicide choker device, or it contained a saw to take off her head, or something like that. Dalton must have activated it as soon as he’d run past Ben. And Ben had fewer than two minutes to figure out what it was and how to stop it.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, pulling back from the device.

  “Julia.”

  “Okay, Julia, I’m Ben. What is that thing around your neck? Did Dalton put that there?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” she said between sobs. “The guy who kidnapped me put it on me. He — he said it has knives built into the inside. Like, knives on springs that can poke inward. Long enough to sever my arteries. Please, you have to help me. Why is it beeping?”

  “There’s a countdown timer on it. Looks like ninety seconds left.”

  She slumped into one of the comfortable suite chairs, softly wailing as she brought her bound and quivering hands up to her face to smear the tears away. After a long, hitching breath, a sort of calm came over her. She no longer wailed, and her eyes fixed on a faraway point through the window.

  “I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend for dinner,” she said, in an absent-minded and dreamy tone. “He’s going to be worried about me.”

  Ben knelt in front of her and squinted again at the collar. His vision was improving by the second, but everything was still blurry. There were a number of buttons on the outside, as well as a tiny keypad. But he had no idea which buttons to press or what to enter. Anything he touched might trigger the collar. If he tried to rip it apart, that would definitely trigger it. Dalton would have made sure there was no easy way to force it open.

  He held his hands out, hovering in front of it. Too panicky to press anything. Seventy-five seconds left on the countdown.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked. Her voice had risen in volume and pitch.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I need a second to think.”

  He stood up and ran toward the door on the other side. Maybe there was enough time to go for help. But, he couldn't get the door open. The handle wouldn't turn. Dalton had locked them in there.

  He put his mouth up to the crack and yelled, as loud as he could. But, he knew it wouldn’t do any good. The rooms were deep and were separated from stadium security by that antechamber room.

  He and Julia were stuck in here. No way to leave. He was going to have to watch her die, knowing he could do nothing to stop it.

  Ben returned to her as the LED readout ticked 0:55, 0:54. He didn’t want her to see the hopelessness in his eyes, but Ben didn’t know how to hide it. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. He could feel the same emotion coming from her. She was blank, flat, and seemingly-calm, but Ben assumed she was entering a state of shock, not actually calming down.

  “My boyfriend’s name is Dave,” she said. “David Turner. He’s a software engineer at Google in Boulder. Can you tell him… tell him I love him?”

  Ben nodded, but he knew it wouldn't matter. This whole scene was set to pin her death on him, for the cops to find Ben with Julia's literal blood on his hands. Dalton had won. He'd played Ben with a skill beyond anything Ben could imagine. The tip to come to find him at the stadium, this elaborate ruse. All of it. Dalton had beaten him. And, because of the stupid Club rules, Ember wasn't anywhere nearby. He was on his own, and there was nothing he could do to save this woman.

  Ben looked up at the collar and noticed something he hadn’t seen before, as the readout ticked down to less than thirty seconds left.

  And
then, an idea occurred. “I know something I can try.”

  31

  Ember slowed when she could see the Biosciences building. Four stories, stone, with darkened windows. Two elaborate columns held up the faux porch above the front door, and a dark statue of something she couldn’t see stood in a nearby garden. The entire scene was washed with a gentle blue glow from the university’s emergency services communication pole that stood in the garden across from the one with the statue.

  Her heart pounded in her chest, likely due to the four straight minutes of flat-out sprinting she’d done to get here from the helicopter landing zone. She couldn’t be entirely sure, though. A four-minute sprint wasn’t the most taxing thing she’d put her body through, so she wondered if some of her elevated heart rate was due to simple anxiety.

  She crouched at the edge of a bus stop and studied the exterior. It seemed quiet, with no sign of anything out of place. There were a few cars in the lot out front, a few random dim lights on in the building above.

  Nothing indicated a problem, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. Just because there were no muzzle flashes in the windows or looming shadows creeping around didn’t mean Zach wasn’t in trouble in there.

  She jogged the rest of the way around to the rear entrance of the building. The door was unlocked, and she drew her pistols as she slipped inside. A long hallway extended from the entrance, with overhead lights flicking on when her motion triggered them. She waited, completely still, to see how long it would take the lights to dim. Only sixty seconds passed before the lights flickered off, starting with the one closest to her, then the next one down the hall.