Page 10 of Fatal Mistake
Her brain cleared for a moment and it hit her then. Hard.
She wasn’t safe. Not here. Not anywhere. Not as long as Oren ran free.
Chapter 4
Dallas, Texas
Monday, August 1
12:25 p.m.
Cal curled his fingers and slammed his fist into the Honda Accord’s charred body. The metal sizzled from water blasted through firefighters’ hoses and heat from the explosion scorched his knuckles, sending pain radiating up his fingers.
Too bad. He deserved to suffer. He should have prevented Keeler from setting off his latest bomb. Could have prevented it if he’d only worked harder, smarter, longer. Anything but this destruction. With it being the first of August, Cal had known Keeler would detonate a bomb. Yet Cal had failed, adding an additional ulcer in his gut. Worse yet, Keeler had now departed from his pattern of targeting Muslim women to killing women Tara Parrish had recently befriended.
Choosing women outside the D.C. area made Keeler unpredictable. A loose cannon and even harder to find.
Cal hit the frame another time. Then again and again. Once for each of Keeler’s victims. Heat blistered his knuckles, the pain intensifying, but he didn’t care. He’d arrived too late today, much like the day Keeler had nearly killed Tara.
Even three months later, Cal’s failure to capture the Lone Wolf haunted his dreams. He’d had a split-second decision to make in the woods that fateful night, and he’d chosen not to go after Keeler to save Tara’s life. Now Keeler had strapped a necklace bomb around this woman’s throat and claimed his seventh victim.
Cal stared at the car’s burned-out shell. The horror this woman must have experienced lingered in the air and ate at Cal’s insides. Four more women had died since he’d last laid eyes on Tara in the hospital. Innocents. All of them. They didn’t deserve death or this horrific treatment. They deserved better from Cal. So did the others. The ones he continued to seek justice for.
Cal thrust another fist at the car. Something he’d taken to doing all the time. A wall. A door. Any solid object that could take his pummeling. He had to get out his anger at Keeler, at himself for failing, or he’d explode.
He tightened his fist and lifted his hand.
“Stand down, Riggins.” Max White’s voice came from behind.
The leader of their team, he was the reason for their team nickname. Reporters had combined his last name with the team’s many heroic rescues and conflict resolutions and dubbed them the White Knights.
Max curled his fingers around Cal’s wrist and dragged him off to the side where shadows from tall trees hid them from voracious reporters circling like buzzards ready to pick apart the carnage for a story.
Cal’s breath came fast and deep, and he stood under Max’s stare without looking at his boss. Max gave his team the freedom to take any steps necessary to get the job done and didn’t often interfere, but when one of their team needed restraining, he stepped in.
Max plunged his hand into his hair, leaving it even more rumpled than usual as he scowled at Cal. “The last thing we need right now is for you to give the press something to fuel their special reports. So get a grip. Now.”
“I don’t care,” Cal said, and truth be told, he didn’t. He’d seen some horrendous things as a SEAL, and during his year as the explosives expert on the Knights, he could honestly say he’d never wanted to lay down his credentials and walk away until today. “This woman should be alive. If I had—”
“Had what?” Max interrupted. “Become Superman and located Keeler on your own when the whole team hasn’t been able to do it? Our team’s the best, and we will get him. Why take it all on yourself?”
“Why? Because it’s personal,” Cal said. “I had him, Max. Could’ve brought him in and I let him go. I—”
“Stop right there. Tara Parrish was bleeding out. You chose to save her life and hoped she’d help us hunt him down later. All of us would have done the same thing, and if you were faced with a similar choice today, you’d do it again.”
“You’re right. I would, but letting Keeler go? That…” Rage wormed its way through his body, and he shook his head in disgust. “That makes this personal, as is every stinking bomb the psychopath has detonated since then.”
“If you hold on to the fact that you saved Tara’s life instead of feeling guilty for the others, you’ll be far better off.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets, the blistered skin on his knuckles ripping open, the pain a welcome distraction. “I would have put her life first no matter what, but her leaving us in a lurch? That I didn’t see coming.”
“You couldn’t.” Max frowned. “Shoot, we still don’t know why she bolted from the hospital. Especially not after we’d cleared her of any involvement with Keeler. Doesn’t make sense for a civilian like her to think she can do a better job of staying alive on her own rather than having our team watch over her.”
Tara had been lucky. Her wound had looked bad, but she’d only sustained bruised internal organs. Three days after checking into the hospital, she’d taken off and disappeared. At first Cal thought Keeler had gotten to her, but there’d been no sign of foul play, just a bamboozled FBI agent unable to explain how she’d disappeared on his watch.
A month later, Cal had discovered her working as a waitress in Atlanta, but by the time he got to Atlanta, she’d run again, leaving fellow coworkers to confirm she’d once lived there. Then Keeler killed one of these coworkers, and yesterday, an anonymous VoIP call came into the hotline telling them Keeler was likely targeting employees of Pecos Palace in Dallas. The team hopped a plane while trying to track the call through Internet servers, but they hadn’t yet come up with the origin of the call.
They had learned that Tara worked at the Pecos Palace for three weeks before disappearing again. Now Cal had no idea where she’d gone, just that she continued to run, and Keeler killed another woman she’d worked with.
