Page 83 of Shadow of Fear
He bent low to look her in the face. “I suppose you’re going to play dumb with me too.”
“I won’t be playing,” Jada said, her voice strong, her eyes fighting back at him. “I don’t have a clue what you want either.”
“Then let me spell it out for both of you.” He came to his full height and glared at Kinsley. “The diamonds. I want my diamonds.”
“Diamonds?” She glanced at Jada to see if she had any idea what he meant.
“No clue,” Jada said.
“I hid them in the base of the lamp at the Bluebird.” He locked eyes with Kinsley. “The one you took for a memory.”
Kinsley gasped. “How do you know that?”
“Tsk. Tsk.” A snide smile crossed his mouth. “You opened your big mouth on social media. Told everyone about the special memories you have with your good friend Jada. The accompanying picture included the lamp.”
“But my account is private for my friends only. So how could you even see it?”
He raised his chin. “Correction. You weren’t quite careful enough. All of your posts are private. Your friends list was out there for everyone to see. It wasn’t hard to impersonate one of your friends you didn’t have enough contact with to realize it wasn’t really your friend.”
Dev had been right about her security setting. She’d changed it now, but the damage had already been done. This was all her fault. Jada had a gun to her head. Dev was tied up, perhaps unconscious, maybe dying. And Hayden was drugged. All because Kinsley didn’t properly adjust her security settings.
Tears formed in her eyes, but she didn’t want to cry in front of this man. No way she wanted him to see that he had gotten to her. Once she figured out a way to safely get rid of him and call an ambulance for Dev, then she could cry and fall apart.
“All you have to do is tell me where the lamp with the diamonds is, and I’ll be out of here.” He challenged her with his pointed look.
“In the back bedroom. I’ll go get it.”
“No,” he said, steel in his voice. “We’ll get it together. The three of us.”
He grabbed the neck of Jada’s sweater and tugged her up while keeping the gun to her head. “Any funny business and I take her out.”
Kinsley didn’t think he was eager to kill Jada, but he seemed willing to end their lives to get his diamonds. So she led the way to the bedroom and lifted the lamp from the nightstand. She shook it but still didn’t hear anything in the base.
He forced Jada to sit on a hardwood chair pushed up to a small desk in the corner and readjusted the gun. “I made sure to pack the base so it wouldn’t rattle and the diamonds wouldn’t be discovered before I could return to collect them. I just didn’t count on the stinkin’ cops finding me and not getting right back.”
Kinsley looked up from the lamp. “I don’t get it. Why put them in an object that easily could be discarded or moved?”
“Like I said. I planned to come right back. When I went away, I was going to send my girlfriend to get them when things cooled down and the police were no longer watching her. But no. She decided to two-time me with my best buddy, so I had to leave them and hope the lamp was still here when I got out.” He smiled. “As you can see, it turned out just fine. Now pull the felt off the bottom and dump the bag on the bed.”
She followed his directions, finding a black velvet pouch tucked in bubble wrap in the base. She opened the drawstring on the pouch and poured out a cascade of sparkling diamonds too numerous to count.
“Ah.” He let out a long breath of satisfaction. “They’re just the way I left them, and I have you to thank for that. If you hadn’t taken the lamp as a souvenir, my diamonds probably would’ve ended up in some landfill.”
“So pick them up and leave us alone.”
He removed the gun from Jada’s head for a second to gesture at the diamonds. “Bag them back up, then leave the bag on the bed and step away.”
She sat on the bed to cup the diamonds in her hand and pour them into the bag. She had no idea of the value of this pouch of diamonds, but it had to be significant. She considered flinging them across the room so she could buy some time to pick them up, but she feared he would shoot Jada, something Kinsley wouldn’t risk.
She glanced at him. “What I don’t get is why you’ve been shooting at us? If you killed us, you would never get the diamonds.”
“I never intended to kill you. Not even wing you.” He narrowed his eyes. “I just wanted to scare you so when I asked for the diamonds, you knew Iwouldkill to get them.”
“But the opposite happened,” she said. “Dev and his teammates came to my rescue and made it impossible for you to get to me.”
“Impossible? I’m here right now, aren’t I?” He scoffed. “But yeah, I didn’t know about him and his team at the time. Still, you never got around to figuring out it was me, did you?”
“We had no reason to be looking for you. You were just some guy we played pranks on back in the day.” Kinsley gritted her teeth. “But you screwed up in the end. We got your ID when you were dumb enough to leave a video of yourself on the drone’s camera.”
