Page 60 of Cold Case Discovery

But what if she wasn’t? Was it worth the risk? Jack kept himself ready, watching, waiting for just the right moment—and he knew Chloe beside him was doing the same exact thing. Poised and ready to lunge.

He wanted it to be now, but it wasn’t. But they would know when it was. They’d be ready. He believed that.

He had to.

“Any mistakes today have beenyourfault. I think you know that,” Jen was yelling at Sarah.

Sarah’s eyes widened, a mix of fear and offense. Panic, maybe. But she stood up to Jen. “I donotknow that! It was your plan that was faulty. We did everything you said! Courtney got Ry to lure Mark here.Itook the first shot and didn’t kill him.Justlike you said. I—”

“You hesitated! You know you hesitated! If you’d taken that shot when you were supposed to, I could trust you. But now? I can’t. So I think we need to retool our plan.”

Sarah was shaking her head. “We have to stick to the plan, or we’ll get caught! I’m not getting caught!” She pointed her finger in Jen’s face, panic mounting. “I’ll tell the copseverything. I’ll tell them it was your idea, your plan. Lure Mark here. Get Chloe away from the scrapbook. I’ll tell them—”

The sound of a bullet exploding out of a gun erupted around them. Instinct had Jack jumping back toward Chloe, who’d hit the deck with her hands over her ears.

When he looked up, he saw Jen holding a gun in each hand while Sarah lay on the ground, still and lifeless. A pool of blood slowly growing bigger around her.

“You won’t be able to tell them anything now, will you?” Jen said to Sarah’s lifeless form. She blew out a breath, shrugged her shoulders a few times like she was shrugging away tension. “Man, I feel better.” She turned to face them, evil smile back in place. “Now. It’s time for a new plan.”

THEGUNSHOTWASstill echoing in Chloe’s ears. She didn’t let herself look at the dead woman on the ground. She looked up from the defensive position she’d fallen into and focused on the woman who might kill them all.

Chloe couldn’t remember ever loving her mother. Even when she was a little girl, too young to understand her childhood was a dangerous disaster, she’d wondered why her mother had bothered to have one child, let alone two.

And still, this was all such a shock. Bits and pieces she could make sense of, but the whole of what was happening, what had happened, was just too bizarre to fully fathom.

Clearly Mom’s plan had been to kill Mark and get away with it. She was teaming up with Mark’s other victims to do it. She’d killed Jack’s parents because they’d called family services on her.

But what did it have to do with the scrapbook?

There were no answers to that yet. No answers could come if they didn’t survive.

So she focused on the one most important thing to her.

She would find a way to get Jack out of this. She certainly wasn’t about to let her mother make another Hudson a victim of her sociopathic ways. No matter what. Chloe would do anything and everything to get him out.

“Now you have more bodies to clean up,” Chloe pointed out. Her voice was steady, her tone cool. She kept her expression blank when her mother turned to sneer at her.

“It’s not about the bodies. That’s easy.” She gestured at the cave. Like...there were bodies back there, deeper in the cavern. A shudder chased down Chloe’s spine, though she ignored it.

“And some bodies, like your father’s, don’t matter. No one will care that Mark Brink was murdered in cold blood. They’ll do some cursory due diligence, then mark it down to his past.” Her lips curled back even farther. “Hudsonsandcopsare different, though. We’ve got to make sure there’s no trace. It’s not aboutbodies, it’s about trails.”

“Forensic investigations have come a long way in seventeen years. You’d be surprised how easy it is to pin you to Mark Brink’s murder,” Jack said blandly.

Every time she poked at her mother, he did too. He took her lead and ran with it. It gave her hope that somehow they could outsmart her mother. They were good cops, a good team. They could do it. They just needed a chance.

Jen took a threatening step toward Jack, those guns in her hands making Chloe have to fight the need to step between Jack and her mother. To protect him.

It would be a death sentence for him. Chloe knew that.

“Even if they could pin it on me, even if they bothered, they couldn’t find me. Do you know how long I’ve been here? Right here. Living, loving and laughing my ass off while no one could findanythingabout your do-gooder parents.”

The whole time. Ever since Mom had just not come home one day and Chloe had spent the next few years struggling to keep Ry on the straight and narrow, trying to keep Dad from ruining their lives. Mom hadn’t been running away, chasing a score or a guy or whatever.

She’d been living in acave? “But why hide if no one knew you’d murdered the Hudsons?”

“Yourfatherwas meant to stumble over those remains and get himself into a heap of trouble. Yourfatherwas supposed to take the fall. But he never did listen, did he? He never followed through or did what he should. So I had to adjust my plans. You see, Chloe, one thing you never could understand was the beauty ofpatience. Always had to be going, moving, doing. Sometimes sitting and waiting is the best thing in the world. Because no one will ever know. And Mark Brink is dead. Finally.”

Chloe didn’t see how sitting and waiting had been best for her mother. Jen had always been mean, cruel, narcissistic and rotten to the core. But she had never been quite this unhinged, or so it had seemed to Chloe at the time. Chloe supposed she should be grateful becauseunhingedleft room for error. One little mistake and Chloe or Jack would take advantage of it and get out of this.

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