Page 102 of Justice Delayed

Melender jutted her chin toward her uncle. “The one in Jesse’s blue bunny.”

“How did you get the stuffed rabbit?” Smith said.

“I don’t know. It was sent to my house anonymously.”

Smith whipped the gun in Quentin’s direction. “You sent her the kid’s stuffed animal?” His threatening tone caused Melender to draw back against the fertilizer bags.

She took advantage of Smith’s distraction to wiggle her body down into the crevice in between the stacked bags. Her fingers grazed the closed clippers. Another shimmy, and she managed to grasp the shears by the handle. Straightening, she paused to check on Quentin and Smith.

“I don’t owe you any explanation.” Quentin’s voice lacked its usual bluster.

“Oh, I think you do.” Smith aimed the gun straight at Quentin’s head. “I repeat. What recording?”

Quentin shook his head. “I don’t know anything about a recording.” Smith took another step closer to him, and her uncle raised his hands. “Yes, I sent the bunny to Melender to scare her into giving up the search. But I swear, I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

Smith swiveled to face Melender, his gun now pointed at her head. “You’d better start talking. Fast.”

Melender gripped the shears as tight as she could to avoid dropping them. When she did so, she discovered the clippers had a release button that kept the blades locked into place. “The bunny had a recording device inside.”

“What?” Quentin raised his eyebrows, his face the picture of confusion.

“Keep going,” Smith growled.

“It was voice activated and recorded up to twenty hours before recording over itself.” She drew in a breath to steady her nerves. She needed to keep talking while she figured out how to cut the plastic tie on her wrists. Pitching her voice low and soothing, she continued. “The police discovered it when they X-rayed the bunny.”

“The police.” Smith spat out the word like a curse. “What was on the recording?”

Melender found the release button on the shears and flicked it up. The blades separated with a soft click, but both men stayed focused on each other. “The night of Jesse’s death.”

Quentin staggered backwards as if punched in the gut. He blindly reached behind him and bumped into a stack of rakes, which clattered to the floor. “That’s not possible.”

“You’re lying,” Smith snarled, his gun trained on Melender.

“I’m not.” She kept her body hunched to portray submission. “The recording is at a Fairfax County Police lab. The detective called the Commonwealth’s attorney to let her know what they’d found.”

Smith shrugged. “At this point, it really doesn’t matter.” He refocused his attention on her uncle. “You have made a mess of this whole thing—and now I have to clean it up. I never should have agreed to your plan in the first place. Too many variables.”

“But it worked.” Quentin had recovered, some of the color returning to his face. “She took the blame, and no one suspected anything.”

“Until Harman got out of prison and started poking her nose around.” Smith narrowed his eyes. “We wouldn’t be in this position had we gone with my plan all those years ago.”

Melender didn’t like the look in Smith’s eyes, which had dropped to an even darker shade of mean. She’d seen that look often enough in the eyes of fellow prisoners right before an attack on another inmate. Trying to keep her upper body as still as possible, she held her wrists as far apart as she could, ignoring the plastic bands that cut into her skin. Then she worked the shear blades into place, hoping she had calculated the proper position between the plastic bands.

“What are you saying?” Quentin’s question drew Smith’s attention back to him.

“She’s a loose end that needs snipping.” Smith kept the gun at waist level but no longer pointing directly at Melender. “I should have ignored your instructions and capped her when this whole thing went down originally, but no, you didn’t want her dead. You wanted her locked away. But see? If we’d done it my way, we wouldn’t be in this mess today.”

Melender stretched her fingers around the handles and squeezed. The blades closed, but the plastic tie didn’t snap. She’d positioned the blades in the wrong place. Smith and Quentin continued to argue while she maneuvered the shears into position again.Please God, let this work.The blades met with resistance as they closed, and she summoned all the strength she could muster in her hands and applied more pressure on the handles. The plastic snapped with a soft ping.Thank you, Jesus.

She didn’t change her body’s position even though her shoulders screamed for her to relax them. Keeping her hands behind her back to give the illusion of being restrained, she locked the shear blades closed. Her hands might be free, but her feet were still bound. Getting her ankle restraints snipped would be impossible to manage without the men noticing.

“We’re doing it my way.” In one fluid motion, Smith swung the gun toward Melender.

The deadly intent in his eyes registered a split second before she acted. Melender brought her hands around to the front and dove over the back of the fertilizer pile as a shot rang out.

ChapterForty-One

Brogan tossed his phone onto the cluttered desk. He’d spent the last hour trying to track down the whereabouts of John Smith, but the man was as elusive as his reputation indicated. Even though the police had issued a BOLO for his vehicle, there had been no sightings. Senator Johnston, who’d retired from public life two years ago, had been unable to shed any light on his former employee, who was indeed legally named John Smith. “John’s a man who likes to live off the grid,” was how the senator had put it. “If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be.”

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