Carter by Kathi S. Barton

he would have been stupid to think that she’d remained the same after all these years, but she’d turned into a real beauty. Not at all like her mother had been.
    He’d hated her from the beginning. Not even after all these years was he sure why he’d married her but for the money. By then he’d had a lot; not like now, but enough. And when she’d told him her worth, he’d married her almost right away. Then she’d gotten herself pregnant, and things had fallen down a slippery slope ever since she’d given birth. Maybe even before. Daniel looked at Victor when he cleared his throat.
    “The house where she’s staying is like a fortress. There are all kinds of animals running around the place that have a system that I can’t seem to figure out. Armed guards as well. The fence alone has enough juice running through it that it could fry a man in seconds should he be stupid enough to touch it. I’m telling you, that place is under more surveillance than this place.” He nodded to Victor Guy, his man of all men. “What do you suppose they’re doing back there?”
    “Keeping me from what I want.” He tossed the pictures on the desk, disgusted with them. “The boy…I’m supposing that there are no shots of him because of the surveillance and fence.”
    “Yeah. We tried, but if he’s coming out of the house, it’s too far away for any of us to see him. And flybys don’t work either. They got that place locked the fuck down.”
    Daniel nodded. He was going to do the same once he had them. Not that he cared all that much for Dane, but the child would be difficult enough to control without her there, so he had to have them both. But Daniel wasn’t above killing her to bring the boy in line.
    “There has to be some way to get in. Deliveries? Maybe one of them goes shopping. You said there were women there. How do they function without the mall?”
    Victor laughed and handed him another set of pictures. Looking through them, he had to ask what they were.
    “The way they inspect each thing that comes in. See that picture where there is a large building? That’s where everything is taken that is stopped at the gate. Twice a day someone comes to that building and goes in. When whoever it is comes out, he has everything loaded in a truck then taken to the house. Nothing goes up there without him looking at it. There is a large SUV that leaves the property in the morning. Misha Lanning is who it is registered to, but it’s not anything I’d fuck with either. And the office that the other Lanning’s work from is almost as tight as the house.”
    Daniel was getting pissed. This was just too much. Why would a person need that much protection if not for hiding something? But the more they dug into their lives, all of them, the more he found that he hated them. These people were cleaner than the silk sheets he had put on his bed daily.
    “That woman…the one that let you in at the house a few months ago; anything on her? Other than that some asshole killed her too. She was going to be our ticket, not a name on a list of reasons for Dane not to trust us.” Their contact was dead now, and he hadn’t seen that coming. And that, too, pissed Daniel off.
    “Nothing that I can find. Her accounts have been closed, but I can’t figure out by who. Oh, and you might like to know that a man by the name of Conrad…let me look.”
    As he searched his notes, Daniel tried to wrap his mind around the fact that Dane had eluded him again. He was, frankly, getting sick of chasing her ass all over the place. If she’d just come to heel, things would be so much better for them all.
    “Conrad Snyder. He shot her a few days ago. I’m still trying to figure out why. But I do know that he’s dead now too. Killed in a blast that he caused. Not sure what he was up to, but he and two other men are now dead, along with our contact. Some ex-cop is all I know.”
    “Find out what you can. Perhaps he had something somewhere that can be of