Hewitt grabbed hold of her by the back of her neck and half-dragged her to the back of the panel van. He shoved her inside facedown and came in after her, pushing her down on the floor, pressing a knee into her kidneys.

He produced a plastic zip tie and put it around her left wrist and through a U-bolt screwed into the floor of the van. The canvas tote was beneath her. She could feel the head of the hammer pressing into her belly.

Hewitt bent down and spoke directly into her ear, his lips touching her so that she wanted to twitch away from the feeling. His blood dripped on her from the wound in his shoulder. “I’ve changed my mind about that mother-daughter threesome,” he said. “I wonder if she’ll be as hot a fuck as you are.”

The suggestion made Lauren want to retch. Instead, she scraped together another bit of bravado.

“You’re not going to have enough blood left in you to get it up, Greg,” she said. “I killed you. You just don’t know it yet.”

She knew no such thing, but if she could rattle him, distract him, get him worried about himself, she might buy them a crucial second or two.... He had already been careless. She was lying on a bag full of weapons. He had bound her to the U-bolt by only one wrist.

“Hurry up!” Ballencoa snapped at him then from the back of the van. “Get the girl in!”

In the next moment Leah was tossed into the van beside her, her right hand bound to the U-bolt. The terror on her face was almost unbearable for Lauren to see. This was all her fault. But she kept her eyes locked on her daughter’s.

“Stay calm, honey,” she whispered. They were almost nose-to-nose, forehead-to-forehead. “Stay calm. Do you understand me?”

“Mommy, I’m so scared!”

“Shhhh . . . We’re going to get out of this,” Lauren promised, even while her mind was filling with the nightmare images of what was probably going to happen to them in these next hours before they died. They would know exactly what had happened to Leslie. It was about to happen to them too.

The doors slammed shut on the back of the van like the lid coming down on a coffin.

Chapter 57

57

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” Mendez said. He had jerked his tie loose and shed his sport coat. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, exposing forearms that were thick with muscle. His body was burning energy like a furnace.

Lauren’s phone had gone unanswered. Ballencoa wasn’t at his house. Michael Craig Houston aka Gregory Hewitt was driving a blue Chevy Caprice. The BOLO had produced no sightings of it.

Tanner rode shotgun. Bill Hicks sat in the backseat.