Читать книгу A Secret In Conard County - Rachel Lee - Страница 9
ОглавлениеErin awoke early in the morning, and for a blessed few minutes nothing hurt. The TV ran quietly, creating background noise to mask the engine roars from the truck stop. The half-finished latte stood on the nightstand. The clock told her she’d slept fourteen hours. Fourteen. And without a pain pill.
She didn’t want to move. As soon as she stirred, the pain would return, at least some of it. She needed to get on the road again. The guy who’d nearly killed her was off the grid, and she had to stay off it, too, as much as possible. Keep moving, use cash wherever possible and wait for the phone call to tell her he was caught, or until she felt well enough to resume duty. She’d chosen this over protective custody, and every single day asked herself why. But she knew why. She felt safer in the middle of nowhere, and she knew she couldn’t stand being in protection, virtually locked up in a safe house under constant guard.
They were sure he still wanted to get her. After all, he’d apparently come for her after someone had leaked her identity and that she was getting close to finding him. A serial bomber. Great thing to have on her tail. A great reason not to feel safe in a safe house, even if cabin fever wouldn’t have driven her crazy.
She should get up and get going again. No matter how much it hurt. But she could see no harm whatsoever in enjoying these few minutes of peace, where no threat hovered, where no pain touched her.
She’d left the lights on, and she dared to turn her head a little. For a supposed fleabag, the La-Z-Rest wasn’t that bad. The decor was badly outdated Western, the kind that shrieked cheap and old, but everything she’d used so far had been spotlessly clean. It would never get five stars, or even two, but all she cared was that it was clean.
Finally, the time to move had come. Her damaged body began to ache again, to throb in a few places. Sleep was losing its grip on her brain.
Sighing, moving slowly, she sat up and swung her feet to the floor. No carpeting, just linoleum that had been scrubbed almost bare of its pattern. Somehow that was reassuring. Next, a hot shower, as hot as she could stand. That would loosen her up for dressing.
Then she had to decide. Move on again? Or stay put for a few days? Staying put and walking the streets of this town lost in time seemed amazingly appealing after all the driving. And walking would help keep her loosened up, keep the pain from reaching shrieking intensity as it did if she held still for too long. The way it probably would when she stood up after such a lengthy sleep.
Agony struck her the minute she rose. It froze her in place while she sucked air from the shock of it, then it eased enough for her to move. It would get better. The docs had promised. It was just that she had suffered so much injury.
Which was putting it mildly, she thought with a kind of bitter amusement as she eased her way into the bathroom and turned on the shower. One of them had even tried to joke about it. “Pain is your friend. It means you’re still alive.”
Well, that was debatable, she thought as she stood under the hot spray. There were times when surviving being shot and being blown up didn’t seem like such a good thing. Ironic, though, that the gunshot that had brought her down just as she stumbled on the bomber had helped protect her when the bomb blew up her house. Very ironic. Maybe someday she could even tell the story with humor. Not yet, however. Definitely not yet.
A half hour later, she was dressed in a light beige slack suit—probably not the style for this place—and comfortable walking flats. She still hadn’t made up her mind about moving on, but she figured she’d stick out on the streets dressed this way. So what? Only Fran knew where she was, and she couldn’t face the restrictive waistband on jeans today. This slack suit had elastic gores in the waist, reducing the pressure on some of her scars.
Moving with care, she managed to get her shoulder holster on over the royal blue shell and put her pistol into it. Once she pulled on the lightweight matching jacket, only an experienced eye would be able to tell she was armed.
She put her credentials and her wallet in the slacks pockets and felt as ready as she would ever be to face this day.
Breakfast first, she decided. But when she stepped outside, she saw what Lance had meant about this stretch of highway. Crossing it on foot might be suicidal unless a person could move swiftly, and that was beyond her now.
Car keys in her hand, she debated whether to try to find that diner. And she still had to pay for the room.
As she was standing there in an unusual state of indecision, a sheriff’s vehicle rolled up right in front of her. Lance sat in the driver’s seat and he leaned his elbow on the open window as he smiled at her.
“Saw your car still here. You staying for a while?”
“Thinking about it,” she admitted. “Mostly thinking about breakfast. I see what you mean about the highway.”
“Like I said, some fools can’t read and others don’t care. Hop in and I’ll take you to the diner.”
She liked the way he suggested she hop in, especially since he’d practically had to pour her into his vehicle when he picked her up yesterday. “Don’t you have to work?”
“You’re my work now.”
Thunderstruck, she narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Well, after I checked you out yesterday, my boss got a call from the Bureau. Asked us to keep an eye on you as long as you wanted to stay. So here I am, your protection detail. Wanna tell me to go to hell?”
The way he asked the question and arched one eyebrow drew a reluctant laugh from her. “No, but I do want breakfast.”
“And the sheriff wants to meet you. So if you want to climb in, we’ll do the diner first.”
So much for a low profile, she thought, scanning the highway as her nerves started to jump. Why had the sheriff been dragged in on this? Why did they feel she needed protection?
All of a sudden a lot of questions hammered at her. “Sheriff first,” she said decisively.
“You got it.”
* * *
Appearing more rested, and dressed in that quietly elegant pantsuit, Erin looked as if she ought to be strolling the streets of a much bigger, classier burg than this one, Lance thought as he drove them toward the sheriff’s offices. Kinda pretty, too, now that her brown eyes didn’t appear quite as sunken. But no one would mistake her yet for being in perfect health. She did resemble a Fed now, though.
“You’re looking a whole lot better this morning,” he said.
“Fourteen hours of sleep will do that.”
“Fourteen?” He whistled. “My dogs wouldn’t let me get away with that.”
A quiet laugh reached him. “How many do you have?”
“Two. One’s an English mastiff, the other a short-haired Saint Bernard. When they jump on the bed, I don’t have much of a choice.”
“I guess not. There wouldn’t be any room left.”
“And to think I considered getting an Irish wolfhound once upon a time.”
“Uh... I’ve only seen one in my life but they’re huge, aren’t they?”
“Practically need a stable for one. My guys are good dogs, by the way, so if you ever come by my place, you don’t need to be nervous. They’d give away the store, not guard it. Of course, the mastiff might not let you leave after you robbed me blind.”
That drew a genuine laugh from her, a nice sound that he was glad to hear. “I think I’d like to meet them,” she said.
“That can be arranged.”
At least she was no longer looking haunted and indecisive as she had been while standing outside her room. There was an instant change, though, when they pulled up at the sheriff’s offices, across the street from the courthouse square. Maybe she was expecting memories to be brought up, things she didn’t want to talk about.
Well, he couldn’t do anything about that. The sheriff was a good man, but she’d have to find that out on her own.
It hurt to watch her get out of his car, but he didn’t try to help. He sensed a huge independence in this woman and figured he wouldn’t be wise to offend it any more than he already had. She had clearly not been thrilled to find out the Bureau had requested protection.
When she walked into the front office, he watched heads turn. A woman dressed like this would get attention anywhere in this town, but everything about her suggested that she was federal. Even so, as lovely as she was, she’d draw male attention anywhere.
Elderly Velma, at the dispatcher’s desk, quickly stubbed out her illicit cigarette. A first. Lance could have laughed.
“Agent Sanders for the sheriff,” Lance announced.
“He’s waiting,” Velma answered in her smoke-roughened voice. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks,” Lance said swiftly. Velma’s coffee was legendarily bad. He gestured to the hallway leading to the back offices and let Erin precede him. He could almost feel the air going out of the front office as deputies relaxed.
Interesting effect, he thought as he rapped two knuckles on Gage’s closed door.
“Come,” Gage called.
Gage Dalton, a dark-eyed man with dark hair dashed with gray and a face marred by a burn scar on one side, rose with a wince. As Lance made the introductions, he shook Erin’s hand. “Have a seat, Agent. Thanks for stopping by.”
“I had a choice?” she asked wryly as she eased herself into a wooden chair. Once certain she was settled, Lance sat nearby. “Did Tom bother to tell you why he’s so all-fired worried about me?”
“Actually yes. You got a call just before you were attacked. The guy knows who you are. He may be afraid that you could identify him. Your ASAC said he knows the risk is small, but it’s not one he wants to take.” Then he changed direction, surprising Lance. “A bomb got me, too,” he said, touching the scar on his face.
Erin had survived a bombing? Lance looked at her, shocked. Her face seemed to have frozen.
“I was DEA,” Gage continued. “It was a car bomb. Unfortunately my family was in the vehicle and I had run back into the house to get a diaper bag. I survived, they didn’t.”
Erin paled and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
“A long time ago. We can make peace with almost anything, it seems. But I want you to understand why this department isn’t going to take the Bureau’s request lightly. I once ignored an instinct that my family was in danger, to my everlasting sorrow. Your office has a feeling and I’m not going to ignore it. Lance has volunteered for protection duty, and we can get another few on board before the day is out. Good ones. Men with the kind of experience that often took them to undisclosed locations overseas. That protection will continue until you decide to leave. All I ask is that you put up with it. We’ll be as unobtrusive as possible.”
“Isn’t this overkill?” Erin asked after a moment. “No one knows where I am.”
“Supposedly no one knew where I lived either. But the Bureau knows, and apparently someone had loose enough lips to let it be known you were working the case against the bomber.”
She drew an audible breath. “They told you that? They believe it was someone on the inside?”
“Yes. Which gives me cause for concern. How many people at your field office now know where you are?”
Lance felt his gut tighten. He’d never imagined this. Never.
“I’ll leave right away, then,” Erin said immediately.
“If you want, you can. But I suggest you hang around here for at least a few days. Take a breather and know we’ll be watching out for you. Looks to me like you need rest more than anything else right now.”
She looked down at her hands, resting on her lap. “I don’t get why they told you all this.”
“I do,” Gage answered. “They apparently feel that if anyone knows where you are, the wrong person might know. And moving on won’t necessarily help.”
At that she raised her head. “Why not?”
“Because from here there are only a few directions to go. Because your whereabouts have been known to the Bureau since midafternoon yesterday. That’s a long time if someone is hunting you.”
“You’re telling me I drove myself into a kill box.”
Lance drew a sharp breath. When he’d helped Erin, he’d never anticipated the possibility that he could be causing her bigger problems. Nor, apparently, had she.
“Well...” Gage drawled the word slowly. “Truth is, Agent, that there are a whole lot of little bottlenecks in these mountains. Any one of them could have been a bad place to stop if you let someone know where you were. Lance here verified your ID, normal precaution. Then I guess from what he said that you talked to a friend and told her exactly where you are.”
Erin didn’t respond for several long seconds. “In short, I was an idiot.”
“Didn’t say that,” Gage answered. “Sooner or later, your ID would have been checked simply because you’re carrying a concealed weapon. Sooner or later you’d have told a concerned friend where you were. Just a matter of time. Going off the grid isn’t easy for someone with a lot of connections. It would have been easier to slip away if you’d reached Seattle or some other big city, but it happened here, a place the state highway runs through and very little else. You can head east, you can head west out of here. If you have time you could get to a bigger city. We don’t know how much time there is, so we’ll just keep a friendly eye out.”
Erin slowly shook her head, and finally Lance spoke. “Maybe it’s better it happened here.”
She turned those brown eyes on him. “Why?”
“Because strangers stick out around here. Easy for us to keep an eye out for you.”
“And we have a fairly good department,” Gage added. “You could have wound up someplace where they couldn’t have provided the coverage we can.”
Lance felt his heart tug a bit as he watched Erin lower her head. From what little he knew, she’d been through a hell of a lot, and now she’d been sandbagged. But what she finally said surprised him.
“This isn’t fair to you guys. I should just hit the road as fast as I can and disappear again. Besides, he’s a bomber. That type usually hunkers down. Him following me across the country is so unlikely.”
Gage looked at Lance. No doubt, the sheriff was leaving it to him since he’d volunteered to be on this woman’s protection detail.
“No,” he heard himself say. “Maybe he won’t follow you. We can’t know that with any certainty. It’s enough for me that your boss is worried about it. Regardless, you need more rest, and we can make sure you get it. Providing protection is part of what we do.”
“But to a single individual? That’s expensive. Man, I should have just let them lock me in the safe house.”
“We provide as much protection as any individual needs,” Lance replied. “Sometimes that’s a whole lot. As for the safe house...”
“As for the safe house,” Gage said, “apart from going nuts, which I know I would have, I can tell you this. I was undercover DEA. Nobody was supposed to know who I was or where my family lived. We got found anyway. I personally don’t have a whole lot of faith in safe houses.”
Erin looked at the two of them, one after another, and he watched something change in her face. He tensed and waited, expecting to hear her announce she was hitting the road anyway. But then she knocked the wind from him.
“To hell with it,” she said bluntly. “I’m sick of this creep. If he’s crazy enough to follow me, if he wants a showdown at high noon, this is as good a place as any.”
* * *
Outside, she stood on the sidewalk, breathing in the warm summer air, taking in her surroundings. Lance stood beside her but said nothing. He seemed to know when not to say anything—a rare quality.
“That’s the diner?” she asked, gesturing at the sign she saw half a block away.
“Yup. City Diner, aka Maude’s diner. Wanna walk or drive?”
“I need to walk. Otherwise everything tightens up and I’ll never get my strength back.”
One stoplight. The end of the earth. Only two ways out. A kill box. But a charming one. If she had to take a stand, this was indeed as good a place as any. She just hoped there would be no collateral damage.
She stepped into the street when it was clear and began crossing. With every step, some part of her protested but she ignored it. Nor was she unaware that the man beside her measured his pace to her much slower one. No comment, he just did it.
When they reached the diner, pain had caused a little perspiration to break out on her forehead. Not bad. Better than it had been. She just wished there was some way to speed her recovery.
He opened the diner door for her and let her choose where to sit. She preferred booths and headed for one, hoping she could ease into it without too much trouble. With her back to a wall and the street visible through the big plate glass window, she felt safer.
She winced a few times and had to bite back a groan, but she slid into the booth without too much ado. Lance sat across from her.
“Don’t they give you something for that pain?” he asked.
“I’ve got enough prescription painkillers in my suitcase to raise eyebrows. I don’t want to take them.”
He nodded. “Latte?”
“Please.”
So when the Gorgon’s daughter, who looked like a younger clone of Maude, arrived to slap down the menus, he promptly ordered their coffee and asked for a few minutes. Erin barely glanced at her, just long enough to take in the name Mavis. “A whole family,” she whispered.
Lance laughed quietly. “The parts I’ve seen anyway.”
She tried to smile as she squirmed a bit, seeking that elusive position that would be more comfortable.
“Maybe,” he suggested quietly, “you could trust me just a bit and take a little pain medicine. Not enough to make you loopy, but maybe enough to give you some ease.”
She answered with the bald truth. “I’m afraid of it. When I was in the hospital they kept me pretty well doped. If I need a brain, I don’t want it stuffed with cotton and rainbows.”
He nodded understanding. “But maybe you could let us be your brains for a few hours. I doubt the guy could be here already. You can’t get much farther from anywhere than here. You could give yourself a few hours to rest some more. You need rest as much as activity, you know.”
“Speaking from experience?” she asked dubiously.
“Four gunshot wounds of experience,” he answered flatly.
She felt small. He’d already alluded to a bad confrontation and hinted that he’d been wounded, too. She had just assumed...well, what had she assumed? That nobody had ever really walked in her shoes? No, she definitely was nowhere near par. “Sorry.”
“For what? I get your worries. I also understand that part of what we’re trying to do here is take some of this off your shoulders. Gage understood why you didn’t like the idea of a safe house. I understand how much you must resent needing all this recovery time. Of course, I didn’t have to wonder if I was being stalked by a killer either.”
She met his amazing blue-green eyes just as the lattes dropped in front of them. A pulse of pure, hot desire hit her core—probably the only place that didn’t hurt, and he was making it ache.
“You look at them menus yet?” Mavis demanded.
“Still trying to decide between breakfast and lunch,” Lance answered, giving her a friendly smile. “Hey, Mavis, you’re not that busy right now. You can spare the booth.”
“Yeah, right,” the woman grumped, but she moved on.
Lance turned back to Erin. “We’d better hurry or she’ll order for us.”
“Would she?” An honest laugh trickled out of Erin and she relaxed internally as she reached for the menu.
“She would,” Lance answered. “Years ago, when the former sheriff was trying to lose some weight, it turned into an epic battle. He liked to come over here for coffee. Well, Maude was always slamming a piece of pie down in front of him. Got to be quite a thing.”
“Did the old sheriff lose the weight?”
“Twenty pounds. But I think he must have been cutting out stuff elsewhere.”
“He didn’t have to eat it.”
“He did if he wanted to keep coming in here. Never insult Maude’s pie.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She was also really starting to like this place. In a very short time, Lance had made her feel like she was an insider, not an outsider, an unusual way for her to feel. Generally speaking, Feds were about as well-loved as a fungus infection, even among law enforcement.
She finally settled on an omelet and some toast. Heavy food didn’t sit well on her stomach. Maybe it never would again. She brushed the thought aside and sipped her latte. Time to be friendly. It seemed the least she could do. “I appreciate all you and your department are doing for me.”
“No, you don’t,” he said, but his eyes twinkled a bit. “You hate it.”
When had she become an open book? But she knew. She hadn’t been concealing her thoughts and feelings too well since the incident. It seemed to require more energy than she wanted to invest. “Okay, I wish it wasn’t necessary.”
“That’ll do.” He smiled at her over his own coffee. “How much can you tell me about what happened? I got a little from what the sheriff said, but I don’t imagine they told him a whole lot either. I don’t have to tell you it would help to know what we’re up against.”
“A raving madman,” she answered. Moving carefully, she leaned back against the stiff but padded cushion, felt scars twinge.
“Professional assessment?” he asked.
“No,” she admitted. “Purely personal. You get any training at Quantico?”
“Some,” he acknowledged.
“Then you’ve had a look into the minds of people who do this kind of thing. We’d like to think they’re insane. They’re usually not.”
“No, they aren’t.” He waited, regarding her steadily. She sorted through her head, trying to decide what he really needed to know, and how much she could safely share. The Bureau liked to play close to the vest, revealing nothing until a case went to trial or a grand jury. But then, cops couldn’t freely discuss any open investigation. He was right, though. They needed to know something about this guy.
She sighed. “Without getting into details...”
“I know. Just what you think you can.”
“Okay. Serial bomber. Not a man who just likes to see things go boom. He likes to kill women. Individual women.”
Lance drew an audible breath. “Okay,” he said after a moment.
She hesitated, then plunged in. “This is not for distribution. We can’t find a link between his victims except for gender and approximate age. All his bombs are different. So for a while we weren’t sure we didn’t have some copycatting going on. Then I found...a piece of evidence that linked all the bombs. We knew we were after one guy.”
“So you’ve got this guy who has it in for women.”
“Apparently. Little did we guess I’d be his next target.”
Lance swore quietly. “But why? Any ideas? I mean...” He paused. “I guess if you can’t profile his victims, you can’t know why he picked you.”
“Yes, we can. Because his victims were all much younger than me. Early twenties. I’m outside the box. Then I got a phone call. I can’t say much about it, but at that point we were pretty sure he’d somehow learned I was on the task force working the case, and that I’d found an important piece of evidence.”
He gave a low whistle, a frown settling over his face. He didn’t even give Mavis a halfhearted smile when she slammed the food down between them. “That should never have gotten out,” he said when they were alone again.
“No.” She looked down at her plate, appetite nearly gone, reminding herself that eating was as important as breathing. She forced herself to pick up a fork. “Long story short. Before we’d even begun to really work the angle, I was at home alone that night, uneasy as all get-out, thinking about just going back to the office, when I heard something outside. Just a little sound, but I was jumpy. I went out, walked around to the side of my house and there he was. I lowered my gun because I saw a cop.”
“Oh, hell,” he murmured.
“He turned when I called out and shot me. I fell. The house blew up. And here we are.”
She stared at her plate, at the fork in her hand, and tried to shove the shadows of memory away. For a long time Lance didn’t make a sound. Absorbing what she had told him, she guessed. Purely out of willpower, she cut off a piece of omelet and put it in her mouth. It might have been sawdust.
“I’m surprised you didn’t shoot me,” he said finally.
“Well, my hand was on my sidearm,” she reminded him.
“True.”
She cut some more egg. “I didn’t get a look at his face. It was dark, and frankly I don’t remember anything except the muzzle flash as he fired at me. The irony is that I survived the bomb because I was lying flat on my face in the grass beside a tree and bleeding out when it went off. Bet he didn’t expect that.”
He finally cut into his own pancakes. “I’m surprised they didn’t put it out that you were dead.”
At that she lifted her head. “How did he know who I was, where I lived and how to reach me? Until we figure that out, no cover story would work, because someone on the inside might have loose lips.”
“You’re right, that’s what Gage said your ASAC is worried about.”
She went back to eating and to compartmentalizing what had happened to her. These were memories she kept safely locked away, memories that bubbled up usually only in her nightmares. She was having plenty of them these days.
“A safe house wouldn’t work either, if you’ve got a leak,” he remarked.
“That’s why they didn’t argue very hard when I said I wanted to hit the road,” she agreed. She began to eat a little faster, trying to put a distasteful chore behind her. At some level she realized she was eating a great omelet, but most of her didn’t want to eat at all. Just get it done. Like everything else. One foot in front of the other until she could take the guy on again. Or until someone else caught him. At this point she didn’t much care who took him down.
“You know,” she said slowly, “before this happened there was an ugly part of me that wanted to be the one who nailed this guy. Me personally. Now I don’t care who gets him as long as he’s caught.”
“You’re competitive, right?”
She looked up. “Yes.”
“And it must be harder for a woman in the Bureau than a man. Oh, I know all about equal opportunity, but then there’s reality.”
“Maybe,” she said cautiously.
“Of course you wanted to be the one to bring him down. That’s not ugly unless it hinders your performance. Just human nature.”
She already liked this guy, but she realized she could start to really like him. “Who made you so wise?”
He laughed, the sound instantly lightening the mood. It rolled out of him easily. “Street smarts,” he finally said.
Her curiosity about him was growing fast. “So what’s your story?” she asked.
“My wounding, you mean? I didn’t duck fast enough.”
In spite of everything, she felt her lips starting to curl into a smile. “That simple?”
“Especially when you’re facing an AR-15 on full auto, yes.”
Shock rippled through her. “Full auto? It’s a wonder you weren’t cut in half.”
“You can thank body armor and the economy for that.”
That surprised a small laugh out of her. “The economy?”
“Guy was unemployed. He couldn’t afford armor-piercing bullets. Still, he got me four times, arms and legs.”
She nodded and scooped up more egg. “You’ve recovered well.”
“It was years ago. I’ve had longer than you. Take it easy on yourself, Erin. We’re here, we’re not half-bad even by the Bureau’s standards and we’ll look after you. Just work on healing. When the time comes, we’ll need you in the best shape possible.”
When the time comes. She thought about that as she finished her breakfast. He seemed awfully sure that they were going to face the guy here. Well, she’d said they might as well have the showdown in this small town. But he also seemed to think they might have time.
But time enough for her to get her strength back? The Fates should be so kind.
