Perilous Christmas Reunion

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  Deputy Davis returned with enough food to get ten people through the night. Cold cuts, rolls, cheese, potato salad, chicken noodle soup, brownies. Chris poured some soup into a cup, made Lauren a sandwich and set everything beside the computer. She nodded her thanks, but never took her eyes off the monitor. He wasn’t sure she really knew the food was there, but when he looked in on her later, she had even managed to consume the potato salad despite it requiring a fork.

  “My little brother gets like that,” Deputy Davis said, gazing at Lauren, “but I never saw a girl be into computers.”

  “She has been since long before I knew her.”

  Machines are always around, she had told him once. You don’t expect them to care about you, so they can’t hurt you by stopping.

  As he had.

  Except he hadn’t stopped loving her until she left him with accusations that he had abandoned her.

  He hadn’t. He had abandoned his work in law in exchange for law enforcement. She wanted nothing to do with a law enforcement officer of any branch.

  For the reason stretching before them. Her brother was a criminal. Chris was the one who would have to arrest him if he found Ryan first.

  Telling himself he was curious about Lauren’s progress with getting to the USB drive’s data, and knowing in his heart he didn’t quite trust her not to contact her brother, Chris stood behind her chair and stared at the monitor. The strings of characters meant nothing to him, but he remained silent so as not to break Lauren’s concentration.

  “The security on this device is tight.” She volunteered the information. “I’ve broken two passwords so far.”

  “How many layers of passwords are there?”

  “I have no way of knowing. This could be the last or we could be looking at another five or more.”

  “Why so many?”

  “For this very reason. Us getting ahold of the USB drive. Ryan getting it. Anyone who isn’t supposed to have it getting ahold of it.” She rested her elbows on the desk and speared her fingers through her hair. “I wouldn’t be surprised if half a dozen people were supposed to be present to open these files and each person had their own password.”

  “How long will it take you to crack the passwords?”

  “As long as it takes.” Her tone was sharp, impatient.

  She rubbed her eyes. Dark circles like bruises marred her creamy complexion.

  Chris shoved his hands into his pockets to stop himself from smoothing away a crease between her arching eyebrows. “More coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Chris started to turn toward the break room and coffee maker.

  “Chris?” Lauren touched his arm.

  He glanced back, half smiled.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you. This is my brother’s future on the line.”

  “And my career.”

  He hadn’t let himself think about that until this moment, but the truth glared at him like that pickup truck’s high beams. If he failed to bring in Ryan Delaney, he wouldn’t be outright accused of not doing due diligence in his job, but people, important people, would wonder if he had let his former fiancée’s brother go free. He envisioned a future of being pushed out of promotion after promotion, until he was little more than a courthouse guard running ladies’ purses through the metal detector eight hours a day.

  “Which is more important, Chris?” Lauren’s question was barely audible in the quiet room.

  He just looked at her. She knew the answer without him saying it. Ryan was a criminal. How could his freedom from justice be more important than Chris’s future in the US Marshals Service? Lauren loved her half brother, and yet she must realize he had proved he wasn’t worth the sacrifice of her relationship with Chris.

  Without a word, she returned her attention to the computer and began to click the keys.

  Chris headed for the break room again, made coffee for Lauren and himself, then began to pace.

  * * *

  Around four o’clock in the morning, the back door of the station flew open on a gust of cold but dry air and three more deputies entered. They fell on the food in the refrigerator and began to tell tales of their night’s adventures.

  Besides tending to small vehicular accidents and a minor house fire, they had relit the pilot on an elderly lady’s stove and rescued a cat from someone’s roof. But they hadn’t found the snowmobile the salt truck driver complained about. Nor had they seen the pickup with oversize tires. Lauren’s house was shut up tight and dark, save for the broken door and damaged shutter.

  “We found some bullet holes too and managed to collect some lead for analysis,” another deputy reported.

  If Lauren heard from her desk, she made no indication.

  “And someone knocked down her antenna,” the first speaker reminded them. “Couldn’t tell in the dark with all the snow, but I think they must have had to climb onto the roof and take it down.”

  That got Lauren’s attention. Her head snapped around, her eyebrows arched nearly to her hairline. “Why?” She blinked and grimaced. “Dumb question. Obviously, I wasn’t supposed to have satellite phone service either.”

  “Who took out the antenna? Ryan or the men after him?” Chris held her gaze.

  She shook her head and returned to the computer.

  At 6:05 a.m. exactly, Lauren flung up her hands in a victory sign and let out a “Woot.”

  Chris was at her side in an instant. “You made it through all the passwords?”

  “Six of them, and that’s the good news.”

  “What’s the bad news?” Chris picked up his cue.

  “All the data is in code.”

  “Computer code?”

  “No, cypher code.” She tilted the monitor so he could read the gibberish on the screen. “But I expect you all have people who can break code. We can transmit it to them.”

  “If we don’t, some agency does. Let me call my boss and find out where to send this.”

  Chris made the call. He passed the instructions to Lauren, who transmitted the data through as secure a channel as she could muster, which Chris figured was rather good, computer security being her passion in life. Sheriff Davis took the USB drive and locked it in the safe they used as an evidence locker.

  “Now what?” Lauren asked.

  “I get you someplace secure and join the hunt for your brother.”

  “By secure, do you mean a jail cell?” Lauren asked.

  “If that’s where you’ll be safest, yes.”

  SEVEN

  Lauren couldn’t breathe. The idea of being locked in a cell sent her head spinning. That Chris would put her in jail under the guise of her safety was unthinkable, despicable. Crushing.

  “I’m not a criminal,” she managed to gasp out.

  “But you have their information now.”

  “I don’t. Please believe me. I don’t know any more than you do.”

  “So you didn’t try to break the code?”

  “Break the code?” That loosened her tongue. “I’m a software engineer, not a cryptologist. I know a wholly different kind of code. I’m not even good at puzzles.”

  “Except for jigsaw puzzles and Scrabble.”

  And several other snowy-or rainy-day activities played on a small table for two or maybe four. They had often been evenly matched at numerous board games and played them by the hour, sometimes joined by his mother and sister.

  “You were the one who excelled at crossword puzzles,” Lauren pointed out.

  She shouldn’t have. He shouldn’t have brought up all those joyful hours of putting puzzles together or playing board games. It had been a happier, more carefree time, when her lawless father didn’t matter to their lives. Once Chris’s father, a prison warden, was murdered and Chris changed careers, their lives, their love, became a jigsaw puzzle knocked to t
he floor with several crucial pieces crushed beyond recognition.

  Trust was one significant piece, a cornerstone from which the rest of the foundation should grow, missing from their relationship. Lauren knew she could deny reading the coded materials on the USB drive until she ran out of breath, and Chris wouldn’t believe her any more than he did about not contacting Ryan or knowing where he had gone.

  She didn’t know where he had gone. A few places came to mind, but how he could have reached those locations without a vehicle and if he truly was wounded, she couldn’t figure out.

  Her conscience told her she should give Chris the list of places where he might find Ryan—his mother’s house, the summer cottages of a few friends. Then Chris could arrest her brother and walk out of her life. That course of action was best for both of them.

  But not for Ryan. Ryan had fled custody for a reason.

  Not because you’re guilty, please. Thinking the words was as useless as saying them. Of course he was guilty of something. Why else would he have those files so encrypted an expert was needed to decode them once she, another sort of expert, had got into them?

  “I thought Ryan sold real estate.” Chris leaned his hips on the desk as though planning a long chat. “What would he be doing with a password-protected file in code?”

  So Chris was reading her mind.

  “I don’t know.”

  She had asked herself the same question a dozen times while working to break the passwords.

  “Do you still believe he’s innocent of everything he’s been accused of?” Chris persisted.

  “He’s guilty of assaulting a courtroom guard and fleeing custody.”

  That inconvenient fact she could not get out of her head—did an innocent man need to flee?

  “Why would he run if he’s innocent?” Chris spoke her fearful query aloud.

  Lauren stood to place distance between herself and Chris and glanced around to see if anyone was listening to their conversation.

  Sheriff Davis sat behind his desk talking on the phone and rubbing two fingers on his temple as though he suffered from a headache. The other men on duty had taken up positions in the break room, either watching a twenty-four-hour news station, or sitting at a table where two computers had been set up. The three men were so studiously appearing to not listen to Lauren and Chris’s conversation, giving up their front desk stations, that she suspected they had and would hear every word. Lauren lowered her voice to just above a murmur.

  “Maybe Ryan doesn’t trust a justice system that has him convicted before he stands trial. Now, if you will excuse me, I’ll go ask one of those deputies if he will take me to the lake house so I can get my car and return to Grand Rapids.” She started to turn away.

  “I can’t let you do that,” Chris said.

  Lauren stopped midstep. “You can’t let me? Who are you to let or not let me do anything?” She tried to keep her tone even, but feared her voice rose with annoyance.

  In the break room doorway, Deputy Davis blushed. “Can we do anything to help you, Miss Wexler? Is that federal man bothering you?”

  Chris scowled as he shoved his hands into his sweatpants pockets and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, avoiding Lauren’s eyes. “Not any more than my duties demand.” He lowered his voice to a level signaling his words were for Lauren’s ears only. “I can’t have you going straight to Ryan and helping him or warning him I’m in the area and hunting him.”

  “I can’t go straight to Ryan if I don’t know where he is.”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t know where he is.”

  Lauren looked into Chris’s eyes. For a moment, gazing into those lake-blue depths, she felt as though she were tumbling from a high dive, falling, falling, falling, soon to strike the icy surface of the water with a graceless smack. Or, worse, go straight to the bottom and crash on the rocks.

  She blinked. Fatigue. She was just exhausted.

  “I don’t know where he is, Chris.” She sighed. “I can think of a few places he might try to get to. But I don’t know how...” Her throat closed and her eyes stung. “I saw blood on the snow. If he was wounded, I don’t know how he got anywhere.”

  “A vehicle stashed somewhere?” Chris suggested.

  Lauren nodded. “I thought of that. He got up here somehow after all. But if someone gave him a ride and dropped him off at my place, he’s on his own in the woods.” She looked away and caught sight of the sheriff in his office, now with his head in his hands and looking as worn as she felt. “I doubt he could have survived being out there all night.”

  “I’m sorry, Lauren.” Chris touched her hand. “I wouldn’t want anyone to die alone in the woods in the middle of winter, regardless of who they are or what they did.”

  Lauren nodded, unable to speak for several moments.

  “As soon as a team can get here,” Chris continued, “they will be combing the woods for Ryan and the men chasing him and us.”

  “That’s a lot of ruined Christmases.”

  “It’s our duty.”

  “Of course it is. Believe it or not, I understand.”

  “I know you do.”

  The air hung heavy between them, as stale as the pervasive scent of overheated coffee in the tiny sheriff’s department. She had always known what would be his duty once he chose to become a deputy US marshal. Apprehending federal prisoners was one of those duties.

  She glanced toward the sheriff. “He doesn’t mind you all taking over his territory?”

  “With a department this size?” Chris shook his head.

  “So you’ll be joining the hunt yourself, I presume?” Lauren glanced at his shoes. “Provided you have more appropriate clothes to wear?”

  “I do have more appropriate clothes in the Jeep, but I won’t be joining the hunt through the woods.”

  Lauren stiffened. “Why not?”

  “I don’t want you to be on your own, especially not at your house,” Chris explained. “Those men aren’t going to give up on hunting us down.”

  Lauren’s head snapped up. “But they know we’re here. If they are after the USB drive, they must know we would turn it in for safekeeping here.”

  “Sure, they’ll figure that out. But they could be afraid we know what it contains. Or they may believe you know where Ryan is.”

  “In other words, I’m not safe on my own, even a hundred miles away.”

  Despite the warmth radiating from the space heater below the desk, Lauren might as well have been back outside with nothing for warmth other than an ancient afghan. Cold seeped clear to her marrow.

  “I’d like to say otherwise, but I can’t.” Chris rubbed his arms as though he too experienced the chill.

  “Then what do I do? I have no clothes other than these. I have no money or credit cards or even ID. I don’t even have my license. And we can’t forget my cell phone is still sitting on the counter.” She sighed. “At least it was. If I could just get inside to pick up a few things...”

  “I think we can do that when the sun comes up,” Chris said. “With the snowfall, we should be able to see if anyone has been near there since the deputies looked around.”

  “And then what?” Lauren wanted to sag with relief at the idea of gathering her possessions around her.

  Her things—her house and car, the books, games and mementos of travel she’d collected—were all she found solid and dependable in her life. Every person left. Pets didn’t live long enough. But things waited for her return to the lake. The pages of old mysteries opened beneath her fingers to well-read passages and the sweet mustiness of ancient paper and ink. Familiar. Friendly. Comforting.

  “Then what?” Chris stared past Lauren’s shoulder, his eyes out of focus. “You’ll take me to the nearest location you think we’ll find Ryan.”

  Lauren shook her head. “I don�
��t think he’ll go there. It’s just a thought.”

  “Any thoughts are good at this point,” Chris said.

  “It’s a relative of his, so I don’t think he’s likely to go there.”

  Chris gave her a skeptical glance, then looked away again. “He went to you.”

  “He was desperate.”

  “He’s still desperate, Lauren.”

  “I suppose he is.” Lauren shoved her fingers into her hair, wincing at its tangled mess and the thought of how bad she must look. “I’ll tell you, but I won’t go there with you.”

  “Why not? Is it unsafe?” Chris’s tone was hard.

  “It’s not dangerous.” Lauren’s shoulders twitched to turn and see what Chris looked at instead of her. “But it’s someplace I don’t want to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—” Lauren sighed. “Because it’s his mother’s house.”

  Chris looked blank. “His mother’s still alive? I thought—I forgot—”

  “That my father had three wives walk out on him?” She twisted her lips in an artificial smile. “The difference between Ryan’s mother and mine is that Ryan’s didn’t walk out on him too.”

  Her mother leaving her behind still hurt.

  Lauren swallowed the sadness from abandonment to the recesses of her soul, then continued, “Our father got custody before he went to prison. After he was arrested, Donna took Ryan in, and my grandmother got me.”

  “So why don’t you want to go there?” Chris asked.

  Lauren shrugged. “She doesn’t like me.”

  An understatement if ever there was one.

  She started to remind him of the one time he’d met Ryan’s mother, but the phone rang beside her, and her hand reached in the reflexive impulse to answer. Chris reacted the same, and their hands collided above the instrument, his covering hers, warm, strong, a little calloused, hers cold but warming in an instant beneath his touch—warmth that spread up her arm to her face.

  She snatched her hand free and backed up a step. Her foot connected with the desk chair, sending it wheeling across the floor to smack against a filing cabinet with a metallic clang.