by N. J. Croft
“You seem very well organized.” He waved a hand toward the makeshift IV stand, and she shrugged.
“I have a…friend who works in an ER. They owed me a favor. I called it in.”
She was moving about the room, clearing away the medical equipment, returning the lamp to its former usage. She was definitely the same woman from the funeral; she was very distinctive. Tall and slender, bordering on too skinny, emphasized by the skintight black jeans and black T-shirt she wore. Black lace-up Doc Martins. Her eyes had a slight tilt—definitely some Asian blood in there but mixed with something else—and were a deep golden brown. Black hair cut short, though longer—shoulder length—at one side, and silver and black earrings. She obviously liked black. And of course there was the tattoo, easily visible, on the side where her hair was shorter. On purpose at a guess.
Finally, she finished whatever it was she was doing and came back to stand over him, lips pursed. “I’m guessing you’d like to talk now.”
“You’re guessing right. Who are you? Were you following me? And if so, why?”
She picked up the tray from his lap and carried it over to the table then came back dragging a wooden upright chair, which she placed beside him and sat. “I’ll answer your questions if you answer one of mine first.”
It seemed fair enough. She had saved his life, but really it depended on what she asked. “I will if I can.”
“Do you know who tried to kill you the other night?”
“No.”
She raised a dark brow. “Really? You have no ideas?”
“Oh, I have plenty of ideas. I’m hoping you’ll be able to cast some light on the matter. So who are you?”
“My name is Sara Riley.”
He glanced at the tattoo. “But I’m guessing you go by another name?”
“My online handle.”
“My wife called you Star.”
Something flashed in her eyes but was gone before he could identify the emotion. “Eve spoke about me?”
He shook his head. “No. Donald Ramsey—Eve’s old professor—mentioned you. He just said someone was helping Eve collect information. Not officially on the team but some sort of computer expert, providing satellite imagery. He didn’t know anything else.”
Something occurred to him. If she was a computer expert, then maybe she was good enough to hack into the Clayton Industry systems and send an anonymous email. “Did you send emails telling me Eve was murdered?”
Her eyes narrowed, and then she gave a small shake of her head. “No.” Then she frowned. “You got emails?”
“Later.” He wanted to know more about her first, how she fit into this. “But you do think she was murdered?”
“I know she was.”
“If you believe that, why not go to the police?”
“I don’t trust the police.”
“But you trust me?”
“I wasn’t sure. Right now, I don’t know who to trust,” she said. “What I do know is I need help—I can’t do this on my own, and Eve mentioned you were in the army. A major. You sounded as though you might be useful considering the circumstances.”
“So you’ve been watching me. Trying to decide?”
She nodded then tugged on the long earring that dangled from her left ear. The right one had a stud in the shape of a skull.
“So maybe it’s time to explain just what those circumstances are.”
“Maybe.”
He guessed that while she was in no way sure of him, she felt she had little choice. Other than that, he was getting nothing from her. “Come on, Star—why do you believe Eve was murdered?”
“Because the same freaking bastards tried to kill me.”
“Who?”
“How the hell do I know?”
He’d have thrown his hands in the air if he hadn’t known it’d hurt like a bitch. “So how do you know it was the same people or even that Eve was murdered? I’ve seen all the reports. There’s nothing to indicate that it wasn’t an accident.”
She gave him a look of total disdain. “Are you really that naive?”
No. “Start from the beginning,” he said. “Tell me everything. How you met Eve…everything.”
She clasped her hands together on her lap and gazed straight ahead for a minute. Noah watched her but didn’t speak again. She was gathering her thoughts; he could almost see her brain working, deciding where to start.
She appeared to be mid-twenties, maybe a little older. She wasn’t beautiful in the conventional sense of the word. Too thin, too angular, all bones and sharp lines. No curves, just the hint of small breasts under the black T-shirt. She folded her arms across her chest, and he raised his gaze to her face. She was returning his look, eyes narrowed.
“Go on,” he prompted.
She blew out her breath. “I’ve never actually met Eve, not face to face, anyway. But I’m a member of a number of online forums where people with similar interests meet and chat.”
“You mean space archaeologists?”
“Yeah.” She grinned. “I always loved that name, but then I always wanted to go into space.”
“What do space archaeologists actually do?”
“We download images, usually from satellites—hence the name—and we study them to find out what they show. You can actually get paid for it—things like looking for indications of oil or mineral deposits. That’s never interested me. I’ve always been fascinated by old stuff, things hidden beneath the ground. I’d been looking at images of Mongolia—”
“Where do you get these images?” he asked.
She looked away. Shifty. “All sorts of places.”
“I’m guessing not all of them legal.”
She shrugged. “I might have been known to hack into the odd satellite system. Maybe redirect a few. It’s all part of the game.”
“It’s not a game.”
“You don’t think I’m realizing that now?” Her tone was sharp, then she sighed. “Anyway, I got into a discussion on a group about Genghis Khan. This other asshole said the tomb would never be found. I didn’t agree. Eve joined the conversation, asked me a few questions, and it started from there. After that, we talked a lot. I liked her, and she offered to pay for my services. We don’t often get paid, but she said money was no object, that some group was funding her. And she had all sorts of useful information and contacts. She was working with a Mongolian who’d spent his whole life studying a poem about Genghis—The Secret History of the Mongols—that contained clues and hints about where he was buried. I was able to redirect my searches.”
“And you found it?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you send something to Eve shortly before she died?”
Her eyes sharpened. “How did you know that?”
So she had sent something. “I didn’t know for sure. But one of the emails I received implied that Eve had been murdered because of information in her possession.”
She pushed back the chair and stood up then turned away and paced to the wall. Her whole figure was tense, hands fisted at her side. Finally, she came back, stood looking down at him, a line between her dark brows. “I sent a satellite image. To Russia.”
“Do you know what she was doing in Russia?”
She shook her head.
“Was she alone?”
“I have no idea. She never mentioned anyone else.” She sank onto the chair, hands clasped on her lap. She appeared to have gotten herself under control, her expression unreadable once more. “I know she had a team with her in Mongolia before that, but not whether they went with her to Russia.”
“Do you know who was on the team?”
“No, but I got the impression there were a few of them.”
He needed to find out who exactly was on that team. He hadn’t heard back from Professor Coffell yet. He wou
ld have to chase that up. Something occurred to him. “Did you send copies to anyone else?”
“No. I worked only with Eve.”
“And did she mention if she’d forwarded copies to anyone else?”
“No. But why would she?”
“Just to safeguard the information in case something happened to her.”
“You mean like her plane going down and everything burning.” She winced. “Sorry. That was insensitive. This must be painful for you. I know you were divorced, but I got the impression that Eve really cared about you.”
“I felt the same. We just couldn’t manage to live together.” He thought for a moment. “Okay, so you sent her the image, but I still don’t understand why you’re so certain she was killed.”
“I told you—because they tried to kill me as well.”
“They clearly didn’t succeed.”
“Hey, the man’s a detective.” She rolled her eyes. “No, they didn’t succeed, but only because Eve warned me. Like you, I thought she was being paranoid—this was a game to me. One I loved playing, but it wasn’t dangerous. Well, there was always the chance someone might find I’d been playing with their satellites but not real in-your-face-trying-to-kill-you danger.” She was tugging on the earring again, probably a nervous action. “But at the same time, she made me scared. She told me to go stay somewhere else just until I heard from her again. So I did. I spent the night in a hostel, and when I went back to my place the following day, it had been gutted by fire. These bastards obviously like burning things. The fire engines and the police were still there, but I waited until everyone had cleared out and went in. Everything was destroyed. All my equipment. Just gone. I was seriously pissed.”
“And scared?” he asked.
“Yeah. I decided I was going to stay out of sight until I heard from Eve.”
“But she never contacted you.” Because she’d already been dead.
“No. After a week or so, I started looking. That’s when I found out she had been killed—I had absolutely no doubt about that. I was terrified enough to stay holed up in a crappy hotel room with no computer for another five days. It was driving me crazy. Hell, I didn’t have much of a life by most people’s standards—I’m a computer nerd, but that was the way I liked it. And I wanted my life back, but no way was that happening until I’d worked out who killed Eve and why.”
“So you came looking for me.”
“I went to the funeral. I thought I’d just take a look at you. Eve thought you were an okay guy—well, maybe an okay asshole, but she liked you—and I didn’t believe you could have anything to do with her death. And you were a soldier—that sounded like a good person to have on my side with people wanting me dead.”
“But you never approached me.”
“Maybe I’m getting paranoid as well, but there were too many people around. I’d gotten used to hiding and couldn’t bring myself to step out of the shadows. Plus, it just didn’t seem like the time. You seemed so…sad. And your kids were there—cute kids. So I took a look and then hid some more.”
“You were following me before the funeral?” Why hadn’t he spotted her? She was an amateur, and he was trained in these things.
“Yes. And I noticed that someone else seemed interested in you.”
“The black SUV?”
“Yeah.”
“So you were following me the night they were killed?”
“I was a long way behind. Then I heard the sirens and the shots.”
“I’m glad you did.” So that brought them up to date. He massaged the ache in his shoulder while he tried to assimilate the information, make sense of it, and decide on a way to move forward. First, he had to decide whether he believed Star’s story.
She was gnawing on her fingernails, but as if sensing his focus, she glanced up and stared back. He decided that yes, he believed her, which meant Eve had definitely been murdered.
Don had said there was some group put in place eight hundred years ago to protect the tomb, but that was mere legend. Noah dealt in facts. All the same, the timing made him suspicious. It lined up too well with the image Star had sent.
“Do you have copies of what you sent Eve?”
“I had everything on the computer in my place. They were destroyed.”
“Not in the cloud?”
“I don’t trust the cloud.”
“Could you go in and get a new image?”
“No. I lost all the information Eve gave me. And she called me, so there are no emails or text messages for back up. I thought she was being paranoid again but obviously not.” She frowned. “Do you really think that she was killed because of that image? It doesn’t make sense.”
No, it didn’t. Unless it wasn’t the image that was important, just that it had led someone to Eve. If they’d been monitoring Star at that point, they could have pinpointed Eve through the communications.
Could Eve have found out something else in Russia? Something someone didn’t want out there? Maybe Genghis Khan was just a cover. Archaeologists often had access to places and people the intelligence community couldn’t get close to. They were given permission to enter regions closed off to the military. Hell, Eve had been in Iraq when they first met. Could she have been approached by someone in the intelligence community, maybe recruited, and asked to collect information? Eve had hated the intelligence community, had always claimed they were anything but intelligent. They’d argued over his work all the time. All the same, the theory couldn’t be dismissed. It certainly made more sense to him than she’d died because of an ancient grave.
“So what do you think?” Star asked.
“Honestly? As you said, it makes no sense.”
“You know I was hoping for more. I’ve been thinking—maybe one of the other archeologists wanted all the glory and got Eve out of the way.”
It was one theory. And actually, not a bad one. Except for the fact that everyone else had dropped out of sight, which hardly seemed to tie in with wanting all the limelight. “I’ve been trying to contact a couple of the people she worked with, but they’re not answering their phones or emails, and no one’s heard from them in a while.”
“You mean since Eve’s death? That’s not good.”
He was suddenly restless. “Do you know what’s happening? Regarding the murders? Was there anything on the news?”
“The police are after you. You left the scene of a murder. Apparently, you’re armed and dangerous. Or you’re dead.”
“Jesus, I need to contact someone, get word to my family that I’m alive. My kids will be going crazy. They just lost their mother—they do not need to be hearing this stuff.”
“You’re right, but do you want to give yourself up to the police right now?”
No he didn’t. He wanted to stay mobile, and there was a good chance he’d be taken into custody at least until they checked things out.
“I don’t think you should tell anyone where you are. We don’t know who we can trust.”
She was almost right. But there was one man he would trust with his life. Peter. “I have an uncle. He’s family. He’ll get word to the kids that I’m okay.”
“You’re sure?” She sounded doubtful.
“I told you he’s family.” Though, really, what did that mean? He wouldn’t trust the rest of his family as far as he could throw them. “Peter is different. I trust him.”
She shrugged. “Your call.”
Until Noah had answers to all of his questions, he was putting his family at risk. He couldn’t go back to his old life.
He felt the familiar tightening in his gut, the tingle in his blood.
Eve had always told him he was addicted to danger. It was the main reason she had left him and taken the children. She’d said she wanted to distance themselves not only from the danger that followed him around, but also so that when
he came to the inevitable bad end—as she was sure he must—it wouldn’t hurt so much.
Now she was the one who had come to a bad end.
And he was going to find out why.
Decision made, he glanced across at where Star slumped in her chair, still chewing on her nails, a frown line between her brows. She wasn’t his idea of a partner, but as she had said about him, she was all he had right now. While he wouldn’t put anyone else in danger, she was already in the thick of it. Like him. Until they figured out what was going on, her life was on hold as well.
Noah would contact Tom first. With Clayton Industries’ resources, the man should be able to find out who was with Eve in Mongolia—in case Professor Coffell didn’t come through with the information. Then Noah would reach out to his contacts in the intelligence community, but he’d be careful. He didn’t know who he could trust.
“So what next?” Star asked.
“We need to follow in Eve’s footsteps, where she went, who she met.”
“Who killed her?”
“Exactly.”
Chapter Eleven
“Peter, it’s Noah.”
“Where the hell are you?”
Noah ran his hand down his face. “Still in London, but it’s probably better you don’t know more than that.” He was using a new cell phone Star had assured him couldn’t be traced, but he was feeling a little paranoid. Didn’t want to say any more than he had to.
“What’s going on? Are you aware that you’re wanted for questioning with regards to murder? It’s all over the news.”
At least he wasn’t a suspect. Yet. “Two guys, who I believe were following me, turned up dead. I called it in, but I’m guessing it was an ambush. I had to make a run for it before the police arrived because whoever killed them stuck around to kill me, too.” He’d decided not to mention Star’s involvement. It felt safer giving out information on a need-to-know basis, and Peter didn’t need to know about Star just yet. He was sure his uncle would go along with whatever he asked, but there was always the small chance he would fall on the side of the law and set the police on them both. For Noah’s own good, of course.