“And if she’s not who she says she is?”
“If she’s not, well, then at least we’ll know.”
It wasn’t the worst plan. “I thought you were afraid the woman with the bright pink hair might blow your head off.”
“At night, in Falls Parks, maybe. But not in the middle of Sixth Street, she won’t. There’s that entire block of apartment buildings to the right. Think of all those potential witnesses.”
“Still. Be smart.”
“I’m always smart, Roxie. I’ll call you back when I have an update.”
Roxanne listened to the line go dead. She drained her mug of herbal tea and shook her head in disgust. She’d need the real stuff to make it through what was beginning to look like an interminable night. She set up a pot of coffee and turned on the coffeemaker.
As she listened to the coffee brew, she mapped out contingencies and strategies for her next moves. She reviewed her priorities. Top priority, always, to protect the homeland. Second, protect the company. Third, protect the client. Fourth, protect her people. Fifth, protect herself.
The fact remained—the only way to protect the country was to make sure Dahlia Truewind kept her mouth shut, one way or another. So if Johnny’s plan didn’t work, she’d have to come clean with Homeland Security to ensure Dahlia’s silence. They’d find a way to keep the girl quiet; but at the likely cost of her career. And a definite blemish on Bedrock Force’s record.
Country first, she reminded herself. She lifted her empty mug in a miserable salute. Country first, Roxanne.
Aroostine twisted in her seat. The man from the Jeep had stopped to make a phone call. He was about ten yards away from the truck.
“Quick, Dahlia, tell me about the guy you saw in Vermillion today. What happened?”
“I thought I might find something in Mercy’s apartment. I don’t know what, I was just looking for anything. I was waiting for somebody to come home so I could talk my way into the building, and I saw that green Jeep pull up. The guy looked like trouble.”
“Like trouble how? Did you recognize him?” Aroostine kept one eye on the man in her side mirror.
“Not exactly. But I recognized the type. He reminded me of the Bedrock Force security team. Always ready to mix it up. Young, strong, maybe not too smart.”
The body spray guy. She’d wager her dinged and dented truck he’d been one of the people who’d gone through the apartment.
“Did he see you?”
“No. I hid. Then I tracked down the editor-in-chief of the campus paper to see if he could help me get the truth out. But then someone showed up there looking for me—I think it was that same guy again—and I bolted out the back door. But he didn’t see me, and anyway, I didn’t look like this.”
“Wait. You wanted a school newspaper editor to help you decrypt a device containing classified information? That was your plan?” She tried to keep the judgment out of her voice. She failed.
“I don’t know,” Dahlia wailed. “I had to do something. And I was all alone, and I didn’t know what to do.”
She suddenly seemed very much a teenager.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. What you did was actually really courageous. And you’re not alone now. So, I want you to listen carefully. Let me do the talking with this guy, okay?”
“Talk to him? Are you joking?”
“No. I have something to say to him. You stay in the truck, okay?”
Dahlia stared at her.
“Okay?” Aroostine repeated.
She nodded her head ‘yes.’
Aroostine removed the keys from the ignition and wrapped her right fist around them, with her house key protruding, teeth up, from between her ring finer and middle finger. Then she swung open the door and hopped out of the cab in one motion.
She dropped to her feet and approached the man, moving quickly.
“Are you girls okay?” His features were arranged to convey concern—wrinkled brow, wide eyes, and slight frown.
She quirked her mouth into a smile she didn’t mean and drew closer to him. She didn’t respond to the question.
“Ma’am? I’m awfully sorry. I was messing with my cell phone—bad, I know. And took my eyes off the road for just a minute. I already called the police, you know, so we can get an incident report for the insurance companies. But, I readily admit I was at fault.”
His eyes drifted down toward the key poking out from within her fisted hand.
“You were at fault,” she agreed in a pleasant-enough tone. “But we’re not waiting around for the police. My friend and I have things to do.”
“I really don’t think—”
“Deliver this message to Roxanne Markham for me. Dahlia Truewind isn’t going to stop until the truth comes out.”
His right cheek twitched at the mention of Markham’s name and his eyes tightened, but he recovered smoothly—scrunching up his forehead and giving her a confused head tilt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you sure you’re okay? Maybe you hit your head?”
“Just tell her.”
Aroostine turned and walked back to the truck, forcing herself not to run and not to look behind her. As she passed the rear end of the truck, she assessed the damage. Nothing major. And the side panel was just dented. The pickup should be drivable.
It better be.
She pulled open the door, hoisted herself inside, and turned the key in the engine.
“What did you say to him?”
She ignored Dahlia’s question as she reversed the truck, clipped her shoulder belt into the receiver, and steered the truck down over the curb and back onto the street.
“Rue?”
“I told him to give Roxanne Markham a message. I wanted to see whether he’s working for her. He is.”
“He told you that?”
“His face did.”
Dahlia turned and looked out the back window. “He’s following us.”
“Are you wearing your seat belt?”
“Yeah.”
“Hang on.”
She accelerated, watching the speedometer rise—forty miles per hour, fifty, fifty-five.
“Rue, this is a city street.”
“Shh …” She didn’t need any distractions. She glanced in the rearview mirror. The Jeep was gaining ground.
“You’re going to get pulled over by the police.”
“We should be so lucky, Dahlia. I was planning to go to the park but that seems ill-advised. Any ideas?”
She needed to shake this guy.
“No. Wait, yes! There’s a hotel. Instead of making the turn off this street to go to the park, keep going straight. It’s only maybe another half a mile. Then you make a left, then the next right and it’s right there.”
A hotel could work. Maybe.
“Do you know if it has a garage?”
The left turn was coming up, so she didn’t wait for the answer. The tires squealed as they rounded the corner. The Jeep was still back there, but he was falling behind.
“Yeah, it does. Underground. The energy company people stayed there one time, and we picked them up for a site visit.”
“Perfect.”
“It’s this next right.”
Aroostine palmed the steering wheel, and the truck careened through a yellow light as it turned red. The driver of the Jeep slammed on his brakes.
“He stopped,” Dahlia said in wonder. “Who stops for a traffic light during a chase?”
“Someone who thinks he knows where to find us.”
“Oh.” Dahlia was silent for a moment. “So the hotel’s a bad idea?”
“No. The hotel’s a brilliant idea. He’ll know where we are, but so what? I don’t think he’s going to make another move on us.” Aroostine slowed as she approached the entrance to the parking structure.
She lowered the window and hung over the side of the truck to pluck the parking ticket from the machine.
“I don’t understand why he rammed us anyway. He doesn’t know who I
am, so he can’t think you have the sat-comm unit. Can he?”
Aroostine focused on maneuvering the big truck through the parking garage. She’d never driven in an enclosed space before, and the experience was disconcerting. She instinctively ducked every time the truck passed under a roof support, as if that action alone was keeping the top of the pickup from scraping the metal beams.
She eased the truck into an oversized spot at the end of a row then turned her attention to Dahlia’s question. “This is just a guess, but that run-in back there was about me, not you. Remember, I asked Ms. Markham about you. So I imagine Bedrock Force wants to know who I am, and what my interest is in you. For all they know, I’m after the box, too.”
She killed the engine. They grabbed their bags and she locked the doors. They followed the signs for the lobby. As they crossed the dimly lit floor, Dahlia smothered a yawn.
Aroostine could empathize. It had been a painfully long and difficult day. She didn’t have any reason to believe the next sunrise would necessarily bring a shorter or easier one.
26
Dahlia dragged herself around the hotel room, first unearthing her pajamas from her bag then assembling her toiletries in the big, bright bathroom. She was bone-tired. But the thought of sleeping in a real bed with a blanket and a nest of soft pillows was sustaining her. She grinned at the pair of queen beds piled high with snowy white sheets and fluffy blankets.
She had real problems that weren’t going to magically go away in the night, but it was like mom always said, ‘No matter how dark things look, tomorrow will be brighter.’
Mom.
A wave of guilt rolled over her. Her mom was so worried about her that she’d dragged Judge Orr into her drama and traveled halfway across the country to beg a total stranger for help. She should have been able to handle her business on her own.
She should be taking care of Mom. Not the other way around. That was the whole reason she took the freaking job at Bedrock Force in the first place. It wasn’t like her great ambition was to squash free speech to protect a bunch of millionaire oil barons or anything. She just had to be realistic. Twenty-five dollars an hour was a lot of money.
Enough money that she could have moved her mom off the rez after a couple of years. She could’ve rented them a clean, safe, modern apartment in a building with wheelchair ramps and grab bars in the bathroom. Instead, she’d thrown away her chance to get a degree because she was so impatient. Then she’d made a mess of things and had lost not only her job, but any chance she might have of getting any kind of decent job—maybe ever. She was so disgusted by how badly she’d let her mom down that she felt like throwing up.
“Are you okay?” Rue asked.
Dahlia caught her eye in the mirror over the dressers. Her eyes were creased with worry—and fatigue. The last thing she needed to do was unload her misery on a stranger.
“I think everything’s just catching up to me,” she mumbled.
Rue studied her for a moment then said, “A hot shower might be just what you need.”
Dahlia’s first instinct was to say no, what she needed was a bed. But it wouldn’t hurt to clean herself up, that much was for sure. And she wasn’t going to be able to hold back her tears much longer. At least the running water would give her cover. She could stand under the spray and cry her eyes out in private.
“Yeah, you might be right.”
She grabbed her pajamas and hurried past Rue into the bathroom. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the other woman knew she needed to have a massive cryfest and had given her a graceful out.
Who was Rue Jackman, and what was her deal? she wondered as she turned the water on full blast and waited for it to heat up.
Aroostine tried not to listen to Dahlia’s sobbing, which echoed off the tile walls and rose above the sound of the cascading water. The girl had to be teetering on the edge of a meltdown. Who wouldn’t be?
She’d witnessed a murder, been ordered to cover it up, taken matters into her own hands to steal top-secret government information, and gone on the run. Now she was being pursued by who knew how many mercenaries and federal agents?
They all wanted the box, right? Not the girl.
Her job was to find the girl. She’d done that. This was supposed to be the part where she found out if Dahlia wanted to go home—or if she’d at least let Janice know she was safe. But Dahlia wasn’t safe. And however much danger the girl thought she was in, the reality was far worse.
So, now your job has changed. Now, you need to help her so she can go home if she wants to.
She wasn’t particularly surprised to feel herself resisting the idea. After all, that hadn’t been the deal. But whether it was what she’d bargained for or not, it was what she’d got.
Joe’s voice filled her mind: Don’t forget Mercy. Mercy deserves justice. Help Dahlia bring her killer to justice and the rest of it takes care of itself.
Easy for you to say. You don’t have to figure out how to do it, she argued internally.
You can do this, Roo. Have a little faith.
She felt the sudden snap of emptiness as his spirit left her. Drained, she ran her fingers across her scalp, pulled out the two remaining bobby pins, and released her hair from the elastic holder lending it some semblance of order. She shook her head until her hair fell loose and heavy down her back.
Her gaze fell on the assorted stuff Dahlia had piled on the far dresser—a gauzy scarf, a rugged-looking metal box, the little beaver charm, and a SIM card for a mobile phone. She stroked the scarf absently, stumbling around her tired mind for a response to the threat the girl faced.
If Bedrock Force wants the box so badly, give it to them.
The voice in her head offering up this ridiculous solution as if it were perfectly logical was her own. There was no way to blame this idea on her dead husband, her dead grandfather, or a spirit animal. But she paused, breathed, and listened to herself.
She couldn’t dream of returning the device to Bedrock Force. But if the secrets on it belonged to the Department of Homeland Security, she could give it to them.
But how?
Walking into a field office and presenting herself as Rue Jackman wasn’t going to happen. Her identification may have fooled an Ohio state trooper. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement fell under the Homeland Security umbrella. If they weren’t able to tell her license was a forgery, then the security of the nation had much bigger problems than one teenager running around South Dakota with an encrypted device in her jacket pocket.
What about Leo? Leo Connelly, Sasha’s husband, was … some sort of operative within the Department of Homeland Security. He never, ever talked about work, but she’d been involved in enough cases with the McCandless-Connelly duo to know that he did something super-secret and only questionably legal.
Her pulse quickened. He could help Dahlia. And, more importantly, Aroostine could trust him to do the right thing with the information, even if it put DHS in a bad light.
The shower turned off. A few moments later, Dahlia pushed open the bathroom door. She was wearing a set of soft-looking pajamas and had a towel wrapped around her hair and piled on the top of her head.
“Feel better?”
“So much. Will it bother you if I dry my hair? I don’t know if you’re getting ready to sleep and I’ll warn you—”
“It takes forever. Yeah, tell me about it.”
Dahlia grinned. It was the first time Aroostine had seen a genuine smile on her face, and it was transformative. She looked like a teenage girl, someone who should be going to the movies or attending a football game. Not hiding in a chain hotel, on the run from some indeterminate number of very bad people willing to do who-knew-what to get their hands on potentially explosive information.
Aroostine glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand between the beds. Eleven-thirty; she felt like she’d been awake for a week. “Sure, go ahead. I am going to turn in. I’m a morning person, so this is way past my bedtime. But don’t wo
rry about the noise or light or anything. I sleep like the dead. Joe used to …”
“Who’s Joe?”
The words had died in her throat, and for a second Aroostine thought they might block her from ever speaking again. She was willing to lie about pretty much anything as Rue Jackman, but not Joe.
She cleared her throat. “Joe was my husband. He died recently. Anyway, he used to play fetch with our dog in the bedroom while I slept right through it.”
“Oh. I’m sorry that—”
“While you were in the shower, I got an idea. I have a friend who works for the government, for the Department of Homeland Security, actually. Well, sort of.” She paused to check the girl’s reaction. Dahlia’s back had stiffened, and her hand froze, hovering over the towel on her head.
“He’s a good guy. I can’t really go into detail about what he does, but he works in a secret group on sort of … um … sensitive matters. I’ve been in some really hairy situations with him, and, I promise you, he’s solid.”
“I don’t … what are you thinking?”
“It’s pretty late—he’s back East, and he and his wife have three-year-old twins. But, I’d like to call him in the morning and ask him to take the satellite communications box off your hands.”
“But, I need it to prove Mr. Swanson killed Mercy and Bedrock Force covered it up.”
“I don’t think you do. First of all, it’s encrypted. You’re not going to stumble across a journalist who can decrypt it—at least not without a lot of time and effort and a willingness to break a whole mess of federal laws. My friend should be able to actually do something with it.”
Dahlia twisted her lips into a crooked bow and thought it over.
Aroostine went on. “Sleep on it. See how you feel in the morning. But, if we get rid of the box, they won’t be after you. And I can take you home … if you want.”
Her eyes filled with tears instantly. “Home?”
“Back to your mother’s place. You’ll still have the SIM card. We can print out the pictures and see if they have anything we can use. Going home doesn’t mean giving up on bringing Mercy’s killers to justice, Dahlia. You can do both.”
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