Kentucky Confidential

by Paula Graves

  Connor slanted a look at Risa. “Must have been some kids, pulling a stupid prank.”

  Ray’s lips curved in a grimace of a smile. “Or some of my competitors, out to screw up my night’s worth of sales.”

  Connor rubbed Risa’s back, his touch warm and comforting. “You have a lot of trouble with your competitors?”

  “Christmas is a cutthroat business.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Risa asked, trying to settle her jangling nerves. It was possible Ray was right, that one of his competitors had tried to sabotage his business.

  Possible. But not likely.

  Ray pulled out his phone. “I’ll call my wife to bring me some more gas. Get the lights up and running again, and then the kids and me can clean up that mess where those jerks poured out the gas.” He nodded at their truck. “Go on, I’ll be fine. Maybe y’all can come back out tomorrow when it’s light and buy your decorations. I’ll give you half price on ’em for your trouble.”

  Risa looked up at Connor, not sure she wanted to leave Ray alone, under the circumstances. He read her expression and gave a slight nod before he turned to Ray. “Actually, if it’s no problem, we’ll wait here with you. I’d like to go ahead and get the decorations tonight.”

  “If you’re sure?”

  “Positive,” Risa agreed.

  Ray flashed them a quick grin. “Mighty friendly of you.” He pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his jacket and walked a few yards away to make his call.

  “I don’t think it was his competition,” Connor murmured, his lips so close to her ear she felt his breath stir her hair.

  “I don’t, either.”

  “Whoever it was, I don’t think he went far. He’s probably out there somewhere, waiting for a chance to follow us wherever we go next.”

  “Which can’t be back to the safe house,” Risa murmured. “At least, not tonight. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Who do we think it is?”

  “I think the more pressing question is, how did they find us?”

  Down the road, headlights appeared in the gloom. Seconds later, Risa heard the rumble of a vehicle engine. Instinctively, she edged closer to Connor, who tucked her under his arm and turned so that his body was between her and the advancing vehicle.

  “It’s Carla.” Ray moved past them toward the roadside as the vehicle, an older-model Chevrolet truck, slowed to a stop.

  A short, plump woman with faded red hair and a round, pretty face stepped out of the driver’s seat and glanced at Risa and Connor before she turned to look at her husband, who had retrieved a plastic gas container from the bed of the pickup. “What happened?” she asked as she handed him the flashlight she held in her right hand.

  “Must’ve been a kid pulling a prank,” Ray told her. “Thanks for gettin’ here so quick, hon.”

  Carla slanted another curious look at Risa and Connor.

  Ray nodded in their direction. “Sorry, didn’t get your names.”

  “Mac and Marisa,” Connor said before Risa could speak. “Nice to meet you. We were about to look at some decorations out back when the lights went out.”

  “Well, I can help you out with that,” Carla said with a smile as Ray turned on the flashlight and headed into the maze of trees. “I brought a couple more boxes of ornaments and garlands the girls put together—the local girls’ clubs in town make money for their activities by doing arts and crafts. Both of our girls are involved, so we sell ’em here at the tree lot every Christmas. Want to take a look and see if there’s anything you like?” She reached into the back of the truck, hauled out a large cardboard box and set it on the ground by the truck.

  Risa glanced at Connor, wondering if they dared stay there any longer. It wasn’t like she could be sure they’d get a chance to use that tree they’d just bought, not if they were about to go on the run. Plus, money was about to become a real problem for them.

  “We’ll take a look,” Connor said, meeting her gaze with steel in his blue eyes. He pointed the beam of his flashlight toward the box.

  Carla opened the box to reveal several small ornaments, individually sealed in clear plastic zip-top bags. Some had been carved from wood and painted, the quality surprisingly sophisticated. Others were made of needlework or handwoven, in homey colors that reminded Risa of some of the craft work she’d seen in the small villages of Kaziristan when she’d been living there undercover.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said.

  “Thank you. I’ll be sure to pass along the compliments to the girls. Anything you like? They’re fifty cents an ornament, and the beaded and woven garland strands are two dollars apiece.”

  Risa selected three wood-beaded garlands, two frosty blue and the other a weathered gold. She also selected a couple dozen ornaments in complementary colors. Connor pulled fifteen dollars from his wallet and handed it over just as the generator roared to life somewhere in the middle of the tree lot. The string of bulbs flickered on, lighting up the darkness.

  “Thank you for everything,” Connor told Ray when he emerged from the thicket. “Hope you have a merry Christmas!”

  “Enjoy your tree and decorations!” Ray gave a wave as they packed their decorations in the back of the truck with the tree. Risa waved back as they drove away from the brightness of the tree lot.

  Ahead, the winding road seemed to disappear into inky blackness beyond the beams of the truck’s headlights. Risa quelled a shiver and turned to look at Connor. “How the hell did someone find us?”

  * * *

  IN CUMBERLAND, CONNOR found what he was looking for—a public establishment still open at 8:00 p.m., with enough cars in the parking lot that an open ambush would be hard to accomplish. In this case, it was a pizza restaurant with a parking lot almost full on this cold Friday night.

  “You’re hungry?” Risa asked, her tone dry, as Connor pulled into the parking lot and angled the truck into a place near the back.

  “It’s dinnertime,” he murmured as he cut the engine.

  “Seriously, what are we doing here?”

  “Getting dinner,” he answered, lifting one finger to his lips.

  Risa’s eyes narrowed, but she understood the unspoken order.

  Connor reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a small rectangular box. Inside was an RF detector, designed to pick up signals from wireless transmitters, such as listening devices. He switched it on and waited for it to scan for a signal. It detected a GPS signal—Quinn put GPS trackers on all of the company’s fleet vehicles—but nothing else.

  “No bugs,” he told her. “You can speak freely.”

  “What’s that picking up?” she asked, pointing to the flashing green light.

  “GPS—this is a company vehicle, so they’ll be tracking it.”

  “What if someone at Campbell Cove Security is the one who’s following us? Maybe they needed to make covert contact.”

  Connor shook his head. “Someone would have found a way to let me know he or she was there. No reason to disable the generator and make such a production.”

  “So nobody’s bugging the car, or us. How did they find us? We need to figure that out, because they may be following us right now.”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I know we weren’t directly followed this time—as dark as it was on the road driving here, nobody could’ve followed without my knowing it.”

  “Does that make any sense?” Risa tugged her coat more tightly around her, looking spooked. “They risked following me around that tree lot with you and Ray there, but they don’t even try to follow us when we leave the place?”

  She was right. It didn’t make any sense. Unless—

  “Damn it,” he growled, snapping open the driver’s door. He grabbed the flashlight from the console compart
ment and started examining the underside of the Tahoe.

  Risa came around the truck to stand beside him. “You said the RF detector picked up the GPS signal. What if—”

  “Exactly.” He spotted the tracker that Campbell Cove Security placed on all the fleet vehicles, as expected.

  But a few inches farther down the underside of the chassis, he found another small tracker, almost invisible against the mud-spattered undercarriage. He checked to make sure it wasn’t connected to anything that could damage the car if he removed it, then plucked it from the undercarriage.

  “If we could put it on another vehicle...” Risa looked up at him, her eyes dark and unreadable.

  “We’d be putting the driver of that vehicle in danger.”

  She nodded. “I guess we can just throw it away.”

  He looked around the parking lot, trying to come up with an option besides leaving it sitting, static, in the parking lot of the pizza restaurant. It wasn’t a terrible option, he supposed, but for their purposes, it would help if the tracker could be on the move for a while, maybe drawing the people following them on a wild goose chase.

  “The river,” Risa said.

  He looked at her. “The river?”

  “We crossed a river on the way here,” Risa said. “We could throw it in the river.”

  “The electronics would short out. It wouldn’t give us any lead time.”

  She grinned at him, and for a second, he felt transported back to the early days of their relationship, when just being together was enough to make them both feel giddy and light. “Luckily for us, we just bought a whole lot of plastic-wrapped ornaments from the crafty girls of eastern Kentucky.”

  “Brilliant,” he said, opening the back of the Tahoe to retrieve one of the bags. “Which way is the river?

  * * *

  “SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT.” Risa stared out the windshield at the darkness, unease rising in her chest. They’d dumped the GPS tracker in the Poor Fork tributary fifteen minutes ago and gotten rid of the Campbell Cove Security tracker as well. Now they were driving west toward Harlan, but she didn’t feel any safer. “How did they connect the Tahoe to me? I don’t have any relationship to Campbell Cove Security. And this is a fleet vehicle.”

  “You have a relationship to me,” Connor said grimly. “And I was using my real name and my real credit cards in Cincinnati.”

  “But that only works if...”

  “If they made you.” Connor glanced at her. In the light from the dashboard, his face was a road map of shadows, but she could see enough of his expression to know it was grim.

  “That has to be it. They made me. And they connected me to you.”

  “So they’re tracking me, not you.”

  “Not anymore,” she said. “We don’t use your credit cards anymore. Throw away your phone if it can be connected to you.”

  “I have a burner phone that should be safe.”

  “Stick with that. How much cash do you have?”

  “About a thousand in a lockbox under your seat. Another five hundred back at the safe house.”

  “We can’t go back there.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Do you have any cash?”

  “Three hundred in a hidden pocket in my backpack.”

  “Also back at the safe house?”

  “Actually, no. I stashed my backpack under the backseat before we left. After the close call in Cincinnati, I didn’t think it was a good idea to let my laptop get too far out of my sight.”

  “We can’t use your phone to connect to the web.”

  “No, but maybe we can spare a couple hundred dollars to buy a new burner we can use instead,” she said, her sense of equilibrium beginning to return. “Also, I don’t think we can risk getting in touch with Campbell Cove Security. At least not for a few days, until we can figure out if they’ve linked you directly to the company. It’s possible they put the tracker on the Tahoe after we left Cincinnati, maybe at that gas station where we stopped outside Lexington.”

  “Quinn will start looking for us if we don’t check in. And if he sends someone to the safe house to check on us and finds us missing—”

  “I know,” she interrupted, “but it’s a risk we have to take. At least until we get some distance from where our last tracking coordinates show up. Let’s just look for a low-rent motel that’ll take cash and ask no questions. Get a good night’s sleep and then we can worry about what comes tomorrow.”

  Connor was silent for a long moment, long enough that she was beginning to fear he was going to argue. But finally, he nodded. “Okay. You’re right. We’re cold, we’re exhausted, and I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Maybe we can find a late-night drive-through on the way.”

  Her stomach rumbled in response, making them both laugh. She rubbed her stomach, where the baby was kicking up a storm. “Junior votes yes to the food, too.”

  Connor reached across the space between them, resting his hand on hers where it lay on her stomach. “We never talked about kids before.”

  “We hadn’t been married that long.” She took his hand and pressed it against her belly. “We thought we had time.”

  Connor’s fingers flexed against her stomach. “Time. Everybody think there’s time. Until there’s not.”

  The baby kicked against her belly, and she heard Connor’s soft gasp of surprise. She suppressed a smile. “And sometimes, you just have to figure out how to make more time for what’s important.”

  “Like Junior.”

  Exactly, she thought, blinking back the sting of tears.

  * * *

  THE REST STOP Motor Lodge a few miles west of Harlan was two stories of shabby brick and mortar, held together, the best Connor could tell, primarily by years’ worth of grime. The bedding on the double bed in the room they rented for the night looked relatively clean, but just in case, Connor retrieved the emergency camping kit from the SUV and spread the two sleeping bags over the bedding for them.

  “Resourceful,” Risa said, her tone approving as she sat down on one side of the bed, her legs crossed beneath her rounded belly. Digging in the bags they’d picked up at a burger joint on the way out of Cumberland, she retrieved a small box of French fries and started nibbling.

  She grinned at him as she passed him the bag, feeling a strange sort of exhilaration as the food hit her empty stomach. Or maybe it was just the feeling that she was, finally, herself again, after months of being someone else. She was Risa McGinnis, she was with the man she loved, and she was weeks away from giving birth to their child.

  Even the threat of ever-present danger didn’t seem to quell her sense that she was finally where she was supposed to be.

  But the sight of Connor’s sober face took a little edge off her sudden sense of well-being. He ate his hamburger slowly, methodically, as if his mind was somewhere far away.

  Back at Campbell Cove Security? Or somewhere else altogether?

  Something Dal had told her a couple of weeks ago, when she’d asked if he knew anything about what Connor was doing now, flashed through her mind, chilling her mood further.

  Seven months is a long time when you think your wife is dead.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Friday night crowd at The Jewel of Tablis was larger than Maddox Heller had anticipated. For cover, he’d brought along his wife, Iris, for this trip, leaving their two children with Iris’s sister Rose and her husband, Daniel, who’d been nearby in Lexington for the week doing research for Daniel’s latest book on criminal profiling. They’d agreed to take the kids through the weekend.

  “That’s Farid,” he murmured to Iris, glancing toward the emailed photo saved on his phone. “Quinn and Cameron said he might be the weak link. If we can convince him it’s worth his while to tell us why the man wanted to look around i
nside Risa’s apartment.”

  “Do you think it was really Tahir Mahmoud?” Iris was trying to appear unfazed, but he knew the thought that Mahmoud might still be alive disturbed her. The man had nearly killed her eight years ago. She’d had nightmares about him for a couple of years before she’d finally managed to conquer the residual fears of that encounter.

  “You saw the photo,” he said, wishing he could give her a definitive no. But he and Iris didn’t lie to each other. It was one of the cardinal rules of their marriage.

  “I did.”

  “What did you think?”

  “It looked a lot like him,” she said after a brief pause. “Damn Alexander Quinn for telling you they’d found the body when they hadn’t.”

  He reached across the table and took her hand. As always, he felt a light quiver of energy where their fingers touched. “Are you afraid he’ll come after us?”

  “I don’t know.” Her fingers tightened under his. “I guess it’s a plus that he hasn’t bothered us in eight years. Assuming he’s still alive.”

  “That’s how I’m choosing to look at it,” he admitted. “But I’ve asked Quinn to harden the security at our new house, just in case.”

  “What about the kids? Daisy rides a bus to a public school every day. Jacob is about to start school next year. How do we protect them?”

  “By finding out if this guy really is Tahir Mahmoud,” Maddox said quietly, glancing across the restaurant at a pretty young woman wearing a bright green scarf over her lustrous dark hair. Darya Nahir. Risa McGinnis had identified the young waitress as a person to interview, since she had waited on the table of the men in question and might have gleaned a little information about them. “There’s Darya. You ready?”

  Iris nodded. “Showtime.”

  Darya approached their table, a friendly smile on her face and a pair of menus in her hands. “Welcome to The Jewel of Tablis. Would you like something to drink while you’re looking at your menus?”

  “I’ll take a mint tea, iced,” Maddox said. “Sweetheart?”

  “The same, only I want mine hot.” Iris smiled up at Darya. “That is a gorgeous roosari. It looks handmade.”