Nate had nodded, watching while she spit. Well, this was a complete one-eighty from how sexy she’d felt in the tent this morning. Then again, the man trusted her enough to jump into freezing water buck naked in front of her. She didn’t mock him about shrinkage; he was doing well to stay quiet about her spitting.
After she’d spit more than she thought she possibly could and produced less than seemed plausible, Grace capped her vial and handed it back to the tech.
“I’m going to run this myself. It won’t be good for anything other than knowledge, though. So you hold onto those ashes. If this goes to court, we’ll have to repeat all the testing for official results.”
Grace liked this woman already. Willing to help out because Brad had asked her for a favor, she was on her A game. She was already popping back out of the car, having gotten what she needed. “I have your numbers. You have mine. Notify me if the numbers change. I’ll contact you as soon as I see anything. Hopefully in a few days.”
“Thank you!” Grace called out as the door closed and the woman disappeared. Then she sighed.
“Hotel.” Nate said as they drove away. “Well, Motel, but not a tent. It’s too late to go back. Mari Zaragosa is the only one who knows we’re here. Well, and her.” He pointed over his shoulder, obviously referring to the lab even though it was far in the rearview by then.
“Do you trust Zaragosa? You’re sure she’s not compromised or anything?”
“With my life.” Nate reached out a hand and took hers, lacing their fingers together. “But that’s my gut. Logically, she’s relatively new to the station, so someone getting to her would be really hard at this point. I trust her not to be followed or monitored either. She’s smart. Knows what she’s doing. So let’s get a meal where we can sit down and then get a real bed.”
Grace tucked the ashes—the only thing left of her brother—up under the seat. It was positively abnormal to be driving around with human remains. Though she did it all the time, now was not the time to have to identify herself or explain why a Georgia Bureau of Investigation badge was getting flashed in Colorado. Or actually, New Mexico now.
Nate was right. This had been a seven-hour drive. They’d not left the park lands until nearly noon and the tech had stayed late to meet them. There was not enough time to head back. She sighed at the thought of a real bed and a real shower and getting to sleep at a regular time.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Nate watched Grace as she moved through the woods in her dark gear. Last night they’d watched a movie that he’d risked going back down to the desk and handing cash over for.
He’d waded through enough porn stations to make him squeamish, but eventually they’d found a recent release neither of them had seen. They’d curled up together against the headboard in a way that seemed perfectly normal. They’d ordered pizza to the room and he’d handed over more of his dwindling supply of cash. But once he managed to ignore that they watched the TV at an angle so they didn’t sit on the bed closer to the window and that his sidearm was aimed at the door, between them and all comers, it was a stunningly regular kind of night. As long as he didn’t count the way his heart managed to pound and the way his mind entered a zen-like calm.
Something in his thoughts whispered that this was exactly how it was supposed to be. He was supposed to be with Grace. Having her curled up against him felt like being home in a way he hadn’t known existed.
His heart twisted, though. Because another part of his brain reminded him that she lived on the other side of the country. That all the things he loved about her—there was that word again—were the things that meant she wouldn’t pick up and come out here to be with him. He ate the pizza and told himself it didn’t sit in his gut like a rock.
Halfway through the movie, her phone rang again. Only this time it was Kevin. He watched her heart in her eyes. This was the man her brother had loved, and she clearly was taking the connection as something more than just information. Nate got on the line and talked Kevin through a meet up the next day.
It would take some maneuvering to shake the watchers Kevin clearly had, but once Nate told him that there were several people keeping tabs on him in his neighborhood, Kevin got mad. “I know Jimmy wouldn’t do something like that. And I wondered why you hadn’t reached out to me again, Grace.”
“I know. I told you I was coming to town and then … nothing.”
“At least this explains it. I’ll do anything to help find whoever did this.”
Nate didn’t say it might take that much.
When the movie ended, he turned her to him and made love to her like he wanted. In a real bed—not a nice one, but a real one—and showed her all the things he didn’t yet know how to put into words. He told himself that the way she moved against him, the way she reached for him, showed that she felt the same way.
The next morning they slept in, feeling lazy and decadent, ate brunch at a local stop, and hit the road. After fast food and a long day in the car, Grace had been a trooper. Once it was dark, they turned onto yet another closed road and found a space to camp out again. It was still far too dangerous to get a motel near Dark Falls.
Nate noticed Grace shaking her head and sniffing at the air as they set up the tent. He’d been moving them to a new location each night, since they couldn’t afford to be found. So they were now on the south side of town, and Grace didn’t like the way it smelled.
She’d started off through the woods, following whatever she’d detected. Luckily, they were in their dark clothes. Too close to town this time, they couldn’t even wear bright colors. There would be no bathing in the river without worries. They didn’t even use the red light, just stayed low and kept a slow pace and headed toward the scent that he couldn’t smell.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her—he did—he just couldn’t detect it. And it was odd following someone else toward something he couldn’t sense. He didn’t like her being in front either. It was harder to protect her from behind and he tried to remind himself that, while she had no idea about a gun, she was hardly defenseless. If she came up against one of Slater’s men, he’d put odds on Grace. She was smart, and she was angry.
The problem would be if they came up against more than one of Slater’s men. Even Nate and his gun and his extra magazine might not be able to handle that.
“Grace,” he whispered. “Maybe we should turn around and head back. We can send someone else to check this out.”
“Obviously, we can’t.” She didn’t even slow down. “You can’t smell it, so why would anyone else? I have a good nose. We need to follow it.”
“We can come out with dogs.” He didn’t like this, something sat odd in his chest. Maybe it was just that he was following blind. Maybe it was being in the woods—not his forte—in a near-pitch-black night, with no plan. But something was telling him to turn back.
Grace wasn’t having it. “Explain? The dogs will stay quiet how? And since I’m struggling to define the smell, though I’m confident I’ve smelled it before…how will we tell the dogs what they are looking for?”
Dammit. She was right. She was just right. He was out of arguments and the bands of dread around his chest squeezed tighter and tighter until he almost grabbed her and hauled her the other direction. She’d protest, and he wouldn’t be able to tell her why but he had to do it.
Nate felt his lips twitch. He was about to do it. “Grace, my gut instinct has saved me so many times.” She stopped and turned to look at him. “And right now—"
He smelled it. He sniffed the air again. It was coming from the direction Grace was headed. It was odd, he couldn’t place it entirely, but something told him to look up. It was hard to see through the tall trees and the darkness. The moon helped, and Nate stood still and focused.
Thin tendrils of dark blue-grey smoke rose into the sky. Shit.
“Is it a meth lab?” Grace whispered, finally pulling in close to him as she looked in the direction of the odor and the smoke.
&
nbsp; Nate couldn’t see anything on the ground. The forest was still too thick.
Grace’s phone buzzed in her pocket then, and she pulled it out. As if his tension wasn’t high enough already. She had to check it. They’d turned down the brightness on their screens, but it still looked like a homing beacon in the dark. Even though she opened the phone under her shirt and peered down the neck to read it, it glared brightly. She was doing everything right, and he was winding up like a toy with a crank. “What is it?”
“Just Brad, checking in.”
At this hour? He must have looked at her oddly because she answered the question he hadn’t given voice to.
“He hasn’t heard from us that we got the ashes to Albuquerque, and he just…had a bad feeling or something.”
She didn’t look at him. She was ignoring the phone now and looking toward the meth lab site. And Nate hated that Brad Layelle’s bad feeling only solidified his own. He told Grace what he thought. “I don’t think it’s an actual meth lab. They’re cooking something, but the smoke is the wrong color for meth—”
“And the smell isn’t quite the same.” She was nodding, though Nate had no idea where she’d smelled a meth lab before and she didn’t volunteer it.
* * *
Grace tried to keep her breathing steady, though she hoped Nate wouldn’t think it was odd if she was breathing heavily. They were out in the middle of the night, trying to follow a smell. A smell he didn’t want her to follow.
They’d found a lab, but Nate would have had her not even search out the smell in the first place. “Do we need to go back? We know what it is now…”
She was looking at him and trying to find something in his face, but his expression was closed. Her heart pounded, and her brain was screaming at her. It was screaming the text message Brad had sent. She’d returned a “thank you” just so he’d know she got it.
Brad was a smart man. He knew she was on the run with Nate. He knew she couldn’t just pick up the phone and call him and say everything was peachy. Because it wasn’t. She hadn’t lied about Brad having a bad feeling. It was just that Brad’s bad feeling was about Nate.
He hadn’t liked that Nate just picked up everything and followed her out the door to investigate a case that he’d already closed up with a bow. It was a pretty bow, too. No officer would want to undo that. So he’d done some digging and not liked what he’d found.
She tried to calm her breathing while Nate thought about what he wanted them to do next. What if he walked her right into the compound and made her a prisoner? He had everything. He had Jimmy’s ashes, so he could barter with Slater X’s people. He had the lab in Denver.
It was Nate who’d suggested the results come to him. That he had a P.O. box under a false name in Dark Falls. At the time he’d said it was for confidential informants to get him information, but that was an easy lie.
She felt like she was going to collapse. Grace had trusted him. Brad hadn’t. And the massive bank deposits Brad had discovered in Nate’s personal saving account said Brad had been right.
Grace almost sank to her knees and cried, right there in the national forest, so close to a meth lab she could smell it. Only it wasn’t meth, it was maybe something new. Hence the desire to protect it. Jimmy’s text had said he thought he’d found something. This must have been it.
Jimmy had suspected local officers. He’d specifically mentioned Forestry officials and sheriff’s deputies, but Grace knew now that some of the DFPD were involved. And Detective Nate Ryder had “caught” her brother’s case and closed it in twenty-four hours with a faulty autopsy. One of the deposits to his account, one of the bigger ones, had come the morning after Jimmy died.
They’d been noisy in the tent and no one had found them. Or maybe they had but it wasn’t part of the plan. The motels—had that been too easy?
It was all she could do to hold it together until he said, “We’ll go back tonight. We can come check it out tomorrow before we meet with Kevin.”
Kevin! She’d set Kevin up, too!
She’d slept with Nate and now she wanted to vomit. But she hid it the best she could and trekked behind him back to the tent, reminding herself that Nate had her sewed up. He had control of all her blood samples and lab results. He had control of the results from Jimmy’s ashes. But she had the remaining ashes. So when she got to the tent, she pleaded exhaustion and she tucked her hand under the air mattress and touched the bag with the last of her brother’s ashes. She vowed to protect Jimmy’s memory from her now-colossal mistakes.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Nate watched as Grace shrugged at him and said, “It’s up to you.”
She’d pushed so hard last night, but something had changed. “We can go check it out. I’ll call it in to Zaragosa when I get a chance. Maybe the SWAT team can move on it.”
“You can already call it in, can’t you?” Her expression looked worried and he wondered where his full-steam-ahead Grace had gone. He reached out for her, but she pulled back, shaking her head.
“I don’t feel well.” She’d tucked the baggie with her brother’s ashes inside her jacket and was hugging it, just as she’d done all morning. She was still eyeing him sideways.
She wasn’t feeling well, but Nate bet it wasn’t physical. He nodded his acceptance of her statement but added the issues with calling in the site. “I can call it in, but I don’t have any information other than a relative location and a funny smell. They’ll have to send a recon team out here. That will just as likely trip some sensors for the people in the lab and nothing will come of it.”
Grace stared at him with wide eyes and a vacant sense of connection behind them. He hated it. “Can you please tell me what’s going on?”
She shook her head this time and hugged her arms closer around her.
Crap. He did not like this. Unfortunately, they did need to do some investigation and call the site in. But she was no longer willing to come along. This was possibly the best chance to shut this operation down, find out who the moles were in the department, and get him and Grace out of their on-the-run life. He needed his job back. He needed a meal of way too much Chinese food. He needed Grace to look at him like she cared, like she trusted him. He wasn’t getting any of that, it seemed.
He sighed, heavy and deep, this all sucked. “I don’t like leaving you here alone, but that’s all I can think of if you won’t go with me. We need to do some recon, so we can get this properly shut down.
She nodded at him, still wearing only that blank expression, and turned away.
He reached out for her before remembering that she didn’t like that now. Didn’t want to be touched, or maybe just didn’t want him to touch her. “Grace!”
She turned back.
“I’d feel a lot better if you were with me. I don’t like splitting up.” In fact, they hadn’t split up at all over the past week. That would make most couples homicidal, but it hadn’t done that to them. It had just driven him closer and closer to her. But now she was shutting down. Was she thinking that she hated the way he breathed and she blamed him for this mess? And how could he ever fucking find out if she wasn’t talking to him?
“I’ll be fine.”
Fine. It was a shitty word. “Do me a favor, and turn your phone on for five minutes each hour? I’ll reach out to you to check in. You can text back. But if I…text you that everything is fine, that’s a signal that it’s not. Turn your phone off and run. Okay?”
She frowned at him as he reached into his pocket and fished out his car keys. He tossed them to her and she caught them with a swipe of her hand, but she was looking more and more confused. He stared at her for a moment, but when she didn’t say or do anything else, he turned and walked away. What else was there for him to do?
Maybe she’d talk when she was ready. Maybe that was it. He felt like just as they were on the brink of breaking this thing wide open, he and Grace were suddenly falling apart.
Leaving her there at their little, hidden campsi
te was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. It shouldn’t have been so hard. She was an adult and a smart one. She wasn’t in WitSec, she wasn’t a prisoner, or one of the criminals he had to protect because they’d flipped on their buddies. She was just Grace.
As he stalked off into the woods alone, it pissed him off to think that he was better with her beside him. He saw more. He could trust her to watch his back, and he could look for more. Hell, they wouldn’t even know about this place if she hadn’t smelled it. She pitched in, pulled more than her own weight, and was…
That was the problem right there. Grace was undefinable.
Nope, he told himself. Grace was utterly definable. She was not his. She’d made that clear this morning. Maybe she’d seen the writing on the wall, seen that this was—hopefully—close to over, and she was pulling back.
He stepped on a branch and listened as the crack reverberated through the trees. That was dumb as shit. He hadn’t been watching and his only consolation was that the echoes bounced the sound around enough that no one would likely locate him from the noise. Crouching down, Nate gave himself a little pep talk about getting his head out of his ass.
At this rate, he was going to walk himself right into the center of the compound moping about Grace and not even realize he’d done it. He was ninety-nine percent certain she wasn’t back at the tent moping about him.
When enough time had passed, he slowly stood and scanned his surroundings. He told himself Grace was fine. He checked his watch. And he headed toward the smoke, stepping carefully, unsure what he might encounter.
Twenty slow minutes later, he saw a clearing with a cluster of trailers. All but one had a cobbled together vent made of crudely cut HVAC ducts with a thin plume of that blue-grey smoke drifting out.
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