He could smell it from here. Though he’d smelled a few meth labs in his day, mostly after they’d blown up, he felt confident enough to say this was different.
He’d expected a perimeter with armed guards. Fencing. Something. But maybe that wasn’t necessary. They’d come so far out that these trailers could explode and no one would hear it. He certainly would never have found them if it hadn’t been for Grace.
Looking around, Nate took note of the precision with which the place was laid out. Though the trailers were nothing to look at, they were evenly spaced. He didn’t know, but he would guess they were at a good blast radius distance from each other. Wouldn’t want them all to go like popcorn if one of your cooks had a bad day.
While he stood there, he saw a man come out of the one trailer without a “chimney.” He talked on the phone and stalked around for a few minutes. Then, as Nate watched, he waved to someone and a truck pulled up the road. With a shout, he alerted all the trailers and, one by one, doors opened.
Each trailer burped out one man or woman holding a teddy bear. Probably stuffed with drugs.
Nate looked at his watch. He’d missed his check in with Grace. But he had enough information.
Turning away, he carefully walked far enough out of sight and turned his phone on. Then he texted Grace that he was on his way back.
* * *
Grace frantically paced around the camp. She had to get out of here. She needed the map of the roads and it had taken her too long to find where Nate had tucked it between the seats of the car.
She’d spent the first part of the hour with her back against the biggest tree she could find frantically texting Brad.
“Where are the deposits from?” She was looking for an out. She knew it. She did not want Nate to be guilty. Still, evidence was evidence.
It took five minutes, but Brad texted back with information about an offshore account.
Grace had an idea. “Did he spend it?”
That came back pretty quickly. “No, it’s all still there.”
She’d thought if he didn’t spend it, maybe that meant it wasn’t his, or it was part of an undercover sting operation. But it didn’t help. He couldn’t spend it. Any criminal knew that spending their ill-gotten gains could get them caught. Nate would know that better than most. If he was doing it, this would be his equivalent of a better 401K. Shit.
It could be a setup.
It might not be. Nate might be the dirty cop in the middle of all this. Or one of them.
Grace wanted to scream, but that was about the worst thing she could do. So she packed up to leave. If she was wrong, and Nate was clean, he’d laugh at her paranoia.
But if he was a dirty cop, she could wind up dead. The only safe choice was to go. She had the car keys…
Why would he give her the keys and leave her alone if he was crooked?
The only answer would be that he hadn’t. He was testing her. So she had to look like she was just putzing around. If he’d killed Jimmy, she’d see him rot in hell. Still, she couldn’t reconcile that with the man who’d held her while she cried and seemed maybe too perfect for her. Wasn’t that the problem?
She looked around the camp, making decisions. She couldn’t prove anything one way or another. He looked dirty. But that didn’t mean he was violent.
In the end, Grace decided to leave the tent. It was too much trouble to pack up and run with it. Plus, if the temperature dropped again sleeping in the open might kill him. She simply couldn’t do that to him.
She’d be out soon. She had half the remaining cash, which wasn’t much, but it would get her back to civilization. Bundling the remaining food in the cloth grocery bag, she thought twice and threw in the gun from the lockbox under the seat. She didn’t know how to shoot it and did not want to get caught with a weapon in her vehicle. If she was pulled over and anyone checked it, they would find it belonged to an officer in Denver that she suddenly realized she couldn’t even name. Bad enough she’d be driving that car; she wouldn’t do it with a firearm on her.
Shit! Her phone! She turned it on late and saw the ping that Nate was on his way back. But he’d sent it fifteen minutes ago and she had to get the hell out of here.
She used the rope from the trunk and slung up the grocery bag in a tree, anchoring it with a slipknot. She wouldn’t let bears get his granola bars and gun, though she almost laughed at the absurdity. She was torn between declaring that she loved him and stabbing him in the back. So somehow, she’d found a way to do both.
She crawled into the tent to check for her things, then popped out and stood up, tucking Jimmy’s ashes into the waistband of her jeans and under her shirt. It felt dumb to do it, but she wasn’t giving up the only proof she had without a fight.
Grace had just clutched the car keys in her pocket when she heard the twig snap behind her.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nate headed back through the woods, almost whistling.
He’d done what he set out to do, and he was hopeful that a little time on her own would make Grace want to at least tell him what was going on. She was acting as though he’d done something heinous and she just didn’t want to speak to him anymore.
That thought stopped him cold. Had he? Did she think he had?
With a few deep breaths, Nate tried to turn his detective brain toward Grace. She’d been acting weird last night, too. They’d gone out chasing the weird smell just fine, but by the time they got back, she was using monosyllabic words and saying “no” to everything.
It was the text she’d gotten from Brad. That’s when things had changed.
He turned on his phone again and saw that she’d texted back that all was well at the campsite. Neither of them had used the word “fine” so aside from whatever Grace knew or thought she knew, things should be okay.
But he was worried. He sat on a log and reached out to Brad via text.
“Hey Brad, can you tell me what you told Grace last night? She’s pretty upset.”
“No.”
Well, shit. Nate tried not to jump to conclusions. “Is it about me?”
This time the answer wasn’t so fast, and it didn’t answer the question either. “Why isn’t Grace answering her texts?”
“Because we are only tur…” screw it. He pushed the button and called.
“Ryder.” The reception was as chilly as Grace’s mood. What was going on?
“Because we’re only turning on our phones once an hour to check in. I’ll get her, and she’ll talk to you herself.” Nate didn’t dare say “She’ll tell you she’s fine.” Then it would really sound like he was holding her hostage.
There was another pause. “Give me to Grace.”
“I’m probably about fifteen minutes away.”
“You can’t see her!” It wasn’t a question but a demand on why Nate would be so stupid.
Brad had a point and Nate started walking. It was dumb to be on the phone out here, splitting his attention, but things had gone from survivable to batshit in the past hour, and Brad’s comments and questions were only making the whole situation worse. “Her choice. She didn’t want to come with me this morning.”
“So, you left her alone?” At least this time the question dialed up a bit and the accusation down.
“What was I supposed to do? She isn’t speaking to me, Brad. I left her with everything. The tent, the food, the car keys—”
“You left her with the car?” The tone was so different, so surprised that it stopped Nate again. He didn’t get a chance to speak before Brad interrupted his surprise. “She probably won’t be there when you get back.”
“What?” This time it was his turn to nearly yell. Shit. He couldn’t do that out here in the woods. He wasn’t far enough away from the drug lab to be yelling at Brad. His feet were eating ground. “Why would she be gone, Brad?”
“I found your bank statements.”
Nate tripped over a root from a tree and pain shot up his leg. That didn’t even make sens
e. His bank statements would show… that he was a single man living on a detective’s salary. “What? You hacked my bank?”
“Not me personally.”
“Lovely. So you told her I eat at China Hut too often for a normal human?”
Brad laughed. Shit. The guy did have his bank statements. That was the laugh of truth. “I’m a bachelor.” And he’d be one forever more if he didn’t figure out what Brad had told Grace and why she was running.
“I’m only telling you this because my guy just found a weird trace. But we found several fifty-thousand-dollar deposits into your checking from an offshore account.”
“Deposits? Plural? What?” No wonder Grace was running. “It’s not there. I don’t have that kind of money unless it happened since… he counted back and named the last time he’d used his phone to check his balance.
“No, it’s been going on for months now. With an extra fifteen grand deposited the morning after Jimmy was killed.” Brad’s voice was cold.
Nate’s heart stopped cold. He’d been set up to look like Jimmy’s killer. His feet stopped, too, and he turned a full circle looking around the woods. His breathing went deep and then shallow. He kept his voice low. “Maybe it’s better that Grace ran off. They’re setting me up to take the fall for Jimmy’s murder. It gets the guy who’s hunting them out of the way and stops the department from looking for a rotten cop. They’ll think they found me. Brad. Brad!”
“What!”
“I’m sending someone to my house to send you copies of my actual bank statements.” He was a cop, he had print copies sent every month for exactly this reason. “If something happens, please be sure Grace knows it wasn’t me.” He hung up on Grace’s friend and dialed Zaragosa.
He wasn’t ready to go back to the camp and see that Grace was gone. He wasn’t ready to give up either. He told Mari everything. The lab, the location. “Ping this phone. I think I’m about one mile east of the lab. That will give you coordinates.” Then he told what Brad had found and begged Mari to get to his house right away and send Brad and Grace copies of his old statements.
Nate’s hopes of getting out of this cleanly were going down the tubes, fast. Only then did it strike him just how much he wanted to stay with Grace. Having the plug pulled on a future he hadn’t realized he wanted was worse than hopping into the frigid river had been. He was likely going to prison for something he didn’t do. And he would die there. He had no illusions about being a cop in lock-up.
When he hung up, he ran toward the campsite he was certain he would find empty. He’d have to pack whatever Grace might have left for him. Hide anything he couldn’t carry and hike out. He was thinking about rationing his food and how far in they’d driven. He had to stay away from forestry trucks and anyone coming through, including his own team looking for the lab. Or him.
He hadn’t even asked Brad if he’d turned the knowledge over to any authorities yet, or just to Grace. He came pounding into the campsite only thinking about Grace being gone. How the worst thing in the world was actually turning out to be for the best.
But when he arrived, he found Grace sitting on the ground, her arms around her waist and a gun to her head.
* * *
Grace watched as Nate approached. Her heart sank, and she felt like seven kinds of fool. There were no good outcomes for her here.
If Nate was dirty, she wasn’t safe. If he wasn’t dirty, then she’d just let herself be used as a trap. She should have been paying better attention. She should have just gotten out of here.
But then what? They would have just found Nate… Though that was only a problem if he was clean.
She couldn’t keep track of all the what ifs and tried to let them go. Job one, get the hell out of this. She offered Nate a wry shrug.
There was a gun to her head, she was coming to terms with the fact that she might not live past today and inside she’d already asked her parents’ forgiveness for her foolhardy rush to solve a murder. She seemed to have forgotten that if her brother was murdered, then there was a murderer. And that murderer was more than willing to kill people who got in his way. Grace had put herself in his way and stayed there. She was resigned.
By her calculations, whether Nate was taking money or not, he was her safer bet. He hadn’t killed her yet nor handed her over to anyone else to do it.
His eyes found hers and something in there told her there was a metric ton of things he wanted to say but couldn’t right now. She looked at him and fought tears.
The man who’d snuck up behind her had cocked the gun and, though she hadn’t heard him approach at all until he’d cracked that one twig, she knew the sound of a gun being cocked and she froze. He’d quickly maneuvered her into sitting cross legged on the ground while they waited for “her boyfriend.”
She’d missed her chance to do much of anything with it. Once she was sitting, an outburst or a sudden play for the gun was much harder. And they way he spoke, this man didn’t know anything about Nate. He was waiting. He’d told her, “I won’t kill you. I need you alive to control your boyfriend. But if you make a move on me and I have to pull the trigger, that’s just the way it is. Keep in mind, I’ll try to keep you alive. You’re useful if you’re breathing. Your pain, however, is no concern of mine.”
It had been effective. She’d obeyed, though now she wished she hadn’t.
Behind her the man laughed and his voice boomed. “Detective Ryder. Welcome to the party.”
Nate put his hands in the air and followed instructions to slowly walk forward.
Shit! Grace thought. It was going to work. This guy was going to get Nate, too. With her eyes she begged him to make a move, but Nate’s mouth flattened as though he wouldn’t risk anything. He should risk her. Getting caught was her fault.
Obviously not new to this, her captor quickly patted Nate down. The whole time he kept the gun aimed on Grace and she was stuck on the ground, twisted up and unable to run, fight back or even make any reasonable outburst. She expected the building anger to explode out of her chest at any moment though. The man made short work of finding Nate’s gun and tucking it into his own pants. Then he found a knife at Nate’s ankle that Grace hadn’t even known about.
The man had the car keys, the weapons, their phones, and he’d even pushed the nearby sticks out of her reach. She wanted to scream.
He was trying to get Nate to sit down beside her, but Nate was stalling.
“Why are you here? What do you want with us?”
The man laughed, “I want to take you back and get rewarded. Though I’m not sure if you need to be alive for that.”
Nate tipped his head as if to acknowledge that, then he nodded. “True, but I’m already AWOL.” He wasn’t even playing the naïve card. He was going for the jugular. “Since I already called in your location, you can kill us, but it won’t stop you getting shut down and going to jail. Check my phone.” Nate motioned with one finger.
The man had stepped back out of range, keeping Grace and Nate as two points on a triangle. It was smart. She was struggling to figure out how to get out of his range and make some kind of move.
She wouldn’t run. She was not going to die getting shot in the back by some petty drug thief who was in with the people who killed her brother. She also wasn’t going to leave Nate to defend himself alone, cop or not.
“Move over!” the man motioned with his gun. He’d not told her his name. Unlike bad guys in the movies, other than his one statement about keeping her alive—which had been a threat more than a monologue—he hadn’t revealed any evil plans.
Nate still stalled. “I don’t want to.”
“I’ll shoot you.”
“You do that,” Nate offered with a falsely cheerful shrug. “I’m already missing from my job. They know what I was looking into. And I have contacts. Like I said, I already called in the location of your little factory back there—” he pointed as if to prove he knew what he was talking about. “And I pinged that phone of mine, that’s now
in your pocket—and it’s on, by the way—to this location, right before I saw you.”
As Grace watched, the man’s eyes got rounder and rounder. Had Nate really done those things? Or was he just talking a good game?
“Look at the phone,” Nate encouraged him with a tip of his head. “You’ll see I made two calls just a few minutes ago. It won’t take much to find you. Especially, if you’ve got my phone and hers pinging your location.”
The man reached into the side pocket of his cargo pants. Though he didn’t take his eyes off Nate or Grace, he was clearly thinking about pulling the phone out. His brows frowned at them and his eyes narrowed. He looked like he was going to shoot one of them if Nate was lying. And Grace had no idea if he was or wasn’t.
The man pulled out the phone and started pushing buttons to try and get past the screen.
Apparently, that was what Nate had been waiting for.
“Grace!” He screamed it at the top of his lungs. But it didn’t make the man look to her. He looked to Nate, swinging his gun toward the man who’d yelled.
She was in the clear, just for a moment. Out of the corner of her eye, when she expected Nate to duck, he ran toward the man. It was madness, but there was nothing she could do except trust that Nate knew what he was doing. So she rolled to one side and up to her feet. Well, she wasn’t cut for running long distances through the woods, but she could sit on her knees for hours and then pop up like nothing. She was never more grateful for all that training digging things up than she was now.
“Grace! Run!” Nate hollered, and even as her feet began moving, she saw he’d grabbed the man’s hands and pushed the gun upward.
Her heart still started as she heard the report of a bullet leaving the chamber, but she could see that Nate wasn’t in the line of fire. It didn’t matter, what was done was done. The next job was to stop anything worse from happening. Even if she had to bandage one or both of them up later.
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