by CJ Lyons
Even a sleepy town like Hopewell would notice a dead man walking.
He slid his hand across his shaved scalp, slicking away sweat born more of nerves than heat or humidity. Only one chance to get this right—and Lord knew, his track record wasn't in his favor.
No one at home. He returned the binoculars to his pack and brought out his bug detector. He knew from previous expeditions that Alan had every room covered except for the attic and the bathrooms. Hopefully he hadn't decided to invest in more of the motion-sensitive cameras.
Sam hoisted his pack onto his shoulders and crept through the foliage until he was directly behind his house. He hesitated. It was always so painful, coming home and being unable to speak with Sarah, leaving her behind. But it was too dangerous. He had to think of Josh.
Now, thanks to Korsakov's release, he no longer had the luxury of playing it safe.
An expanse of open lawn spread out between the forest and the bathroom window that was his target.
He stood still, listening. No cars approaching. He sprinted through the grass until he reached the cluster of lilac bushes outside their bedroom windows. Dead blooms still clung to the branches. He rubbed one between his fingers, inhaling deeply. Sarah always slept with the window open, loved smelling the lilacs in the spring and the peonies and roses in the summer.
Sam duck walked along the foundation of the house until he reached the bathroom window. He activated the small palm-sized surveillance detector. The screen glowed green. Good to go.
He pried the screen loose and pushed the window up. The pack went in first, then Sam followed, swinging his leg over the windowsill. He used his foot to drop the toilet lid down, wincing at the sudden clang of porcelain in the empty house. Nothing happened. No one came. The house was silent. He eased himself the rest of the way inside.
Because of Alan's surveillance cameras he was confined to the bathroom. Even in this cramped and crowded room, he still felt Sarah's presence. The cobalt blue tiles they had chosen and laid themselves, the scent of her shampoo—honey and almonds—the way her robe hung from the door, inviting him like an old friend.
He couldn't resist, nuzzling his face deep into the folds of the soft material, pretending it was Sarah who caressed him. Soon, soon, he promised himself.
The old railroad clock in the front hall chimed the hour. Three o'clock. Josh would be coming off the bus from day camp, and for the first time in ages Sam wouldn't be there to meet him.
He blew his breath out in frustration. It would be worth it when Josh was reunited with Sarah. He leaned forward, pouring himself a glass of water from the small pedestal sink. The gun resting at the small of his back nudged him, a not so subtle reminder that you can't outrun fate.
The crunch of gravel alerted him to a car's arrival. He stood near the window, listening. The carport was on the other side of the house. He strained to hear footsteps on the porch that ended at the kitchen door Sarah always used. Nothing.
"Sarah!" A man's voice bellowed from the front room.
Sam jumped, gagging on the water. He carefully returned his glass to the sink top, his hand trembling with fury as he recognized the voice. Alan.
He drew his gun, hating the weight in his hand, but no longer feeling clumsy with the semi-automatic. It had been a learning process, one that had cost him some blood before he figured out how to work the slide without catching the skin between his thumb and finger, but he'd eventually become a half-decent shot. Nowhere near as good as Sarah or the Colonel, but he sure as hell could shoot the stuffing out of a hay bale from twenty yards.
Edging the door open a crack, he held the gun ready, the acrid smell of gun cleaner replacing Sarah's scent in his nostrils. Alan called Sarah's voice again, then pushed open the bedroom door. His footsteps echoed from the oak floorboards. Then Sam saw the man himself.
His teeth ground together and he wondered how Alan could not hear it from where he stood not six feet away. Alan stood in front of Sarah's mirror, combed one hand through his hair, then sat down on the bed. Sam watched, his finger stroking the gun's trigger guard. Alan stretched a hand beneath Sarah's pillow, pulled out a small, velvet-covered journal.
"'Where would Damian have taken them?'" Alan mimicked Sarah's voice, using a high-pitched whine that was nothing at all like what she really sounded like. "'I'll find them. I have to.'" A thunk sounded as Alan hurled the book across the room, hitting the side of the dresser. It landed on the floor mere inches beyond the bathroom door. "Bitch! You're meant to be thinking about me. I'm the man right here in front of you! What have you gone and done now?"
The bedsprings creaked as Alan leaned back and reached for the telephone on the nightstand. "Colonel Godwin? Hi, it's Alan. Yeah, I know I wasn't supposed to get home from my meeting until tomorrow, but I just missed Sarah so much, that—"
Sam cringed at the other man's tone of sincerity. Hell, he'd believe him—if he didn't know the real Alan, if the man hadn't sent an assassin to kill Sam and his son.
"She's where? Up on the mountain and she found a body? Who is it?" Alan sat up, sliding off the bed and back onto his feet. "No, don't tell her I called. I want to surprise her. Yeah, maybe tonight's the night. Thanks, sir, I appreciate that."
He hung up and moved toward the bathroom. Sam tensed, held his breath. He knew he should stop looking through the cracked door, turn away to avoid detection. But the desire to confront the man who had destroyed his life, to have an opportunity to maybe even kill him, was too strong.
Alan stepped closer. Sam gripped the doorknob, really to explode into action. If Alan took one more step, if he reached for the door, if he looked up and saw Sam's eye in the tiny slit watching him...
Scenarios flew through Sam's mind faster than his pulse pounded. A bead of sweat slid from his forehead into his eye, stinging. He blinked hard, his gaze never leaving the tiny sliver that was his view into the bedroom. Just one more step.
Alan saved himself by stopping in front of the mirror, addressing his favorite audience, his own reflection. "Son of a bitch! First I have Korsakov breathing down my neck, now the cops will be crawling all over the place if that's Leo Richland they found."
He banged the bedroom door open and stalked from the room before Sam could hear any more.
Leo Richland was dead? How? When? Sam sat on the toilet and stared at his gun. Probably Alan had killed him. He raised the gun, sighted it on the roses that covered the shower curtain. Could still kill Alan now, one less person to worry about. He'd be picked up on the cameras, but who really cared if it kept Sarah and Josh safe?
He jerked his hand as if a bullet really were zooming through the gun barrel, causing it to recoil. No, he couldn't kill Alan, not until he had Sarah safe. It would raise too many questions, alert Korsakov.
But he had to get a message to her—and he couldn't risk Alan blundering into him while he was stuck here in the bathroom. He glanced around, trying to think of a way to leave a message that Alan wouldn't see. Then his gaze settled on the mirror. When he was a kid, he used to leave nasty messages for his sisters to find when they came out of the shower.
Stupid kid's trick, but it would work. Sarah always liked to take a shower after a hike, definitely before bed.
He stood and leaned over the sink, exhaling his breath onto the mirror. It wasn't the way he'd planned this, but then again nothing was.
CHAPTER 18
Sarah helped Hal wrestle the awkward package of decomposed remains through the scrub and back to the road. Gerald Merton lagged behind, wheezing as he carried the rest of their equipment and yelping every time a branch snapped back in his face.
"If you’d hurry it up, you’d catch them," Hal yelled over his shoulder, his tone harsh.
Sarah jerked to a stop, the foot of the vinyl body bag almost slipping from her hands. It wasn’t like Hal to lash out like that. Hal said nothing, merely turned his glare from Gerald to her. His face was red, sweat rolling off his nose and brow. He made a noise of disgust when Gerald stumbled
on a root, then started up the trail again, pulling her along as she tried not to disturb their delicate cargo.
Sarah wasn’t exactly enjoying the grisly task, even though she was certain the body didn’t belong to Sam, but Hal was more upset than she’d ever seen him before. Not just upset. Angry. As if the dead man had chosen an especially inconvenient time to surface. With the anniversary of Lily's death tomorrow, she guessed he had.
They transferred the bag into the back of Gerald’s Excursion. He fussed a bit about the smell and water, but Hal cut his whining short by stomping away to peel off his wetsuit and change back into jeans and his uniform shirt.
"Geez, who put a rattler in his cornflakes?" Gerald asked as he and Sarah packed rolled up blankets around the corpse to keep it from sliding around the rear of the Excursion. "Never seen him so antsy. Not even when…" he trailed off, his gaze darting from the body bag to her.
"When we pulled Lily out of Snakebelly," she finished for him, her voice low and solemn. Lily's body had been so battered and bruised, she'd rolled around inside the body bag like a rag doll. They'd lowered one of the Search and Rescue's wire mesh stretchers down and strapped Lily into it for fear of doing more damage as they hoisted her up. But still, Hal had insisted on zipping open the bag, unwrapping the plastic shroud and looking for himself.
Shuddering as she remembered the unearthly cry of despair that was the only sound Hal had uttered that long day, Sarah glanced over her shoulder. Hal was behind his GMC Jimmy, one arm rising up in the air as he tugged his t-shirt over his head. She was glad it was her rope they had left behind in case they needed to search Snakebelly further—and she'd do her best to be sure it wasn't Hal who returned to do the searching.
"Lily. Yeah, right," Gerald muttered, slamming the door on the anonymous dead man and their conversation. "Tell him I’ll get everything ready and meet him down the mountain."
He drove off, giving the large SUV too much gas and fishtailing over the rutted logging road. Sarah watched the cloud of dust in his wake until she heard the chime of Hal opening the Jimmy’s door.
"You coming?" he called as the engine kicked over with a low snarl. She grabbed her pack and jumped into the passenger seat. They headed down the narrow, twisting dirt road. "Want me to drop you home?"
"No, the Rockslide will be fine."
"Suit yourself."
They jostled over the road in silence for several minutes. Even Hal’s driving seemed changed—sloppy, careless, over-compensating for curves, almost dropping one wheel off the edge of the road several times. Sarah gripped the side of her seat and pumped an imaginary brake pedal with her foot.
"You and Alan should still take off, get out of here for a long weekend," he surprised her by saying.
"What’s so special about this weekend that everyone is trying to get rid of me?" she asked, trying to make a joke of it.
"I'm asking the Colonel for a town council meeting tomorrow. It’s past time they knew how I really feel about how things have been running around here lately."
He was hunched forward over the steering wheel as if ready to wrestle it from the dash. His teeth were clamped so tight she could see the muscle spasming at the corner of his jaw. Then it hit her—Friday, tomorrow, was June 21st.
"Hal, wait for another day. Not tomorrow."
He shook his head, his gaze riveted on the road ahead. "No. It has to be tomorrow."
"But tomorrow is the anniversary of when—" She choked on her words as he turned to stare at her, ignoring the hairpin curve ahead of them. "When Lily died."
They almost spun off the road before he corrected their trajectory. Sarah bounced forward, into the dash, bracing both hands against it.
"That's why it has to be tomorrow," he finally said. "And why I don't want you around to get caught in the middle." His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed hard, twice. "At first I was angry, real angry. When Sam came and told me the insurance wouldn't pay up, that I was going to lose the house after all—"
"It wasn't his fault," Sarah protested. "No company will pay on a…when someone takes their own life. He tried to help you."
"I don't need charity!"
His words barraged her. This wasn't Hal, the man who never raised his voice, who always shunned the spotlight, simply doing his job without fanfare or complaint. Sarah stared at him in concern. She'd been so buried by her own grief that she had been blind to the changes going on in her friend. What else had she missed?
"Never did need no charity. Not now, not then. What I need," he drew in a ragged breath and his voice lowered, "is for people to see the consequences of their actions. They need to know they can't just treat people like they're nothing."
"Hal, be careful, you might lose your job."
He snorted a short-lived laugh. "I don't give a shit about the job. This is about the town and the people in it. It's got nothing to do with any job. Come tomorrow, they'll see that. They'll understand."
She drew back in her seat, wrapping one hand around the armrest as they bounced onto the paved road leading into town. He braked hard, pulling up with a jerk in front of the Rockslide.
"You mind what I say, Sarah," he said as she opened her door and slid free from the passenger seat. "Tomorrow morning, you and Alan take off for the weekend. Don't try to interfere."
The staccato clacking of a man's boots against linoleum jolted Caitlyn awake. She rubbed her eyes, took a breath, trying to re-orient herself. Her heart refused to listen to reason, instead it sped up in excitement, just as it had every day of her life until she was nine.
That sound meant only one thing: her father was home. Every day, she'd listen for the sound of his footsteps as he'd walk up the path, cross through the kitchen and enter the living room where she'd be waiting. She'd abandon everything to race across the floor and leap into the air, certain he would catch her no matter how high she flew.
Those few moments in his arms were always the best part of any day. She'd never again feel so safe, so warm, so loved.
Idiot, she cursed her errant memories. Just meant the Chief wore cowboy boots. Like so many of these local yokels.
She straightened in her seat behind the single desk in the spartan office. After phoning when she stopped for gas outside Albany and being told it would be a few hours before the Hopewell Chief of Police could grant her an audience, she had finished her drive through the twisting mountain roads but had still managed to arrive before Chief Waverly. She'd called ahead to give him fair warning that the FBI was coming, to let him get his house in order, maybe even pull the Durandt case files so she wouldn't be wasting her time. Instead she'd been greeted by a yakky old shrew of a postmistress who refused to allow her entry to the Chief's office.
Like that would stop her. She hadn't quite had to go to the extreme of pulling her weapon, but after listening to the lady's yammering, it became a definite possibility. Once she convinced the postmistress, Victoria was her name, that yes, she was indeed a bonafide agent of the federal government, Caitlyn had proceeded to make herself at home in the Chief's chair while the postmistress kept up her monologue about terrorist activity and Homeland Security money and strange goings on at the dam and it was about time the government sent someone "real" to investigate it.
Finally, customers at the post office pulled the old biddy away. Caitlyn had taken advantage of the relative quiet to open her laptop and review her files.
And drift to sleep. Now she glanced through the open door that separated the post office from the police department. The afternoon sunlight backlit the man. He had a lean, Gary Cooper build, complete with a cowboy hat he hadn't yet removed, shadowing his face. His stride was that of a man accustomed to carrying the weight of responsibility on his shoulders and the weight of a gun on his hip.
He wore jeans and a khaki shirt with a small patch sewn onto the sleeve. No other insignia. A pair of aviator style sunglasses dangled from the neck of the white T-shirt visible between the unbuttoned top buttons of his uniform shirt. He came
to a halt in front of his desk, his head tilting up, finally exposing his face as he raked her with an eagle-sharp gaze. He had high cheekbones, bright blue eyes, a narrow nose that had been broken at least once. A muscle twitched at the corner of his jaw as he stood, staring down at her for a long, silent moment.
"Agent Tierney," he said in a slow drawl, drawing her name out as if he were savoring it on his lips. "Nice to meet you again. You've gained some weight. Looks good on you."
Caitlyn met his gaze, watched as amusement crowded out his annoyance. A smile parted his lips and she gave him one in return. "Chief Waverly. Nice to see you as well. Looks like you've lost weight. Been busy?"
They continued their staring match, neither conceding the contest for several seconds. Usually Caitlyn would have relinquished control of his desk, his environment, back to a local law officer—any little courtesy to convince them to give her full cooperation.
But Waverly struck a chord in her. When he looked at her just now something had sparked in his eyes, in the way his glance had lingered the tiniest bit too long on her lips, her body. Damn it if her body hadn't responded with an answering spark. She shifted in her seat. No, not spark, it was more than that.
More than she'd felt in a long time. But she'd be damned if she'd let him know that. Besides, she had work to do.
Work that should have her leaping from his chair, spouting off an apology for trespassing in his space, politely thanking him for helping her. But instead, she kept her seat—his seat—and fought him for control in an adolescent staring match.
His chuckle echoed through the tiny space, breaking the silence. He spun on his heel to toss his hat on one of the hooks beside the door, grabbed a metal chair and slid into it, his long, lean legs stretching out in front of him, ankles crossed. "What brings you back to Hopewell? Does it have anything to do with the corpse I just dragged out of the river?"