by Gayle Wilson
That was something else she’d tried to rationalize. Why she was so sure that man had been trying to kill her. There was no definitive answer. Nothing except her absolute certainty that he had been.
“Someone began following me.”
Unconsciously, as she’d considered how to tell him this, she had allowed her eyes to fall. Now she forced them up, focusing on Michael Wellesley’s face. Because she could detect no trace of disbelief or amusement in his features, she made herself continue.
“Sometimes it was nothing more than a feeling. A chill on the back of my neck. A dozen times I made up my mind that it was all in my head, but I knew he was there. It got to the point where I thought I could tell when he was behind me.”
She searched his eyes, again looking for ridicule. There was nothing there but a patient waiting.
“About three weeks after the fax came through, the senator asked me to take a disk over to campaign headquarters. It was already late, and the reelection office was halfway across town. I wondered why he didn’t just let me courier it over the next day, but I didn’t feel I could afford to refuse. He’d been distant since the incident with the fax, so I thought he was looking for an excuse to let me go. If I left, I wanted it to be on my terms. Not because he’d fired me.”
She was talking too much. She’d thought so much about what had happened that every detail was burned on her consciousness. Part of that had been an effort to understand the event, but mostly it had been an attempt to make sure she was right about what the attack meant. It had changed her life in such a fundamental way that she couldn’t afford to be wrong.
“He didn’t offer to pay for a cab, so I took the Metro. As I entered that station, someone attacked me. It wasn’t a robbery. He didn’t grab my purse when I dropped it. I believe he had a knife, and he intended to kill me.”
“Because you saw a fax about this ranch?”
Michael Wellesley’s inflection was carefully neutral, but she had asked that same question too many times not to understand its implications.
“I know how crazy that sounds, but…I can’t think of anything else. Believe me, I’ve tried. Why would someone else want to kill me?”
“Why would Gettys?”
She didn’t have an answer to that. She had never had one. That was the reason she’d come to the Half Spur. To try to understand why it had happened.
“It had to have something to do with this ranch,” she repeated adamantly. “Whatever you’re thinking, I’m not making this up. And I’m not wrong about what that man was trying to do. My purse was lying on the ground and he ignored it.”
“Okay, not a robbery, but women are attacked every day. Maybe this was just a random—”
“There was nothing random about my being followed. And don’t forget that it was Gettys who sent me there that night. That’s how the attacker knew where I’d be.”
“If he’d been following you, he’d know anyway,” Michael said reasonably. “He wouldn’t need Gettys to send you somewhere. Maybe this guy was a stalker, someone who saw you and fixated on you.”
“He had adjusted the security camera somehow so it didn’t point to the area where he attacked me. He had to have done that in advance. It couldn’t have been spur of the moment. Someone had to have told him I’d be there, and only Gettys knew. He sent me there.”
At least he didn’t have an answer for that, she thought, feeling she had scored a point.
“How’d you get away?”
“I fought him off.”
For the first time she read skepticism in his eyes. And why wouldn’t he be skeptical of that claim, considering how easily he’d disarmed her?
“I guess he wasn’t as good as you are,” she said, not bothering to hide her resentment that he was questioning what she was telling him.
“I would think Senator Gettys could afford the best. Especially for something as potentially important as a murder for hire.”
This was exactly why she had never gone to the police. You don’t accuse one of the most powerful men in the Senate of attempted murder. Not without proof. And proof was something she’d never had.
“You think I’m making this up?”
“I think you have very little to tie Gettys to what happened.”
“Don’t you mean if it happened?”
“Something happened, or you wouldn’t be here. I’m just doing what any good cop or prosecutor you tell this story to is going to do. I’m asking for something more solid than a coldness on the back of your neck to connect Gettys and the Half Spur to that attack in Washington.”
She had nothing more solid. Nothing but her absolute conviction that, because there was nothing else, those things had to be connected. Apparently that wasn’t enough for him.
“Then I guess you can’t help me after all.”
Angry that the hope he’d offered had been nothing but smoke and mirrors, she turned, intending to head for the grazing horses. Michael caught her arm before she could take the first step.
“Please, let me go,” she ordered quietly.
She wouldn’t try to fight him. He’d already demonstrated how ineffective her efforts would be. There was no need to make a fool of herself twice.
“Tell me about the Half Spur. You must have learned something in the months you’ve spent here.”
“It’s a sheep ranch,” she said, mocking the question. Mocking him. “They shear the sheep and then they sell the wool.”
“And they take blood samples.”
“As part of a research project.” Her tone was less grudging. This was something she’d considered when she’d first arrived, but there was no pretense of hiding the sampling, which argued there was nothing sinister about it.
“A project no one here knows anything about.”
“Quarrels knows.”
“Why do you say that?”
There was an edge of interest in his voice that hadn’t been there when she’d told him her story. But then that’s why he was here. Not because of what had happened to her, but because of whatever was going on at this ranch.
Which was why she’d come as well, she realized. Even if he didn’t believe her story, maybe she could use him.
“Because he’s the one who packs the samples for transport to wherever it is they end up.”
“He mails them?”
She thought about it, wondering why she’d never considered that might be what he was doing.
“It’s possible. I always thought he delivered them personally. He packs them into insulated containers. They aren’t wrapped for mailing, but I guess he could take them to a packaging company in town. Have it done there.”
“I’m not sure they’d be eager to handle something like that,” Michael said. It sounded as if he were thinking out loud. “Handling biohazards requires a special license.”
“Biohazards?”
“For all they could know.”
He was right. No one would be willing to ship blood products about which they knew nothing. Besides, it was probably illegal.
“So wherever they go,” she said, working her way to the conclusion he’d already reached, “you think he must take them himself.”
“It seems likely. Now if we knew how long he’s gone each time…” He tilted his head, waiting for her give him the information.
“He leaves at night. Late. Maybe eleven. He’s always back for breakfast the next morning, and the truck is empty.”
“Every week?”
“Every time we draw blood,” she corrected, feeling like the star pupil. “Sometimes that’s every two weeks. I’m not sure I understand why the length of time he’s gone is important.”
“Because it gives us a starting point to figure out where he takes them.”
“Somewhere within a three and a half hour drive.”
She felt like a fool for not having put that information together before now. It was just that she’d decided early on that the blood samples weren’t relevant to what had happened to
her.
There was nothing secret about them. Quarrels had told her when he’d hired her that they were part of the job. He told everyone that.
She’d grown up on a farm. She was familiar with the government hoops her father had had to jump through. If he could have gotten paid to draw blood from his animals, there was no doubt in her mind that he would have had the whole family lined up to do it.
“We take a map and draw a circle with the compound in the center and a three and a half hour radius,” Michael said. “It gives us somewhere to start.”
“That’s a lot of territory.”
“Or we can follow him.”
We. The word resonated in her heart more strongly than it should have. She had been alone for so long that having someone on her side, even if he didn’t believe her about the attack, made her throat ache.
“You knew more than you thought about this place.”
He had probably been counting on that. And on his own ability to ask the right questions. Still, the approval in his tone was balm to the sense of failure she’d lived with all these months.
Always an overachiever, she wasn’t accustomed to failure. Besides, there was something about Michael Wellesley’s confidence that was contagious. He’d been sent here to do a job, essentially the same one she’d been trying to do for months. The difference was he believed he’d succeed.
She believed he would, too, she recognized with a flicker of surprise. Whoever and whatever this man was, it was clear to her that he was accustomed to accomplishing whatever he set out to do.
She felt again that small, fragile flutter of hope with which she’d first responded to his offer of help. Who his friends were didn’t matter. Just the thought of someone this determined being on her side was enough for now.
Chapter Seven
“Nicola Carson,” Michael said into his satellite phone. “She says she was Gettys’s intern.”
“Of course. I knew I’d heard the name as soon as you said it, but I couldn’t think where,” Colleen said. “Nicki Carson. Are you saying she’s your Nate Beaumont?”
“One in the same. She says she was attacked back in Washington. That someone tried to kill her because she saw a document pertaining to this ranch.”
“She says that’s why she disappeared?”
“You sound…” He didn’t finish the sentence because he wasn’t quite sure what he’d heard in his sister’s voice.
“Believe me, there were a lot of suggestions about her disappearance. None of them dealt with an attack.”
“I must have been out of the country. I don’t remember a missing intern. And I would have if Gettys’s name had been mentioned.”
“It was about then,” Colleen said.
She meant San Parrano. So…eight months ago.
“What kind of suggestions?”
“Nothing I can remember with a lot of detail. Not without doing some back-checking on the media stories. I can tell you that all of them were pretty unsavory.”
“Exactly how unsavory?”
“Let me ask around. It’s been a while. At the time I wasn’t particularly interested in what happened to Gettys’s associates. Maybe my feelings about the senator have colored my memory of the incident.”
“You’re leaving me in the dark here, Colleen,” he accused. He recognized evasion when he heard it, especially from someone who usually shot as straight as his sister did. “That could be dangerous.”
“I don’t think she’s a danger to what you’re doing, Michael. I didn’t mean to imply that.”
You might have if you’d seen her with that knife.
“I was planning to get her to help me,” he said, blocking the image of those sapphire eyes slowly filling with tears. “Without telling her who I’m working for, of course.”
“Are you sure that’s a smart move?”
“She’s been here a while. We seem to have a mutual interest in finding out about what’s going on. Would what you heard preclude her from working with me?”
There was a hesitation before Colleen answered. “Not necessarily.”
“So you do remember the basics of those unsavory rumors,” he said, trying to pin her down. They were probably nothing compared to the things he was beginning to imagine, none of which he liked. And none of which he could believe the woman he’d discovered today might be associated with. “What are we talking about? Drugs, spying, embezzlement?”
There was another silence. Michael was beginning to wonder if he’d lost the connection when Colleen said, “It was something about a call-girl ring.”
A peculiar sensation tightened his stomach. Of course, just because Nicki Carson looked like a child when her eyes glazed with tears didn’t mean she was an innocent. Few people were these days. Especially not women who worked for Franklin Gettys, a notorious womanizer.
“Political?” he asked, fighting other unwanted images.
“Men influential in government circles linked with ambitious young women, most of whom had some interest in politics,” his sister confirmed.
He had to force his mind, still trapped by the remembrance of Nicki’s body under his, to focus on what Colleen was saying.
“I can call some people,” Colleen went on. “Get more details.”
“She left town because she got caught? Or because she threatened to blow the whistle on someone?”
“At least one of the tabloids suggested she’d been permanently silenced because she had tapes of her clients. Most of the stories were more in the line of her running before she could be indicted for blackmail.”
“And there’s no question she was involved?”
“Supposedly she was in all of it. Up to her very pretty neck. I have some contacts among the Washington press. Jeremy Canton for one. He covered the story. I’m not sure he ever speculated on why Nicki left town,” Colleen said. “I don’t know who the source was for the call girl explanation, but I can try to find out from him. Are you saying she’s been at the ranch since she disappeared?”
“She says she thought of hiding here because she figured it was the last place Gettys would look. And because she believed she could find out why that document she saw was important enough to make someone try to kill her.”
“So her version has nothing to do with sex, lies or videotapes?”
“Hers has to do strictly with Gettys’s ownership of the Half Spur.”
Another silence. This time he knew the cause. Colleen was digesting the information he’d just given her, trying to fit it into the framework in which Colorado Confidential was working.
“Do you think she’s telling the truth?” she asked.
He avoided an answer. “How long will it take you to get in touch with Canton?”
“Give me a couple of days.”
A couple of days. Despite the sickness in the pit of his stomach, Michael knew he didn’t have a choice.
“No word on the baby?” he asked, changing the subject. He knew that she would have told him had there been.
“Nothing. I can’t begin to imagine what the Langworthys must be feeling. Holly, the mother, has gone into seclusion. The press is foaming at the mouth for a chance to talk to her. It seems that when the family discovered the baby was missing, she said something about it all being her fault.”
“A fairly natural reaction,” Michael said. “Any mother would feel a certain amount of guilt if her child disappeared, no matter what the circumstances were.”
“Granted, but in a kidnapping that has this much media interest, you can guess at the speculation that statement has set off.”
He wondered briefly if that same kind of inches-and-airtime-to-fill conjecture had played a role in what had been written after Nicola Carson’s disappearance. And then dismissed the idea as wishful thinking.
“I’ll call you back in a few days,” he said aloud. “I’d like to have any information you can dig up about Nicki Carson.”
“I’ll ask around, but remember that in her case, just as in
Holly Langworthy’s, media theory isn’t the same thing as fact.”
“Nor is every self-serving story someone tells to explain their actions.”
“You liked her.”
Past tense. He had, but he wondered what his sister had heard in his voice that had led her to that conclusion.
“She has guts. She thought I was the guy who’d attacked her. That he’d tracked her here. She pulled a knife on me.”
Colleen laughed, which made him feel marginally better.
“What’d you do?”
Lay on top of her as she trembled because she thought she was about to die.
“I protected myself.”
“I’m glad,” Colleen said softly. “Keep on doing that. And call me in a couple of days. I’ll see if I can have some more information for you then.”
This time she broke the connection. He punched the off button and laid the phone on his stomach. He should get up and put it on the charger, but the pain medication was finally beginning to kick in. If he moved, it would negate the effects.
Why the hell had he thought he could do this? Shawn Jameson had been right, and he’d been too stubborn, or too stupid, to realize it.
He had come back to this trailer the last two nights feeling like he’d taken a beating. And far more important than his physical shortcomings, he had apparently lost the one instinct necessary for undercover work—the one that was supposed to tell him who he could trust.
He had believed Nicki Carson today. And Colleen had been right. Nicki’s version had included nothing about being a whore for the rich and famous.
He didn’t have many illusions left, certainly not about what went on in Washington. He’d seen too much of the slimy underbelly of this nation’s politics. He had even been involved in some of it. More than he liked to remember.
And after all, was there really any difference in those who sold their souls for an ideology and those who sold their bodies for…?
For what? he wondered. Fun or profit? Just a small town girl trying to make good?
He put his crossed wrists over his forehead, closing his eyes. At the back of them, burned like the afterimage from a flashbulb’s explosion, a pair of blue eyes looked into his as if he represented her last chance for salvation.