Love Inspired Suspense May 2015 - Box Set 1 of 2: Trail of EvidenceGone MissingLethal Exposure

by Lynette Eason

“Silver Taurus,” Met answered. He picked up Clay’s phone, then swore and threw it into some nearby bushes. “You’re not going to find it.”

  “Let’s just get out of here, then.” The other man started toward where they had parked their car.

  They needed the other guy’s photo, and this was as good a chance as they might ever get. Clay glanced at the restaurant and saw that the men who’d been loitering outside had gone in. He grabbed Joslyn’s phone and sneaked out from behind the car. He followed Met as he headed to the men’s white Taurus, keeping low behind the cars, trying to get a better angle of the other man.

  Clay ducked behind an SUV just as Met said, “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” the other man said.

  Clay’s throat was tight, his heartbeat pounding in his ears as he stood perfectly still. There was a minute or two of silence, then the sound of shoes scuffing asphalt.

  “Nothing,” Met muttered. “Just get in the car, G.”

  Clay peeked out from behind the SUV. He wasn’t at a great angle, but he could take a few pictures of the other man, whom Met had called G. He had straight, brown hair cut short over his high forehead, intent eyes and a square jaw. Clay found himself sizing the man up like he would an opponent in a sparring match at his mixed martial arts gym back home in Illinois. The man would have a reach advantage with his long arms, and he walked with athletic confidence. But Clay would be able to use his larger-boned frame to his advantage if he took him to the mat in a wrestling or jujitsu move.

  Clay had only taken a few photos of G when Met suddenly turned in his direction. “He’s over there, G!”

  G pulled out a gun and fired at Clay.

  *

  Joslyn couldn’t see Clay, but she heard the gunshot. She jumped, every nerve in her body firing. Was Clay all right? She had to help him.

  There was a second shot, and she instinctively flinched. Get yourself together, Joslyn. She forced her frozen muscles to move and began making her way toward where she’d seen Clay go.

  “No! You idiot!” Met said.

  But it was too late. The sound of the gunshots drew gang members from inside the restaurant. They ran into the parking lot, some of them with guns in their own hands. They shouted, pointing to where Met and G stood, and started firing at them.

  Joslyn used the confusion to duck behind a black Cadillac. She had a view of Met and G, although she still couldn’t see Clay. She reached and took out her gun from the flashbang side holster in her bra. It wasn’t very large caliber, owing to its small size, but if she got close enough, she could take a shot.

  She gulped. That was assuming she’d be able to pull that trigger against a human being and not a paper target.

  “Get to the car!” Met ducked behind an SUV.

  “It’s too far away!” G turned to the car next to him and smashed the window. Wails from the alarm rang out. Within seconds, the two of them had scrambled inside and disabled the alarm, and the engine roared to life.

  She darted forward, then saw movement behind a car ahead of her. She froze.

  Clay appeared behind the tailpipe of a Mustang. The sight of him made an ache pulse tightly in her chest. He was okay.

  He hadn’t seen her yet, but he started toward her.

  No, they had to get to the car. She scuttled around a motorcycle to kneel behind an SUV, and Clay finally saw her. She waved her arm toward the other parking lot.

  He nodded and changed directions, heading toward her rental car.

  Gang members ran toward the two men in the stolen car, their guns blazing, but G backed out sharply, making the men scatter. He put the car in gear and skidded out of the parking lot, bullets pinging off the back of the car.

  The two men had gotten away—in a different car. The license-plate number they’d gotten was all for nothing. He could only hope Joslyn’s face recognition program would come through.

  SIX

  Joslyn ran as fast as she could after Clay without being seen by the gang members. Clay met up with her and pulled her behind a minivan. They crouched in its shadow, both of them breathing heavily.

  She heard the gang members shouting to each other in Spanish. She hadn’t taken Spanish classes since her undergrad years, but she thought she understood enough to realize that the men were confused rather than angry. From the sound of their voices, they were looking around the area where the car had been stolen. Good thing Clay had gotten away from that section of the parking lot during the chaos following the gunfire.

  A gang member accidentally set off another car alarm, and his friends began yelling at him. Then the voices sounded fainter as the men moved away. Clay risked looking around the minivan to see about a dozen men walking toward the restaurant.

  “They’re moving away.”

  Joslyn rose as if to go, but Clay grabbed her hand and tugged her back down to sit on the asphalt. “Wait a minute or two, just in case.”

  She nodded. The light was starting to dim as the sun grew lower, so Clay’s hair shadowed his face. The unbearable heat of day was still radiating from the ground, but she shivered in the aftermath of the gunfight.

  He still had her wrist and must have felt her trembling. He took her hand and rubbed it between his own. Only then did she realize her fingers were shaking.

  “You can reholster your gun,” he said.

  “I almost fired at the two men.” Joslyn bit her lip. “I’m so thankful to God that I didn’t have to.”

  The words came out in a rush, but Clay suddenly looked slightly uncomfortable. She’d been a Christian for less than a year, but she’d already gotten used to thinking of God beside her, never leaving her alone.

  After an awkward heartbeat of silence, Clay said, “If you’d fired, the gang members might have known you were there.”

  “But the gang members were firing their guns.”

  “They’d recognize if the gunshot sounded different,” Clay said. “I did, sometimes.” Then his eyes slid away, and she knew he was thinking about his other life, working for that mob family.

  She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t any different, that she’d done things she regretted, but she’d gotten a second chance. She hesitated, because she didn’t know him very well and bringing up her past was still like a knife in her heart, so the words stuck in her throat.

  She became aware of the silence of the early evening, aside from the rumble of traffic and the faint call of a distant police siren. “Let’s go.”

  They made their way to the low wall that separated the two parking lots, got into Joslyn’s rental car, and slowly drove away.

  Clay let out a long breath. Then he slammed the palm of his hand against the steering wheel in frustration.

  She jumped, and she had a flash of Tomas in his car, doing the same thing only minutes before using those hands to beat her. She flinched and closed her eyes for a moment. Breathe. Tomas is in prison. You’re safe now.

  When she opened her eyes, she was surprised by the regret on Clay’s face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  But there was that hint of confusion in his eyes, too. She knew her reaction had been a bit extreme, but she didn’t want to explain. He looked as if he might have already guessed that someone had hurt her at some point. “What are you upset about?” She made her voice light, neutral.

  “It was all for nothing.”

  “You didn’t get a picture of the other guy?”

  “Oh, I did.” He dug in his pocket and passed her the phone. “But when they stole the other car, I didn’t get the license-plate number.”

  “It’s a longshot, but we can still track their white Taurus in case it was rented with a credit card. I’d need to get online.” She suddenly gasped. “Stupid, stupid! Pull over the car, quick.”

  He looked over his shoulder, then signaled and pulled into a grocery-store parking lot without even questioning her. He was so trusting. He reminded Joslyn of her father… She closed off the thought.

  Once th
ey were parked he asked, “What is it?”

  She was already halfway out of the car and opened the back door. She reached under the floor mat of the seat behind her and slid out her laptop. “I should have realized, but with everything that’s been happening, I didn’t even think about my computer.” She set it on the trunk of the car and fired it up.

  Clay had gotten out of the car to stand beside her. “Has that been in the car the whole time?”

  “I didn’t want to leave it in the hotel room, and I thought it would be safe in the car. But I’ve left my car unattended a few times.” Why was it taking so long for her computer to turn on? Or was she just being impatient and paranoid?

  “You think they got to your computer, too?” Clay said.

  “Those guys cloned our cell phones. That takes special equipment. We already know they’re high-tech and financed. It would be nothing for them to break into a rental car, even with the car alarm.” Something was definitely wrong with her computer. She closed the top and flipped it over, peering at the casing. Were those tool marks?

  “Can they hack into your computer? Or would they just install a GPS tracker?”

  “I’d like to think they couldn’t hack into the computer. I don’t think they’d have enough time. But a GPS tracker…” She rummaged in her bag and came out with the portable toolkit she carried with her. She used a screwdriver to unscrew the casing of her computer and peered inside.

  She just wasn’t as familiar with hardware as she was with software. Everything looked fine, there was nothing obvious like the tracker she’d found under her jacket collar, but still, she sensed it had been tampered with. She shook her head. Her boss was going to kill her. Well, Liam would rant a bit, but then Elisabeth would point out that Joslyn had done the right thing, to be safe rather than sorry. That decided things for her.

  “Would you do me a favor and buy lighter fluid for me?” She gestured with her head toward the grocery store behind them. “Oh, and matches.”

  “Sure.” Clay trotted off.

  Joslyn removed her hard drive, then removed the platter, and by the time she was done, Clay had returned. “Let’s go somewhere I can torch this and also where we can get rid of the clothes they tagged,” she said. “We need somewhere remote so it’ll be easier to destroy the hard drive without anyone seeing the fire.” They hadn’t ditched the clothes at the mall with the car being stolen, and Clay had wanted to take advantage of any trackers to try to trap them in that restaurant parking lot, but they needed to get rid of it all now.

  Clay took the freeway out of downtown Phoenix and headed west, past Surprise and into the boonies. The sun was setting but the land was so flat that there was enough light to see how the roads formed a grid around squares of farmland or empty lots, waiting for development. Soon they found a piece of empty land several blocks away from the nearest housing development.

  Clay parked along the side of the road on pitted dirt that made the car bounce and sway. They got out and headed toward the middle of the lot, which was hard rock, gravel and clay, scattered with stones and pieces of broken concrete.

  Dropping her computer, the removed hard drive and the platter onto the ground, Joslyn squirted the hard drive and platter with lighter fluid. She didn’t want to make the fire too high because then it would be too noticeable, but it had to be hot enough to melt the platter. Clay lit a match and tossed it on the pile.

  “Let’s get rid of our stuff, too,” he said. “Anything they might have tampered with.”

  Nausea quivered in her stomach at the thought of those two men touching her things. She hadn’t brought anything important with her on this trip to Phoenix. However, she’d only just started putting her life back together after Tomas was arrested last year, and she’d had to start from scratch. Getting rid of her things made her feel as if she was losing herself again, and she didn’t like that lack of control over her life.

  Get over it, you’re just dumping some clothes. She went to get her bag from the car and made sure she wasn’t leaving anything important that she might need. They dumped their bags next to the burning hard drive for the two men to find, if they bothered to come looking. She made sure the GPS tracker from her jacket was there.

  “We should get a new car,” Clay said as they started walking back to the car.

  “I don’t have the funds to buy a used car. Do you?”

  He winced. “No. Another rental?”

  “They all have LoJack.”

  “You think these guys have some kind of device where they can track our car’s LoJack?”

  “Probably not, but if they have the resources we think they do, they could hire someone to hack into the LoJack database.”

  “Then we should get rid of this car, stat.”

  “They won’t be after us right away,” Joslyn said. “It would take a hacker a bit of time to do it.”

  “I’d suggest public transportation, but those guys aren’t squeamish about firing a gun in public places.”

  “They might be able to tap into traffic cameras anyway.” She thought hard as they walked. “I need to get online—no, more than that. I need to run my facial-recognition program on those photos we got. That limits our options down to one.” She stopped walking and faced him. “I need to go back to Sonoma.”

  His brows lowered over his eyes. “But Fiona…”

  “The online research I need to do will help us find her, but I can’t do it here. I need a more powerful computer than anything at an internet cafe, and I need a secure line. Besides, we don’t know that she’s still in Arizona.”

  He nodded slowly. “I see your point. So do we head to the airport?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but I don’t think we should fly back. They got you arrested once already, so who’s to say they won’t do something like that again once we’re inside the airport? Airport security takes any threat they hear about seriously.”

  “Driving will take longer.”

  “But there’s fewer people around.” And she’d feel more in control of the situation if it was just her, Clay, and the highway.

  “So are we going to drive back with this rental?” They’d gotten to the car by now.

  “No, I want to make it harder for them to track us. We’ll get another rental.”

  “They won’t be able to trace that, too?”

  “Eventually they will, but to find it, they’ll first have to figure out the credit card I’m going to use is connected to the O’Neill Agency.”

  They drove her car back to the company she’d rented it from and returned it, but then instead of heading to the main terminal, they walked outside and headed down the street. The car rentals were all clustered together in an industrial area, with the freeway, loud and breezy, only a block away.

  The rental car agency she chose had a few people inside the glass reception room, but Clay grabbed her and pulled her to the side. “Let’s wait awhile and go in when there isn’t a crowd around to remember seeing us.”

  The sun had set and it was full dark by now, so there wouldn’t be as many people coming in and out of the rental agency. “Okay,” she said. They stood around the corner of the building, next to some planters full of flowers.

  “What kind of research can you do on Fiona that you didn’t do before?” Clay asked.

  “I didn’t know the connection with Martin. I want to know what Fiona might be running from—what she might have been involved in—so that we can know where she’d go.”

  “The opposite of what she’s running from.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe Martin’s enemies are after her,” he said.

  “Was Martin involved in anything shady?”

  Clay gave a short bark of laughter. “I’m pretty sure he was, just from the little I knew about him.”

  She’d need to do some digging on the internet. “I was wondering if Martin talked to her to warn her, and that’s why she ran.”

  “So Martin was helping her?”

  “W
ouldn’t you want help against men who rigged your house to explode?”

  “Yeah, true,” he said. “It’s just that I know Fiona wouldn’t get involved in something that would get her in trouble.”

  He was so emphatic. Joslyn said hesitantly, “I don’t think Fiona would do anything like that, but…it’s hard to really know a person.” Look at how much she thought she knew Tomas. “And you haven’t seen Fiona in years.”

  He bent his head, his hair falling into his eyes. All she could see was the outside floodlight glinting in his gold-brown hair. “I know she wouldn’t get into any kind of shady business because…well, that’s the reason she left Chicago. Because of me and my shady business.”

  “The mob family? Fiona told me about that.”

  “She didn’t want me involved with them. We had huge fights about it. Finally she threatened to leave the house we were sharing together.” Clay sighed, raising his eyes to the night sky above. “I was young and stupid. The money was great and it beat having a desk job somewhere. I liked the excitement and the danger, plus I was good at it. And I didn’t think she’d really leave.”

  “But she did.”

  “She didn’t just move out of our house, she left Chicago. I didn’t know where she went—I tried contacting Martin, but he wouldn’t even return my calls.”

  “What?” The word flew out of her mouth before she could stop and think.

  He gave her a strange look.

  She felt heat rising from her jawline. “It’s just…Martin knew Fiona was in Los Angeles. She mentioned to me about meeting with him regularly, since his main office building is there. Why wouldn’t he return your calls just to tell you Fiona was safe?”

  Clay looked away, and she could see the muscle leaping in his jaw. “We didn’t have that kind of relationship,” he said in a tight voice.

  She knew they weren’t close, but that kind of behavior was almost cruel. What kind of man was Martin Crowley?

  She took a deep breath. “You said yourself, Martin loves Fiona. Why would he get her involved in anything illegal that he’s doing?”

  Clay frowned and stared at the ground as he thought about it.

  “I don’t know your history with Martin,” she said. “You probably have a good reason for hating him. But anything that can help us find Fiona is important. Whatever feelings you have about Martin—try to set them aside for now. Don’t let them cloud your judgment.”