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

by Lynette Eason

  G held Clay’s arms behind his back. There were fresh cuts on Clay’s face, and his hair was a wild blond mess around his head. Clay’s left shoulder was hitched a little higher than the other, and she wondered if he’d reinjured his broken arm in its cast.

  Met was hissing something to G, obviously displeased about something. Maybe they had expected to take them by surprise, which wouldn’t have allowed Joslyn and the others time to call the police or barricade themselves inside the house. Thanks to Clay, they hadn’t been blindsided.

  Met’s face was red. He pointed his gun directly at Clay’s bent head, and Joslyn couldn’t breathe.

  Met shouted, “Joslyn, you come out right now, or I swear I’ll—”

  Suddenly Clay snapped his head backward and clocked G full in the face. The man grunted and Clay pulled free.

  Met’s gun went off.

  Joslyn’s heart went into overdrive. She gripped her weapon, ready to fire out the window at them, but then realized there was no blood. Clay had staggered backward but was still standing. Met had missed.

  Clay slammed his right elbow at G’s face, but the man blocked it with his arm and countered with a fist to Clay’s side. He grunted, but recovered quickly and twisted full around to tackle G to the ground. They rolled in the grass and weeds of the backyard while Met aimed his gun at the two of them, looking for a shot.

  Then she heard the wail of sirens.

  Met swore, then started running toward the side gate. “G, come on!”

  G managed to get to his feet, but Clay clung to his legs. G kicked out at Clay, who released him. Then the man ran after Met.

  Joslyn unlocked the back door and headed outside cautiously, her weapon at the ready, but the backyard was empty except for Clay. She ran to where he lay on the ground.

  “Are you all right? Your arm…”

  “I’m fine.” He was breathing heavily. He winced a little as he sat up.

  The sirens were deafening, now, and they stopped right outside the front of the house. Had they managed to catch Met and G or had the thugs gotten away?

  Armed police officers came into the backyard through the side gate, shouting orders she couldn’t quite understand. Too late, she wondered if she ought to have reholstered her firearm. She laid the gun down on the ground and put her arms up.

  “Did you see the two men who were running away?” she said. “One had curly hair, the other one had short, brown hair and was taller…”

  “Hey!” Clay shouted.

  An officer yanked her arms behind her back. She heard the clink of handcuffs just before cold steel bit into her wrists.

  TEN

  They were wasting time. Joslyn jerked angrily at her handcuffs. Fiona was out there running from dangerous men like Met and G, and Joslyn was still sitting on the front porch with her hands cuffed behind her back.

  Anna and Mariella had told the officers what had happened, several times, in fact. Sometimes talking both at the same time, which didn’t help matters. The officers had been about to let Joslyn go when they ran Clay’s ID and saw his record. Unsure what to do about his “associate,” they’d left Joslyn in cuffs.

  Thankfully, Clay had called Liam as soon as he could, but even when he did that, one of the officers had demanded to know who he was calling.

  “Her boss,” Clay said brusquely, and the officer frowned and moved away.

  Clay had been on the phone almost constantly for the past hour, but she couldn’t make out who he was talking to. That might be because there was at least one policeman near her at all times.

  Then one of the officers in charge got a phone call. His voice became crisper, more deferential. “Yes, sir…no, sir…”

  Finally he disconnected the call and approached her, a thundercloud expression on his face. And then he unlocked her handcuffs. “You’re free to go,” he muttered.

  Her shoulders were sore from being restrained for so long, and she rubbed them. “Could I please have my ID and my conceal-and-carry license?”

  The lawman grudgingly handed them to her, and then she added, “And my firearm?”

  He hesitated.

  Clay was suddenly there, his cell phone in his hand, although he wasn’t talking into it. “Is she being arrested? Charged with anything?”

  “No.”

  “Then give her back her firearm.”

  The officer handed her the gun. Clay helped her to her feet and they went back into the house.

  In the foyer, Clay handed her the phone. “Here. It’s Detective Carter.”

  That’s who he had been talking to? Joslyn took the cell phone. “Hello?”

  “Joslyn, are you all right?” Detective Carter’s gravelly voice was music to her ears.

  She had to fight an unexpected tightness in her throat. “I’m fine. Are you the one who called that officer?”

  “No, that was a friend of mine.” There was humor in his voice. “I called in a favor.”

  “I’m sorry you had to do that for me.”

  “You’re worth it.”

  She wiped away a tear. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll see you later.”

  She disconnected the call and handed it back to Clay.

  He took it, then folded her in his arms.

  It felt wonderful. He was solid, warm, comforting. She smelled stalwart cedar, uplifting citrus and calming musk. She could relax, rely on his strength, let his presence chase away the stress and humiliation of the past hour.

  She leaned back, but kept her hand on his chest. Without looking at him, she said, “Thank you.”

  His hand covered hers on his chest and squeezed. “You’re worth it.”

  She tried to remember all the reasons she couldn’t let herself get closer to him, all the ways he reminded her of Tomas, but it was useless. All she knew was the comfort of his hand holding hers, the steadiness of his heartbeat under her fingers.

  She had to focus on Fiona.

  She stepped away from him.

  Even if there wasn’t all this crazy danger surrounding him, she couldn’t consider anything deeper with Clay. He wasn’t a Christian, he lived in Illinois. He was strong, powerful, confident.

  She was too afraid.

  She hadn’t made right choices before, and she’d lost everything. Her father, her home. Her baby.

  She was rebuilding her life and she wouldn’t risk it. Not again.

  Joslyn moved into the living room, where Anna and Mariella were sitting and talking.

  “They finally let you go,” Anna said. “I just made more coffee. You want something to eat, too?”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Joslyn said. “I’m so sorry about all this.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Mariella said. “I wish they’d caught those goons.”

  “Who were they?” Anna asked.

  “We don’t know,” Clay said from behind Joslyn. His voice was neutral, normal-sounding. “But we saw them in Phoenix, too.”

  “They’re after you because of Fiona?” Mariella asked.

  “We just don’t know. That’s why we’re trying to find out everything we can about Fiona before she moved to Phoenix.”

  Mariella nodded toward the coffee table. “We put the box there for you.”

  “Would you mind looking through it with us?” Joslyn asked. “There might be some things you can tell us about the stuff inside.”

  “Sure.” Anna leaped to her feet.

  The largest thing in the box was a spun glass ornament in shades of red, blue, orange and yellow. When Mariella held it up, the light shone through and cast the colors upon the walls.

  “Oooh,” Anna said.

  “I know that,” Clay said. “It’s from an artisan’s shop in Lake Tahoe. Fiona loved looking in there whenever we went to Tahoe on vacation.”

  “I can see why,” Mariella said, turning the ornament in her hands.

  There were a few framed photographs. One was of Fiona holding up a huge largemouth bass.

  “That’s from a
houseboating trip we took. Whoever caught the smallest bass had to cook for a month,” Anna said, snickering. “Chuck bragged the most and lost.”

  Another photo was of Fiona and Joslyn in evening dresses in front of the Zeddmore Museum of Art. “I had forgotten about this,” Joslyn said. “Fiona got exclusive tickets to the opening for a new exhibit of Japanese art, so I went with her.”

  Another photo, this one in a faded Mickey Mouse frame, was of Fiona as a young girl with another little girl, the two of them wearing identical Mickey Mouse Tshirts and Goofy hats. A teenaged Clay was behind them, flanked by two older women, and looking bored. One of the women looked exactly like Clay and Fiona.

  “Is that your mom?” Joslyn asked him.

  He nodded. “We had season passes to Disneyland and went at least once a month. We got to know a lot of other season pass holders like Hannah and Amelia.” He pointed to the other woman and the little girl.

  There were also a bunch of paperback books in the box, all bestselling romances. They looked fairly new and most had price stickers on the back from the store where Fiona had bought them.

  “She has a thing about cracks on the spine,” Mariella said. “It never looks like she reads her books. The only way you can tell is if the pages aren’t quite tight enough to be brand-new.”

  There was also a beautiful seashell, which looked as if it had come out of the ocean because it wasn’t lacquered or polished.

  “Did Fiona do any deep-sea diving?” Joslyn asked.

  Mariella and Anna shrugged. “Not as far as I know,” Mariella said.

  There was also a ratty pair of house slippers, made out of woven bamboo strips for the footbed and stuffed cotton fabric tubes for straps.

  “She wore those in the house all the time,” Anna said.

  “I remember,” Joslyn said. “I didn’t think about it before, but they look Japanese, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, they look like my grandma’s house slippers,” Mariella said. “I’m a quarter Japanese.”

  “She didn’t have those in Chicago,” Clay said.

  “Did she have this in Chicago?” Joslyn held up a Chicago Cubs sweatshirt that was brand-new—it even still had the tags on the label. “I thought she was a die-hard Dodgers fan.”

  “Yup.” Clay grinned. “I bought it for her just to annoy her.”

  They had gone through the entire contents of the box. Joslyn looked down at all the items on the table, but couldn’t see how any of it pointed to what Fiona had been up to while she was Los Angeles, apart from her schoolwork.

  “Do you know if she did anything outside of school?” Joslyn asked Anna and Mariella. “Something without you guys or her other friends?”

  Mariella tilted her head as she thought. “Sometimes she’d go to art museums by herself. Actually, she might have gone by herself more often in the months before she moved away.”

  “She didn’t always tell us where she went,” Anna said. “We usually assumed she was at school or a museum.”

  “Or getting candy,” Mariella said with a smile.

  Joslyn looked over each item. “She didn’t go to Disneyland?”

  “Maybe once or twice, but it was usually with us or other friends,” Anna said.

  Joslyn fingered the shell. “How about on any vacations?”

  “No…” Anna said slowly. “But she did go on a short trip once. I happened to wake up and see her leaving the house with a small roller bag and a messenger bag over her shoulder.”

  Joslyn hadn’t known about this. “Do you remember when this was?”

  “I don’t remember exactly, it’s been so long…summertime, maybe?”

  Probably during the short summer break in between semesters for their degree program.

  Anna continued, “She didn’t say where, but she mentioned it was a trip with her dad. She was only gone a couple days.”

  “She went on another trip with her dad,” Mariella said. “It was winter sometime, and it was only for a couple days, like over the weekend. I only found out about it because she was having car problems and she needed a ride to the airport.”

  Joslyn hadn’t known anything about Fiona taking trips with Martin, but then again, he was her father and he had the money to be able to take her on a vacation anytime he wanted.

  “So with four of you in the house,” Clay said, “would you notice if she were gone a couple days at a time? Could she have taken more than just those two trips?”

  “Yeah, she could have,” Anna said. “Our schedules were completely different. Sometimes we’d go for days without seeing each other.”

  Joslyn felt they’d discovered something important. What were these trips Fiona had taken with Martin? Had she gone on more than one of them? Where had she gone—and why?

  “What was she wearing when she left on those trips?” she asked Anna and Mariella,

  “A summer dress,” Mariella said.

  Anna said, “Jeans and a jacket.”

  “She could have been wearing those things because of the weather here, or it could be because of the weather where she was going,” Joslyn said thoughtfully. “It’s hard to know.”

  “Martin’s the key,” Clay said. “When those two thugs mentioned Martin, they obviously didn’t know him. I’m guessing they’re not working for him. Maybe the reason she’s gone has to do with these trips Martin took with her. So he might be protecting her after all.”

  “Like I thought,” Joslyn said. “So where would Martin take Fiona to protect her?”

  Clay held up the glass ornament. “I think I know.”

  *

  Clay hadn’t driven down this road around Lake Tahoe in years, but landmarks here and there popped out at him familiarly—the Spangler Café, where Fiona bullied him into going because she liked their muffins, the eight-foot-tall carved grizzly bear at the entrance to a rustic motel, a formation of rocks just off the shore that was glimpsed through a break in the trees. Joslyn had driven most of the way there, but he’d taken over in Tahoe.

  The landmarks and attractions reminded him of his time here with Fiona. He was certain she had to be here. Would she be glad to see him? He couldn’t help a slight niggling of nervousness.

  “How do you know Bobby will even be at his cabin?” Joslyn asked. Bobby was Martin’s cousin and a self-proclaimed mountain man. His secluded cabin would be the perfect hideout for Fiona.

  Joslyn looked out the passenger-side window of the car at the redwoods and firs edging the lake. “If it’s his vacation home…”

  “It was when Fiona and I came to visit,” Clay said, “but he moved up here to live permanently around the time Martin divorced my mom and she and I left Los Angeles.”

  Her soft gaze made him uncomfortable, as if she could see all the hurt he’d felt at the time. “Martin had custody of Fiona?”

  “He sued for custody and won because Mom could only get low-paying jobs to support us.” He remembered her working two jobs at once to pay for their tiny apartment. It had been the reason they’d left California.

  “But didn’t Martin pay child support? Alimony?”

  Clay shrugged, but it hid the burning anger in his chest. “His lawyer was better than Mom’s. He barely paid enough to support her, and none for me since I wasn’t his biological son. She’d been out of the workforce for so long, she had a hard time finding a job.”

  “That’s awful,” she breathed.

  “That’s Martin,” Clay said.

  There was silence for a while, then Clay added, “But Fiona and I reconnected when she went to Chicago for college, against Martin’s wishes.” And Clay had thrown that opportunity away by ignoring her and practically forcing her out of Chicago. He should have listened to her. She was his sister.

  He turned off onto a narrow dirt driveway, not because he remembered it but because his navigation system told him to. He flipped on his headlights since the trees lining the driveway blocked out the light. The car jumped and rocked on the pitted surface.

  �
��Well, this is definitely a remote location,” Joslyn said.

  “Bobby’s a survival expert,” Clay said. “It’s why he doesn’t have a phone or cable TV or utility lines. He considers this cabin ‘luxury living’ because he’s used to roughing it in the wild for days on end.”

  “You mean he likes doing that kind of stuff?”

  “He took Fiona and me on some of the worst and best camping trips.” Clay navigated around a narrow turn where the road was lined with trees and juniper bushes. “I saw him take down a bear once without blinking an eye. If Martin wanted to keep Fiona safe, he’d send her to Bobby. He’s the first person I thought of when I saw that ornament, because the shop where it came from is only a couple miles down the main road.”

  They rocked down the driveway for another quarter mile before entering a clearing, with trees rising around it like sentinels. There stood a rustic cabin with weathered boards, but the yard and roof were clear of branches and leaves, and the small front porch had been swept recently. Despite the spring weather, Tahoe was a little chilly and a thin curl of smoke was rising from the brick chimney. Beside the house was a detached garage with a set of closed double doors, all made out of the same weathered wood as the cabin.

  Clay parked behind the garage and tried to peer in between the cracks in the doors, but it was too dark and he couldn’t see if Bobby’s truck was there. He made his way onto the porch and knocked on the heavy wooden door. “Fiona! Bobby! It’s Clay!”

  “Does he like you?” Joslyn asked him as she peered through the front window. A curtain covered it but there was a narrow crack between the panels.

  “Bobby?” Clay remembered him as a crotchety old man with a heavily weathered face. “Well…he didn’t seem to dislike us.”

  She gave him an exasperated look. “That’s very helpful.”

  “He might lie to me about Fiona being here just because Martin asked him to,” Clay said, “but if Fiona knew I was here, she’d come out.” He hoped. Had he burned his bridges with her the last time he saw her?

  He pounded on the front door again. “Fiona!”