The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy

by Pauline Baird Jones

  Bumps and delays were all too common on the road to power, but in the past few months Peter seemed be experiencing more of them than usual. With luck, Stern had once again removed one for him.

  “You’re late,” Peter said.

  A tall man with the ability to look shorter when needed, Stern had pale hair and flat, cold eyes that looked as if light couldn’t penetrate, let alone warm them. He had a thin, bland face, a thinner mouth that neither smiled nor frowned. The knack to pass almost unnoticed was a skill he’d taken pains to cultivate, content to leave the limelight to Peter. The power he sought was the kind that couldn’t survive scrutiny. Like the ancient gods, he found that only the taking of life satisfied his needs.

  He walked to the middle of the room and stopped, sliding his hands into the pockets of his off-the-rack pants.

  “No. I’m not,” Stern said, his voice flat and even.

  Peter stiffened at the lack of apology in Stern’s voice. Perhaps he thought that knowing where Peter’s past was buried gave him a get-out-of-awe free card. He was wrong, but now wasn’t the time to tell him. Only a fool poked a snake with a stick when the bloodlust was on him.

  Peter dropped into his leather chair, taking care to arrange the creases of his suit for minimal wrinkling. He nodded toward one of the wing chairs in front of the desk, but Stern strolled between them instead.

  This also annoyed, but Peter didn’t let that show either as he leaned back, his fingers making a steeple for his chin to rest lightly on. “I hope you have something good to report.”

  Stern’s shoulders moved in what might have been a shrug. “He’s dead. I’m not sure if he’s gone.”

  “Did you find—”

  “If he had anything, it wasn’t on him. Could’ve been taking a pass, planning to go back later.”

  “How did he get into the RABBIT files? He didn’t have clearance. If the Feds find out—” Peter shuddered, a frown once again pulling at his refreshed skin until he realized it and stopped himself. RABBIT, a highly specialized supercomputer chip they were developing for the military, was responsible for most of the bumps plaguing him right now. Stern had warned him about getting involved with government contracts, but the money had been too good to pass up.

  “How are they going to find out?” Stern shrugged; the movement made his ill-fitting jacket gape and exposed the holster at his waist. “I got his company ID. And if someone does happen to make the connection, I’ve erased all records of his incursions into the secure files.”

  Peter wasn’t convinced. His instincts, the only thing he trusted, were twitching like they hadn’t since the night he lost Nadine. Just thinking about her started a tic below his right eye. “We have no clue what he found or if he told anyone?”

  “Nope.” Stern stood unmoving except for the rhythmic flutter of his light lashes. “I was on him as soon as the computer flagged the intrusion. Took the same flight. Followed him all the way to his bolt-hole. But I couldn’t see him every minute.”

  “Did you question him?”

  Stern stirred, a flicker of pleasure passing through his dead eyes. “He wasn’t very resilient.”

  Peter looked away, disquieted by the sudden urge to make sure that if push came to shove, Stern died first. “Great, so we don’t know who his contact was?”

  Stern shrugged again. “Only thing I found in the dive was some very fancy computer equipment and a bunch of flyers.”

  He extracted a sheet from his inside pocket and tossed it to Peter, who opened the sheet, studied it, then frowned.

  “He headed for Montana like an arrow. Why would he have flyers for a bar in Estes Park?”

  Stern looked bored. “No way to know if he brought them or they were already there.”

  Peter crumpled the edges of the flyer, then loosened his grip, smoothing the sheet and studying it again. “Do you think it’s important? Maybe you should check—”

  “I’ve already sent one of my men. Country-western bars aren’t my natural habitat.”

  “I guess not.” Peter looked amused before worry over took him again. “Lucky you were here to see the security flag come up.”

  “Maybe.” Stern didn’t believe in luck.

  “What a mess!” Peter jumped up and paced to the window.

  “That’s why we have a backup plan.”

  “I don’t like the timing. We’re announcing the engagement and my candidacy on Sunday.”

  “How is the prospective first lady?”

  Peter’s expression turned feral. “Eager. Her daddy not quite as much, but he’ll come round when I’m governor—and the grandchildren start arriving.”

  Stern joined him by the window.

  “Grandchildren. Interesting concept. Course, you’ll have to curb your appetites to make it work. The press isn’t as careless as they used to be about politicians’ hobbies.”

  Peter’s face lost its complacency, his gaze shifting away from Stern. “I am aware of the need for discretion.”

  “The question isn’t do you know it, but can you do it?”

  “Yes.” He’d give up what he must to get Audrey and her father’s political clout. If need pressed, there were ways to get sustenance on the side. “I have my memories to sustain me.”

  “Stick to memories they’ll be calling you Governor.”

  “Yes.” Peter smiled. Governor. That all-important next step toward more power over lives, land, people. A different kind of lust sent an electric charge across his newly tightened skin. When that power was his, he could do whatever he wanted. And Audrey? He’d do what he wanted with her, too. In time, after he’d properly schooled her, her life would be his to do with as he pleased. Her life and those of her daughters. He smiled, thinking of the smaller, perfect versions of their mother.

  Were they strong enough for his love? He didn’t know. He hoped so. He wanted them to be strong—though not as strong as Nadine who’d gotten away from him and Kerry Anne who almost hadn’t. It still surprised him that they were both stronger than their drunken slut of a mother who’d taken a voluntary dive down her oh-so-elegant stairs. Two suicides in two months turned out to be too much, even for the laid back small town cops of his former home. Immediately after her funeral, he’d retired his Montgomery Justice identity. It was in the interim between that one and his present life as Peter Harding, that he’d met Stern, who had also been someone else.

  “You slip up, Peter, you’ll be getting a number and strip searched instead of sworn in,” Stern said, breaking into his side trip down memory lane.

  “I know what’s at stake.” Peter shifted irritably at the tiny cloud of old business that shadowed his vision of the future. Where was Nadine? Could she have found him? Was she the one—?

  “It hasn’t stopped,” he admitted. “I’m still getting the messages.”

  “He might have left something behind to foul up our computer systems. I’ll check it out.” Stern looked at Peter. “Unless there’s something you’re not telling me?”

  “I got a note,” Peter admitted. He unlocked a drawer and extracted a folded sheet of cheap notepaper.

  Stern took the sheet and opened it. Letters cut out of a newspaper formed the words: I know.

  “Cryptic.” He was quiet for a moment. “If someone is pulling your chain—”

  “How could they know to pull that chain?” Peter heard the rising panic of his own voice and reined it in. “How could anyone know?”

  “We don’t know they’re pulling that chain. Relax. I made sure that no part of your past can be traced to this present.”

  “Unless it’s Nadine.”

  Stern shrugged. “What if it is? She has no proof. The person you were is gone.”

  “The press feed on innuendo like piranhas on flesh. All it would take is a whiff of suspicion to end my political career.”

  Stern turned, walked back around the desk and dropped into Peter’s own chair. He stretched out his feet; his hands unnaturally still on the armrests, that look of pleasure com
ing back to his eyes.

  “Not if I take care of her before she gets to the press. The same way you took care of her big sister.”

  * * * *

  The sun was hanging low on the horizon by the time they hauled Ollie out in his body bag. Outside the window, the low-rent district where Oliver Smith met his end looked sad under the fading August sun. Inside, the light was as merciless when it found its way through the dirty windowpanes. It bumped up the smell of garlic, old deer meat, and onion and outstripped the pitiful air conditioning, and put beads of sweat on poor Mac’s face. The detective was already showing stress at being caught between the immovable FBI agent and the hard-as-a-rock Deputy Marshal, Jake noted, with amused sympathy.

  The techs faded away in a discreet hurry, leaving Jake to finish up with Bryn, who was seated in front of the computer. Mac went out, too, muttering something about getting them all something cold to drink.

  “How long has it been since we’ve had a whiff of a trail on Hyatt?” Jake stood in the middle of the room, turning in a slow circle. In one corner, shoved up against the peeling green paint of the wall, was a rumpled bed, in another a lumpy chair and crooked floor lamp. But it wasn’t the place he was straining to pick up on. It was the people who’d been there. Even in the most generic of settings, it was hard not to leave some traces of your personal taste behind.

  He stopped turning when he got to Bryn and the sturdy desk tucked in a kind of alcove next to the closet. She’d been sitting there for what seemed an hour, like a virgin trying to make up her mind to have sex, while the crime scene slowly cleared.

  “Two years, almost to the day. The Interplex Technology heist,” she said.

  “I remember that one. Almost perfect piece of work. Like to meet the guys who plan their heists.”

  “You and half the law-enforcement agencies in the country.”

  Something in the way she said it triggered Jake’s instincts. Jake walked over to her, propping a shoulder against the doorjamb. “It’s not one guy, is it?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. “I had my hands on one of Phagan’s kids for a very short time. He let slip a nickname.”

  Jake arched a brow.

  After another hesitation she said, “The kid called him Pathphinder. Apropos, isn’t it?”

  “Almost, too.” Pathfinder. More modest than mastermind, Jake mused. Not a lot to go on, but then, if the file Bryn had reluctantly shared with him was accurate, the FBI knew about that much about the notorious hacker who called himself Phagan. They knew a little more about Dewey Hyatt, his second in command and the fugitive Jake now had his sights set on, and that their operation somehow involved teenage runaways. Precious little, unless Bryn was still holding out on him, which was possible, since interagency cooperation was a contradiction in terms.

  “Kid could’ve been blowing smoke up my skirt, but it didn’t feel like it,” Bryn said. “As usual, Phagan spirited the kid away before I could find out more.”

  There was something in her voice that told Jake she’d let this particular hunt get a tad personal. Big mistake, but she already knew that. Bryn was as strict with herself as she was with colleague. It was what made it both pleasure and pain to work with her.

  “Fagan?” The question came from Mac, who had returned bearing soft drinks. He handed them out while Jake looked at Bryn for direction. She gave a slight shake of her head. No reason to make Phagan more of a legend than he already was. Besides, if the locals smelled a big fish, they’d start withholding information, hoping to make a big collar on their own. Why make it easier for Phagan to elude them? Not that he was having any trouble now.

  “The thief in Oliver Twist,” Jake said.

  Mac rubbed his forehead as if it hurt. “Oh.”

  Jake hid a grin with a long, cool drink from his cup, not too surprised Mac wasn’t into classic literature or musicals.

  Bryn took a drink, then a deep breath, one that seemed weighted with purpose, and turned back to the computer. Her hands hovered above the keyboard as if it were a bomb that might go off. The screen was dark, but the green cursor glowed in the lower right-hand corner.

  “Anyone touch the computer while securing the scene?” Bryn asked with a reluctance that was out of character.

  “No, ma’am,” Mac said, “except to dust for prints.”

  She wriggled her fingers, like a maestro, then lowered her hands and tapped a few keys. Nothing happened. The computer wasn’t going to give up its secrets without a fight. She scowled. Mac shifted, dabbing at the sweat on his brow.

  Jake leaned across her and picked up a plastic wrapped sheet from the clutter of evidence bags. It was a simple flyer advertising a country-western bar called JR’s located near Estes Park, Colorado. Though Jake was assigned to DC and had an apartment there, he called Denver home. He’d been born and raised in Denver and his mom and brothers still lived there. He knew Estes, too, and thought he remembered the bar. His family had a cabin just outside Rocky Mountain National Park. It took him a bit of thinking to pull up a memory of a log structure east of town on 34. Good music. Better beer.

  The flyer was an odd thing to find so far from its home. Even odder, the series of numbers and letters written down one side.

  “Any idea what this is?” he asked, distracting Bryn from her attack on the computer.

  She seemed relieved at the distraction, rather than annoyed as she took it. “It’s an Internet address for a MUD.”

  Jake blinked. “A mud?”

  Bryn smiled with a decidedly superior air. “A multi-user dungeon. A place on the Internet where people meet to play games. Looks like home is in Colorado.” She gave at Jake with a tense look. “Dewey and his friends like to play games.”

  As if on cue, Jake heard a humming sound. A small airplane flew across the computer screen dragging a banner that had written on it: You’ll have to do better than that, darling.

  Bryn choked and banged on the keyboard with her fists. The airplane did fly out of sight, but it wasn’t over. A small Yugo putted across the bottom of the screen with the words Love, Phagan on a sign on the roof.

  Jake opened his mouth, but Bryn’s look shriveled the words in his throat. He took a careful step back, avoiding eye contact with Mac. His elbow bumped a pile of evidence bags, starting a small avalanche that spread to the other side of the desk and continued onto the floor. He bent to pick them up.

  Bryn looked at Mac, her eyes scary and her smile steely. “I don’t want anyone but you near this computer, until this person,” she scribbled a name on the back of her card and handed it to him, “comes to pick it up. Don’t show that name to anyone. Don’t tell it to anyone. You, yourself bring the guy here to pack it up, and stay with it all the way back to the airport. Understand?”

  He nodded. “But…”

  “We might still be able to pull something off the hard drive.” She stood up and stepped close to him. “No mistakes. I’d hate to have to come back and rip your heart out.” She stared at him for a long beat. “And eat it.”

  Mac gulped twice before he managed to say, “No, ma’am, I mean, yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.”

  Jake started to dump the bags of evidence back onto the desk when he saw what the bags had been hiding. An answering machine, with a blinking message light.

  “Looks like somebody has a message.” Jake crouched down and studied the machine, then looked at Bryn.

  Bryn turned to stare. “Somebody wouldn’t be that stupid, would they?”

  Mac craned to see. “It wasn’t doing that before.”

  Jake still had on surgical gloves, so he tilted the machine. Fingerprinting powder fell off it in a mini-shower. He found the volume at zero on both ringer and recorder. With the volume turned up, he rewound the tape, then pushed play.

  A tinny voice came out of the speaker.

  “If you’re there, pick up.” A pause, then a sigh. “Call Pathphinder ASAP. And if you see Phagan, tell him the egg’s in the nest—should hatch right on schedule.
If we still have a schedule. You know where to reach me.”

  A hesitation. Then a click.

  “Well, I’ll be—” Bryn looked at Jake in awe. “Pathphinder is a woman.”

  “What was that about an egg?” Mac asked, the effort of trying to keep up written in neon across his face.

  “A cuckoo’s egg.” She hesitated, as if she’d like to stop there, but Jake arched his eyebrows for more. “In cyberspace, an ‘egg’ is a computer program laid in a host machine where it will ‘hatch’ at some later time or from some specific action.”

  “Laid?” Jake frowned. “To do what?”

  “Anything the Cuckoo wants. Give unauthorized access. Crash, maim or destroy. Phagan’s used them to disable security systems and to download sensitive data. Like the Trojan horse, they’re bad news for the ‘nest’ computer.”

  Jake nodded then looked at the phone. “I wonder…”

  He lifted the receiver and punched in the callback code. In a few moments it was ringing. He held the phone out so Bryn and Mac could hear a voice with a decided Texas accent say, “JR’s in Estes Park. What can I do you for?”

  Jake replaced the phone without answering and then grinned at Bryn whose jaw had dropped.

  “It couldn’t be that easy, could it?” she asked.

  “If the bad guys were sensible, our job would be harder.” He looked at his watch. “Just enough time to catch the last flight to Denver.” He grinned at Mac. “Thanks for the assist.”

  “No problem.” The detective looked at Bryn gathering her stuff up. “No…problem.”

  Jake held the door for Bryn. “Ladies first.”

  She grinned, looking like the easygoing farm girl her parents had hoped for. “Let’s go catch us some bad guys.”

  * * * *

  “Who was on the phone?”

  Mert Mentel, lead singer in Cattle Call, slung the pay phone’s receiver back on its cradle and turned to find Phoebe leaning against the office door jamb. She leaned real good. Had the best rack in town and a waist he could span with one hand even falling down drunk. Which was the only time to make a run at the girl. Something in her brown eyes stopped him in his sober tracks. Her eyes had always been sad, like grief had a permanent home there. And her smile was usually wry, as if life were a joke only she understood.