The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy

by Pauline Baird Jones

All he’d thought about during the drive across town was finding out the truth, but now that he was by the car, Amelia’s keys in hand, he hesitated.

  He wasn’t naïve. He knew there were all kinds of truth. He’d have sworn on his dad’s grave that Amelia’s eyes had spoken the truth. The pursuit was real. The wound he’d dressed was real. And the kiss? Well, that had been real, too. Very real. Was he letting emotion cloud his judgment? Or did his judgment need clouding? Jake had had every reason to doubt Phoebe, but he’d followed his instincts, trusted his feelings over the facts that were piling up. In the end, both the facts and his instincts turned out to be right. She had been a thief, but a good thief.

  But Jake had been in love. He’d fallen like rock the minute he saw Phoebe.

  Luke wasn’t in love. He was just feeling…chivalrous. She needed help, and it was his job to help her. Unless she was a criminal. Then it was his job to stop her, to arrest her if she had conspired to eliminate her father and steal the oh-so-secret Shield—which she must know wasn’t completed. Did she think she could finish it? Have a secret “green” agenda to stop it? A grudge against her father? Or was she an innocent victim?

  He rubbed his face. He felt like he was looking at Amelia through an out-of-focus camera lens. It would explain some things if she was Prudence—but others? Not even close.

  He hunched his shoulders, took a quick breath, and shoved the key in the lock. A single turn, and the lock popped up. It didn’t seem possible, it made no sense, but somehow, some way, Prudence Knight and Amelia Hart were the same person. Unless Amelia had somehow gotten possession of Knight’s keys? Yeah, right. She’d lied to him. That had to be it.

  It was a bitter pill to swallow. He looked at the keys. The apartment was probably bogus, too. Still had to check it. A good cop always checked his facts. And if it wasn’t there? Then he’d add Prudence Knight to his suspect list and do his job.

  There was one absolute where the Kirby family was concerned.

  They always did their job.

  He leaned against the car and wished, more than anything, that he could ask his mom what to do when he didn’t want to do his job.

  * * * *

  Donovan Kincaid watched his tail take the corner just the right distance behind him. They were good, but he’d been expecting them. Bryn was determined, and she was smart. She’d figured it out before him. He’d been so busy worrying about Prudence, he’d quit thinking. Only one other time that had happened, and Prudence had been the result. How often had he told his men to forget feeling and focus on thinking? It had seemed so simple when he had no ties, no daughter to feel connected to.

  Maybe he’d always known that ties were, well, ties. He’d tried to avoid them. He was a soldier, a man on the move. Then he’d met Prudence’s mother. She’d been beautiful, and he couldn’t think of anything but her. For two weeks she’d belonged to him. He thought it would be forever, until the morning he woke up, and she was gone. He’d tracked her down, found out she was married. That’s when he went overseas. It had been a dark time for him. He’d done some things he wasn’t proud of, but he’d never crossed a line he couldn’t cross back over. When his head cleared, he came back to the states. He hadn’t meant to look her up or even keep track of her, but he was curious. Maybe he’d wondered if she was sorry. Maybe he wasn’t as over her as he’d thought. Whatever the reason, it had been a shock to find out she’d died not long after giving birth to a daughter.

  It wasn’t hard to do the math and figure out she was his daughter, not John Knight’s. He’d kept track of her through the years. Eventually she finished school and went to work for Knight. He’d kicked around some more, then started working in D.C., where he’d met Bryn. He hadn’t tried to seek out Pru, as he called her in his mind, but as his reputation as a security consultant grew, he moved closer to her, until the day Hamilton Merryweather came to him. He should have stayed away, but the compulsion to connect with her had been stronger than his common sense.

  It had been part pleasure and a lot of pain to be so close to his little girl. John Knight was a cold, unfeeling man who lived only for his work. Donovan thought he’d crushed the life out of her until she gave him the slip the first time he was following her. Since he couldn’t talk to her, he started photographing her. When she was going wherever it was she went, there was a look in her eyes that told him the fire she’d gotten from her real father was burning inside her.

  A hundred times he almost told her. A hundred times he didn’t. He told himself he did it for her, but it wasn’t true. He held back because he was afraid of being rejected, of losing the right to at least see her. It didn’t help that she had herself wrapped in an air of reserve that turned him mute every time he was within ten feet of her. He’d been all over the world, talked with kings and leaders without fear or favor, and here he was afraid to talk to his own daughter.

  And now he might not get the chance. Who had her? They had Shield and if they had Pru, how long would it take them to find out it wasn’t ready? And what would they do when they did? John Knight had thought he was so clever, hiding it all in her head. He’d just made it easy for someone to take him out and put Pru at risk. And somehow, he had put her at risk, too. Someone had smoked out his interest in her and was planning…what? They already had Shield, so what else could they want that he could deliver?

  Whoever it was had seriously underestimated him, and he had an idea of just who that might be. He’d known when he met Grady O’Brien that he was a dangerous man. That’s why he hadn’t gone back to that camp. Even that small contact appeared to have given O’Brien ideas.

  He looked in his rear view mirror. Time to lose the tail. Then he needed to do a little recon of Grady’s camp. Grady wasn’t the only person who could come up with a plan and execute it.

  * * * *

  Dewey entered the restaurant in much the same way a Christian might have entered an arena full of lions. It was odd to be in love with someone that scared him, but he could no more change that than he could change the way the moon moved through the night sky—in the real world. In VR, he was captain of his fate, master of his soul and ruler of the skies. In this world, Bryn was master of his fate, captain of his electronic parole bracelet and the ruler of his heart.

  If only she could figure out her own heart. Didn’t Bryn know she loved him? Hadn’t she figured that out yet? And if she did, what would she do about it? He knew a lot of things about Bryn, but he didn’t know that.

  He saw her before she saw him. She’d brought her work with her. Smart girl. He was usually late. She frowned down at the paper she was holding. A file lay open on the table in place of her plate. The two little wrinkles between her brows made his heart jump in his chest the way it had the first time he’d seen her. She’d been so uptight she crinkled when she walked. And that walk, well, that made his heart jump, too. She had a great ass and this side-to-side move that just about knocked him over when he saw it. And don’t get him started on her legs. Man, the good Lord knew what he was doing when he gave women legs. He’d been thinking about giving her an ankle bracelet, but wasn’t sure his libido could stand it. If he went up in flames, he’d never know if they could make it as a couple.

  He approached, taking his time. This might be the last walk toward her, so he wanted to savor what time he had left. Of course, he should have been thinking about how to tell her instead of his little stroll down memory lane. He’d thought about doing it ala You’ve Got Mail, but he didn’t want to add plagiarism to his list of crimes. There was always the direct approach.

  “Hello, Bryn. I’m Phagan.” Then his head gets lopped off, it rolls across the floor, to rest against a wall with his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. With his luck, his body would keep on walking for a few minutes, before slumping to the ground. Besides, the direct approach sounded so Al-Anon-ish, so twelve steps waiting in the wings. “My name is Dewey Hyatt and I’m a Phagan.”

  If confession was good for the soul, why was it so hard to conf
ess? No, the direct approach was just too…direct. Which left the indirect approach, whatever that was—

  He saw Bryn stiffen, then turn in her chair to look at him, and he knew that she already knew. He just didn’t know how she knew.

  Bryn watched Dewey stop, tug at the neck of his shirt, then walk up and drop in the seat opposite her. He looked like a man on his way to the death chamber.

  She almost smiled, but her body was still in shock. Thank heavens she’d brought the file with her, so she had something to pretend to look at while her thoughts spun in crazy patterns inside her head.

  “How…when…” his voice trailed off.

  The “when” could be counted in moments. How was a little harder. On some level, she realized she’d always known. Or she should have. It had been in front of her face for the last year. It was as if her brain had finally arranged all the pieces into a recognizable pattern.

  She’d been thinking about both of them all the way the restaurant, listing their good and bad qualities in her head. Oddly enough, the lists had come out the same. The odds of that happening were as great as two strangers having the same DNA. That’s when she had the blinding flash of illumination. She wasn’t in lo—interested—in two men. There was only one, and she might have to kill him.

  Dewey knew it, too. He looked at her like a man who’d played his last card and knew it was a loser. His shoulders slumped and for the first time, he looked serious.

  Like a small, bad boy whose world was ending in a crash.

  Against her will, her heart softened. She didn’t let it reach her expression. There was just too much happening too fast for her to give ground right now, especially not when it was crumbling under her feet. At some level, she knew she wasn’t making sense. How could she when her head was spinning with rage?

  And relief.

  Okay, she admitted it. She was relieved. She wasn’t looking at three choices: Phagan, Dewey or neither. Just two. Do I or don’t I? And if I do, how do I make it happen? Making it not happen would be easy, so very easy.

  This deception could end Dewey’s parole in a heartbeat. It had been based on truth in elocution. He hadn’t lied, but he’d left out the mother of truths. If he’d said anything, tried to defend himself or charm her, it would already have been over. But he didn’t. He just sat there looking at her. Totally in her power.

  But not.

  He reminded her of Phoebe the day she’d been arrested. Not fighting her fate, but not giving in either. Self-contained, relieved everything was on the table. All the burdens at someone else’s feet. Later, she’d asked Phoebe what she would have done if she’d got jail time. Phoebe had looked at her as if surprised at the question.

  “I’d have done it. Running isn’t all that fun, sugar.”

  Phoebe always got more southern with her, Bryn had noticed, or when anyone asked about her life of crime. It was a defense mechanism from her years of shifting identities. It was her own fault, Bryn realized. She hadn’t forgiven Phoebe for getting away with her crimes. Or was it her happiness that Bryn was jealous of? And Phoebe sensed it, hence the auto-defensive southern-ness.

  It wasn’t easy to realize she wasn’t a nice person. Not only had Phoebe paid a heavy price for crimes committed by her father, she worked hard to give everything back, to atone. And if Bryn were honest with herself, which apparently she wasn’t, Phoebe had never been a criminal in her heart or her soul–she had always hated what she did.

  And Dewey? He was always joking about being a criminal mastermind, but he’d been docile in his captivity. He’d tweaked her with his past, but she deserved it. She thought she’d loosened up, but not enough. She was still holding something back, even with people who gave everything to her without reserve.

  When did I lose my sense of humor? My sense of balance? Was it the agency or a character flaw? A man had loved her enough to give up everything. And his everything was a lot. He was a criminal mastermind with uncounted resources at his fingertips. Enough to get himself out of that dive he lived in now, for sure. Instead of being impressed or even grateful, she’d been annoyed. Of course he hadn’t told her. How could he trust himself to a woman who trusted no one? Not even herself.

  He leaned toward her but didn’t touch her, to her disappointment.

  “Why are you so sad, Miss Bailey?”

  “Are you hungry?” He shook his head. “Neither am I. Let’s get out of here.”

  She pushed back her chair and stood up. He stood up, too, his expression troubled, worried. There wasn’t just a world between them. There were two, hers and his. But there was nothing between them that hadn’t been between Jake and Phoebe. She took a deep breath and then held out her hand. It seemed to take a long time for it to reach the halfway point between them. In painfully slow motion she saw Dewey look at the hand and then look at her.

  Don’t crack a joke, please, she prayed.

  He didn’t even smile. Just slowly—very slowly—took her hand in his.

  He’d touched her before of course, but it had never been like this. She’d never…initiated the contact. Had always shooed it off. Who’d have thought the mere touching of hands could be so shattering? The slide of his flesh against hers. The slow meshing of fingers. The full palm contact. The click of two wrongs uniting into an amazing right. She felt like she’d exploded and was now reintegrating as someone else. Someone she didn’t know, but felt a lot more comfortable with.

  They turned together and walked outside. They must have stopped to collect coats. She didn’t remember. Was just glad to find herself outside on the sidewalk with Dewey. It must have been cold, but she didn’t feel it. She was wrapped in warmth, all of it flowing steadily from their two joined hands.

  Out of the light from the restaurant, they stopped and turned to face each other. There was so much to say, so much to wade through, but none of that seemed to matter. His hand holding hers tightened. His other hand touched her cheek. Chills feathered down her body from the contact. She caught her breath. He started to bend his head towards her, but his cell phone rang. He stopped, then shook his head.

  “It might be your parole officer,” Bryn said, not recognizing her own voice. It was so breathy, so husky.

  “Right.” He pulled it out, giving her a shaken, crooked grin before saying, “Dewey Hyatt’s Criminal Enterprise.”

  For once she wanted to laugh at it. Finally she wanted to laugh.

  He waited a minute, then said, “Hello?” He stowed the phone. “Wrong number, I guess. Now where was I?”

  “You were about to kiss me,” Bryn said. “And I was about to let you.”

  His grin curled her toes. When his arms slid around her, her insides opened like petals in the sun. He picked her up and twirled them in a slow circle.

  “You…amaze me, Miss Bailey.”

  “Good,” she said.

  * * * *

  Grady hung up the phone with a frown. Dewey Hyatt’s Criminal Enterprise? Obviously it was a joke, but had he got the real name? Where had he heard that name?

  He turned to the computer and did a simple google search, just to see what he’d turn up. His first hit was a newspaper story about a year old. About a pair of high-tech thieves getting parole and community service hours—if they’d help the government fight computer-related crime. Along with the article were pictures, mug shots, of the pair.

  Grady studied both pictures. He wanted to be able to recognize them if he ever saw them again. He spent the most time on Hyatt. Was he, he wondered, the genius who had unraveled the viruses Grady created? He’d cracked the last one in under an hour. Pity he’d changed sides. He could use talent like that on his team.

  What he found even more interesting than the pictures, though, was the name of the Deputy US Marshal involved in the case. Jake Kirby. Brother of Luke. That was one law enforcement infested family, but he was only dealing with one of them. And Luke wasn’t federal. A simple homicide detective. No problem.

  * * * *

  Despite the l
ateness of the hour, Luke couldn’t go home without checking the address Amelia had given him. To his surprise, and relief, it was there. What did it mean? It sure wasn’t the address listed on her employment records. He could postulate that the PDA belonged to a friend, but how had she gotten the keys? It made his head hurt to think about it.

  He looked at his watch. It was after two in the morning. If she was in there, she’d be asleep. If she was in there, he needed to know she was all right. He needed to look at her with the Prudence photograph in mind. He sighed. He just needed to see her again. Oh boy.

  Finally, he tapped lightly on the door. When there was no answer, he tried a couple of the keys. One released the lock, letting him push the door open.

  “Amelia?” Nothing. He didn’t want to blind her with a light, so he pulled out a pen flashlight, but the precaution wasn’t necessary.

  She wasn’t there.

  There were, however, signs she’d been here. The clothes she’d been wearing were in a small heap on the bathroom floor. The towel was still damp. The smell of soap and lotion still hung in the air, teasing his nostrils with memories of what it had been like to be close to her.

  It didn’t take him long to look around her apartment and conclude it wasn’t a place where someone lived their life. The pictures on the wall were an odd combination of Amelia and Prudence. Amelia, in a Clark Kent/Superman motif, didn’t wear glasses. The bank statements and driver’s license said Amelia Hart, but he knew, didn’t he, that Amelia was Prudence Knight? So why the apparent double-life?

  The license put her age at thirty-four, which made his heart do a little jump. Not as young as he’d first thought. A thought he shouldn’t be having right now. Face it, man, if she had been planning to kill her father and steal Shield, establishing another identity was the logical, first step. While his cop side argued against her, his heart sided for the defense. This place didn’t really look like a hideout. It looked like a retreat. A place she’d come to read, listen to music, maybe to be alone?

  The next question was, where had she gone? She must have known he’d come here as soon as he was free. So why wasn’t she here? Unless he hadn’t been too good at keeping this secret? And whoever had been after had caught up with her again? There was no sign of a struggle, but they could have taken her as she left. Where else would she go? She didn’t know where he lived. Hadn’t made it to Dewey’s apartment to know where that was.