Cole turned to Scarlett. “And your cousin Jason helped me stop Rocky.”
Heather said, “I don’t know if I would’ve been able to put the final pieces of the puzzle together if I hadn’t read an online article about the two of you and the work you did.”
Scarlett hugged her in a warm embrace. “I’m so glad you found your way back home, and look at all these people you’ve been able to reunite with their families.”
“You know, Jim, we all lived with Rocky for years and looked at him as a father figure,” Heather murmured. “I knew even as a child that he was a bad person, but as children we’re trapped. We don’t have many choices, but it sounds like you made the right ones.”
“Yeah, and some of us are lucky enough to find our real families.” He put his arm around Scarlett and kissed the side of her head. “If any of those kids, your commune brothers and sisters, need help coping, give me a call. I work with vets who have PTSD and I have a lot of referrals.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
When they left, Cole cranked his head from side to side. “This is turning into quite a party. Even the Timberline sheriffs and the FBI are having a good time.”
Heather tugged on his sleeve. “You haven’t met Summer—I mean Kayla—yet. Here she comes with her twin.”
Kendall Rush wrapped Heather in a bear hug. “I am so grateful to you for bringing my sister back to me.”
Kayla smiled shyly. “Now I have two sisters, because you’ll always be my sister, Meadow. I’m sorry—Heather.”
She smiled. “Cole, this is my sister, Kayla, and her husband, Gerardo.”
Everyone shook hands, and remembering all the different names was getting to be a challenge.
Kendall introduced her fiancé, Cooper Sloane.
As Cole shook his hand, he said, “The Timberline Sheriff’s Department still talks about you—best sheriff the town ever had. Any chance you’ll come back?”
“Not a chance. Neither my fiancée nor my daughter can take the rain. We’ll be staying in Phoenix.”
Kendall looked around the room. “This is such a happy occasion, except we’re missing someone. Did Stevie have a good life?”
“Rocky, as much as he tore apart other families, did it all to establish his own tribe, as he called us,” Heather answered. “Despite his criminal activities, he treated us all with kindness. It was a commune—we were isolated and didn’t have a lot of modern conveniences, but we learned to depend on each other and we all had our jobs. River, as we knew him, loved working with machinery. He loved dirt bikes and motorcycles. I’d say he was happy, wouldn’t you, Summer?”
“I think he was, as much as any of us were.”
Kendall put her arm around her twin’s waist. “I know you and Gerardo have a life in Mexico, but we’re going to visit as soon as we can and you have to come up for our wedding.”
As the crowd began to thin and her parents retired to their hotel room with James, Heather turned to Cole.
“For one terrifying week, I didn’t have a name or a family or an identity. Now I have three names, more family than I can visit in twenty Christmases and I know who I am.”
“Quite a turnaround.”
“But through all the darkness, I had one shining light—you.”
“I was your shining light, really? Because I was pretty sure you couldn’t wait for me to leave Timberline.”
She grabbed the lapels of his jacket. “That’s just because I didn’t know if you were a drug dealer out to kill me or a cop out to arrest me, and you turned into my white knight out to save me.”
Cupping her face with his hand, he whispered, “Now you just have too much damned family around. How am I ever going to get you alone again, Caroline, Meadow, Heather?”
“I’ll tell you what, señor. I have to go down to Mexico to take care of some business. I’m sure you can make up some reason why you need to be down there. We could sneak away, drink tequila, take long siestas.
He nuzzled her ear. “Do we really have to take a nap during the siesta, or can we do...other things?”
“Oh, we can do other things, but will all the excitement go out of it for you now that I’m no longer a woman of mystery?”
“I don’t want a woman of mystery. I plan to find out every little detail about you, but don’t leave me if I happen to call out Caroline in the throes of passion.”
“Leave you, Cole Pierson? Never going to happen.”
Then he kissed her and she knew exactly who she was.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from THE GIRL WHO CRIED MURDER by Paula Graves.
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The Girl Who Cried Murder
by Paula Graves
Chapter One
Mike Strong scanned the gymnasium for trouble, as he did every time he walked into a room. Fifteen years in the Marine Corps, in war zones from Africa to Central Asia, had taught him the wisdom of being alert and being prepared. All that training hadn’t gone out the window when he’d left the Marines for life as a security consultant.
Especially at a company like Campbell Cove Security Services, where preparation for any threat was the company’s mission statement.
The new 6:00 a.m. class was amateur hour—otherwise unschooled civilians coming in for an hour of self-defense and situational awareness training before heading off to their jobs at the factory or the grocery store or the local burger joint. In all likelihood, none of them would ever have to draw on their training in any meaningful way.
But all it took was once.
His later classes were more advanced, designed to give law enforcement officers and others with previous defense training new tactics to deal with the ever more complicated task of defending the US homeland. He’d come into this job thinking those classes would be more challenging.
But if the newest arrival was any indication, he might have been wrong about that.
She was tall, red-haired, pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way. Pert nose, a scattering of freckles in her pale complexion, big hazel-green eyes darting around the room with the same “looking for trouble” alertness he’d displayed a moment earlier. Beneath her loose-fitting T-shirt and snug-fitting yoga p
ants, she appeared lean and toned. A hint of coltish energy vibrated through her as she began a series of muscle stretches while her eyes continued their scan of the room.
What was she afraid of? And why did she expect to find it here?
Trying to ignore his sudden surge of adrenaline, he started with roll call, putting names to faces. There were only twelve students in the early-morning class, eight men and four women. The redhead, Charlie Winters, was the youngest of the group. The fittest, too.
Most of the others appeared to be fairly average citizens—slightly overweight, on the soft side both mentally and physically. Nice, good-hearted, but spoiled by living in a prosperous, free country where, until recent years, the idea of being the target of ruthless, fanatical predators had seemed as likely as winning the lottery.
“Welcome to Campbell Cove Academy’s Basics of Self-Defense class,” he said aloud, quieting down the murmurs of conversation in the group. “Let’s get started.”
He followed Charlie Winters’s earlier example and took the group through a series of stretching exercises. “I want you to get in the habit of doing these exercises every day when you get up,” he told them. “Because you won’t have time to do it when danger arises.”
“How will stretching help us if some guy blows himself up in front of us?” one of the men grumbled as he winced his way through a set of triceps stretches. Mike searched his memory and came up with the name to go with the face. Clyde Morris.
“It won’t, Clyde,” he answered bluntly. “But it might help give you the strength and mobility to get the hell out of Dodge before your terrorist can trigger the detonator.”
He didn’t miss the quirk of Charlie Winters’s eyebrows.
Did she disagree? Or did she have an agenda here that had nothing to do with preparing for terrorist threats?
Nothing wrong with that. There were plenty of reasons in a free society for a person to be ready for action.
But he found himself watching Charlie closely as they finished their stretches and he settled them on the mats scattered around the gymnasium floor. “Here’s the thing you need to know about defending yourselves. Nothing I teach you here is a guarantee that you’ll come out of a confrontation alive. So the first rule of self-defense is to avoid confrontations.”
“That’s heroic,” Clyde Morris muttered.
“This class isn’t about making heroes out of you. It’s about keeping you alive so you can report trouble to people who have the training and weapons to deal with the situation. And then return home alive and well to the people who love you.”
He let his gaze wander back to Charlie Winters’s face as he spoke. Her gaze held his until the last sentence, when her brow furrowed and her lips took a slight downward quirk as she lowered her gaze to her lap, where her restless fingers twined and released, then twined again.
Hmm, he thought, but he didn’t let his curiosity distract him further.
“I guess I should take a step backward here,” he said. “Because there’s actually something that comes before avoiding confrontation, and that’s staying alert. Show of hands—how many of you have cell phones?”
Every person raised a hand.
“How many of you check your cell phone while walking down the street or entering a building? What about when you’re riding in an elevator?”
All the hands went up again.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “How can you be alert to your surroundings if your face is buried in your phone?”
The hands crept down, the students exchanging sheepish looks.
“Look, we’re fortunate to live in the time we do. Technology can be a priceless tool in a crisis. Photographs and videos of incidents can be invaluable to investigators. Cell phones can bring help even when you’re trapped and isolated. You can download apps that turn your phone into a flashlight. Your phone’s signal can be used to find you when you’re lost.”
“Thank goodness. I was afraid you were going to tell us we had to lose our iPhones,” one of the students joked.
“No, but I am suggesting you start thinking of it as a tool in your arsenal rather than a toy to distract and entertain you.”
Again, he couldn’t seem to stop his gaze from sliding toward Charlie’s face. She met his gaze with solemn eyes, but her expression gave nothing else away. Still, he had a feeling that most of what he was telling the class were things she already knew.
So what was she doing here, taking this class?
Swallowing his frustration, he pushed to his feet and retrieved the rolling chalkboard he’d borrowed from one of the other instructors. “So, revised rule one—stay alert.” He jotted the words on the board. “And now, let’s talk about avoiding confrontations.”
* * *
MIKE DISMISSED CLASS at seven. One or two students lingered, asking questions about some of the points he’d covered in class or what points he’d be covering in their class two days later. He answered succinctly, hiding his impatience. But it was with relief that the last student left and he hurried to his small office off the gymnasium. It was little more than a ten-by-ten box, but it had a desk, a phone and a window looking out on the parking lot.
He caught sight of Charlie Winters walking across the wet parking lot. She’d donned a well-worn leather jacket over her T-shirt and baggy sweatpants over her yoga pants, but there was no way to miss her dark red hair dancing in the cold wind blowing down the mountain or the coltish energy propelling her rapidly across the parking lot.
She stopped behind a small blue Toyota that had seen better days. But she didn’t get into the car immediately. First, she walked all the way around the vehicle, examining the tires, peering through the windows, even dropping to the ground on her back and looking beneath the chassis.
Finally, she seemed to be satisfied by whatever she saw—or didn’t see—and pushed back to her feet, dusting herself off before she got in the Toyota and started the engine.
As she drove away, Mike turned from the window, picked up the phone on the desk and punched in Maddox Heller’s number. Heller answered on the second ring.
“It’s Strong,” Mike said. “You said to let you know if I had any concerns about the new class.”
“And you do?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Concern may be too strong a word. At this point, I’d call it...curiosity.”
“Close enough,” Heller said. “So, you want a background check on someone?”
“Yes,” Mike said after another moment of thought. “I do.”
* * *
CHARLIE KEPT AN eye on the rearview mirror as she drove home as fast as she dared. She’d like to get a shower before her early-morning phone conference, and she was already going to be cutting it close. Could she really keep this up two days a week, given her boss’s delight in scheduling early meetings?
Besides, after this morning’s class, she wasn’t even sure it was worth her time. All that stretching and they didn’t do anything but go over the basic tenets of self-defense. On a chalkboard. Hell, she’d already covered those basics with a one-hour search of the internet. She didn’t need an academic journey through the philosophy of protecting oneself.
She needed practical tools, damn it. Now. And she didn’t want to spend the next few weeks twiddling her thumbs until Mr. Big Buff Badass deigned to detach himself from his chalkboard and teach them something they could actually use.
Channeling her frustration into her foot on the accelerator, she made it back to her little rental house on Sycamore Road with almost a half hour to spare. As had become habit, she waited at the front door for a few seconds, just listening.
There was a faint thump coming from inside, but she had two cats. Thumps didn’t exactly come as a surprise.
Taking a deep breath, she tried the door. Still locked.
>
That was a good sign, wasn’t it?
She unlocked the door and entered as quietly as she could, standing just inside the door and listening again.
There was a soft prrrrup sound as His Highness, her slightly cross-eyed Siamese rescue cat, slinked into the living room to greet her. He gave her a quizzical look before rubbing his body against her legs.
“Did you hold down the fort for me like I asked?” She bent to scratch his ears, still looking around for any sign of intrusion. But everything was exactly as she’d left it, as far as she could tell.
Maybe she was being paranoid. She couldn’t actually prove that someone had been following her, could she?
There hadn’t been a particular incident, just a slowly growing sense that she was being watched. But even that sensation had coincided with the first of the dreams, which meant maybe she was imagining it.
That could be possible, couldn’t it?
She went from room to room, checking for any sign of an intruder. In her office, her other cat, Nellie, watched warily from her perch atop the bookshelf by her desk. If there had been an intruder, the nervous tortoiseshell cat would still be hidden under Charlie’s bed. So, nobody had been in the house since she left that morning.
Beginning to relax, she took a quick shower and changed the litter box before she settled at her computer and joined the office conference call.
Because she worked for a government contractor, Ordnance Solutions, most of her conference calls consisted of a whole lot of officious blather and only a few nuggets of important information. This call was no different. But she wrote down those notes with admirable conscientiousness, if she did say so herself, especially with His Highness sitting on her desk and methodically knocking every loose piece of office equipment onto the floor.
She hammered out the project her bosses had given her during the conference call, a page-one revision of the latest operational protocols for disposal of obsolete ordnance from a recent spate of military base closures. Most of the changes had come after a close reading by the company’s technical experts. Charlie was used to working her way through multiple revisions, especially if the experts couldn’t come to an agreement on specific protocols.
In the Arms of the Enemy Page 20