by Harper Allen
His idea of a future with her had been to remove himself as far as possible from her presence—to go back to a job that, from his description of his previous employment, would have him in Italy one week and an obscure South American state the next, with scarcely any downtime in between.
Of course, that was before he knew I’d kept the truth about his daughter from him, she reminded herself unhappily. Now he not only doesn’t want a future with me, he’s made it plain he regrets our past—all except for one part of it.
That part was Emily. He’d adored her even before he’d known she was his. And that was why Del’s accusation was not only over the line, Caro thought slowly, but totally unjustified.
Yes, Gabe’s story was unbelievable. At his insistence, everyone except Susannah and Tess, who were with their own children at Tess’s house, had assembled in the kitchen of the Double B to hear it, and Caro suspected her own face had shown the same baffled incredulity as Con’s and Daniel’s and John MacLeish’s at Gabe’s recounting of his eerily unsettling encounter with Alice Tahe. But the clincher for them all had been his reluctant admission to Del that he had no idea how he’d made his way back to the ranch, and no memory of having done so.
So his story was unbelievable…but the urgency with which he’d told it rang true. And while he was responsible for keeping his little daughter safe, Caro thought, the last thing Emily’s father would do was get drunk.
“I guess I can’t blame you for jumping to that conclusion, Hawkins.” It was obvious from Gabe’s controlled tone that he was keeping his temper with difficulty. “I know parts of this sound crazy—”
“Try all of it,” Del interjected.
“—but however she got her information, I think Alice stumbled on the truth,” Gabe continued, ignoring Del. He took a deep breath. “The past has become the present. The circle has come around. There’s only one thing that could mean.”
“You’re talkin’ about the Beta Beta link,” Daniel Bird, Susannah’s father and Del’s old comrade, said softly. He looked down at his hands. “I always suspicioned it would turn out to be connected to what’s been happenin’ at the ranch. Somethin’ inside me knew the past wasn’t done with us yet.”
“Well, I’m done with the past,” Del said sharply. He favored Gabe with an icy stare. “Yesterday my wife was abducted by that son of a bitch Dixon. She’s still in the hospital getting over the trauma. I don’t give a pinch of horsesh—” he shot a glance at Caro “—a damn about this new theory of yours, Riggs. Dixon was behind Jess’s kidnapping and death, and he all but came straight out and confessed he’d targeted Caro and Emily because the password Jess had provided Caro with when he gave her access to his business affairs meant she could do exactly what she did—search Crawford Solutions’ bank records and discover the phony Dos Abejas payoffs. Besides, only a guilty man would have bolted like he did when he saw the evidence we had on him.”
His tone was hostile, and Caro stared at him. This was a side of Del she hadn’t seen before, she thought in dismay. Whereas his previous altercations with Gabe had been more in the nature of two strong-minded men disagreeing with each other, this time he—
Del turned stiffly away and lifted the coffeepot from the stove. As he did, she saw the tremor, instantly stilled, that shook his hand.
Ex-Marine Lieutenant Hawkins was afraid. Even as the impossible thought came to her, Caro knew she was right. He’d tried to hide it with a show of aggression, but he was afraid.
“There’s no harm in letting Riggs tell us what his theory is, old buddy.” John MacLeish sounded puzzled. “After all, we can’t say we have the case all wrapped up just yet, not when we don’t know who Leo is.”
“That’s not really true, Mac.” Caro realized that in her agitation she’d spoken too loudly. She went on more quietly. “I think Del does know who Leo is—or at least, he’s afraid he does. Am I right, Del?”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
She cut across his frosty rejoinder. “You could handle it when it was Jess’s theory. You could even handle it when I wondered if the logo on the side of the kidnappers’ truck meant we should look into your Vietnam past. But all Gabe would concede to was that someone might be using the Beta Beta Force connection as a smoke screen, so you allowed yourself to dismiss it, too.”
She turned to Gabe, and even at such a moment she found her gaze lingering on the hard planes of his face as if she were imprinting them on her memory. “He always rode you hardest for a reason,” she said unevenly. “He saw in you the man you could be, Gabe—and he knew that man would be someone he could respect. Tonight you became that man when you went to see Alice Tahe on the Dinetah and made peace with a part of yourself you’ve denied for too long. But you also came back convinced that the Beta Beta connection’s real, and although Del’s managed to dismiss that theory from everyone else, he can’t when it comes from you.”
She waited for Gabe’s response. When it came it wasn’t what she’d expected.
“You did the right thing, princess,” he said slowly. “You wanted our daughter to have a full-time father, not a stranger who showed up every once in a while and then broke her heart by leaving again. The Gabe Riggs I was this afternoon didn’t get that. The man who came back from the Dinetah tonight does.”
He held her gaze a moment longer, then he turned to Del. “I need to hear it from you, Hawkins. Do you really think I’ve gone over the edge with this Beta Beta theory, or is it like Caro says—you’re so afraid it could be true that you’d rather close your eyes to it than let this investigation go any further?”
“I think you’ve gone over the—” Del’s crisp tone faltered. His hawklike gaze slid away from Gabe’s and then went to each of the others at the table in turn, ending with Caro. A corner of his mouth lifted wryly. “Too damn pretty and too damn smart, aren’t you, darlin’?” he growled. “Just like my Greta.”
His sigh was heavy. “I’m afraid it could be true, Riggs. I think Leo could fit our first profile—a Vietnam vet who’s harbored a hatred against the Double B’s all these years for the death of a friend at the hands of Zeke Harmon. And it’s not just the two bees symbolism that’s convinced me, it’s the loose ends we never tied up from the other two cases that have happened here over the past few months—the killer who targeted Susannah, and the people who were after Tess. Except, there’s one big difference between those cases and this one.”
“The difference being that targeting Susannah was a way of getting back at her father, Daniel,” Connor said with a frown. “And the killers who tried to eliminate Tess and Joey were really after MacLeish. If this mysterious Leo’s method of operation is to ally himself with people who have their own unrelated agendas, like that killer Scudder had with Susannah, for example, why did he choose to work with Dixon?” He shook his head. “Jess was one of the ranch’s bad boys a long time ago and he’d kept in touch with Del, but again, there wasn’t the same kind of close relationship between them that there was between Daniel and Suze—a father and a—”
“A father and a daughter?” Gabe said thinly. “No. But according to Jess there was a father-son relationship between him and Del. I think his stubborn belief in that caused his death.”
Del had looked shaken before, but now there was a haggardness to his features. “Leo’s plan was to punish me for whatever loss he suffered at the hands of a renegade Beta Beta Force member by killing a man he thought was my son?”
“Your son, the woman your son was going to marry, and the child he would have raised as his own.”
Caro saw the flash of anguish that came and went behind Gabe’s eyes as he answered Del, and knew with a pang that she was responsible for putting it there. A moment ago he had said she’d been right in keeping the truth about Emily from him. She’d told herself the same thing, and had believed it. But at the sight of his pain when he contemplated how close he’d come to never knowing he’d fathered a daughter, for the first time she felt an unsettling doubt as to whe
ther any justification was enough to excuse what she’d done.
Did I really have a right to decide that he wouldn’t be an acceptable father for Emily? she asked herself. When I got pregnant with her, I certainly wasn’t mother material. How would I have felt if someone had taken her away from me?
He was still talking. With difficulty she attempted to focus on what he was saying.
“Leo’s scheme dovetailed perfectly with Dixon’s. I just haven’t figured out how he found out what Steve was planning, in order to put himself in a position where Steve would give him a part to play.”
“It doesn’t wash, Riggs,” Del said suddenly. The haggard look left his face and relief took its place. “Jess was a year older than Con and Gabe. I would have been serving out my last year in ’Nam when he was conceived, so if this Leo did even the most rudimentary checking of the dates, he would have—”
“San Francisco, Lieutenant,” Daniel said in his soft drawl. He looked up from his hands. “Three days R and R. It was just before everything started to go bad that last year, and all of us Double B’s were given leave together. That shy little girl from your hometown came all the way out to the coast to see you, and you took her and us out to dinner one night. We had ourselves a right fine time, too, if I remember rightly.”
“I don’t think I like what you’re implying, Daniel.” Del’s words were clipped. “I saw Sheila Crawford as a sister, damn you, and if you think I took advantage of her—”
“If you’d stop pulling rank on everyone here and listen for one second, Hawkins, maybe we could get somewhere,” Gabe broke in. “Daniel’s just saying it’s not impossible Jess could have been your son.” He grimaced. “Oh, hell. What I mean to say is, it’s not impossible that Leo might think—”
“I get what Daniel means. I get what you mean, too.” His fists clenched, Del took a step toward Gabe. “You think Jess might not have been so off base about who his father was as I always said he was, dammit. Do you want to back up what you just said by accepting the invitation I extended to you the night you arrived, Riggs?”
“If I thought I could knock some sense into that hard head of yours, yeah!” Gabe exploded. He thrust his face close to Del’s. “But that won’t happen, will it, Lieutenant. You’re so used to giving orders and keeping everyone else in line that it doesn’t ever occur to you that you might get it wrong sometimes.”
“It doesn’t occur to me that I might get it wrong?” Del gave a bark of laughter. “That’s pretty good, coming from you. Hell, even when you were a teen you thought you knew it all, Riggs, and you haven’t changed a—”
“Stop it, both of you!”
Caro was on her feet before she was aware of what she was doing. She looked from Gabe’s angry face to Del’s furious one, took in their identically rigid jaws and tight expressions, and braced herself against the table to keep from swaying.
The past has become the present. The circle has come around… As the words resounded in her mind, for an instant the atmosphere in the Double B kitchen seemed filled with the scent of something smoldering, like the smoke from a grass fire. She shook her head to clear it.
“It couldn’t be true,” she breathed, her gaze frozen on the scowling men in front of her. “But it has to be. You two couldn’t be anything but—”
“Anything but what, dammit?” both Gabe and Del growled simultaneously as she paused.
She chose her words carefully. “Del, you once told me you had a rehab nurse the year after you came back from Vietnam. I…I got the impression she was someone very special to you. What was her name?”
The ex-marine blinked. “What’s that got to do with—” Something in her expression seemed to alert him, and his frown faded. “Mary Morgan,” he said quietly. “That was her married name. Her husband Robert was listed as ‘missing in action’ only weeks after their wedding, but she never gave up hope that he would come back to her. Not until the day she got a telegram notifying her that his body had finally been found, that is. What are you getting at, Caro?”
She ignored him and turned to Gabe. He knew, she thought as she saw the stunned disbelief in his eyes. He knew what she was about to say, even if he couldn’t accept it yet.
“I remember you saying that when you ended up in the foster system, Gabe, you only had two things to remind you of who you were and where you came from. You’ve held on to them all these years. One of them is a watch-brooch—a watch-brooch that hangs upside down, like a nurse would wear pinned to her uniform. The other’s on your wrist right now.”
“Yeah, and there’s a name stamped inside this cuff, princess,” Gabe said tightly. “It says H. Morgan. I also remember telling you that Harry Morgan’s one of the most famous Navajo silversmiths, and like all of the good ones, he has his name stamped on the inside of every piece he makes, to identify himself as the artisan.”
“But this piece has the top of the H deliberately scored across by the man who once owned it, to make it into an R, Gabe,” she said softly “As in Robert Morgan, the husband who never came home to Del’s rehab nurse, Mary…and who left his widow only memories…and the silver and turquoise bracelet her son wears today.”
She shook her head, still holding his gaze. “The real proof of who your father is isn’t either of those things, though. It’s been staring both of you in the face ever since you arrived back here, no longer a teen but a grown man. Your mom might have reverted back to her maiden name of Riggs when she knew her husband was dead and the child she was bearing had been fathered by a man who was still trying to put the pieces of his life back together, a man she must have decided was still too shattered to cope with the responsibilities of being a father. But when Del knew her, her name was Mary Morgan. All anyone has to do is look at the two of you right now to see you’re his son.”
“She’s right.” Connor was looking at Del and Gabe as if he’d never seen them before—or at least, Caro thought, as if he’d never seen what was suddenly so obvious to him. “Even when we were teenagers something about you and Hawkins occasionally bugged me, Riggs, but I never could put my finger on what it was.”
“For God’s sake, there’s no similarity at—” Del began.
“Dammit, Con, we don’t look anything like—” Gabe snapped at the same time.
They both stopped speaking abruptly and stared at one another. Del’s frosty gaze suddenly wavered. Gabe’s hard expression turned to uncertainty.
And all at once Caro realized that the choking miasma of a smoldering smudge-fire was back, this time so thick that she could hardly breathe.
“The past has become the present. The circle has come around,” she whispered, a nameless dread filling her. “Dear God, if Leo wants to destroy Del, what better way could he find than to—”
She didn’t finish her sentence. Instead she turned and ran from the kitchen, flying up the stairs and down the hall to the bedroom where Emily was sleeping.
Except, Emily wasn’t sleeping in the crib beside the bed. Emily wasn’t in the room at all. Emily was gone, the only clue to her disappearance the gently billowing curtains at the half-open window.
Terror gripping her, Caro was only dimly aware of Gabe entering the room behind her and his curse as he took in the scene.
“What better way could Leo find to destroy Del than to take his granddaughter?” she rasped, her knees giving way as Gabe’s arms went swiftly around her.
“GABE’S GOING TO FIND HER.” Standing behind the chair she was sitting in at the kitchen table, Del let his hand drop onto Caro’s shoulder. “He has to,” he added hoarsely.
She turned a tear-ravaged face to him. “But what if he doesn’t? What if none of them do? I shouldn’t have let him persuade me to stay here and wait in case Leo calls, Del. If I was out there with the rest of them there’d be two more of us to search, because you wouldn’t be stuck here guarding me!”
Her tone climbing swiftly toward panic, she half rose from her chair, and Del gently pushed her down again. “I’d feel better
if I was out there combing the Double B spread, too, but Gabe’s right. Leo set this up as a kidnapping, and even if he’s not interested in demanding a ransom, there’s every chance he’ll phone just to spin his twisted game out a little longer. We need to be here to keep him talking if he does.”
He raked a hand through his close-cropped hair. “Sheriff Bannerman’s got volunteers covering the back roads, he and his deputies have set up roadblocks on the main routes, and thanks to Connor, the FBI’s on the way. As for the Dinetah, Matt Tahe’s Tribal Police have it sewn up so tight that a shadow couldn’t slip past them. The other thing that’s in our favor is we know Leo doesn’t have more than half an hour’s head start on us, since Emily was in her crib when you checked on her before coming downstairs tonight.”
He was doing his best to bolster her spirits, Caro thought leadenly, but he knew, as well as she did, that if the mysterious Leo had gotten onto the Double B property, there was a possibility he could get safely off it.
After all, a baby wouldn’t slow him down much, she thought, her hands clasped together tightly on the table. And if he found Emily was hampering his escape, a monster like Leo wouldn’t have any qualms about—
“Whatever you’re thinking, put it out of your head.” Del’s voice was sharp enough to break through her fearful imaginings. He covered her hands with his. “I know it’s hard not to, sweetheart,” he went on gruffly. “But if you try to stay strong for me, I’ll do my darnedest to stay strong for you. Deal?”
“Deal,” she answered unevenly, feeling a sudden rush of affection for the tough ex-marine. She forced a shaky smile. “Tell— Tell me about Mary Morgan, Del. If you want to, that is,” she added.
His smile was as much of an effort as hers, but he didn’t seem offended by her request. “I don’t mind. Mary’s one of the few good memories I have of that time. I told Greta about her the second time we went out together.”