by B. J Daniels
“That’s not possible. My parents never would have—”
He cut her off. “We don’t have time for this now. I need to find out who was piloting that plane the night it crashed in the Breaks.” He looked to his father. “You let them use our airstrip on the ranch. Don’t tell me you didn’t know who was behind the controls.”
“That was your grandfather’s doing. He allowed them to use the airstrip, but he never flew the planes. He made sure none of us was around when a plane was coming in with a…package,” Loren said.
Eve had believed there was a conspiracy to keep the truth from her. She had no idea. And Old Town Whitehorse was perfect for this kind of operation. Isolated and close-knit.
“If my father discovered the plane was carrying drugs and that the pilot…” Lila looked up at Carter. “This pilot, he has my daughter?”
“I think there’s a good chance,” Carter said. “That’s why I have to find him.” Before he kills again. “I have no idea even where to look.”
The circle could have gotten pilots from out of town. Even out of state or out of the country. Canada was less than fifty miles from here. For all he knew the killer could be transporting Eve across the border at this moment. After all, getting into Canada, if you knew the back roads, was just a matter of opening a barbed wire gate and driving through.
He picked up one of the photographs that had spilled across the tabletop, his mind reeling. It was a picture of his father and Lila. They were both very young and, even in the faded photo, Carter could see that they were in love.
Past it was a snapshot of his father and grandfather standing next to Loren’s first plane, under it an older black and white of his grandfather’s squadron from WWII.
Carter felt a jolt as he reached for it. “You didn’t tell me Dr. Holloway flew with Grandpa in WWII.”
“Doc got shot down. He never flew again,” Loren said.
“At least not that you know of,” Carter said as he stared at the photograph of a much younger Dr. Holloway. “He signed all the birth certificates, right?”
Lila nodded.
Next to Doc in the picture was a kid who didn’t even look eighteen. He looked vaguely familiar. “Who is—”
“That’s Errol Wilson,” Loren said. “He was a mechanic at the end of the war. He loved to hang out with the pilots, Dad said. Loved to fly.”
“Errol had a pilot’s license?” Carter said, remembering the way Errol had been acting around Eve that day in the Breaks.
“No,” Loren said. “That is, he had his license, but he got it taken away because of some mess or another he was involved in. Errol never got over it. Worst thing that can happen to a man who loves to fly.”
“Errol and Wanda never had any children,” Carter said, his mind racing.
“No, Wanda couldn’t conceive,” Lila said.
Carter felt his heart rate take off at a gallop. “The circle didn’t offer them a child?”
Lila met his gaze, hers hard and cold. “Errol didn’t want someone else’s bastard. There were enough of them in Whitehorse as it was, he said.”
Carter hurriedly got on his radio and put out an APB on Errol Wilson. Then he asked Lila where he could find Doc.
“He came back from Great Falls when I did. He said he had work to do. So I assume he’s at his office.”
Carter’s two-way radio squawked. “Sheriff, we found Samuelson.”
ERROL BROUGHT the car to a stop and killed the engine, filling the trunk with an eerie silence.
Eve looked at Bridger and saw her own fear mirrored in Bridger’s eyes as she heard the car door open, felt Errol climb out. The door slammed. A moment later, she heard the key in the trunk lock.
The lid opened. Eve blinked at the sudden light.
“Come on, you two,” Errol said. “We don’t have all day.”
Past him, Eve saw pine trees. She tried to retrace the trip in her mind, remembering the bumpy roads then the paved, then another rough road to here.
The nearest pines would be in the Breaks. But Errol had driven on paved highway for what had seemed like at least an hour. If he’d gone south…Doc Holloway had a cabin in the Little Rockies near Zortman.
Errol helped her out. Her legs were cramped, her wrists aching from the tape, but she found her feet and glanced around. Doc Holloway’s old Suburban was parked in the pines nearby.
Drawing a knife, Errol cut the tape on Bridger’s ankles. He sheathed the blade to pull the gun again and pointed it at Eve’s head.
“Unless you want to see your twin’s head blown off, you won’t do anything stupid,” Errol said, pulling her back a few feet to give Bridger room to get out.
“So we are twins,” Bridger said.
“Fraternal, according to Doc,” Errol said.
“Doc Holloway? We were born locally?” Eve asked.
“Up north by the border. A home delivery,” Errol said.
“What else did Doc tell you about us?” Eve asked. “Do you know who our birth mother was?”
“Doc didn’t say, I didn’t ask,” Errol said. “I had to land on the highway up there. Doc met the plane with the two of you. Whoever your mother was, I’m sure she was just glad to get rid of you.”
“You’re a real bastard, you know that?” Bridger said.
Errol laughed. “Takes one to know one.”
“The sheriff will be looking for us,” Eve said.
“Everyone will be looking for you,” Errol said. “But they won’t find you. Not for a while, anyway. Come on.” He shoved her toward a path that led up the hill. “Either of you does anything stupid and I shoot to kill, understand?”
“You’re going to kill us, anyway,” Bridger said, behind Eve as she started up the trail.
“I can do it now if you keep mouthing off,” Errol shot back. “This is your own fault. You just couldn’t quit putting your nose into things. You have only yourself to blame.”
“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that all the way to hell,” Bridger said.
Eve heard Errol hit him from behind. Bridger let out a “whuft” sound. She looked back, afraid of what Errol had done to him, but Bridger motioned for her to keep moving. “I’m fine,” he said.
“He tell you that he’s been spying on you? I caught him taking pictures of you,” Errol said.
Eve turned a little to look back at him.
“Her name was the only one I had. I had to assume she was in on the cover-up,” Bridger said.
“Yeah? Well, between the two of you, you’ve made a real mess for me to have to clean up,” Errol said.
As Eve topped a rise in the trail, she saw the cabin. It was small, built of logs, set back against the mountain. There was a porch across the front and an old rocking chair. Next to it, a creek tumbled in a waterfall to drop a good twenty feet into a rocky pool below.
The roar of the creek reminded her of something Doc Holloway had once told her about his cabin. “I have an old rocker on my cabin porch. Someday I’m going up there and I’ll just sit and listen to the creek next to my cabin instead of whining patients. Someday soon.”
She felt tears rush her eyes. This couldn’t be happening. Errol had always scared her. She didn’t doubt he planned to kill them. But not Doc. And yet it had been Doc’s name on her birth certificate. He was in this up to his neck. But he wouldn’t be part of a kidnapping, possibly even murder. She recalled last night at the hospital when she’d seen Errol and Doc arguing. Is this what they’d been arguing about?
As sunlight caught on one of the cabin windows, she told herself Doc wasn’t a killer. He was a healer. He had always been kind to her. He wouldn’t let Errol kill them. In fact, she was sure Doc would be furious that Errol had brought her and Bridger here. He would fix this, just as he’d fixed her broken wrist when she was eleven.
The cabin door opened.
JUST DOWN THE ROAD from Eve’s house, deputies had found Deputy Flynn Samuelson’s body stuffed in a ditch culvert. Samuelson had his throat cut.
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br /> Eve was still missing.
Trying not to panic, Carter called for the coroner and an ambulance and ordered the deputies to keep searching for Eve. He felt his despair growing. Just as he suspected, a killer had Eve. He feared it was the same one who’d murdered her grandfather thirty-two years ago.
“Sheriff!” one of the deputies called from the barn. “I found something. Better come take a look.”
Carter entered the dark barn, his heart in his throat. The deputy was standing by the back door, the sunlight streaming in from outside. Please, don’t let it be Eve. He moved through the barn, bracing himself for the worst.
“I found tire tracks where a vehicle had been parked back here,” the deputy said as he led him outside. “I found this by the back door.” He stepped over to the side of the barn. “In the grass.”
Carter held his breath as he drew back the high grass. He stared down at the wallet. It was black leather, expensive looking. As shiny as it was, the wallet hadn’t been there long.
“I didn’t touch it,” the deputy said.
“Good work.” Carter picked up a stick and carefully opened the wallet to expose a driver’s license. Bridger Duvall. What the hell was his wallet doing here?
“Isn’t really a place where a man would drop his wallet,” the deputy said. “It’s almost as if someone threw it into the grass there—”
“So we would find it,” Carter finished for him. Was it possible the killer had both Eve and Bridger Duvall? He recalled what Max Roswell from the crime lab had said about the baby hair in the brush found in the plane. Two different individuals. Two babies on the plane. Related to each other.
He checked Bridger Duvall’s birth date, knowing even before he looked that it would be February 5, 1975.
His cell phone rang. He jerked it from his hip. “Jackson.”
“More trouble, Sheriff,” the dispatcher said. “It’s Doc Holloway’s office building. It just exploded. They think Doc is trapped inside.”
THE CABIN DOORWAY FILLED. Eve felt her mouth go dry as she saw that it wasn’t Doc Holloway who stepped out.
“Took you long enough,” Wanda Wilson said as she moved aside to let her husband and his kidnap victims enter the cabin. She was a wide-bodied, short woman with a round face, close-set eyes and gray hair. For as long as Eve had known her, Wanda had worn a sour expression, as if she’d just eaten something bitter.
Eve glanced from Wanda to the roar of the creek far below the porch. As she looked down and saw the water rushing over the boulders, she felt a wave of vertigo and stumbled.
“What’s wrong with you?” Wanda demanded.
“The tape is cutting off my circulation.”
“It won’t hurt much longer,” the older woman shot back.
Errol stopped for a moment, motioning to everyone to be quiet. Eve heard it, too. The sound of a car coming up the cabin road. Then there was nothing but the wind high in the pines and the chatter of squirrels off in the distance.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Wanda said. “But let’s get this over with and get out of here.”
“Why are you doing this?” Eve asked, stopping short of the doorway to look back at Errol. She’d definitely heard a vehicle down the road. She was praying it was Carter. All she had to do was buy her and Bridger time.
Errol jammed the barrel of the gun into Bridger’s ribs and she thought for a moment he was going to pull the trigger in answer.
“Because of your grandfather, that righteous son of a bitch,” Errol snapped.
“Don’t,” Wanda warned.
“Why not tell them? You want to know why you both have to die? Because you’re just like your grandfather, Charley Cross, that’s why. He couldn’t keep his nose out of other people’s business. Him and his high-and-mighty good deeds.”
“Errol—”
He didn’t seem to hear as he continued his tirade. “Ol’ Charley thought I should just fly bastard babies all over the state out of the goodness of my heart. Oh, sure, he’d pay for plane rentals and fuel, then slip me a twenty like I was some servant. He could have overlooked the weed I was running. The bastard was going to turn me in. After everything I’d done for him and your grandmother.”
“Oh, my God,” Eve said, her knees giving out.
“Damn it, Errol!” Wanda bellowed as she kept Eve from falling all the way to the porch floor. “Shut the hell up.”
“What difference does it make now if she knows I killed her grandfather?” Errol demanded. “Your grandmother thought the plane crash killed him. Charley was unconscious. I waited until your grandmother got out with one of the babies, then I stopped Charley from opening his mouth ever again.”
Eve began to cry for the grandfather she’d never gotten to know. She thought of Grandma Nina Mae letting the world believe that Charley had deserted her, run off to Mexico. She felt sick to her stomach. Her grandmother had had to leave Charley in the plane, to keep the secret. To protect Eve and Bridger and the other children.
“You bastard!” Eve cried, lunging at Errol. Wanda jerked her back.
“Do that again and I kill your brother right here and now,” Errol threatened.
Bridger let out a chuckle. “You were running drugs and using the baby operation as a front. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”
Eve didn’t believe Bridger for a moment, but Errol did.
He chuckled. “Maybe I was wrong. I should have taken this kid. The kid and I would have had a great business going. We could have cut Doc out of it entirely.”
“Doc wouldn’t have gotten involved in selling drugs,” Eve said, not so sure about that but wanting to believe it was true. She wondered where Doc Holloway was. What if that had been his car she’d heard and not Carter’s? What if Errol knew Doc a whole lot better than she did?
“You always were so naive,” Wanda said, grabbing her arm and dragging her into the cabin. It was dark inside, only minimal furnishings. Wanda pulled her over to a trapdoor in the wooden floor and shoved her toward the stairs that dropped down into total blackness.
“Don’t do this,” Eve said. “No one can prove you killed my grandfather. But if you kill me, Carter won’t stop until he finds you.” It wasn’t much of a threat, but once she said it she knew it was true. “He loves me. He’s always loved me. He will track you to the ends of the earth.”
Wanda laughed. “Yeah, that’s why he married Deena Turner.”
“Anyway, this isn’t my doing,” Errol said. “This is Doc’s. His cabin. He’s the one who signed all those fraudulent birth certificates. When your sheriff finds the ‘retirement’ money Doc put away from our drug deals, he won’t look any further. He’ll believe Doc was flying the plane that night. And there won’t be anyone to tell him different.”
“Get down there!” Wanda ordered. “Or I’ll throw you.”
Eve didn’t doubt it. She saw no way out. Errol had a gun on Bridger and she suspected it would turn out to be Doc’s if Errol had to use it. “At least cut the tape on my wrists. I’m not going to do anything. I know you would shoot my brother if I did.”
“Cut the damn tape,” Errol snapped. “I’m sick of listening to her whine.”
Wanda swore as she took Errol’s knife and none too gently cut the tape. “Now get down there.”
“What’s going on?” asked a voice from the doorway.
Everyone turned at the sound.
Eve stared in disbelief. “Deena?”
Chapter Sixteen
Carter raced into Whitehorse. He could see the smoke from miles away. As he approached Dr. Holloway’s office building, he saw that it was a total loss.
“Doc?” he asked the chief fireman.
“We got him out. He was in bad shape, but still alive when the ambulance took him to the hospital.”
The deputy had reported back that there was no sign of Errol or Wanda at their house. Carter could feel the clock ticking. What if Errol didn’t have Eve? What if he was wrong and the killer wasn’t local? Eve could be
anywhere.
He refused to even consider that she might not still be alive as he drove to the hospital. An internist met him at the door.
“Doc?” Carter asked.
The intern shook his head. “He was too badly burned. Even if we could have gotten him airlifted out to Billings or Salt Lake City to the burn center there…”
Carter rubbed a hand over his face. Doc was gone and so were all the medical records. Also gone was any hope of getting answers.
“He was asking for you right before he died,” the intern said. “He kept saying Sheriff, and what sounded like cabin? Make any sense?”
“Yeah,” Carter said, and ran for his patrol car.
EVE WASN’T SURE what Deena saw first, the gun in Errol’s hand, the tape binding Bridger Duvall’s wrists or the shotgun Wanda had grabbed.
“What’s going on?” Deena asked again, her voice breaking as her attention settled on Errol’s gun, now pointed at her. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“What are you doing here?” Wanda demanded.
Deena seemed to pry her gaze away from the gun to look at the older woman, who had now raised the shotgun, pointing both barrels at Eve and Bridger.
“I was following Bridger’s car,” Deena said. “I knew he’d been sneaking around Eve…” She glanced at Eve, then Bridger.
Eve saw that Deena held a small digital camera in her left hand and knew at once what Deena was doing here. She’d planned to expose Eve’s affair with Bridger to Carter. The woman was so transparent. She’d seen Bridger following Eve and had followed the two of them—right into trouble.
“What are we going to do with her?” Errol demanded.
“What do you think?” Wanda snapped. “We don’t have much choice.”
Errol started toward the door and Deena. Deena might be transparent and a whole lot more, but she wasn’t completely stupid. Sizing up the situation, she turned and ran.
CARTER HAD NEVER been to Doc’s cabin, but he knew the small old mining community south of town. And he’d heard Doc talk about the place enough that he didn’t have any trouble finding the road.