Edge of Black

by J. T. Ellison

  Roth and Xander were at the kitchen table, poring over maps. They were looking for the closest geothermals that were in desolate areas, ones only accessible by foot. That’s where they thought the camp would be. There were only three or four areas that fit the bill, almost all up in Eagles Nest, in the White River National Forest.

  Sam thought they were crazy to try to go in without more of a plan, but as Xander always said, once a Ranger, always a Ranger. He could plan a mission through a minefield in his sleep. What looked utterly insurmountable to her was a cakewalk for him.

  He’d given her permission to call Fletcher only once they were ready to rock and roll, and it looked like they were about at that point. Xander was rolling up the maps. The trailhead they’d be using was fifteen miles away, up Colorado State Road 9, so they’d have plenty of time to catch a cell signal to make their phone calls.

  They spooned a bit of Sunshine’s famous stew into their mouths and took the rest in thermoses and, at three in the afternoon, headed off.

  Sam was incredibly uncomfortable.

  She was in the backseat of the rented SUV, and felt as if there were guns and arrows and bolt-throwing crossbows pointed at her back. Which there were. Xander had loaded up the truck with gear: weapons, backpacks and tools. He wouldn’t tell her what everything was for. He and Roth were in the front, organizing, planning, discussing trailheads and alpine zones and bivouacs and longitudinal areas and taluses and walking-in.

  She started thinking some hot tea and a warm fire sounded like a much, much smarter plan than the one she’d determinedly forced herself into.

  She was going to hold them back, no doubt about it, but that was important, she thought. She hated that Xander was so willing—hell, excited—to run headlong into danger. At least his father was along—his pacifist father, who didn’t blink as his son loaded enough ammunition to take down a herd of moose in the back.

  Great.

  They were climbing now, and Sam glanced at her phone. She had bars.

  “Who do you want me to call first?” she interrupted.

  Xander harrumphed, but Roth said, “McReynolds.”

  Sam grabbed the card Reed had given her earlier and dialed the number and, when it started to ring, handed the phone to Xander.

  “Reed. Xander. Hey listen. Crawford took off into the woods last night, and his dad came by all sorts of agitated. We’re going up after him. We just wanted to let you know what was going on, just in case.”

  Silence, then Xander laughed. “Yes, Sam made me call. She’s a stickler like that.”

  He listened some more, then gave Reed the coordinates they were heading toward.

  He listened for a minute, then Xander’s voice changed. “No, I hadn’t heard. Thanks for telling me. Right. Right. Good idea.” He paused for a minute. “Yes, I will. On my honor. Okay.”

  He handed the phone back to Sam.

  “You better go ahead and call Fletcher.”

  “Why. What’s wrong?”

  He caught her eye in the rearview mirror.

  “Someone just blew up a reproductive services center in Boulder.”

  Chapter 49

  Washington, D.C.

  Detective Darren Fletcher

  Bianco put her tirade on hold long enough to let the aide fill them in on the details of the bombing, but Fletcher could feel the waves of anger coming from the other side of the desk. Poor Inez was shriveled up in her chair, completely stricken. He thought Bianco had been overly hard on the girl—it wouldn’t be the first time a little pillow talk had resulted in an embarrassing story gracing the pages of a newspaper.

  Fletcher had a hard time believing the accounts he was hearing. A man was seen leaving just as the fire alarm went off. The building was evacuated successfully—thankfully, he’d struck in the afternoon instead of the morning, when the surgical procedures were normally done. Many more would have been hurt if the operating suites had been full.

  There were no reported casualties, though several people had been taken to the hospital with respiratory issues. But the building itself was decimated. It was a combination research hospital for reproductive endocrinology and a fertility clinic, but not just for everyday women with fertility issues. They were doing cutting-edge work, stem cell transplants and clinical studies for in vitro fertilization in addition to the run-of-the-mill fertility treatments. The center was internationally recognized as a leader in reproductive technologies. Couples flew in from all over the world to have the very best possible care, and they had the highest success rate of any clinic in the country.

  But the bombing wasn’t the weirdness. That came in the form of reports of a small girl, around six or seven years of age, who the police were convinced had set off the bomb.

  According to witnesses, she’d been lost on the street, walking up and down the sidewalks crying, looking for her father. She had a cell phone in her hand, and one woman thought she meant to call her father with it. So the business owner had taken her into her store, sat her down on a stool and told her to call her parents.

  The girl had no idea how to use the phone, though, no real concept of what a phone was, either, which seemed strange. The woman looked at the phone and saw a number already programmed in. Assuming that was the parents’ number, the woman told her to press the green button to send the call, and the girl, who seemed more than willing to please, did. Moments later, the building, less than half a mile away, went down in a pile of rubble at the feet of the people who’d just evacuated it.

  The Boulder police had sent photographs of both the child and the cell phone detonator. The aide handed them to Bianco, who glanced at them and tossed them onto her desk. Fletcher reached over and picked them up, and felt the punch in his gut. He showed the photo of the girl to Inez.

  “Oh, my God. Do you think?” she asked.

  “What? What does he think?” Bianco snapped.

  Fletcher pointed toward the conference room.

  “I’d say the chances are pretty high that her mother is sitting in the conference room.”

  Bianco’s tune changed a bit when she realized the link to the bomber was sitting five feet away from her office. She was still obviously pissed at Fletcher and Inez, but she put her indignation aside long enough to allow herself to be briefed on the rest of the story.

  When Fletcher finished, she sat back in her chair. Anger turned to incredulity.

  “So let me get this straight. While I was getting my head handed to me for letting my staff run amok with highly sensitive information that can compromise national security, you two were busy finding the wife of the bomber. Who happens to be the daughter of two of our victims.”

  “It looks like that’s the case, yes, ma’am.” Inez was paddling, anything to get back in her boss’s good graces. Fletcher wasn’t quite as anxious.

  “Well, we don’t know that she’s the congressman’s kid, though.” Fletcher was still a little unsure of that, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.

  Bianco gave him a look as if to say keep up, stupid, so he shrugged. “Okay, she’s their illegitimate love child. Fine. The Post never got anything wrong, ever.”

  “Don’t get fresh with me, Detective. You are still on my shit list. But you can’t leave yet. I want to meet this girl.”

  “Before we do, Andi, let me reiterate something. There is no way the paper got that story from Inez. Neither one of us had that connection until you told us just now. We were still piecing together the CIA connection, as well. I’d say an apology is in order.”

  Bianco’s eyes were still simmering, but she raised her hand, palm first, in apology.

  “Fine. Inez, I’m sorry. I ever find out you leaked something from this office, you’re fired. Happy now?”

  Inez nodded meekly.

  “Good. But before
we go singing ‘Kumbaya,’ where the hell did the leak come from?”

  “I don’t know,” Fletcher answered. “But there’re only a few people who could have this level of detail. While you were out, we discovered that Glenn Temple has been impersonating the congressman on the street with the working boys and girls. Hence the rumors that the congressman has a few interesting proclivities. They don’t know what the real Peter Leighton looks like, Temple has been careful to pick from the low end of the spectrum, the specialists. I’d wager some of the higher-priced call girls would know who he was, primarily because they service the same level of clientele, and part of their job is to be savvy about the daily goings-on in town and on the Hill. But Temple would know that, too, so he made sure that his playmates weren’t following the news closely.”

  The look on her face was priceless. “Glenn Temple, the congressman’s chief of staff.”

  “Yes, ma’am. There’s more. ViCAP came back with some matches to several unsolved cases here in the tri-state area. Mostly working girls, strangled, raped, left out in the open. We are thinking Temple might be responsible for these murders as well, but has been trying to lay the blame on his boss. Who happens to be one of his best friends, as well. We need DNA from him, and we were in the process of following that lead, so we need to make that happen sooner rather than later.”

  Bianco was totally back on board.

  Yeah, you don’t mess with the Fletch.

  “Where is Temple now?”

  “Don’t know.”

  She gave him one of her more unfathomable looks, then hit a button on her phone. Sutton came into the room.

  “Would you be so kind as to have Cusack and Halder go pick up Glenn Temple for a chat? Inez will give you the information. Thank you, Inez. You and Sutton may go.”

  Inez didn’t waste any time. She threw Fletch a grateful glance and hightailed it out of there. He didn’t blame her for a second.

  “You are so damn lucky, Fletcher. If you didn’t have case-breaking information right now, I would have you tossed out on your ear.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, biting back a few choicer words.

  “Tell me about Ledbetter’s kid.”

  “Shouldn’t we figure out where the leak came from?”

  “Surely it was Temple. Right?”

  He shook his head. “Honestly, I think it’s even closer than that. Think about it. Who stands to gain from this sort of information getting out?”

  “Leighton’s enemies.”

  “Leighton’s dead, and his grand wide-reaching appropriations bill has been tabled indefinitely. His enemies don’t have anything more to work with. But someone’s going to have to fill his seat. And there is a tradition in this town. I’ll bet you good money the powers that be have been knocking on Mrs. Leighton’s door already, asking for her to do the right thing and step in. I don’t know how Indiana works, if they can appoint her to fill out his term or if they’ll call for a special election, but either way, she has a lot to gain by keeping her husband and his life in the news cycle. It’s completely feasible. If it’s true, it just means she was a little more ambitious than I gave her credit for. According to her, she and her husband knew he had a death knock coming, it was just a matter of when. Besides, who else would know about the kid? It wouldn’t be hard to keep a record of work with the CIA under wraps, they wouldn’t be in business if they couldn’t keep a decent secret. But an illegitimate kid—that’s the meat and potatoes of any decent opposition researcher.”

  “Maybe the kid did it herself?”

  “Come talk to her. I think you’ll see that isn’t the case.”

  “And we’re sure that Gretchen Leighton isn’t behind this whole thing?”

  “Andi, I’m not sure of anything right now.”

  She started to pace. “So, why were they murdered? Why the grand cover-up of a Metro attack if the point was to knock off the three people? Why not just take them out and walk away?”

  “I’ll give you my best guess. This is personal. It has felt personal from the get-go. The delivery methods, the timing, everything. I think the killer was trying to win back his ladylove in there. He had something good going, out there in the woods, with just the birds and the trees and his perverted faith as their best friends. Then she got knocked up, scared and ran away. He hunted her down, found out she’d given the kid up for adoption. I have a good feeling that when we look into this kid they have in Boulder, we’re going to find that it’s the child they conceived, and he took her from her adoptive parents. With the kid back under his roof, mommy makes three. He probably didn’t know she was estranged from her mother. He probably figured Dr. Ledbetter was influencing her to stay away from him. So he eliminates the two authority figures that are keeping her from him—mommy and daddy.”

  “And Conlon?”

  “He thought Conlon was his friend. Everything on the boy’s computer says he’s been drawing information out of Carter for months. Carter felt used, and while he was eliminating the people who made him unhappy, decided he might as well take care of the friend, too.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “From what Loa has been telling me, he’s not sane. Not in the least. He’s a religious zealot who takes great pains to follow the words of the Bible without understanding the actual message, just takes the lessons and makes his own kind of sense from them. I’m betting he’s got a touch of schizophrenia. It fits. Brilliance and madness all bundled together. No one said it had to make sense to us, it only has to make sense to him. Murder rarely does have its roots in logic.”

  Bianco sighed.

  “You’re one hell of an investigator, Fletcher. So where is this whack job now?”

  “That I can’t tell you, outside of I’d lay bets he’s within a four-hour radius of Boulder.”

  His cell rang, and he looked at it, relieved. He’d tossed a lot of that off his head, theories that came together with the details Bianco had thrown at him, and now he had to go make it all stick.

  The call was from Sam.

  He excused himself and answered it, shocked to hear actual fear in her voice.

  “Fletch? Thank God I caught you. My cell signal sucks. Listen. We think we know where the bomber is.”

  And the phone went dead.

  Chapter 50

  Eagles Nest

  White River National Forest, Colorado

  Dr. Samantha Owens

  “Oh, hell. He’s going to kill me.” Sam shook her cell phone as if that would help her get service again. The farther into Eagles Nest they drove, the worse the mobile service. She’d finally managed to get through to Fletcher, and the minute she dropped the news, she dropped the call, too. They’d been flirting with the rain for a while now, heavy downpours interspersed with rumbles of thunder and some foggy virga hanging low over the mountains, but the storms now seemed to be passing without too much bother. They should have clear weather into the night.

  They’d found Crawford’s vehicle, and Sam had to admit, Xander had been right about where Crawford was headed.

  “Don’t worry,” Xander assured her as he tied a backpack on her. “Once we get above 7500 feet, we should have a nice clear signal coming across the mountain.”

  “And how long’s that going to take?”

  “I don’t know. What do you say, Roth? Day? Day and a half?”

  She shot daggers at him.

  Roth shook his head. “He’s teasing you, Samantha. I’m sure we will find service along the trail. They have better signals out here now for hikers, have cell towers strategically placed so they don’t get too lost. How’s that pack feel? Too heavy?”

  “I think I’ll be okay.”

  Xander raised an eyebrow at her. “I can take out that nail file you insisted on. That might make all the difference.”

 
Sam stuck her tongue out at Xander, who, laughing, went back to the car for another load, and put the phone in her pocket. The pack was a bit heavy, but she moved it around and figured it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. They had four hours of daylight left, and Xander wanted to get them as high up the trail as he could before they made camp for the night.

  Sam thought about what her best friend would have said to all of this a year ago. “You, camping? Ha!” Yes, well, falling in love with an outdoorsman meant she was now more than accustomed to roughing it.

  Hiking a vertical to 7500 feet on the trail of a killer? Maybe not so much.

  Satisfied they had everything, Xander locked the truck, and they started off, Roth leading, Xander taking the rear. After a few choice comments about the view, and a few well-aimed kicks toward his midsection, they settled into a steady pace.

  They’d been hiking for an hour before Sam got a decent enough signal to try Fletcher again. She was more than relieved to take a break. Roth and Xander fidgeted with their things, checking weapons and straps, while Sam dropped her pack, drank some water and made the call back to D.C.

  Fletcher answered immediately, annoyance and relief bleeding through the phone. His voice was at a decibel she recognized as his version of DEFCON One.

  “Whatever the hell you’re doing, Owens, stop. Cease and desist, immediately. We have teams converging on the area to go after the killer. His name is Ryan Carter, by the way. We have his wife here at the JTTF. I’m sending you a photo. Where are you?”

  “Halfway up a mountain, on our way to where we think his camp is. How did you get his wife?”

  “You’re doing what?”

  “Xander knows the area, and his friend Will Crawford knows the killer. He took off after him yesterday, and we are following his trail. How’d you get the killer’s wife?”

  “It’s Ledbetter’s daughter, Loa. Not only that, Congressman Leighton is her father. Long story short, she ran off with Carter, got pregnant and changed her mind about living in the woods, ran away, gave the kid up for adoption and started her life over. There was a bombing a couple of hours ago in Boulder, a reproductive clinic. We believe we have Carter and Ledbetter’s daughter in custody—he left her behind.”