Blind Trust

by Sandra Orchard

  Tom turned his phone in his hand. Yeah, what was he thinking? There was no way a twenty-year-old arrest was connected to Ian’s killer. Zoe probably wasn’t even the woman’s name.

  So why not call? Nothing to lose. None of their other leads were panning out.

  The phone rang. Once. Twice.

  He suddenly felt like a caged animal. If this turned out to be the same woman who got his partner killed . . .

  He crushed the paper with her number scrawled on it, wishing it was her neck and hating the ugly emotions burgeoning in his chest, choking off all sense of—

  “Hello,” a female voice said. Not Zoe’s. The woman had a British accent.

  “I’m calling for Zoe Cortez. She there?”

  An odd scuffle sound interrupted the woman’s response. “Ah, no, she’s not in at the moment. May I take a message?”

  If this was his partner’s Zoe, there was no way she’d respond to his message. More likely she’d skip town the instant she found out he was onto her, which if she had caller ID, might be what that scuffle sound had been.

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll call back. Thanks.” He clicked off the phone with a groan. Lord, I need your help. Lead me to this guy so I can protect Kate.

  The rear door of the research center opened and Kate strolled out.

  What was she doing? He’d told her to call him if she had to go anywhere. As he reached for the door handle to remind her as much, his cell phone rang. Kate held a phone to her ear. Okay, so he couldn’t yell at her yet. He settled back in his seat and watched her through his windshield.

  When she bypassed her yellow Bug and opened the door of a white Honda, he clicked on his phone and started his engine. “Where you going, Kate?”

  “Hey.” She glanced around as if she’d sensed from his question that he might be watching, then slipped inside the car without noticing him. “I’m going to Landavars Greenhouses to pick up some herbs. But I’m borrowing Patti’s car, so you don’t have to worry about anyone following me.”

  “Is that the only place you’re going?”

  “Uh, no.” She fixed her phone on the dash and turned on the car. “I need to drop off some paperwork at Betty’s B and B.” Her voice rose with excitement as she pulled out of her parking space. “I might have a lead on that plant I found, but it’s all in Spanish. Betty said she’d translate it for me.”

  “That’s awesome. I’ll—” Movement in his side mirror caught his attention. “Listen, be careful. I’ll catch up to you as soon as I can.” He clicked off as a tan Toyota Corolla coasted behind his parking spot, Michael Beck at the wheel, his gaze fixed in the direction Kate had just turned.

  Tom rammed his gearshift into Reverse and stomped on the gas. His fender clipped the rear end of the Corolla, but Beck didn’t stop.

  Tom shoved his stick into Drive and swerved onto a parallel lane, racing him to the end. But instead of turning out of the parking lot after Kate, Beck veered left across the bridge leading to the lilac garden. A dead end. Tom grinned. Beck obviously wasn’t from around here. Tom careened after him, screeching to a diagonal stop in the center of the bridge.

  The Corolla pulled a donut in the parking lot, then jerked to a stop, and Beck bolted from his car.

  “Stop! Police!” Tom shouted, racing after him.

  “Okay.” Beck lifted his arms.

  But momentum, adrenaline, and a chestful of anger at what he’d put Kate through hurtled Tom straight into him. He whirled him around and rammed his back against the nearest tree. Fisting the guy’s plaid shirt in his hand, Tom pressed hard against his chest.

  The guy didn’t put up a fight. In fact, he kind of smiled. Tom was struck by the sense he knew him, and not just because he’d seen his face a hundred times on that video clip. The red tinge of his beard stubble was testimony to his former hair color. “Who are you?” Tom locked on his green eyes, and his heart jerked. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  Kate stashed the sage Patti had asked her to pick up in the Styrofoam cooler in the trunk and then headed to Grandma Brewster’s. As she’d done all morning, she continuously monitored her rearview mirror.

  A black car appeared. The same black car she’d noticed on her way to the greenhouse. Her pulse quickened. Gripping the steering wheel, she scouted her options. As she cleared a four-way stop, another car pulled in behind her. Seeing her opportunity, she swerved into old Mr. Surely’s farm, circled behind the barns and exited the two-hundred-plus-acre block via the back farm lane. No other car in sight.

  Tom would be proud of her. She sat a little taller and stepped on the gas. In record time, she pulled into Grandma Brewster’s driveway. She grabbed the last page of the stack Patti had printed off—the one with the photo of the plant—and opened the door.

  The black car swerved into the driveway behind her, and a male voice called out. “Thought you could get away from me, huh?”

  14

  “I am dead. You understand?”

  Tom loosened his hold on Michael Beck, aka Mike Baxter, and stared. He couldn’t help himself. The eyes, the hair, the telltale mole on his temple—this was Kate’s dad. And he’d shoved him up against a tree trunk. Tom released his grip, a thousand questions buzzing through his brain. “No, I don’t understand. You were stalking Kate. Had her scared half out of her mind. What were you thinking?” His indignation welled up so fast, he plowed his fingers through his hair to arrest the urge to give the man a good shake. “How could you abandon your wife and daughter, let them believe you were dead?”

  “Shh.” The man glanced around, and even though there wasn’t another soul in the secluded lilac garden, he kept his voice steely low. “It was the only way to keep my family safe. Then and now. If you care about Katy as much as I think you do, you won’t tell her.”

  “Are you nuts? She’s been tormented by your arrest, your supposed death. She needs to know you’re alive. I can’t not tell her.”

  “She can’t know.” A flicker of regret crossed his stone-faced glare. “Her safety depends on it.”

  Tom’s heart lurched. “What are you talking about?” He’d let her drive off without a tail, thinking Beck—Baxter—was the only immediate threat. He whipped out his phone.

  Baxter grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?”

  Tom jerked free of his hold. “Calling her to make sure she’s okay.”

  “I didn’t mean she was in imminent danger.”

  A research station truck pulled up to the bridge and a burly-looking guy jumped out of the cab. “This your car, mister?” He hitched his thumb toward Tom’s car blocking the one-lane bridge into the lilac garden.

  “Yeah.” Tom resisted the impulse to pull rank and tell him he was interrogating a witness. Kate’s undead father didn’t need any more attention directed his way. “Sorry about that. I’ll move it now.” To Baxter, he warned, “Don’t move. I’ll be right back. Then I want answers.” Tom parked his car beside Baxter’s Corolla and waited for the security guard to finish his rounds of the area before confronting Baxter again. “Okay, start talking.”

  “First I need your promise that you won’t tell her.”

  Tom jabbed a finger into the man’s chest. “All I’ll promise you is that I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her safe from whoever might hurt her.” His jaw clenched at the possibility that might mean keeping her father’s secret. To let her keep thinking her father was dead when he knew the truth was the worst kind of betrayal. He ground his teeth until they hurt. “Why are you here? Why have you been following her?”

  “I had to make sure she was safe.”

  “Safe? Sounds to me like you’ve put her in more danger by coming here.”

  “I’ve been a ghost for twenty years. No one’s going to recognize me, let alone connect us, if you don’t give me away.” He snapped a twig off a tree and crushed it in his hand. “But when I saw the newspaper coverage of Katy’s attempted murder, I was afraid they’d figured out she was my daughter.”

  Katy. Her fa
ther poured such love and heartache into the affectionate nickname, Tom felt for him. “The attempted murder had nothing to do with GPC Pharmaceuticals.”

  Baxter shook his head as if he couldn’t believe that.

  “Kate exposed Molly Gilmore for killing your daughter’s colleague in a twisted ploy to get revenge on a lover who’d spurned her.” Tom’s voice cracked at the memory of how close he’d come to losing Kate. He shut down the thought and cleared his throat.

  Baxter squinted at him. “You believe that?”

  “Trust me. Molly Gilmore is one warped woman. After she killed Kate’s colleague, she decided she wanted the guy back and tried to frame Kate for the murder.”

  “But the woman who was killed—Daisy—she’d discovered something. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Again, Baxter cast furtive glances around the perimeter and lowered his voice. “Something GPC wasn’t happy about?”

  “Kate thinks as much,” Tom admitted, but even she hadn’t gone so far as to blame the pharmaceutical company for Daisy’s death. “What did you see in Colombia that turned you against GPC?”

  “You know about my trip?”

  “Your old buddy Peter Ratcher filled us in.”

  Baxter snorted.

  “You don’t trust him?”

  Baxter flung the crushed twig to the ground and ripped off another. “I don’t know if I do or not.”

  “He knows Kate’s your daughter. He told her about your arrest. That you were trying to do the right thing.” Tom got into Baxter’s face. “If you don’t trust him, I need to know.”

  Baxter patted the air in a calming gesture. “It’s okay. I took care of him.”

  “What do you mean you took care of him?”

  “I hacked into his accounts to buy some time, keep him preoccupied rebuilding his identity.”

  “That’s why I haven’t been able to get ahold of him?” Tom blew out a breath. “Here I thought he’d recognized you in the video clip of you spying on him at the hardware store. And—”

  “You what?” Baxter clamped his head in his hands as if it had suddenly exploded with pain. “Did he recognize me?”

  “He didn’t say so, but I thought I saw a flicker of something.”

  Baxter groaned and slumped back onto a bench, his eyes hollowed out. “If he’s already told someone . . .”

  “Told someone what? That you’re alive? Based on a grainy video clip . . . after twenty years? Who’d believe him?”

  “True, but it’d be just as bad if he tells them Kate’s my daughter.”

  “He’s not the only one who’s connected her to you. The daughter of one of the fire’s victims recognized your picture in Kate’s house and accused you of destroying her village.”

  “You know about the fire?” Baxter’s voice broke. “Kate knows?”

  “Did you pay the guy to set it?”

  “No! GPC was behind it. Why do you think they wanted to bury me when I didn’t deliver? The plant is like bananas. It doesn’t grow from seeds. Destroy all the plants, lose the species forever.” Baxter’s expression soured. “Except I was supposed to deliver the Golden Goose.”

  “Yeah, what did you do with the plants?”

  Baxter shook his head. “I can’t tell you that.”

  Tom squinted at him, not sure what to think. Just because this man was Kate’s long lost father didn’t mean he didn’t swindle his employer and sell the plants to the highest bidder. “Why are you really here?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Uncomplicate it.” Tom planted a foot on the bench beside him. “What really happened twenty years ago?”

  “I was cooperating with the police to expose GPC. The police ‘arrested me’”—he made quotation marks in the air—“for my own protection.”

  “You mean like witness protection?”

  “That was the plan. Only my wife couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing or speaking to her parents again.” The deep lines carved in Baxter’s face said he hadn’t borne not seeing his wife and daughter any easier. He fisted his hand against his forehead, his eyes squeezed tight, as if he was fighting back a rush of emotion. He swallowed hard, dropped his hand. “The police staged my death so that GPC would think they didn’t have to worry about me.”

  The missing reports in his arrest record now made sense. “So your wife knew you didn’t really die?”

  “Yeah.” Baxter blew out a breath, then got up and paced. “I’m sure she thought I’d come back eventually, once the court case was over.”

  “But your family buried a body.”

  “A casket.” Baxter’s gaze lifted to some faraway point. “A couple of months later, Peter started going by my house. The detectives were worried he’d draw the truth out of my wife, that maybe GPC was using him.” Baxter choked on the explanation, clearly struggling to recount what happened next. He pressed his palm to his mouth a moment, briefly closed his eyes. “The detectives figured my wife needed to believe I was really dead because if GPC figured out I wasn’t, they’d threaten her and Katy to lure me out of hiding.”

  The emotion had seeped from Baxter’s voice. It sounded dead—not unfeeling like it’d been an easy decision to dupe his wife that way, but like he’d shut off the part of him that was allowed to feel. A survival strategy Tom knew too well from his FBI days.

  “Peter claimed he felt guilty for not doing more to try to help you.”

  “We couldn’t take the chance. So the police told her I died . . . for real, this time.”

  “That’s when she moved back to her parents’?”

  Baxter scrubbed a hand over his face. “Nothing to keep her at our home anymore.”

  That also explained why she didn’t want to take Kate to the cemetery, why she’d battled depression for years. Tom fought to keep his own emotions in check. “So what happened? Why didn’t you testify against GPC?”

  Baxter grew restless again and continued pacing. “Shortly after my wife moved away, the detectives investigating GPC died under suspicious circumstances. My lawyer advised me to drop the case.” Baxter’s expression twisted as if he’d swallowed a bitter pill. His breath came in shallow, angry huffs. “He said that some companies are just too big to topple. That if the police continued to investigate my allegations, GPC would figure out I wasn’t dead. And my family would be in jeopardy.”

  Tom braced his hand on a tree limb. “So you disappeared.”

  “Yes.” Baxter slumped back onto the bench. “Once the detectives were killed, I knew my family wouldn’t be safe if anyone knew I was still alive. So I staged my death for the benefit of my handlers.” He leaned forward, recounting his story now like a casual observer who had no emotional connection to what transpired. “They never recovered the body, of course. I bounced through several identities, compiled what evidence I could against GPC, anonymously feeding it to the appropriate authorities whenever I thought it might make a difference.” His nostrils flared. “It never did.”

  Tom rested a foot on the edge of the bench, leaning his forearm on his knee. “So why come out of hiding now?”

  A car turned onto the dead-end road leading their way and slowed at the bridge. Baxter eyed it suspiciously.

  A young woman jumped out sporting a digital camera with a large zoom lens.

  Baxter sprang from the bench and hurried to his car.

  Tom blocked him. “Wait, where are you going?”

  The woman on the bridge glanced their way but focused her camera on something in the treetops.

  Baxter reached past him for the door handle. “I’ve got to go.”

  “What am I supposed to say to Kate?”

  Baxter gulped a breath, deep pain in his expression. “Nothing.”

  Tom let him climb into his car, knowing he couldn’t leave until the woman with the camera moved her car off the bridge. He braced his hands on the roof and leaned down to speak to Baxter through the driver’s side window. “How can I contact you?”

  “Leav
e a light in your front window. I’ll contact you.”

  Tom snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding. Don’t you have a cell phone?”

  Baxter looked at him as if he were an idiot.

  “Right, you prefer to leave notes,” Tom bit out, fed up with Baxter’s cloak-and-dagger routine. He still hadn’t gotten a straight answer on why Kate would still be in danger after all these years.

  “Your responses to my notes told me what I needed to know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re a good man.”

  Tom shook his head. Not that good—as a cop, anyway—not if Baxter had been watching him undetected. Of course, twenty years of being a ghost had given the man lots of practice. Tom glanced over his shoulder to the bridge. The woman was climbing back into her car. “How do you think your being here will protect Kate?”

  Baxter started his car and shifted into Drive. “It won’t. That’s your job.”

  Heart racing, Kate peered in her rearview mirror at the black car that had her blocked in Grandma Brewster’s driveway. The trees and bushes lining the driveway suddenly didn’t feel all that serene.

  The driver—Jarrett King—hopped from the car. She gulped. The mayor’s son, Patti’s boyfriend. The only other person who knew about her interest in the rare plant.

  Stuffing the picture she’d brought to show Grandma B into her back pocket, she climbed from the car and turned toward him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Kate?” Jarrett sounded shocked. “Why are you driving Patti’s car?”

  Kate pressed a palm to her chest. “Oh.” He’d thought she was Patti. “I borrowed it.” She closed the car door, expecting him to get back into his car and drive away. Instead he slammed his own car door closed and stalked toward her. “What—” she cleared the squeak from her voice. “Was there something else you wanted?”

  “Huh?” His head ticked sideways. “Oh, no, not from you. I’m picking up some concoction my mom ordered.”

  Kate couldn’t help letting her breath escape in a rush. Clearly this whole business with Michael Beck had her way too jumpy. “You go ahead. I came to ask Grandma B a few questions. I could be awhile.”