“Riki, he’s gone. He was never there in the first place.”
“Oh, he was there, all right. Sloan promised he would come back, and he will.”
Hector Balough smoothed a hand over his fringe of red hair, a gesture of pained patience that Erika recognized all too well. “Honey, it doesn’t make sense. The FBI said there was only one man working undercover. That Floyd character. Why would they lie?”
“Besides the fact that I broke their guy’s jaw?” she asked. “Technically, Sloan’s NYPD, so they weren’t really lying when they said he wasn’t working for them.”
Hector reached beneath the bar and brought out a can of root beer to refill her glass. “Maybe you should talk to someone about this.”
She hooked her heels onto the bar stool. “Thanks, but all I’ve done is talk for the past week and the only person who doesn’t think I’m crazy is Rufus.”
“We don’t think you’re crazy, Erika.” Ken Latimer patted her shoulder as he took the stool beside her. “You just need a rest.”
She sipped her root beer. “I still haven’t caught Hartwell’s appliance thief.”
“Seriously, you should relax. That was a major bust last week. Wates is dead, his weapons-smuggling ring is smashed and all the Stingers are accounted for. Isn’t that enough excitement?”
Erika glanced at the mirror that hung behind the bar. Some of Sloan’s buddies were gathered near the pool table in the far corner. They were watching her uneasily while trying to pretend they were interested in their game. Evidently, they had sent Ken to test the waters since he had been Sloan’s partner. She saluted them with her root-beer glass and turned to Ken. “I’m just getting warmed up. Did you get me the information I asked for about Sloan’s father?”
Ken ran his index finger beneath the neck of his NYPD sweatshirt and cleared his throat. “Are you sure you want to do this now?”
“Absolutely. What did you find?”
“Your hunch was right. The slug that killed Patrick Morrissey came from a 9 mm Heckler and Koch.”
She put down her glass and smacked her palm on the bar. “I knew it! Is ballistics running a comparison with Wates’s gun?”
“That’s the strange part. I found the file, but the box of evidence was signed out of the property room more than a year ago.”
“By Sloan, right?”
“Yes. He never told me he was looking into it. How did you guess?”
“It was something Wates said after Sloan read that obituary I used to keep in my bag. He reacted to the Morrissey name and the fact that Sloan’s father had been a cop. At the time I had other things to worry about, but it got me thinking. Ken, what do you believe Sloan would have done if he had discovered who had killed his father?”
“Geez, that ate at him since he was a kid. He thought the world of his family. He would have done whatever it took to nail the killer.”
“Uh-huh. Including going undercover as a criminal named Max Tanner?”
Ken turned his head and actually met her gaze straight on for a change. “Possibly. He always was impulsive.”
“And what if, once Sloan started poking around as Max, he discovered the man who murdered his father twenty years ago was now involved in smuggling arms that could lead to the deaths of thousands of innocent people?”
“Same thing. He would have done whatever it took to stop him.” Ken furrowed his forehead. “I checked out Patrick Morrissey’s last case. He was investigating a smuggling ring when he was killed.”
Erika nodded. “See? It fits, doesn’t it?”
“You know, this has possibilities.”
“And what if, in the middle of all this, Sloan happened to accidentally fall off his sloop and was picked up by the Coast Guard, who were working with the FBI who were also investigating Wates?”
“That would get complicated.”
She smacked the bar again. “That’s exactly what Sloan said. The feds would have jumped at the chance to get a man deep undercover, and Sloan had loads of incentive. They probably promised him it would be over in a matter of weeks.”
“Honey,” Hector said, sliding his hand over hers. “You know the FBI said Max Tanner was the genuine article. He had a record that went back to his teens. You saw his mug shot. He wasn’t Sloan.”
Oh, the doubts were always there, gnawing at the edges of her mind, but she refused to succumb to them. Yes, she had seen Max Tanner’s photograph. He had black hair, and his height and weight were close to Sloan’s, but his face had been completely different.
And there had been the matter of Max Tanner’s rap sheet. Theft, extortion, aggravated assault and manslaughter. His prowess with a switchblade was well known in his home town of Dallas. “They never found Tanner’s body,” she said.
“Well, no, but—”
“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
“Riki…”
“And we all know records can be faked.” She pulled back her hand and rubbed the underside of her ring with her thumb. “The Max Tanner I met on the ship was Sloan. He’ll be able to explain the rest when you see him.”
The door of the bar swept open, letting in a rush of cold air. Erika’s pulse leapt, as it always did whenever a door opened. Or a phone rang. Or someone called her name or she saw a dark-haired man on the subway platform tilt his head a certain way. She twisted to look behind her.
The man who had entered the bar was plump and bearded.
“Dr. Goldstein,” Erika murmured. “What’s he doing here?” She returned her gaze to her uncle. “Uncle Hector?”
He rubbed his fringe again. “I called him, Riki. I thought you might like to talk.”
She glanced at Ken and then at Sloan’s friends. Everyone suddenly looked the other way. “What’s going on? Is this some kind of intervention?”
“Good evening, Erika.” Dr. Goldstein pulled off his gloves, used them to brush off the seat of the barstool to her left and sat. “How are you feeling?”
“I am not crazy,” she said through her teeth.
“No one is saying you are, Erika. We’re all your friends and we’re concerned.”
“Well, sure,” she said. “You think I was hallucinating again, but those times I ran after Sloan, he really had been there. He told me. He loves me as much as I love him, and that’s something that never dies.” She pointed to her heart. “The truth is in here, not in my head. It was there all along, but I’d been too afraid to listen to it. Not anymore.”
“Erika—”
“Nothing on this earth is going to keep us apart.” The room wavered. She choked back her tears. “One way or another, we’ll find each other again.”
The front door opened. Erika’s pulse spiked as it always did. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and glanced in the mirror behind the bar.
A tall, raven-haired man stared back at her, his gaze the pure blue of an August sky. Shadows of exhaustion tinged the skin beneath his eyes and a week’s growth of beard darkened his cheeks. He moved slowly, his progress hampered by the crutches he balanced on. A cast enclosed his right leg from above the knee to his ankle.
Of course, she thought. The deck of the freighter was as high as a house. He must have broken his leg when he’d hit the water.
Her heartbeat tripped into a sprint. “Sloan,” she whispered.
He hobbled forward. The lines beside his mouth deepened with his lopsided grin. “Hello, Riki.”
She spun off the stool and leapt across the room.
Sloan’s crutches clattered to the floor as he opened his arms. “Sorry I took so long, but those damn feds and their paperwork—”
She caught his face in her hands, stopping his words. She no longer needed explanations. There would be time for those later. Besides, some things you had to take on faith. She lifted herself on her toes and smiled. “Welcome home, Sloan.”
He wasn’t a ghost or an illusion. He was solid flesh and blood, as real as the love that glowed from his face. His arms locked around her back, his li
ps sealed to hers, and joy exploded through her soul.
Sloan’s name rippled around the room. Chair legs scraped. Glasses shattered as a table toppled over.
On some level, Erika was aware of the commotion. She heard the whoops from Sloan’s friends as they crowded around them. She felt Ken slap his partner on the back. She glimpsed her uncle vault over the bar.
Yet right now, she was busy getting reacquainted with the taste of her lover.
And this was one indulgence she would never give up.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S MURDER
Julie Miller
Dear Reader,
During the fifteen years I spent as an English teacher, I was often surprised by the stereotypes that some folks would have about me. Spinster schoolmarm. Mean old battle-ax. Having to use perfect grammar around me or else I’d call them on it. (Okay, I still correct my son sometimes—but then teaching is in my blood and he’s the most important student in my world.)
Every now and then I run across someone who insists on calling me “Miss” instead of “Mrs.” And more than once I’ve reassured acquaintances that after hours and on summer break, I’m off-duty, and they can relax and speak in whatever sentence fragments and with whatever pronoun references make them comfortable around me. And I always loved the students who were surprised enough to tell me I was nice, occasionally eccentric and usually fun—and that they learned a lot from me, anyway.
I tried to bring some of those same sensibilities to my story in Cornered. English teachers can be very nice people—they can be as normal as the next guy—funny, shy, smart, resourceful, sexy, caring. You name it. As with any stereotype, sometimes it just takes a better awareness—a chance to get to know that person before truly realizing what a treasure he or she is. Rafe, my hero, has some definite stereotypes to overcome if he intends to survive this mission. But Hannah is the go-to woman to debunk his misconceptions about spinster schoolmarms—and teach the rugged mountain man a thing or two about love, as well.
And to all you fellow English teachers out there—you rock!
Enjoy,
Julie Miller
Chapter 1
“Oh. my God.”
Hannah Greene gaped at the scene inside the tent. Her blood seemed to rush to her feet, leaving her light-headed.
“Breathe deeply, girl,” she coached herself. “Keep it together. You can handle this.”
A good Greene woman would.
She squeezed her eyes shut, wished the ugliness away, then slowly re-opened them. She swallowed back the bile rising in her throat as her resolve failed her. “No, I can’t.”
Glancing over her shoulder, she groaned at the deserted campsite. It was too early for anyone else to be stirring yet. So much for Randolph College’s fractured English department turning over a new leaf, learning to bond and help each other instead of hindering goals and careers. She was on her own.
What should she do? What would her father do? Her mother? Her sister?
Hannah peeked back inside the tent. She swallowed hard. Somebody had to go inside. That somebody was going to be her.
In a minute.
“Frank?”
Maybe he’d answer. Or not.
She crushed the edges of the tent’s nylon flap in her shaking fists and stared at the gruesome scene. There was so much blood. Too much for this scene to be natural.
Nature. Hannah shook her head, silently cursed her track record with Mother Nature.
What was a near-sighted English professor doing up here in the boonies of Wyoming’s Teton Mountains, treading through patches of high-altitude snow on what should have been her summer vacation? Camping with nine people she barely liked and didn’t trust? Pushing her plump body to new extremes of physical exertion and thin-aired endurance? How had she gotten so far away from the security of her books and research?
And how the hell would she ever get back to them without their mountain-climbing and survival guide to lead the way?
Hannah forced herself to take another look at the man on the cot. Frank Brooks, the taciturn mountaineer from Extreme, Inc., Adventures who’d been so patient with her and her inexperienced cohorts as he led them up Mount Moran on this week-long wilderness-bonding retreat, was truly and completely dead.
“Now what are we supposed to do?” she fretted out loud.
Oh, how she longed for the normalcy of a classroom. Or some improperly punctuated sentences to grade.
Or a cop.
“Dude. That guy’s dead.”
“Rowdy!”
Hannah jumped inside her boots, startled by Rowdy Trent, the young man who’d sneaked up behind her. Where had he come from?
Pressing a hand to her thumping heart, she spared a withering glance for the graduate assistant who preferred surfer lingo to iambic pentameter and who, fortunately, wasn’t going to be her assistant and create more work for her. But, incompetent as Rowdy could be, Frank’s death was shocking, and Rowdy did have feelings.
Inhaling a steadying breath, she reached out and gave Rowdy’s arm a reassuring squeeze before entering the tent ahead of him. She could do this. She was a Greene. If she chewed the inside of her lip hard enough, she could stem the panic that threatened to make her run screaming from the tent, and remain calm enough for the both of them. If. “We’d better wake up Dr. Copperfield and let him know what’s happened.”
Not that the new president of the college—and self-appointed leader of this misguided expedition—would know anything more about handling dead bodies and hiking down mountains than she did. But Dick Copperfield was in charge. And from the time she was a child, Hannah had been trained to defer politely to status and authority.
Or rather, she’d been given little opportunity to do otherwise. After all, she’d inherited the recessive genes of the Greene pool—she was the shyer one, the plainer one, the less ambitious one. Not that her parents didn’t love her, but they just didn’t expect the same things from their brilliant, book-loving daughter as they did from her older sister.
But her mother and father weren’t here. And Piper wouldn’t be caught dead on a mountain in her Jimmy Choos.
Dead on a mountain. What a lousy train of thought.
Buzzing her lips with a dismissive sigh, Hannah squatted beside the body on the cot. She needed to fully assess the situation. She needed to help.
She breathed deeply, wishing that a lungful of crisp, mountain-morning air could alter the image of their guide’s blank, staring eyes and bloody chest. She didn’t know whether to cover him up or try to administer CPR in an impossible attempt to revive him. But one brush of her hand across his cold, stiff knuckles had her reaching for the blanket still tied to his backpack.
“Dude, is that a climbing piton?” Rowdy leaned over her shoulder and fingered the metal stake that skewered the left side of Frank’s chest.
“Don’t touch that!” Hannah swatted the air in lieu of his hand. “It could be evidence.”
“Of what?”
She adjusted her narrow-framed, tortoiseshell glasses on the bridge of her nose and glared her shaggy-haired colleague back a step. “Murder.”
Rowdy’s blue eyes blanched. “You don’t think this is an accident?”
Hannah visually inspected the pistol-like device used to fire stakes into a sheer rock face to anchor rappelling lines and climbing gear. Frank had demonstrated how to use the device yesterday in a training session before taking them up thirty feet of a vertical cliff.
Mentally gauging the distance between the equipment on the opposite side of the tent and Frank’s body—and remembering that it had taken the muscles in both hands for her to fire that thing yesterday—Hannah was doubtful it could have gone off accidentally. Besides, Frank would have cried out or cursed, awakening the rest of them in the night. Unless he’d died instantly. In which case, he wouldn’t have been able to get back to his cot and lay himself out so neatly in a supine position.
Hannah was no expert in mountain-climbing, but she’d read plenty o
f Agatha Christie and true-crime books over the years. She taught an elective writing class on how to structure a mystery novel. The clues were evident to her observant eyes. She shook her head. “This was no accident.”
“Crap.” Rowdy was already shuffling toward the exit. “You mean there’s somebody up here on the mountain with us? Killing people?”
“I don’t—”
“I’m gettin’ the hell out of here.”
“Rowdy.” They needed a plan. They needed to think rationally. Hannah pushed to her feet and tried to calm him. “We need to keep our wits—”
“One of us could be next.”
“I doubt—”
But the tall man with the shaggy, sun-bleached hair had already bolted, leaving Hannah alone with the corpse.
Swallowing her worry, Hannah planted her hands on her hips and glanced back at the blank brown eyes that had smiled so kindly at her last night when Frank had promised to show her how to forage for edible foods among the trees and rocks this morning. With a silent prayer, she closed his eyes and pulled the blanket up to cover his face.
Maybe it was a good thing that Rowdy had run off. It probably wouldn’t have reassured him to hear that the killer didn’t need to return to camp. Hannah had understood the dire nature of their situation almost immediately.
By stranding them up on the mountain, more than two days away from civilization—without a clue or a compass to guide them—the killer had already sentenced them to death.
“A little help, please?”
“Yeesh.”
Hannah stood in the morning sunshine that, even at the end of June, was cool enough to raise chill bumps beneath her long flannel sleeves. Or maybe the chill had more to do with the dead man inside the tent behind her. Fighting off guilt and an unexpected sorrow for the man she’d known for only a few short days, Hannah surveyed the quiet tents nestled among crags of granite outcroppings. Bordered on two sides by a forest of Douglas fir trees, and on a third by a drop-off only mountain goats could climb, the camp was eerily silent. Without the bustle of Frank building a fire and preparing breakfast, the others must have slept in.
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