Private Affair

by Rebecca York

  Well, now he had that opportunity. But where would it get him? They were together for the moment. But when this case was over, she’d be going back to New York.

  Max knew she hadn’t loved the idea of playing house with him. He hadn’t loved the idea either, but it was the plan that made the most sense if he wanted to mingle with her former classmates without drawing attention to himself. Actually, the pretend engagement had been Shane’s idea. And Max had wondered if the suggestion was some kind of perverse payback for Max giving him a hard time when he and Elena Reyes had been tracking down a thief and a killer at S&D Systems. The takedown had involved a scam—which had been Elena’s idea. She’d put herself in a lot of danger by using herself as bait, but they’d gotten to her in time. And now she and Shane were a happily married couple. Like his other partner, Jack, and his lady, Morgan Rains.

  Neither of the two married guys had been willing to play Olivia’s fiancé, which was how Max had gotten the job. And maybe in a secret sort of way, he liked it. Who wouldn’t love being seen as the lover of a top New York model?

  And how did she like being engaged to a washed-up cop? That shouldn’t even enter into the equation, but he couldn’t stop the thought from lodging in his head.

  So what did that mean? He wanted her to like him? More than like him? Did he think she was going to actually wind up climbing into bed with him?

  He repressed the urge to laugh out loud, because this engaged couple’s game was some kind of cosmic joke. Would he have chased the boys in the pizza parlor away if one of the girls hadn’t been Olivia? He had been very aware of her in high school, of course. Probably everybody had because she was gorgeous, even back then. And now she was even more striking because she’d learned how to enhance her natural beauty with the right haircut and makeup. But under normal circumstances, he never would have met her when they were all grown up and out in the world.

  Back in his Donley days he’d been on the fast track to the juvenile detention center. Another lost kid with no one to rein him in. His dad had battled with his mom constantly, and finally the drunken jerk had just walked away one day when Max was twelve. After that, his mom worked long hours to try and support herself and her son. It hadn’t been an entirely successful effort. She’d kept a roof over their heads in one of the subsidized apartment complexes in Ellicott City. But clothing and food were another matter.

  By the time he was thirteen, he was tired of wearing the secondhand shirts and jeans that they got from church charity sales. And he was tired of his stomach growling because all there was for dinner was a mayonnaise sandwich or a package of cheese crackers that he’d lifted from a gas station convenience store.

  By his sophomore year at Donley, he’d taken matters into his own hands. He and another guy in similar circumstances had started breaking into houses in affluent neighborhoods and stealing anything that they thought they could sell for cash. They’d been pretty good at it. And for over a year they’d gotten away with a string of robberies that made the local papers.

  Then they’d gotten caught, and Officer Cliff Maringer had taken Max into an interrogation room and sat him down for a long talk. Did he want to go to juvie, where he’d be living with a bunch of badass guys who would teach him to be the kind of loser who grew up with nowhere to go but federal prison?

  Max had pretended to be tough. Inside he’d been a scared kid. Maybe he’d responded to Cliff as a father figure. And responded to what Cliff was offering him—a way to make something of his life and not just drift along from one bad situation to another. Cliff got him a job at a fast-food restaurant in Columbia, where he could earn some money and where he could eat for free when he was on shift. It wasn’t the best food in the world, but it was better than what he’d gotten at home. And there was certainly more of it.

  The relationship with someone who cared had turned him around. And when he’d gotten a little older, they’d become friends. When Cliff had died of an early heart attack, Max had vowed to honor his memory by going to the police academy.

  He’d joined the Baltimore City PD as a patrol officer, then graduated to detective. Since he’d turned his life around, the values he’d absorbed from Cliff had been his guide in his job—and in his life. The memory of his old pain had spurred him to help troubled teenagers make better decisions, partly by sharing his own sordid story with them. And he’d always made it a point to go the extra mile for the little guys who expected the cops to stick it to them—not defend them. He’d been secretly glad of making a difference. And then bad luck had slapped him in the face.

  Which was another reason he wasn’t so glad to be back here now.

  His dark thoughts were interrupted by a beeping sound, and he was instantly transformed from reflection to protective mode.

  “Stay down,” he ordered Olivia as he hurried toward the keypad for the alarm and looked at the readout.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Somebody’s out there.”

  “Or it’s just an animal,” she suggested. But the little quaver in her voice gave away her jittering nerves.

  “Yeah, well, we’re not going to take a chance on it being a deer chomping down the cornfields.”

  Chapter 6

  As Olivia’s pretend fiancé, Max hadn’t gone armed to her reunion committee meeting. But his weapon was handy. He walked to the desk in the small room that had been set up as an office and opened the bottom drawer. Taking out two Sigs, he checked the magazine on both of them, then handed one to Olivia. After accepting the assignment, Max had been relieved to find out that she could shoot. Apparently that had been part of her lifestyle out here on a farm where there were acres of open space around the house. She’d said her dad had taken In Cold Blood to heart. It was the true story of a couple of killers who went looking for cash in the home of a farm family and ended up murdering all of them, told in vivid detail by Truman Capote. After reading it, Farmer Winters had taken Olivia and her mother out onto the property for regular target practice sessions, although neither woman had ever needed to use a weapon to defend herself.

  “I’m going out to investigate. You stay in here. I’ll lock the door behind me.”

  Her face had gone pale, but she nodded.

  Max was thinking it was too bad Farmer Winters hadn’t taken the next step and built a safe room they could use in an emergency. Of course, those had been simpler times. How many farmers would have thought of a safe room?

  He walked around the first floor switching off lights, then turned to Olivia. “You have your cell phone?”

  “It’s upstairs.”

  “Go get it. And stay up there. If you hear anything, call the police.”

  “Anything like what?”

  “A gunshot.”

  She winced, but she was already moving toward the stairs.

  “And let’s make sure you don’t shoot me when I come back in. If it’s me, I’ll call out ‘Jack Brandt,’” he said, naming one of his partners instead of himself.

  “Okay.”

  “And if everything’s okay in there, answer with ‘Runway,’” he said.

  She made a face but didn’t voice an objection.

  When she was halfway up the stairs, he headed for the back door, turning off more lights as he went and peered out the window into the darkness. He could switch on floodlights, but that would only make him a target for whoever was out there watching. Of course, it might not be a person at all. There were plenty of animals in the area. Raccoons, opossums, foxes. But only a deer would have been big enough to trip the sensors that he, Jack, and Shane had put around the property.

  However, he wasn’t going to take a chance on the intruder being a four-legged animal.

  Although he and his partners had set up sensors as an early-warning system, they extended only about seventy yards from the house. Any farther out and someone would still have freedom of movement.

  Max silently cursed the hasty arrangements to protect the Winters property. But the quick job was o
ut of necessity, he told himself. They’d only had so much time before the meeting tonight. And in any case, they couldn’t cover the whole damn farm with motion sensors.

  Plus they’d only gone with the sensors—no electric fences or explosive charges like they employed around the safe houses that Rockfort Security sometimes used. Those defenses would have been a dead giveaway that more was going on besides Olivia Winters and her new fiancé coming back to spend some time at the old homestead.

  Max stepped outside into the darkness. After locking the door behind him, he listened intently, hearing nothing. His gaze swung to the barn, and he saw that the door was closed. And it looked like it was still secured by the padlock that Olivia’s father had installed years ago.

  Of course, someone could have cut it and made it look like it was intact, but judging from when the sensor had gone off, he didn’t think anyone would have had that much time.

  He tested the boards of the back porch, wincing when they squeaked a little. At the bottom of the steps, he walked a few paces from the house, then looked back the way he’d come. When he swung his gaze up, he saw that all the lights on the top floor were off—which was a good move on Olivia’s part. But was she standing at the window, staring out? He would have warned her not to, but he was pretty sure she would have done it anyway. He would have. Staying inside without a clue about what was going on outside would have been difficult for anyone except a timid person who hid from danger. And he already knew that didn’t describe Olivia. She could have stayed in New York and continued modeling. Instead she’d cleared her calendar, come down here, and looked for a detective to help her investigate her friend’s murder. Of course, she apparently hadn’t cleared it with her agent as well. What did that mean exactly?

  He switched his focus to his surroundings as he moved silently across the property into the darkness, aware of every sound around him, from the wind rustling the leaves of the trees to the buzz of insects. When he reached a patch of woods about fifty yards from the house, he stopped and listened. The alarm had been silent out here, but it had told him the threat—if there was a threat—was coming from the northwest corner of the property, a wood lot that had grown unkempt in the absence of an on-site resident.

  Anyone could be hiding in the deeper shadow under the trees or in the underbrush. And going in there could be dangerous. But it might flush out whoever was stalking the house. There were a lot of possibilities for who it might be—from the fairly innocent to the frankly malevolent. Someone from the meeting they’d left a few hours ago could be curious about the newly married couple and could have come around to check out their story. It could be a neighbor who passed the property often and had noticed that someone was living here after years of the place being vacant. Maybe they thought that whoever was in the house didn’t belong here—and they wanted to check that out. Or it could be the killer, coming for Olivia.

  He’d taken this job for the satisfaction of bringing down a killer. The idea of someone going after Olivia had only been an abstraction. Now that it was suddenly a reality, he felt a surge of protective emotions. Like he was a knight or an ancient warrior charging out to protect his woman. He snorted at the analogy, yet he couldn’t shake it. He hadn’t known Olivia well back in high school, and they’d only been together for a few days now, but the idea of anything happening to her made him realize that he’d come to care about her with gut-tightening urgency in a very short time. And not just because of her public persona. On the surface, she might come across as a poised, confident model, but he’d learned that she hadn’t traveled all that far from her roots.

  Those thoughts flickered at the edge of his consciousness, because the bulk of his attention was focused on his surroundings.

  If the trespasser was in the woods, he’d have two choices. Either hide from the man who had come out to investigate or make a run for it.

  Too bad Max couldn’t give away his own location by using a flashlight to flush out the bastard. That might have been efficient from a searcher’s point of view, but it would have been a risky strategy when he was out here alone and the intruder could shoot in the direction of the light.

  He used the wood lot for cover, moving from tree to tree, listening for the sound of breathing—or anything else that would give the guy away.

  He realized he was thinking of the interloper as a man because all his intuition rejected the idea of a woman sneaking up on the house. But it still could be possible—for someone with sufficient motivation. Which was what? Deep resentment at some old slight? Anger that Olivia had come back to stick her nose in where it didn’t belong?

  When he stopped and listened again, he thought he heard the sound of raspy breathing coming from his left. At least he’d made the guy reconsider his risky behavior.

  Ducking low and correcting his course, Max headed toward a tree with a sizable trunk. Before he reached it, someone broke from cover and ran.

  He couldn’t see more than a vaguely human shape in the dark. The figure was dressed in dark clothing for concealment.

  Straightening, Max pelted after him, but the intruder had spent some time preparing for his attack. As Max followed him, running as fast as he could in the dark, he suddenly smacked into an invisible barrier. Nothing solid. Something that had a bit of give.

  Seconds after he hit it, he bounced back, feeling sharp barbs tear into his flesh. Christ, what was that? Gingerly he reached for the thing that had stopped him and got more sharp gouges on his hands.

  As he tried to figure out what had hit him, he listened to the thud of footsteps disappearing into the darkness. Then the sound of a car starting told him that the assailant had made a clean getaway.

  Now that he knew he was alone, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and activated the flashlight feature, playing it over whatever had blocked his path. He saw that the obstacle was several courses of barbed wire, strung across the route the intruder had been following. The bastard had known to duck low enough to avoid the trap as he ran. With no inkling of the danger, Max had plowed right into the wire. It was at shoulder and head level, and he could see he was damn lucky that he hadn’t put out his eye with a barb. Which might have been what the stalker had intended.

  “You missed,” he muttered as he ducked under the barrier and continued down the trail, still cautious. The intruder might have fled, but now Max knew he could have left other nasty surprises along his escape route.

  Caution slowed his progress considerably. He stepped carefully, aware that another booby trap could be lower down. And he moved with his hands in front of him, testing the safety of the path he was walking. Stopping, he called Olivia’s cell phone. She picked up on the first ring.

  “Max?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “More or less.”

  She sucked in a sharp breath. “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get back. I just wanted you to know that the emergency’s over.”

  “How do you know?”

  He sighed. “Whoever was on the property got away. I’m checking to see where he parked.”

  “It’s a man?”

  “I’m just using a convenient pronoun. I’m hanging up now. I’ll be back soon.”

  Finally he came to a clearing in the woods beside a farm road. Whoever had been stalking the house had probably driven this far and walked the rest of the way.

  The day before, Max, Jack, and Shane had walked around the area. The barbed wire hadn’t been here then. Had the perp brought it with him? Or dragged it from somewhere on the farm? And when had he done it? If it was while Max and Olivia were at the meeting, it would mean that it wasn’t anyone who had been there.

  Or they could have come here afterward and been lucky enough to stay out of the range of the sensors until they decided to sneak up on the house. That would mean that whoever it was didn’t actually know that the property had been wired for motion detection. They’d come too close and set off the
alarm. At least that part of the defensive strategy had been successful. Too bad Max hadn’t seen the barbed wire before plowing into it.

  In the clearing, he played his light over the ground and saw nothing notable—except that the weeds had been beaten down by the vehicle’s tires. The marks were wide apart, probably from an SUV or a pickup truck.

  It hadn’t rained in over a week, which meant the ground was too dry for the car to leave tracks, just impressions in the dust. But Max would come back here tomorrow anyway to have a look around in daylight.

  With a shake of his head, he turned and started back toward the house, moving faster now that he wasn’t in danger. He was anxious to get back to Olivia.

  “Jack Brandt,” he called out as he approached the house, using their agreed upon signal. And really, saying the password made sense since he could have gotten bushwhacked between calling her and coming back.

  “Okay,” she answered. Then, “Uh—runway.”

  A low light was on in the kitchen, and she opened the door before he reached it. He saw that she still had the gun in her hand, which showed that she hadn’t let her guard down.

  As he stepped inside, she switched on the overhead light. He watched her take in his appearance, then drag in a sharp breath as the full impact hit her.

  “Max, you’re hurt. What happened?”

  “I got a little cut up, is all. It’s not bad.”

  “With what?” she asked.

  “Barbed wire.”

  “How?”

  “The bastard set a trap out there in the woods,” he said.

  “It looks wicked. Come up to the bathroom where there’s more light.”

  “In a minute. I want to check the surveillance output.”

  “You think you’ll find anything?”

  He made a dismissive sound. “Unfortunately, no. I’m betting the sneaky bastard didn’t get close enough to the house to get his picture taken. But I can’t dismiss the cameras out of hand.”