My phone rang, startling me from my thoughts; it was Ramón. As I answered it, I climbed inside my rental.
“You’re not working today, are you, Blue?”
“No, actually… I was out looking at apartments.”
“Ah, then I guess I have my answer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, I understand that it’s a lot to ask.”
“It’s not that, it’s just, oh God, Ramón, I just feel at loose ends in every area of my life right now, you know?”
“I do.”
“I know that you do, and you’ve been there for me every step of the way.”
“I love you, Blue.”
I smiled into the phone.
“Say it again.”
“I love you, and it really doesn’t matter where you live, as long as you save a place for me in your heart.”
“I’ll come by later, okay?”
“You never have to ask, but why don’t we eat out?”
“That sounds good.”
I heard a beep, telling me that I had another caller. When I checked, I saw it was important.
“Ramón, I have to take another call; it’s my mama.”
“Give her my love, and I’ll see you later.”
I ended the first call and answered the second.
“Hi, Mama.”
“Hey baby, is there a chance that you could come home tomorrow?”
“If you need me, of course, what’s up?”
“We have to make plans, Blue, funeral arrangements, they finally released your daddy’s body.”
“I’ll be there tonight, Mama.”
“Thank you, baby, and don’t eat, I’ve been cookin’ all day.”
My mother cooked a lot when she was stressed. I could imagine the feast she’d prepared.
“I love you, Mama.”
“Me too, baby, now take your time and drive safe, and are you bringing Ramón with you?”
“I’ll have to ask, but I’m sure he’ll come along.”
“Good, I like that fella a lot, and a smart girl would hang on to him.”
“You didn’t raise any dummies, Mama.”
She laughed. “That’s for sure, and Blue?”
“Yes?”
“Stop picking fights with large men; watching that video damn near gave me a heart attack.”
“He started it.”
“And damn if you didn’t finish it, girl. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you are your daddy’s daughter, and woe be to the man or woman that messes with you.”
“Do you think Daddy would be proud of me, Mama, proud of what I do?”
“Now Blue, don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Your daddy was proud of you from the second you slipped from my womb and not a damn thing would ever change that, and it goes double for me. Now stop yakking and go pack a suitcase, the sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll get here.”
“Yes, ma’am, and I’ll see you tonight.”
I ended the call feeling good, and then I started my crappy rental and drove home.
Chapter 10
We buried my father on a cloudless day, amid family and friends that traveled to be with us from across the country.
My Caliber cousins were there, including Jake the fifth, who I hadn’t seen since we were teenagers, and who taught me to smoke a cigar when I was sixteen.
Ramón thought it a wonder that the Calibers had stayed close to the Steeles, despite having moved to New York City decades ago. Our two branches of the family had always stayed in touch, and probably always would.
The media kept a respectful distance away, but images of our family coming and going from the services were shown on TV. One local station also made a new documentary about the original Jake Caliber, who was a legend of the old west. At the end of the program, they showed a representation of our family tree that traced our roots back to the Scottish Highlands.
From where my daddy was buried, you could see the statue of ol’ Jake Caliber – The Man Who Never Missed. That statue marked his gravesite.
The morning after the funeral, Ramón and I came downstairs to find my sister and Chad already awake and making pancakes.
After breakfast, the four of us sat around and talked, and I learned what they planned to name their child.
“Blue? You’re naming him after Daddy, that’s so sweet and I know he would have loved it.”
Jenny smiled at Chad. “It was my husband’s idea, but I think he’s just trying to stay on Mama’s good side.”
“Another Blue in the family, well now, you know that if you don’t spoil him that I will.”
Jenny smiled at us. “What about you two, any plans to have a baby?”
It was just like Jenny to ask that kind of question. She had inherited my mama’s bluntness and so I couldn’t blame her.
I took Ramón’s hand. “No plans, but who knows what the future holds.”
Chad looked at both of us.
“Do you think you guys may marry someday?”
Ah, I thought, Chad also has the blunt gene.
Ramón answered him, and I heard the pain behind the words.
“I don’t think Blue is the marrying type, at least not where I’m concerned.”
I sat there staring at him, with my mouth slightly agape when my mama came downstairs and said good morning to us.
Jenny jumped up to make more pancakes and the conversation went off in another direction. I didn’t bring up what Ramón said during the rest of the visit, and neither did he, but I realized that my refusal to move in with him had hurt him more than he let on. I felt like crap for it.
Ramón and I saw little of each other in the days following that, because he had to leave for Santuario to see to some minor crisis.
I used that time to examine my life and decide what it was that I now wanted to do with it. To my surprise, owning a horse ranch by the age of forty was not at the top of the list.
I had grown and matured in the years since I’d first chosen that goal, and forty now seemed a ridiculous age to mothball myself on a ranch, despite my love of horses.
Would I own a ranch someday? Maybe, even likely, but that day was far off. I decided that I had other priorities I wanted to pursue much more.
I had been out truck shopping and was sure that I knew what vehicle I wanted next, but I decided to sleep on my decision for a night before going back to make the deal.
As I entered my apartment, a phone began ringing in my purse.
My own phone was sitting on my hip, and so I knew that it had to be the Lawson Hotline, as I had come to think of the phone he sent me.
“Lawson?”
“Hello, Miss Steele, have you given my offer any more thought?”
“I have, but I would like to meet with you in person before I commit.”
“Why?”
“I want to look into your eyes as we set down the ground rules.”
“I understand, but I assure you that the position is as good as I described it. This is a step up into another league, Blue, a league you’ve been ready for, and for some time I’d say. Your recent confrontation with Dirk Ward made that fact even plainer.”
“When can we meet?”
“I’m engaged in activities a few states away from you at the moment, but we’ll get together soon. Can I take your agreement to meet with me as a sign that you’ll accept the position?”
“If it’s as you presented it, yes.”
“Fantastic, you won’t be sorry, now, I actually called because I would like to assist you in finding Protégée.”
“From what they’re saying on the news, Darrell Harker is in the wind and the FBI is clueless about where to find him.”
“This is true, but is that also true for you? I was hoping that a woman of your abilities would have a different slant on the case.”
I sat down on the arm of my sofa.
“Lawson, I recently buried my father, and the rest of
my life has been a mess as well. To tell you the truth, Darrell Harker has barely entered my mind.”
“Yes, I can see that, things have been in flux for you, haven’t they?”
“They have, but they’re also beginning to settle down, and these last few days I’ve made certain decisions, one of which was to accept your offer.”
“Thank you, but I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“Take another look at the material I sent you concerning Protégée and study it from a hunter’s viewpoint. If you’re the person I think you are, you’ll come up with an angle of pursuit that others missed.”
“I will do that, and in fact, it’s something I’ve been meaning to do.”
“Thank you, Blue, and welcome to the team.”
Ramón had returned from Santuario and I went to his house that night to welcome him home. For once, I cooked, although my culinary skills are modest.
We were out on the patio. As we sipped on wine after the meal, I told him that I had accepted Lawson’s offer.
“Despite my concerns about the vagaries of federal bureaucracy, I think you’ve made the right choice. You’re too good at what you do to waste it on chasing down bail skips.”
“I expect it will be more challenging, but I think I’m ready for it.”
“You’re the best there is. It’s why Lawson made the offer.”
“So tell me, what was this minor crisis in Santuario?”
Ramón smiled. “Do you remember my friend Juan and his wife Marta?”
“Of course, my mouth still waters when I think about her enchiladas, and I loved their little girl Maria to death.”
“Marta has grown tired of small town life and wants to move here, but the rest of the town is sad because it means she’ll have to close their restaurant.”
I grinned. “That was the crisis?”
“It’s the town’s only restaurant and Marta knows how to make everyone’s favorite dishes.”
“So what solution did you come up with?”
“Walter came up with it. Marta will mentor the girl who helps out in the kitchen for a few months, and then she’ll take over the restaurant when they leave.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “That way, they’ll still receive an income and the town won’t lose their only restaurant.”
Ramón rolled his eyes. “And you thought that you grew up in a small town.”
I laughed, but after it faded away, we grew quiet. I realized that there were more gaps in our conversations since coming back from my mama’s house.
As if he had been reading my mind, Ramón brought up the remark he had made at the breakfast table the morning after the funeral.
“I apologize for that. It was petty and petulant, and even worse, I displayed self-pity.”
“You were also wrong. You are definitely a man I would marry, it’s just that my life has been in such a state of chaos lately that I’ve barely had time to think. I remedied that while you were gone, and did some hard, clear thinking.”
“About us?”
“Yes, and about Lawson’s offer, and other things, and on the way over here I realized something else.”
“What’s that?”
“I have to find Protégée if I’m ever going to have peace about what happened to Daddy. It amazes me that I haven’t been more pissed that the bastard is still roaming free out there.”
“As you said, things have been in a state of chaos, but I agree that it’s important you find him.”
“Those files Lawson sent me, are they still in your office?”
“Yes.”
“Good, I’m going to stay up all night and study them until I find something. Lawson believes that I might uncover a clue to his whereabouts that others have overlooked, and he may be right about that. With any luck, I might be able to track down Darrell Harker soon.”
Ramón glanced at his watch.
“It’s still early, and those files aren’t that thick, you should have enough time to go over them before bedtime.”
I put down my wineglass as I shook my head.
“I’ve something more important to do before I start that.”
“More important? What is it?”
I smiled. “It’s you.”
Just after midnight, I climbed from the bed and left Ramón’s side, to go downstairs into the small office he keeps.
By the time the sun came up, I had gone through everything several times and come up empty. I even surfed the web for any news stories or video involving Protégée, just in case they contained some fact not in the files.
I rose stiffly from the chair behind the desk, and after stretching, I walked out to the kitchen to make coffee. As it brewed, I strolled through the house aimlessly, as in my mind, I went over the known facts of Protégée once again.
Once the coffee was done, I poured a cup and went outside to sit on the patio. However, I was still too restless to settle in a chair, and so I wandered about the dew laden grass in my bare feet.
As the sun rose higher in the east, it caused the trees in front of it to cast long shadows across the ground. The intermittent shadows looked as solid as the bars of a prison cell when contrasted against the brilliant light that shined between them; it sent the dew to sparkling.
I stopped walking so suddenly that I caused my coffee to slosh back on me, but I was so taken aback by the realization forming in my mind that I hardly noticed the sting of the burn.
I whispered to myself.
“Bars, the house had bars on all the windows.”
I dumped the rest of my coffee into the grass and rushed back into the office. Twenty minutes later, I was certain I had found the key to finding Protégée.
Chapter 11
Five nights later, I was in a small town just east of Helena, Montana, in the home of Darrell Harker’s parents. Darrell Harker, who was otherwise known as Protégée.
I had been staying there alone for more than two days as I lied in wait, hoping for a chance to avenge my father. The home was worth nearly a million dollars and had six bedrooms and four full baths. The neighborhood was upper-middle class and so the homes on either side of the property were some distance apart from it.
The lawn outside was an immaculate green carpet and the furnishings inside the home were all high quality and beautiful. All the other houses in the area shared these qualities, but the Harker home had something that the other homes did not.
It had bars on the windows and security gates that fastened across the doors. Granted, the bars were remote controlled. They would slide back into hiding within decorative camouflage at the mere push of a button, but they were still bars. The security gates, although covered with fanciful filigree, were nonetheless constructed from wrought iron. They were swung shut across the home’s doors every night.
The Harkers, Dr. Jim Harker and his wife, Louise, were people living in fear, and what they feared was their son.
I had looked at the news footage of the Harker’s house several times and not noticed the incongruity of the bars.
Homes such as this, in affluent neighborhoods, rarely have obvious and intrusive security measures such as burglar bars. Their owners preferred to let electronic surveillance and security patrols deter crime.
However, the Harkers weren’t concerned with discouraging strangers from making off with their valuables, they were fearful of their own son making good on the threat to kill them in their sleep.
Bars and gates had been installed in all five places they had moved to since the day they shipped off their son to live with his granduncle. Those measures had been employed religiously every night since without fail. Darrell Harker would inevitably track his parents to their new home and make his presence known. He never threatened them again, he didn’t have to; the very fact that he had found them was threat enough.
The Harkers, both sixty, were re-interviewed after I brought the bars to Lawson’s attention. They admitted that, yes, they still fe
ared their son, thought him insane, and had shipped him off to the elder Harker’s shabby double-wide trailer hoping never to see him again.
When the interview was over, Lawson pulled me aside and asked a question.
“You have a plan to use this to our advantage?”
“Yes, but we’ll need the Harkers cooperation.”
The Harkers agreed to the plan, and the following afternoon they were interviewed live on a popular daytime talk show. They discussed their son’s mental instability in detail and made a plea for him to turn himself in to the authorities for help. They also mentioned that they had sold their home and would soon be moving to an undisclosed location after changing their names. They said it was an effort to avoid the stigma of being the parents of Protégée.
When the interview ended, I turned to Lawson with a pained expression.
“Maybe that was a little too heavy-handed; I mean the man’s not an idiot.”
Lawson sent me a small smile.
“The story isn’t far-fetched. Dr. Harker told me that they’ve thought of changing their names, but that it would have put him at a disadvantage career-wise, being a renowned surgeon.”
“I can see that; he’s built up a reputation under his own name.”
“Yes.”
“Your people will be staying back, right, until I call them?”
Lawson said, “Yes,” and then handed me a large envelope.
“What’s this?”
“That, Miss Steele, will officially make you one of my people.”
I opened the envelope and found credentials that contained a badge and a photo ID. They identified me as Blue Steele, Special Agent for Homeland Security.
I stared at the badge. It was something I thought I would never carry, even as a police officer, and now I had suddenly leapfrogged to federal agent.
Lawson offered his hand. “Welcome aboard, Miss Steele.”
I shook his hand.
“Call me Blue, boss.”
Blue Steele Box Sets 2 Page 5