Cold River

by Carla Neggers

  She adjusted the snowman’s stone eye. “And what’s going on, Sean?”

  “You’re getting sucked into Bowie’s world.”

  “Well, I guess that’s true, since his world is rock and I just had a pile of rock fall on top of me.” She stood back from the snowman. “I think he looks more like a lawyer now, don’t you?”

  “Hannah—”

  “Did Jo and your brothers put you up to prying the truth out of me? Do they think I’ll be more likely to talk to you than to one of them? Is that what you think?” She shook her head. “Don’t answer. I understand that you think I’m not leveling with you, but maybe it’s not a question of leveling. Maybe I’m just keeping things to myself that should be kept to myself.”

  Sean suppressed his frustration with her. “You’re exhausted, and you’re in pain. We can talk tomorrow.”

  “No, we can talk now,” she said. “You all don’t need everyone with a harebrained theory distracting investigators from real clues to these killers. Do you think I’d protect Bowie if I had even the slightest suspicion he was involved with them?”

  “I think you’d resist being suspicious of him in the first place. You’re not objective where Bowie’s concerned.”

  “And you are?”

  Sean could see her reserve, her self-control, drop into place. She shoved her hands into her coat pockets, obviously forgetting momentarily about her injured wrist. She bit down on her lower lip in pain but didn’t moan or make any sound. Then she bolted back across the common.

  He caught up with her across the street in front of the café entrance.

  She held up a hand before he could speak. “I know,” she said stiffly. “I pushed you into saying that.”

  “No one’s trying to make things harder for you.”

  She peeled his scarf off her neck and handed it to him. “Good night, Sean.”

  “If you decide you want to talk, you know where to find me.”

  She pretended not to hear him and headed down to the main entrance, running up the steps to the center-hall door. She glanced back at him. “You’re not hiring Devin out of charity or some sense of guilt, are you?”

  He stood at the bottom of the steps. “If you know anything about me, Hannah, you know I do almost nothing out of guilt, and you’re not a charity case.”

  “Fair enough.” She seemed to make an effort to smile. “You’re not used to cold-weather hiking. You might want to soak in a hot tub tonight.”

  “You do the same.”

  “I would,” she said cheerfully, “except my cheap landlord won’t install a tub in our bathroom.”

  He grinned at her. “Then come up to the lodge. You can use the tub in my room.”

  A picture came into his head of Hannah settling into a scented bath in his warm, comfortable room at Black Falls Lodge.

  “I’ll keep you posted on cellar repairs,” she said crisply.

  He wondered if she was fighting similar images of him, her and a hot bath but forced himself to return to the issue at hand. “We all understand you want to believe Bowie has his act together. With your brothers away—”

  “I’ll be alone.” Her tone wasn’t combative. “Yes, Sean, I know.”

  “Hannah,” he said, “is there more of a history between you and Bowie than my brothers and I are aware of?”

  She gave him a cool smile. “How would that be possible? Nothing goes on in Black Falls that you Camerons don’t know about,” she said, and ducked inside.

  Sean waited for the door to shut behind her before he walked back up the street to Elijah’s truck and the dark drive back up the mountain. He’d figure out how much he’d tell Jo and his brothers about his evening in town.

  It wouldn’t be everything, that was for damn sure.

  Hannah lay awake, the shades pulled, her brothers’ voices and the television in the next room part of the background noise that was life in their small apartment. Devin had tried to explain more about his plans to her—the mix of impulsiveness and long-held dreams that had gone into them—but Hannah was so tired and distracted, trying not to feel rejected, that she took in only half the details, finally promising to sit down with him tomorrow and get everything sorted out.

  “It’s just a seven-hour flight to Los Angeles, Hannah.”

  A day to get there. A continent between them. The time, the money—the distance. The world her brothers had grown up in versus the one they wanted to embrace.

  She stared at the old plaster ceiling. Her parents had dreamed of being a normal family. She wasn’t sure anymore who knew her father had been to prison, serving sentences for brawls, theft, disorderly conduct and simple assault. She wasn’t even sure at this point how much Devin and Toby knew. They’d probably learned more about their father from town gossip than from her.

  He’d failed them and himself. And he’d known it.

  As she went over the events of the day in her mind, Hannah concluded Sean’s little hit on her in the cellar had been largely tactical, perhaps subconsciously so. He’d been trying to win her trust, worm his way into her psyche. Even if his reaction to her hadn’t been calculated or deliberate, it was, she decided, intended to get her to let down her guard.

  “Hannah…Hannah…Hannah…”

  She tried to block out the voice and rolled over onto her side, her wrist throbbing as she replayed the day in her head. Hiking up Cameron Mountain. Checking the old stone foundation of Drew’s cabin. Realizing Sean was out there. Seeing the Cameron brothers out by the lodge.

  Hearing Poe barking, and the voice at the crypt.

  “Hannah.”

  Had Bowie been playing games with her—protecting himself, trying to scare her off, distract her? He could compartmentalize—he’d learned to as a boy, as a way to cope with his father’s drunken rages.

  Had he managed to compartmentalize having let himself be used by Melanie Kendall and Kyle Rigby? Had he fallen in with them to indulge his resentments against the Camerons?

  Hannah couldn’t stop the flood of questions and possibilities. Bowie could have spotted her crossing the road to the cemetery to check on Poe. Had he dislodged the debris pile in order to cover up the retreat of someone he’d met there?

  Even if he wouldn’t have hurt her, it didn’t mean he wasn’t involved in the network responsible for the murders of Drew Cameron, Alex Bruni and possibly others.

  It didn’t mean he wasn’t a danger to himself and others.

  She turned over again. She didn’t believe Bowie was capable of being involved with killers. And that was what Sean had been trying to tell her was the problem.

  She heard snoring down the hall and sighed, satisfied that at least her brothers were sleeping tonight.

  Fourteen

  December 29—Black Falls, Vermont

  Ryan “Grit” Taylor was cold under the blankets on the lumpy twin bed in one of the dozen small, falling-down cabins Jo Harper owned on the frozen Vermont lake below Black Falls Lodge. He’d stoked up the woodstove before going to sleep, but the fire had died down by dawn. There was no insulation in the cabin and it was the dead of winter. The last forecast he saw had the temperature dropping into single digits overnight, and he had no doubt it had. An offense to his Southern soul. He could have stayed at the lodge, but he hadn’t wanted to. Too many people.

  Not being a coward, having faced bullets, blood and death, he figured he might as well get up. He donned his prosthesis, following a procedure that wasn’t quite routine but wasn’t new, either. He sat up on the side of the bed and put a prosthetic sock over the stump, made sure there were no wrinkles or folds, and grabbed the PTB—patella tendon bearing—socket that stood upright on the floor. Quickly but carefully, he inserted the stump into the socket and secured it with an elastic cuff.

  “Done,” he said, part of his ritual.

  Life sucked, but whatever.

  He added kindling to the hot coals in the woodstove and shut the door, hoping he wouldn’t have to baby the fire to get it going. He l
ooked out the picture window and saw Myrtle Smith coming up the path, which he’d cleared of snow himself, using a shovel that had to be a hundred years old. Jo had found it in another cabin. He’d discovered she was a waste-not-want-not type.

  Myrtle wasn’t, but if she ever needed any shoveling to be done, she’d get someone else to do it.

  Grit opened the door. “Myrtle, what are you doing?”

  “Trying not to fall,” she said without looking up from the narrow path. “If you were dead in there, no one would find me until fishing season.”

  Myrtle, too, had a Southern soul. She hated cold weather. She hated snow and ice.

  “Hurry up,” Grit said. “I don’t want to let the heat out.”

  “What heat? You’re in a cabin in the boonies.”

  “I’ve got the woodstove going.”

  “Ah. I’m reassured,” she said, picking her way across an icy patch directly in front of the cabin door. “It’s Vermont. My car thermometer reads four degrees below zero. A woodstove isn’t going to get me to forget that.”

  Grit had met Myrtle in mid-November at the spot in front of the Washington, D.C., hotel where Ambassador Alex Bruni was killed in a hit-and-run masterminded and executed by the two killers who’d then headed to Vermont to kill more people. In the weeks he’d known her, Grit had concluded that Myrtle was a drama queen who wasn’t happy unless she was bitching.

  “I’m not hurrying,” she said. “I almost went ass-over-teakettle on the ice by the lake. I spend half my time up here trying not to fall and break something, I swear.”

  Grit grinned at her. “Think of it, though. I could rescue you. Throw you over my shoulder and carry you to safety. Oh, wait. I already did that when I pulled you out of your burning house.”

  Myrtle rolled her violet eyes as she walked past him into the cabin. She’d never been inside, and from her frown, Grit guessed she didn’t appreciate what she saw. She glanced at him. “Do your own cleaning, do you?”

  He shut the cabin door. “You always been a pain in the butt, Myrtle?”

  “It’s gotten worse since my Russian friend had his toothpaste poisoned by unnamed assassins and my house was set on fire.”

  “Just your office burned,” Grit said. “Your house is intact.”

  Andrei Petrov, a controversial Russian diplomat, had died in London over the summer under mysterious circumstances. Myrtle hadn’t been satisfied that he’d just keeled over while brushing his teeth and had launched her own personal investigation. She’d begun to suspect a network of professional killers was responsible for Petrov’s death and started looking into other similar deaths, which had led her to venture out to the site of the hit-and-run that had killed Bruni. Police now could place Melanie Kendall and Kyle Rigby in London at the time of Petrov’s death.

  Myrtle had good reason for being a little dramatic.

  She stood by the woodstove and put her gloved hands out toward the fire. “This investigation is dead in the water. We’re not getting anywhere. Some rocks fall up in a cemetery and a tarp blows in the wind, and everyone gets all excited.”

  “The stonemason’s on probation.”

  “For a bar fight, Petty Officer Taylor. In my day, bar fights between stonemasons and mountain men were par for the course. Nobody called the damn police.”

  “In your day, duels to the death were legal, too.”

  She ignored him. “Whoever hired Kyle Rigby and Melanie Kendall has gone to ground. Their network’s probably disbanded. Law enforcement’s being tight with information, but we’d know if they had a freaking clue.”

  Grit shrugged and said nothing.

  Myrtle opened up the woodstove. “I grew up in a little town in southern Georgia. We had a woodstove. My grandma would put on a pot of white beans….” She drifted off and got more kindling out of the bucket next to the stove and set it on the anemic fire, blew on the coals and stood back as if she knew what she was doing. She shook bits of wood and sawdust from her glove. “Goatskin. Cost me a fortune. Those mountain men, Elijah and A.J., told me to get some windproof blah-blah-blah gloves. Ugly as sin.”

  A.J. had outfitted Grit with just such a pair of gloves. They were fine. “Why are you here, Myrtle?”

  She watched flames slowly spread through the kindling. She didn’t look as cold. Grit figured it was the psychological effect of seeing the fire. It wasn’t any warmer in the cabin. “You never told anyone that Charlie Neal was switching places with his lookalike cousin,” she said without looking at Grit.

  He didn’t say anything. Instead he pulled on a fleece-lined sweatshirt. If he’d had his way, Myrtle wouldn’t have known about Charlie Neal and his cousin, Conor, either. Feeling guilty over causing Jo Harper to be sent into exile in Vermont, Charlie had done his own investigating after Alex Bruni’s death. He’d conducted his research mostly on the Internet, but he’d also switched places with Conor and headed out into the city on his own, without benefit of Secret Service protection. He’d come to believe, as Myrtle had, that paid assassins were at work and had produced a list of potential victims. Not everyone on his list had checked out—but authorities were paying attention to it. They just didn’t know it came from the vice president’s son.

  “The Secret Service think they have Charlie buttoned up,” Myrtle said. “But you know he’s still on this thing. He’s got an IQ of one-eighty and he gets bored easily, and he wants to matter. He’ll find a way to meddle.”

  “He can take anything he learns straight to the Secret Service.”

  “What if he doesn’t trust the Secret Service?”

  Grit pulled the covers up on his bed.

  Myrtle kept her sights on him. She wasn’t one to quit. “I’m not saying they don’t deserve to be trusted. It’s just that Charlie idolizes you and Elijah. The hero SEAL and the hero Special Forces soldier.”

  “I’m not a hero,” Grit said.

  “Eye of the beholder.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  She lifted a small birch log and set it on the burning kindling. “You sweep this place for listening devices? Jo Harper’s still Secret Service. She knows how to bug an old cabin. She’ll throw both our butts in jail if she—”

  “Cabin’s not bugged.”

  “So you did sweep for bugs. Damn, Grit. All right. I have a phone number.” She handed him a piece of paper. “Call it.”

  “We’re playing with fire, Myrtle.”

  She picked one last wood chip off a glove. “At least it’s warm.”

  Being a bold type, Grit dialed the number Myrtle gave him from a big icy boulder on the steep trail up to the lodge. He had a view of the lake and Elijah’s house. That meant Jo Harper could look out the kitchen window and see her cabin guest up there with a cell phone and wonder who the hell he was calling in the cold.

  Grit didn’t know for sure, but he had a feeling who it was.

  Special Agent Harper would go berserk if he was right and she found out.

  Someone picked up on the other end. “Is this Petty Officer Taylor?”

  Grit recognized the boyish voice of the sixteen-year-old son of the vice president of the United States. If Jo had her Secret Service listening devices in Elijah’s house, or if Elijah had his Special Forces listening devices in his house, and one or both could hear Charlie Neal on the other end of the connection, Grit knew he’d be hauled off his icy rock.

  “It is,” Grit said. “Do you have a Secret Service detail with you, Charlie?”

  “Sort of. My cousin and I are in the control room in our school auditorium.”

  “Aren’t you on break for the holidays?”

  “Yes, sir, but we’re dismantling the lighting we did for the freshman Christmas play. It’s a private school. We can have a Christmas play.”

  “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ I work for a living. You’re both there? You and Conor?”

  “That’s right.”

  Then the two teenagers hadn’t done one of their prince-and-the-pauper switches.

&
nbsp; “Listen,” Charlie said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Scary when you start thinking with that one-eighty IQ.”

  Charlie brushed him off. “We need to expand our view of this group of killers and not just focus on Melanie Kendall and Kyle Rigby.”

  “We? You aren’t on this investigation, and neither am I. I’m filling time between PT appointments. You’re in high school. You’re under Secret Service protection.”

  “We know that Rigby was the senior partner,” Charlie said as if Grit hadn’t spoken. “Kendall was newer. I think Rigby knew or was in contact with at least one other killer.”

  The kid was relentless.

  Grit realized he should hang up, march down to Jo Harper and rat out Charlie Neal, but instead he played devil’s advocate. “What if they were the only killers? Rigby and the woman. What if there’s no network? They found their own clients and pretended there was a middleman.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “To keep their clients comfortable in their anonymity.”

  “Ah. To mislead people.” Charlie was thoughtful. “Nah. Doesn’t work. Then who blew up Kendall’s car?”

  “Some friend of Rigby’s. A one-time deal. ‘I get killed, you blow her ass up.’ Like that.”

  “Still doesn’t work,” Charlie said, as if, of course, he knew better.

  “You wanted me to call you so you could theorize? You can do that with your cousin and your Secret Service detail.”

  “You sound as if you’re in pain, Petty Officer Taylor. How’s the leg?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one that got blown off. What’s left of it. That one.”

  Grit gave the kid credit for not backing down. “I don’t like the cold, and I don’t like the son of the vice president of the United States talking to me about killers. Think about something else.”

  “I am. My mind can work on different tracks all at once. I get bored easily.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  “And I didn’t just set up this call to theorize.”

  Anyone else, and Grit would have thought—okay, the kid feels bad. Hurt at being dismissed. Not with Charlie Neal. “Why did you set up this call, Charlie?”