by Cindi Myers
“Right.” She brushed a lock of hair off her face. “Because I’m so attractive with two black eyes, a busted lip and a row of stitches across my head. Though maybe he’s into zombie chic.”
“So you don’t go for the chiseled look?” he asked, keeping his voice light.
“Chiseled is right. He looked like someone carved him from granite.”
“I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley. He looks like he could take me apart with his bare hands.”
“You look like you could hold your own in a fight, Sheriff.”
The air between them felt suddenly charged. “Are you saying you’ve been checking me out?” he asked.
“I’ve been locked up with nine hundred other women for three years,” she said. “I check out every man I meet.” But her smile seemed to say that she liked what she had seen when she looked at him. He had to fight the urge not to puff out his chest.
He stopped at the entrance to the storage facility and punched in the code Brenda had given him. The barrier rose and he drove to the first row of units on the right and parked. “I don’t see anyone else out here,” Lacy said as she and Travis climbed out of his SUV.
“I checked and only about half the units are rented,” Travis said as he fitted the key into the padlock on the Stensons’ unit. “Tom Reynolds owns the place and he told me most of the time people stash their stuff out here and don’t look at it for years. The payment comes out of their bank account automatically every month and they probably never even think about the boxes of old clothes and papers or Grandma’s furniture or whatever it is they’re paying to store.”
He shoved up the rolling metal door and it rose with a groan. Everything looked exactly as he had left it when he was here with Brenda, boxes and furniture piled haphazardly, everything smelling of dust and old paper. “Let me get the video recorder set up before you go in,” Travis said. “We might as well do all this by the book.”
Lacy waited while he set up the recorder on its tripod, then she moved into the unit ahead of him. “Where do we start?” she asked.
“The boxes are labeled alphabetically,” Travis said. “Why don’t you glance through a couple and see if anything catches your eye.” He lifted a box from a stack and set it on top of Andy’s desk. “And look for any H’s. The boxes we looked at already were labeled Hake, but maybe some papers related to the development ended up mixed in with the general files.”
“All right.” Lacy accepted the box he slid toward her and began flipping through the papers. Every few seconds she would pull up a file folder and examine it more closely. The sun beat down on the metal building and even with the door open, it grew stifling.
Lacy stopped to wipe sweat from her forehead. “Maybe we should just grab a couple and take them back to the house,” she said.
“Good idea,” Travis said. “Let me get my tape from the SUV and we’ll seal up a couple to go through later.”
He turned and had taken two steps toward the door when an explosion ripped through the air and knocked him to the ground.
Chapter Ten
The concussion from the blast slammed Lacy to the concrete floor of the storage unit and sent a tower of boxes tumbling over her. She lay stunned, head spinning, trying to make sense of the roaring in her ears and the pain in her knees and hands.
“Lacy!” Travis’s voice rose above the roar.
She lifted her head. “I’m here!” she cried, the sound weak and barely audible even to her own ears. She took a deep breath, inhaling smoke, and coughed violently, then tried again. “Here!” she shouted, hoarse.
“Can you move?” Travis shouted. “Head toward my voice.”
She rose up on her knees and shoved boxes and papers away from her. Then she felt the heat of the fire licking at her back. Terror sent her lunging forward, fighting against a wall of boxes and scattered furniture. “Help!” she shouted. “Help me!”
“I’m coming!” The wall of debris shifted, and a hand reached in, groping wildly for her.
Lacy took the hand and was yanked forward, half carried toward a blast of fresh air. Then she and Travis were rolling in the gravel, his hands beating at her back, and the flames that licked there. Then he pulled her to her feet and they ran, away from the burning storage unit, into the field beyond, where they collapsed, arms still tightly wrapped around each other. Even there, the tower of flame that reached toward the sky radiated heat over them.
Lacy’s eyes filled with tears as she looked into his soot-streaked face. His eyes met hers, and he rested the back of his hand to her cheek. “I thought I’d lost you,” he whispered.
She took his face in both hands and pressed her lips to his, the kiss desperate in its intensity. He wrapped both arms around her and rolled onto his back, carrying her with him, their lips still locked together, her body stretched atop his. Tears ran down her face and mixed with the soot. She tasted the salt of them as she opened her mouth to deepen the kiss. Everything—the roar of the fire, the ache in her knees, the stench of the smoke—receded, burned away by passion. Some part of her, banked and given up for dead all these years, roared to life, fueled by the feel of his hard, male body beneath her, by his searching lips and caressing hands. She wanted. She needed. She took.
He was the first to pull away, breaking the kiss and rolling her aside, then sitting up and taking both her hands in his. “I need to call this in,” he said.
She nodded, unable to speak, adrenaline still pumping through her body. He released her hands, only to caress her cheek again. “You’re the most amazing woman,” he said.
“You’re making a habit of saving my life,” she said.
His expression hardened and he dropped his hand. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“This isn’t about debts and payments,” she said.
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about you making me feel more alive than I have in years. It’s about... I don’t know.” She looked away. She had almost said “love,” but that was absurd.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter why right now,” he said. He pulled her close again, so that her head rested on his shoulder. “I’m just glad you’re okay. That we’re both okay.”
She turned her head to watch the fire. Other storage units had caught now, their contents feeding the blaze into even more of an inferno. “I heard an explosion,” she said.
He nodded and, with one arm still wrapped around her, shifted to take out his phone. “This is Rayford County Sheriff Travis Walker. The storage units at the end of Fireline Road are burning. There was an explosion. We need the fire crew, an ambulance and a crime scene team out here.” He listened a moment. “Just some burns. No fatalities. Get an officer out here to block the road,” he said. “I don’t want anyone back here but emergency personnel.”
He ended the call and replaced his phone on his belt. “Why do we need an ambulance?” she asked.
“You’ve got blood on your hands, and you might have some burns.” He took her wrist and turned her palm up to reveal the drying blood there.
“I scraped my hands and knees on the concrete when the blast threw me down,” she said. “What about you? Are you hurt?”
He shook his head. “I was closer to the door, so the blast threw me forward.” He squinted toward the blaze, black smoke billowing to the sky. “My SUV is probably on fire by now. And all of Andy’s files.”
“Do you think that’s why this happened?” she asked. “So that we couldn’t get to those files?”
“That would be my guess. I know one thing—I want to talk to Ian Barnes and find out what he was doing out here.”
“Do you think he booby-trapped the storage unit or something?”
“Or something,” Travis said. “Maybe he was just checking out places to climb, but he might have seen someone else out here.”
Sirens sounded in the
distance. Travis shoved to his feet, then offered her his hand and pulled her up beside him. “Sounds like the cavalry is on the way,” he said. “Let’s see if we can circle around to the road and meet them.”
Lacy kept her hand in his as they hiked over the rough ground, around the still-raging blaze and out to the road. She had kissed him in an adrenaline rush of fear and elation, but she didn’t regret the impetuous gesture. Danger hadn’t changed her feelings for Travis, but it had made her see the foolishness of playing hide-and-seek with her emotions. Crazy as it seemed on the surface, the man who had been her worst enemy was fast becoming her best friend.
* * *
THE FRONT PAGE of the Eagle Mountain Examiner had a three-column color photo of the fire at the storage units, with a smaller inset picture of Travis and Lacy, scorched and ragged, standing surrounded by half a dozen emergency personnel. “You look like two extras in a low-budget horror film,” Adelaide said as she laid the paper on Travis’s desk.
Travis scowled at the photo. “I didn’t even know this was taken.”
“Tammy was at Kate’s this morning, crowing about getting the story in just under deadline,” Adelaide said. “You bumped a piece about the Eighth Grade Science Fair. She had to move the pictures of Olivia Dexter’s first-place exhibit on DNA testing to page four.”
“My apologies to Olivia,” he said. “Have we heard anything from the arson examiner?”
“He says you’re keeping him busy,” Adelaide said. “He sent over his preliminary findings this morning—it was definitely a bomb, with some kind of trip mechanism, probably set to go off on a delay once someone triggered it.”
“Adelaide, you aren’t supposed to read official reports addressed to me.”
“He sent it to the general office email and I’m in charge of the general office.” She waited while he logged on to his computer and opened the email from the county’s arson investigator. “You know, I think I read terrorists use those kind of bombs over in Iraq and Afghanistan,” she said. “That way they can make sure all our soldiers are inside a building before they blow them all up.”
“Go back to work, Adelaide,” Travis said. “And close the door behind you.”
He read the investigator’s report, though everything was as Adelaide had said. The bomb wasn’t sophisticated, but it was effective, and the kind of thing anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of explosives could use. He closed the file and left his office.
“Where are you going?” Adelaide asked as he passed her desk.
“Out.”
He drove instead of walked, wanting the security of a vehicle around him. His SUV had been consumed in the blaze, so he was using the department’s “spare” vehicle, an ancient 4Runner with a dented door, sagging seats and no air-conditioning. He would have to petition the county commissioners for funds for a new vehicle and probably wait for an insurance settlement to come through before he could get a new ride.
He parked in front of Eagle Mountain Outfitters and went inside. Wade looked up from the cash register, an outdoor magazine open on the counter in front of him. “Hey, Sheriff, what can we do for you?” he asked.
“I’m looking for your friend Ian,” Travis said.
“He isn’t here.”
“Where is he?” Travis asked.
“Is something wrong, Sheriff?” Wade asked.
“I need to speak to Barnes. Where is he?”
“He’s staying over at the Bear’s Den,” Wade said. “Paige Riddell’s place. Why do you need to see Ian?”
“I just want to talk to him.” Before Wade could question him further, Travis left the store, got back in his vehicle and drove three blocks to Paige Riddell’s Bear’s Den Inn. The faded brown Jeep he and Lacy had seen turning off Fireline Road yesterday sat in the driveway of the two-story Victorian home, next to Paige’s red Prius. Paige answered when he rang the doorbell. She was a tall woman, with straight, shoulder-length, honey-blond hair and serious gray eyes. In addition to operating the bed-and-breakfast, she taught yoga at the local gym and headed up Eagle Mountain Conservationists, the environmental group that had succeeded in getting an injunction to stop Henry Hake’s resort development. “Sheriff Walker,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“I need to talk to one of your guests—Ian Barnes.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What about?”
“That’s none of your business and you know it, Paige. Can I come in?”
She opened the door wider and let him walk past. “Ian is uncomfortable with strangers,” she said. “He suffered horribly in the war.”
Travis turned to study her. In her midthirties, and a little too serious for his tastes, but she might appeal to a man like Barnes. “You and he are friends?”
“No. But I respect his privacy.”
“So do I. Which is why I won’t tell you what this about. Is he here?”
“He’s upstairs, in the sunroom off the back of the house.” She nodded toward a set of carpeted stairs.
Travis took the stairs quickly, but Ian met him at the top. The muscular veteran in the black knit cap filled the doorway to the sunroom, his expression blank. “Sheriff,” he said, no inflection to the word.
“Let’s go into the sunroom where we can talk in private,” Travis said.
Barnes backed into the room, keeping his gaze fixed on Travis. He sat in a square, heavy wood rocker in the back corner of the room. Travis pulled up a wrought-iron armchair. “I saw you out on Fireline Road yesterday afternoon,” he said. “What were you doing out there?”
“I was looking for places to climb. I heard there were some good routes up Dakota Ridge back that way.”
“Did you go by the storage units at the end of the road? Maybe turn around there, or stop and take a look around?”
“No.” His expression and his voice never changed, both as cold as a robot’s. In Travis’s experience, being interviewed by the police made most people a little nervous, even if they were innocent of any wrongdoing. The first time he had interviewed Lacy after Andy’s murder, she had fidgeted constantly, and practically vibrated with tension. At the time, he had mistaken her unease for a sign of guilt.
Ian Barnes might have been talking to a store clerk or a complete stranger, for all the emotion he displayed. Was he that unfeeling—or simply more experienced at dealing with law enforcement? “You know about the bomb that went off out at the storage units yesterday afternoon,” Travis said.
“I saw the paper.”
“But you don’t know anything about it.”
“No.”
“Someone suggested to me that this might have been the type of bomb used by terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a delayed timer. You must have run into that sort of device while you were serving over there.”
“Yes.”
“So you would know how to put one together. How to deploy it.”
“I know a lot of things. Yesterday I was looking for places to climb. I don’t know anything about your bomb.” He stood, an imposing figure looming over Travis. It was hard not to read the gesture as an intentional threat.
Travis rose also, and found that he and Barnes were almost the same height. He looked the other man in the eye. “Why are you in Eagle Mountain, Mr. Barnes?” he asked.
“I’m visiting friends. Doing some climbing.”
“Have you been to the area before?”
Something flickered in those impassive brown eyes, a shadow of something—guilt? Fear? “No.”
Travis knew he was lying. All his words thus far might have been lies, but Travis was certain about this one. Ian could have said he had visited Wade and Brock before, or come here on vacation. Instead, he had lied. Why?
“If you had something to do with this, I’ll find out,” he said. He turned to leave, but at the door, Ian’s words stopped him.
“If you
want to know who has it in for you and your girlfriend, you should talk to that writer, Exeter,” he said.
Travis turned to face Ian again. He could have protested that Lacy wasn’t his girlfriend, but the memory of her in his arms after the fire cast doubt on the truth of that statement. “Why Exeter?” he asked instead.
“He was in Moe’s Pub the other night, mouthing off about the power of the written word and making Lacy pay for being so rude to him.”
“What did he say, exactly?” Travis asked.
Ian sat in the rocker again and picked up a book from the table beside it. “Ask him,” he said, then opened the book, ignoring Travis.
Paige met Travis at the bottom of the stairs. “Did you upset him?” she asked.
“Do you really think anything upsets him?” Travis asked.
“Not everyone wears his feelings on his sleeve,” she said. “Some are more stoic.”
Travis headed for the door, then thought better of it and faced her again. “When that environmental group you head was opposing Henry Hake’s resort development, did any of your members do more than protest?”
She wrinkled her forehead. “What do you mean? We filed an injunction against him in court and we won. We succeeded in stopping the development—which was a ridiculous idea, anyway. The environment at those elevations is far too delicate to support the kind of infrastructure Hake wanted to build—all so a few ultrarich people could enjoy looking down on the rest of us from their ridiculously oversize homes.”
“Did you write threatening letters to him? Destroy equipment?”
Her eyes widened. “No! Our group doesn’t just work for the environment—we’re committed to peace. It’s part of our core values and mission statement.”
“But you don’t control all your members,” he said. “Maybe one of them stepped out of line.”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
Travis glanced up the stairs, wondering if Barnes was listening. “Someone threatened Henry Hake back then. Someone destroyed machinery on his property. Andy Stenson was looking into those threats. It may have been what got him killed.”