Chapter Seven
“Does this spiderweb tattoo have special significance?” Stephen asked.
“It’s a badge of honor among white hate groups,” Rachel said. “A member isn’t entitled to wear it until he’s killed for the cause.”
“Nice guys,” he said with a grimace. “Did we ever work a case involving these creeps?”
“Besides the Maitland kidnapping?” She curled her legs beneath her, settled on the bed and wrinkled her forehead in thought. “Only one, that I can remember. A bank robbery a few years back.”
“You’ll have to fill me in,” he snapped, frustrated by his lack of recall—and the resurgence of his desire at the sight of her, nestled atop the covers in her toobig shirt, wide-eyed, with her magnificent hair in disarray.
“We had an added incentive to catch these guys,” she explained. “Not only did they shoot a bank security guard, they battered an elderly woman.”
“But we did catch them?”
She nodded. “Their take was less than three thousand dollars. When we arrested them, they claimed they’d stolen the money to finance their cause but in the few days it took us to catch up with them, they managed to spend it all. Cigarettes, beer and lottery tickets. Some cause, huh?”
“Could those two be the ones after us?”
“Not likely.” She stifled a yawn with her hand. “One was killed in a prison brawl shortly after sentencing. The other will be locked up for a long time.”
“And their fellow hatemongers?”
“From what our investigation revealed, they were a loosely organized group without significant goals, except for weekly beer busts and late-night rides through town looking for non-Caucasian victims to bash.”
He settled into a chair by the fire and stared at the drawing in his hand, attempting through the force of his will to recapture his memories.
His only result was a headache.
“Why is this sketch in my wallet?” he muttered, and rubbed his throbbing temples. “Have I carried it since the Maitland case?”
She shook her head. “The paper looks too new, and its creases aren’t worn enough to be that old.”
“If the paper’s new, this tattoo could be connected to a recent case I was following and totally unrelated to whoever’s after us.”
“We won’t figure that out tonight.” Her soft, empathetic smile made him want to kiss her again. “You need sleep.”
Fatigue dragged at him, quenching his desire. “I can’t argue with that.”
“Who knows? Maybe you’ll have your memory back when you wake up.” She scooted under the covers and snuggled into her pillow. “Steep well.”
He turned out the light, but the rest he needed so desperately didn’t come. He lay for what seemed like hours, listening to the soft sounds of her breathing before he drifted into sleep.
RACHEL AWAKENED to the welcoming aroma of freshbrewed coffee, but as memories of the past twenty-four hours flooded her, she buried deeper in the bed and yanked the covers over her head.
Jessica’s absence burned like a raw wound in her heart, and she silently cursed the circumstances that separated her from her daughter.
In addition to the pain of missing her child, Rachel suffered the embarrassment of having surrendered to her emotions the previous night. Last night she’d been too tired to feel ashamed. After a good night’s sleep, mortification reared its ugly head. She must have been temporarily insane to have kissed Stephen that way. And she’d had to employ every ounce of self-control to break away.
She groaned and burrowed deeper under the blankets. No longer could she kid herself, insisting that she considered Stephen only a friend. Just the thought of him, lying asleep in the bed next to hers, sent her pulse into overdrive and made breathing a chore.
Sure, he’d kissed her first, but she couldn’t blame him for that. After all, hadn’t he admitted she was the only person who seemed familiar? Wasn’t she the one who’d burst into tears over missing Jess? He was just being comforting, while she’d been a shameless dimwit.
She moaned with chagrin. As soon as his memories returned, he would remember his wife in Atlanta, feel really embarrassed over his behavior last night—and perhaps even blame Rachel for leading him on.
And she would end up looking like a chump.
She pounded her pillow with her fists, more desperate now than ever to discover who stalked them, so she could return to Jessica and get away from Stephen.
Before she made a fool of herself. Again.
“Rachel?” Stephen tugged at the covers. “You awake?”
She gripped the blankets tighter over her head. “Go away.”
Her face burned over how brazenly she’d returned his kiss last night. She couldn’t face him. Not yet.
“You were moaning. You okay?”
“Just dandy,” she muttered with another groan and squirmed deeper into the bed.
“You sure you’re not ill?”
The man might have lost his memory, but his persistence was operating on all cylinders. “I’m fine. Please, leave me alone.”
“Breakfast is ready.” He jerked the covers again.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Good. That leaves more for me. I don’t remember, of course, but I doubt you like blueberry muffins or three-cheese omelets.”
Her stomach growled with hunger. She hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday. Even though the Kidbroughs had ordered supper for her at the restaurant last night, she’d been too distraught over saying goodbye to Jessica to eat.
With the suddenness of an explosion and the clarity of a spring day, an answer to her problem hit her. She would explain her plan to Stephen over breakfast. As long as she concentrated on getting home, she wouldn’t be distracted by him.
She rolled the covers off her face and came eyeto-eye with Stephen, sitting on the edge of her bed and looking very pleased with himself.
“Where’d you find breakfast?” she asked.
“The motel has a great little mom-and-pop restaurant. And they deliver.”
He stood and indicated the small table he’d moved in front of the fireplace, where a cheerful fire crackled. Sunlight tumbled through the windows at an angle that told her she’d slept until mid-morning. The cabin was redolent with the smell of burning hickory logs, strong coffee and hot, buttery bread.
Even more appealing than breakfast was Stephen. He wore tight jeans, a hunter-green plaid shirt that brought out emerald highlights in his dark brown eyes, and sturdy work boots, an attractive alternative to his suit-and-tie FBI uniform.
A three-day beard that would make lesser men appear scruffy gave him a rugged and rakish appearance. She was relieved to notice his color was better and the tight lines around his eyes had eased. The night’s rest had done him good.
“Well?” He was appraising her with a quizzical tilt of his head.
Blushing at being caught daydreaming, she fumbled for something to say. “Maybe I am a little hungry.”
She tossed back the covers, forgetting until that moment that she wore only a flannel shirt that barely reached her thighs. With a desperate lunge, she whipped the top blanket off the bed and wrapped it around her.
Stephen crossed to the table and pulled out a chair.
Attempting to regain her dignity, she kicked the trailing blanket away from her feet, strode to the table and sat. Stephen leaned over her from behind and poured her coffee.
The scent of him, soapy fresh but unmistakably masculine, almost made her forget her plan. She took a long sip of the hot, fortifying brew and plunged ahead before he could distract her again. “I’ve decided what we have to do.”
“You have?” He took a chair across from her, poured himself a cup, and confronted her with raised eyebrows over the rim. “And what did you decide?”
“We contact your Atlanta office.”
“And?”
“Ask for your partner.”
“Then what?”
“We explain about your
amnesia and the person who’s stalking us and ask to be sequestered in an FBI safe house until the Bureau can locate and capture the people who’re after us.” She sat back in her chair, pleased with her strategy and wondering why she hadn’t thought of it sooner.
Stephen continued to stare at her over his coffee cup, but he didn’t say a word.
“Well?” she demanded. “What do you think?”
He set his cup in its saucer, reached across the table for her hand, and entwined his fingers with hers before she could pull away. “That’s exactly what we’re expected to do.”
“So?”
“So maybe whoever’s after us is watching the office and my partner, even tapping his phone.” Stephen theorized, “and what if more than one man is after us?” He nodded toward the dresser where the sketch of the tattoo lay. “What if an entire group of white supremacists are on our trail?”
Rachel ducked her head over her breakfast to hide her heated face. Stephen had not only stirred her senses, he’d obviously scrambled her brains. She should have factored in the possibility of more than one stalker. Drawing a deep breath, she concentrated on the problem that faced them and was immediately aware of a niggling inconsistency.
“When you first called to warn me,” she reminded him, “you said the threat concerned a case we worked in Savannah. But the only two cases involving members of hate groups are that bank robbery and the Maitland kidnapping.”
“The only two that we know of,” he amended.
“Right. And of those two, one of the bank robbers is dead, the other locked away. And Jason Bender shot and killed both the Maitland kidnappers.”
“Could be the surviving bank robber or the kidnappers—What were their names?”
“Bubba and Weed,” she said.
“Could be the bank robber or Bubba and Weed have friends or relatives who are out for revenge?”
“If it’s revenge for Bubba and Weed, why go after us?” she asked. “Jason shot them.”
Their glances met over the table. Stephen apparently had the same thought.
“Contact Jason,” he said. “See if he’s had any threats.”
Rachel managed to reach the phone on the dresser without stumbling over her blanket and dialed the Savannah office of the FBI. Marie, the same receptionist who’d worked there when Rachel left, answered.
“Sorry, Rache,” she said when Rachel had identified herself and asked for Jason, “Jason left a few days ago for a few weeks’ vacation.”
“Did he leave a number where he can be reached?”
“He’s hiking the Appalachian trail, so he’s incommunicado, except for every few days, when he checks in for his messages. Do you want to leave one?”
“No,” Rachel said, thinking quickly, “but could you tell me if anyone else has called for him?”
“It’s been like old home week around here,” Marie said. “Just after Jason left, Stephen Chandler called, looking for him.”
“Thanks, Marie.”
Rachel hung up the phone and repeated Marie’s words to Stephen.
“If I called Jason to warn him,” Stephen said, “then we’re on the right track with the hate group.”
Rachel shrugged. “Maybe. Or you could have been calling about an entirely different case, and the timing is just coincidental. I still think we should go to Atlanta and ask the Bureau for help.”
Stephen frowned. “My gut says no.”
Rachel slid back into her chair. “You’re not suggesting the Bureau’s after us?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what to think. All I know is that every time you mention contacting the FBI, alarms go off in my head.”
She had too much respect for his instincts to argue. “So what do we do now?”
“Finish your breakfast,” he said with a devilish grin. “Who knows when we’ll have a chance to eat again?”
She dug into her omelet, but barely tasted it. How had she landed in such a mess? On the run from a nameless, faceless killer, separated from her child, and too enticingly close to another woman’s husband—who just happened to be the father of her baby.
Her glance darted around the tiny room in an attempt to avoid meeting Stephen’s gaze, and her attention fell on Stephen’s computer case.
“You used to keep a daily journal,” she said. “Maybe the answers we need are in your computer.”
An hour later she wished she’d never mentioned his computer. They’d learned his files were password-protected, and without FBI decrypting software, they hadn’t a prayer of determining what that password was, regardless of how many key words or wordnumeral combinations they tried. Stephen had known enough about circumventing passwords to make his unbreakable.
“I give up,” Stephen finally admitted. “Looks like returning to Atlanta is our only choice.”
She felt her eyes widen with surprise. “You’re ready to ask the Bureau for help?”
He shook his head. “I want to try retracing my movements of the last few days. I must have stumbled onto something that made me warn you. We have to figure out what that was, and we’ll never do it from here.”
“But you’ll be recognized in Atlanta.”
“Not if I make some changes,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “And you, too.”
“Me?”
“You’re coming with me. I’ll need your help.”
Rachel started to protest, but realized she had little choice. She couldn’t return to Jessica or her work until their stalkers were captured. And she couldn’t leave Stephen to operate on his own, without memories. Besides, they worked well as partners. Their individual investigative techniques complemented each other’s, and they’d solve this case faster together.
The sooner it was solved, the sooner she could walk out of Stephen’s life. The prospect gave her relief, but no pleasure.
“You’ll need clothes,” he said.
She couldn’t argue with that. She’d washed her underwear before going to bed last night, so it had been fresh and dry this morning, but her blouse was getting a bit dingy, and her slacks looked as if she’d slept in them.
“You’ll also need a disguise,” he added. “And we should change vehicles. That makes cash our first necessity. Do you have any?”
“Sorry.” A flush of embarrassment worked its way up her cheeks. Since quitting her well-paying job as an agent, money had been a continual problem. She doubted she had more than fifty dollars in her wallet, and not much more in her checking account, at least till payday.
Stephen shrugged and chuckled. “We know enough about robbing banks—”
“That’s not funny. What about the ATM card you found last night?”
“An ATM withdrawal would be the quickest way, and the least likely to attract attention, but my card’s useless without my personal identification number.”
“Which you can’t remember.”
“Right.” His expression was rueful.
“It’s probably in your computer,” she said with a scowl of frustration.
“My checkbook was in my computer case. I can cash a check at the branch bank we passed after leaving Shoney’s last night.”
Her medical school training kicked in as she noted Stephen’s diminished color, the returning pain lines around his eyes, and the fatigue in his voice. He shouldn’t be going anywhere, not for a while.
“Let me cash the check and take care of the car while you stay here and rest.”
“I can’t rest.” His eyes flashed with anger, and he clenched his fingers into fists. “Operating in the dark like this is driving me crazy.”
“You’ll be in better shape to investigate in Atlanta if you pamper that arm now.” She had checked his wound after breakfast and been glad to discover no signs of infection. However, he’d still lost a lot of blood and he needed time to recuperate. Pushing himself to the limits of his endurance was only asking for trouble. “We’ll make a list of everything we need. While I shop, you rest—”
He scowled and
shook his head.
“Then spend the time trying to crack your computer password,” she suggested gently. “Without it, you can’t even access your e-mail.”
His expression softened, and she had to look away from the warmth in his eyes.
“You’re pretty special, Doc. How did I ever let a partner like you get away?”
“I was no match for a promotion and big pay raise. Now, will you help me make a list?”
SHE HAD USED most of the day to find what she needed. First, long lines at the bank delayed her when she cashed Stephen’s check. Finding a garage that would store her Explorer out of sight had taken even longer. But what had exhausted her most was trying not to call attention to herself by glancing over her shoulder every few minutes to see if someone was watching her. Out in the open she’d felt exposed, vulnerable and frightened.
By the time she’d purchased all the items on the list she and Stephen had compiled, the late-afternoon sun was sinking over Mount Pisgah.
She drove the rented Blazer into the parking place in front of their cabin and was removing several bags and packages from the back when the front door banged open. Startled, she dropped the parcels and reached for her gun. She stopped herself from drawing when she saw Stephen bounding down the steps.
“You were gone so long,” he said, “I was worried. Thank God, you’re safe.”
She gathered her packages again and slammed the rear hatch. “The streets and stores are clogged with tourist traffic. Everyone comes to the mountains for the fall foliage.”
“Let me help.” He tried to take some of the packages from her.
“I have them.” She hurried inside, and Stephen followed.
After dumping her bundles on the nearest bed, she collapsed in a chair in front of the fire. “I hate shopping.”
Stephen began unpacking items from the bags. “I thought women lived to shop.”
“Not this one. I don’t care if I never see the inside of a store again.” She grinned to take the edge off her complaint. “Maybe I’m missing an essential female gene.”
Undercover Dad Page 10