Warlord

by Angela Knight

  “Hmmm.” Jane digested that idea. “What about the beads?”

  The wolf lifted a hind leg and scratched briskly at his left ear. “Rank and combat decorations. One of ’em also designates his status as a military assassin.”

  Jane gapped. “He’s an assassin?”

  Freika stopped scratching as though registering her instinctive revulsion. “It’s not like in your time—grassy knolls and sniper scopes. Baran and I slip into guarded military camps and take out enemy commanders during wartime.”

  She frowned. “That sounds dangerous.”

  The wolf angled his head in his version of a shrug. “It’s the stuff of suicide missions, sweetheart. We’re good at it, mostly because Baran doesn’t give a damn whether he lives or dies. And hasn’t for a very long time.”

  “Not since the Xerans got his team,” she guessed.

  “Possibly. I only joined him when he volunteered for the assassination unit six years ago.” He rested his head on her knee and looked up at her, something sad in his eyes. “My orders were to keep him from committing suicide by enemy, but he hasn’t really attempted that, despite some close calls. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that will change when he finally goes after General Jutka.”

  “Who’s General Jutka?”

  The wolf was silent so long, she had to prompt him. “Freika? Who’s Jutka?”

  “I think you’d better ask Baran that. But I will tell you he’s the man we’re supposed to go after when we return to our own time.” Before she could interrogate him further, Freika said, “Whoops, there comes Baran. And he’s not happy.”

  Jane looked up to see him striding across the parking lot toward them, his braid swinging angrily against his cheek. She’d stopped off and picked him up a pair of sunglasses before they’d gone to the motel, but she was willing to bet that behind their protection, his eyes were glowing with rage.

  He walked over to her car door and pulled it open. “Okay,” he growled, his tone savage. “You try.”

  Simmering, Baran watched Jane charm the doughy desk clerk who had coldly refused to tell him a damn thing a few minutes before. He’d done everything he could think of to get the information he wanted, short of hauling the little bastard over the counter and planting his fist in that smug round face. He’d considered that, too, but his computer had warned him there was a ninety-eight percent chance the clerk would call local law enforcement. And he couldn’t afford to go to jail, not with Druas after Jane.

  Who, at that very moment, was leaning her elbows on the counter and hanging on to the doughy little bastard’s every word.

  The man temporized. She wheedled. He wavered.

  Finally the clerk sat down at the primitive computer behind the counter. “There’s only one guy that’s checked in within the last three days without family members in tow,” the man said, fingers tapping on the keys. “Tony Anderson. Atlanta address. He told me he sells farm equipment. I think he’s talking to the guy with Sanders Tractor and Farm Supply….”

  “Oh, yeah. Jimmy Sanders. I interviewed him when his guard unit got called up for Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  Was there anybody she hadn’t interviewed?

  “What’s his room number, Danny?”

  “Now, Jane, you know I can’t tell you that.” At her pleading expression, he hesitated. “Uh, would you like a cup of coffee? I just put on a fresh pot.”

  She looked at him a second before a dazzling smile spread across her face. “Sure, Danny. That’d be great.”

  The clerk got up and ducked through a doorway behind the counter. Jane stood on tiptoes and craned her neck to check out the computer screen. “Our boy’s in Room 104,” she told Baran and made for the door. “Come on, let’s check it out.”

  He caught her wrist as they stepped outside. “No, I’ll check it out, you wait with Freika. If it is Druas, I don’t want you in the line of fire.”

  Jane frowned at him, her rich brown eyes concerned. “I don’t like that idea, Baran. “What if you need backup?”

  “I won’t.” He eyed her a moment from behind the awkward sunglasses she’d given him. “Why was he willing to give that information to you when he wouldn’t tell me anything even when I all but threatened him?”

  Jane shrugged. “Tayanita is a small community, Baran. Everybody knows everybody. But nobody knows you, so nobody’s going to talk to you. You’ll be seriously hampered if you try to investigate this thing by yourself. Like it or not, you need me.”

  Baran frowned heavily, watching as she got back into the truck. He was beginning to see that.

  And he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

  Twelve

  But when Baran stalked back to the SUV five minutes later, it was to say that Tony Anderson was not Druas. He hadn’t even had to talk to him—just scan him through the door. The man was definitely not Xeran.

  Their luck was no better at the other two motels, though Baran did allow Jane to do the talking. She was able to get the information they needed at the Avon, but even she struck out with the clerk at the Journey’s Inn. Baran was forced to circle the entire motel, scanning each room for signs of the Xeran or twenty-third-century equipment. He came back simmering with frustration.

  “So where the hell is Druas?” Jane said as Baran got in the SUV and slammed the door. She could make out the glow in his eyes even through the sunglasses.

  “Probably killing somebody,” he snarled.

  On the dashboard the scanner crackled and popped.

  They ended up stopping at a Burger King drive-through for a late lunch. At Jane’s suggestion, all three of them got out of the SUV to eat at one of the restaurant’s cement tables in the shade of a huge, colorful umbrella.

  The scanner at her elbow, Jane munched a french fry and watched Baran sniff his burger dubiously while Freika worked his way through a pile of Whoppers on the grass at their feet. “Who’s Jutka?”

  Baran put down his food and looked down at the wolf, who gazed up at him guiltily. Then he shrugged and went back to eating. “A Xeran general.”

  “Whom you’re supposed to kill.”

  “It would simplify the war considerably.”

  “If you don’t get killed trying.”

  He munched and considered the question. “There’s always that.”

  Jane dragged another fry through a blob of ketchup and frowned. “Freika’s worried you won’t be as careful as you should be. Why? What’s so special about this guy—I mean, considering you’ve evidently been assassinating people a while now.”

  He looked up at her and chewed, his face expressionless. She was beginning to regret buying him those sunglasses. At times he looked entirely too much like the Terminator in them. “Freika talks too much.”

  “Well, yeah, but sometimes he does have a point.”

  “Thank you,” said a voice from under the table.

  But before Baran could answer the question—assuming he intended to—a short horn toot called their attention. Jane looked up to see a familiar champagne Crown Vic whip into a parking space not far from their table. Tom Reynolds got out.

  Normally Jane would be delighted to see the primary in a murder investigation, particularly when she hadn’t interviewed him yet. This time, though, there was something in Reynolds’s calculating expression that made her uneasy.

  “Taking a break from harassing hotel clerks, Jane?” he asked pleasantly, plopping down on the cement bench across from her and Baran.

  Hell, Jane thought. Busted. Maybe literally, judging from the look on Tom’s face. She shrugged and pasted a bright smile on her own. “Just working on a story.”

  “Yeah, and I know exactly what story you’re working on,” he said, his eyes hard. “Stay out of my case, Nancy Drew.” Tom flicked a gaze at Baran. “By the way, exactly when did the Hardy Boy here come to town? He wasn’t with you Friday night at the murder scene. In fact, you didn’t even mention you’d hired him.”

  “The subject didn’t come up,” Jane drawled. Oh, Go
d, Tom was suspicious of Baran. She thought fast. “He flew in early this morning.”

  “Yeah?” His eyes flicked to the bigger man’s face. “You already found a place to stay?” His smile held a distinct edge. “You’re not registered at any of the motels.”

  Baran leaned an elbow on the table and lifted a dark brow. “Actually, I’m staying with my good friend Jane.”

  “Uh-huh.” The look he gave Jane was so coolly disapproving, she felt her cheeks heat. “Your daddy wouldn’t much like that.”

  “Daddy didn’t like a lot of things,” Jane snapped back. “But since I’m twenty-nine years old, he wouldn’t have had much say even if—” She clamped her teeth shut over he wasn’t a dead wife-beater.

  “Guess not.” She was surprised at how much the disappointment in Reynolds’s eyes stung. He flicked his attention back to Baran. “How you feeling after your little run-in with that lightning bolt?”

  “It wasn’t a lightning bolt. And I’m fine.”

  “Even the hands? Gashed ’em up pretty well, looked like. Get ’em tended?”

  Baran shrugged and displayed a broad palm. He’d pulled off Jane’s makeshift bandages after the trip to the second hotel. Now the wound showed as nothing more than a healing red line. “They looked worse than they were.”

  Tom frowned at his palm in astonishment. “Damn, I could have sworn—”

  “How about the woman in the car wreck?” Jane interrupted, pulling out her notebook more as a means of distracting the detective than anything else. “How’s she doing?”

  The detective’s expression turned grim. “She didn’t make it.”

  Baran stiffened. Jane glanced over at him. His face was blank, but she could sense his helpless anger at the news. He’d tried so desperately to save her….

  “That’s too bad,” she said softly. Straightening her shoulders, she assumed an expression of cool professional interest. “What can you tell me about the crash?”

  Tom lifted a sandy brow at her. “I just directed traffic, Jane. You need to talk to the Highway Patrol to get the details. You know that.”

  Of course she did, but she also wanted to keep him from grilling Baran. “Oh, yeah. So what about the murder? Can you tell me anything about it?”

  Tom hesitated, then sighed. “Let me go get my paperwork out of the car.” He got up and headed back toward his Crown Vic.

  As he walked away, Jane looked at Baran, taking in his stony expression. “You tried,” she said softly.

  He shrugged, but something in the movement communicated pain. “Evidently I wasn’t supposed to succeed.”

  Thirty minutes later Jane tucked her notebook back in her purse as Tom drove away. He’d given her the formal details of the case, including the victim’s identification. She’d have to get the details of the cause of death from the Tayanita county coroner, but she already knew what he’d say: Jennifer Moore had been strangled, then methodically butchered.

  She sighed and looked over at Baran, who’d listened patiently during her conversation with Reynolds. “So where do we go from—”

  “…Alpha six, caller reports stabbing at 534 Cherokee Lane,” the scanner interrupted.

  All three of them froze, looking at the rectangular device as the tension rose, almost vibrating in the air between them. “Is that…” Baran began.

  “…white male victim, blond hair, blue eyes. Caller said she stabbed him in the buttocks when she caught him with another woman.”

  Relieved, Jane grinned at the Warlord. “Ten will get you twenty the butt in question was bare and between the other woman’s thighs at the time of the stabbing.”

  Baran’s lips twitched as he relaxed, sitting back on the cement bench. “In any case, I doubt Druas was involved.”

  “Not unless he was the victim, anyway.” She snorted. “Now, there’s a mental image to cherish.”

  “We’re not that lucky.”

  “Not judging by recent events, no.” Jane sobered. “So, as I was saying before our butt-stabbing friend interrupted—where do we go from here?”

  Baran shook his head, beads tapping his cheek. “I have no idea. Unless you want to drive around Tayanita County while I scan every house.”

  “God, please no,” Freika said from underneath the table. “I don’t think I could take being cooped up in that truck with both your libidos that long. I’m traumatized enough as it is.”

  Jane picked up a cold french fry and threw it at him. He snapped it out of the air. As he swallowed, she looked over at Baran. “Much as I hate to admit it, I don’t care for that idea, either.”

  He shrugged and drummed his fingers on the cement table. “It does sound like a waste of time.”

  “Besides,” she added, picking the scanner up and tucking it back into her purse, “I’ve got a newspaper to put out tomorrow, and right now I don’t have a damn thing to put in it. Well, nothing anybody would believe anyway, assuming I could even print it….”

  “Which you can’t,” Frieka said, popping over the lip of the table to lick up a couple of surviving fries with his long pink tongue. “You know, these are good.”

  Jane aimed a swat at his pointed ears. He dodged, giving her a dirty look. “As I was saying,” she continued to Baran, “I need to do a couple more interviews.”

  He lifted a questioning brow. “With whom?”

  She grimaced. “Jennifer Moore’s family.”

  Which, she knew, wasn’t going to be any fun at all.

  Cars were lined up on both sides of the street in front of the neat brick colonial that belonged to Jennifer’s sister, Rebecca Rogers.

  Jane pulled the SUV into an empty spot and got out as she draped the chain of her press card around her neck. Opening the rear door, she reached for the huge peace lily that occupied the seat next to Freika. She’d had to pick it up at the grocery store, since all the florists were closed on Sunday.

  Reporters didn’t usually give flowers to survivors, but Jane had gotten into the habit years ago. It was a multipurpose gesture, showing she both sympathized and regretted intruding. Families seemed to get the message; she got cussed out a lot less now, and people were more inclined to talk to her.

  “You’re going to have to stay in the car,” she told the wolf when he started to jump out past her.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “Let me out to terrorize the neighbors.”

  Jane snorted. “This is South Carolina, furball—even the little old ladies are armed. Somebody’d shoot you.” Turning, she found Baran eyeing the line of cars with a frown.

  “I don’t understand why this is necessary,” he said. “They can’t tell us anything about Druas.”

  “No, but they can tell me something about Jennifer Moore,” she said, fluffing the plant’s emerald leaves. “And like it or not, talking to the families of victims is part of my job.”

  Jane hadn’t even bothered to ask Tom where to find Jennifer’s family—she’d known he wouldn’t tell her. But when she’d driven by the Trib office, she’d discovered that, as she’d hoped, the funeral home had already faxed in the obituary. As was customary, the obit had listed where Jennifer’s family could be reached.

  The plant in her arms and Baran at her heels, Jane started toward the brick two-story. Her stomach twisted with that ugly, sick feeling she always got when she had to conduct this kind of interview. She knew families of murder victims often seethed with impotent rage—a rage for which reporters made the perfect guilt-free target.

  Unfortunately, without a human glimpse of the victim’s personality, it was too easy for readers to view this kind of story as more titillating than tragic. So Jane gritted her teeth and sought to ignore the knots assembling themselves in her stomach.

  Then Baran took her elbow as she started across the neatly trimmed lawn. There was something so comforting about his solid male presence, she felt the knots ease.

  This was, she thought, so much easier with a partner.

  A number of people were sitting out o
n the house’s screened-in front porch. One of the traditions of Southern grief was that friends and family always gathered as soon as they heard the news of a death, to sympathize, cry, and bring food. The crowd usually ended up spilling out on the porch; Jane had lost count of the number of interviews she’d done standing on the front stoop.

  A pale, subdued young woman came to push the screen door open and take the peace lily from her arms. “Thank you for coming,” she said in a soft upper-class drawl, probably assuming Jane and Baran were friends of the family.

  Jane lifted her laminated press badge and met the woman’s eyes. “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief. Jane Colby with The Tayanita Tribune. We were wondering if you had a photo you wanted to run of Mrs. Moore in the paper tomorrow.” Usually the funeral home took care of that detail, but then again, they might not.

  The brunette’s expression cooled. “I’ll check,” she said, and turned around to step back into the house.

  Jane, with Baran behind her, instantly found herself the focus of five pairs of hostile eyes. “I want to tell you how sorry I am for your loss,” she said, letting the sympathy she felt show in her own gaze. “This is”—she couldn’t think of a word that did it justice and settled on—“horrible.”

  A tall, thin girl spoke up from the wooden porch swing. “Did the police tell you anything? Do they know…”

  Somebody hushed the teenager, but Jane answered her question anyway. “At this point, they’re still investigating, trying to find witnesses.”

  “It wasn’t Barry,” a haggard, potbellied man said. Grief and anger seethed in his voice. “People are going to think it was Barry, but he was at work. Second shift at the Triad plant. This is killing him. And the kids…Her little kids…”

  She had two, according to the obit. They were six and four; Tom had said they’d been spending the night with their grandmother when it happened. Jane winced at the thought of what Druas might have done to them had they been home.