There, she found a drugstore and went inside. Each step intensified her dread. Willpower kept her headed for the special products aisle. Once she was there, the row of shelves became a tunnel, sucking her in. No way back. Only forward to a potentially dreadful outcome.
At the pregnancy tests, she forced away her flightiness and picked up one. The package felt like lead in her hand all the way to the checkout counter. The girl glanced at her as she processed the purchase.
“Where is your restroom?”
The girl blinked and then pointed to a back corner.
Penny took the test there. After going into a stall and performing the task, she stared at the positive sign as it emerged, telling her what she already suspected but didn’t want to believe.
Pregnant.
She would become a mommy?
A mommy without a daddy for her baby.
She saw herself advancing to upper executive management, making a name for herself, career-driven and socially active, not a mother by accident. This must have been how her own mother had gotten trapped. She’d carelessly had an affair with a man who didn’t love her. Her mother could claim youth and stupidity. Penny should have known better.
Anyway. On to the next problem. If you could call it a problem. She’d been fine all these years without a father. Now that he had a face he felt real, not just a name her mother told her. Maybe she needed proof, to see him with her own eyes, a living, breathing being, the father who had discarded her but embraced three other children.
She shouldn’t go there and put herself through the torment. But why would something torment her that hadn’t mattered until now? She didn’t have the answer to that. But she hoped to by the time she returned from North Dakota.
* * *
Kadin couldn’t believe Penny left without him hearing a thing. He shrugged his gun holster over a short-sleeved button-up shirt and then hid the hardware with a light dress jacket. He’d tracked Penny to Bismarck. What the hell was she doing? Why did she have to pick now to go find her father? Grabbing his keys, he hurried down the stairs and into his office.
A man stood there. Tall, really tall, with a blond buzz cut that hinted to at least an affinity to military, his blue-gray eyes staring hard at him and his leather pants and jacket suggesting he rode a motorcycle. Kadin looked past him, through the office door and out the front window. Yes. A mean-looking one leaned on its stand.
Kadin had locked the building, but Penny must have left the front door unlocked. He went for one of his guns.
The man held up his hand. “I’m here for work.”
Stepping farther into the office, Kadin took his hand off his pistol. “I’m on my way out. You’ll have to come back.”
“This won’t take long. And I came here all the way from Montana.”
Then why didn’t he call first? Actually that seemed really strange. “What’s in Montana?”
“Home.”
The way he answered sounded too simple, as though there were so much more to it than that.
“How did you find out about me?” Kadin asked.
The grin that half formed looked more wry than amused. “You’re something of a celebrity.”
Not that much of one. People had to be looking to find him. “Not good enough.”
“I’m available and your company needs me.”
“Why you?”
“I was a marine for eight years before becoming a narcotics investigator and SWAT member.”
Now they were getting somewhere. He certainly sounded as though he had the right background, but Kadin didn’t have time for an interview. If it weren’t for Penny running off...
“Look, I really have to go,” Kadin said.
“Working a case?”
He leaned over his desk and picked up a business card. “Call me in a day or two.”
The man took the card. “I hoped we’d get to know each other sooner than that.”
Kadin began to look closer at the man. He’d seen eyes like that before, past haunts kept at bay by tough determination.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Lucas Curran.”
“You’re part of a SWAT in Montana?”
“LAPD. I resigned a couple of years ago and moved to Montana.”
That could be impressive, or not. “Why did you leave?”
“I got bored.”
There was that grin again, and the simple response that held hidden meaning not divulged.
He couldn’t afford to beat around the bush. Penny could be in danger. He had to get to her. Now. “I don’t hire anyone who has something to hide.”
The stranger leaned over the desk, his long fingers grasping a folder and sliding that toward Kadin. “Everything you need to know about me is in here. I’d be a great asset to this agency.”
Kadin picked up the folder and put it in his leather briefcase that also had his ammo.
“And this agency will be an asset to me.”
Kadin looked up at Lucas’s pointed, suggestive look. What personal vendetta did he have? Kadin could understand the drive to fight back against injustice or to stop criminals from hurting anyone else. But a man looking for a cover to practice lawless revenge crossed a line.
“Why do you need my agency?” Kadin asked. “Why can’t you work alone to do what you intend to do?”
“I intend to solve cold cases,” Lucas said.
“Didn’t you do that in LA?”
The man gestured to the briefcase. “Everything you need to know is in there.”
He was sure full of himself. Or was that a smoke screen?
“Why do you want to work for me?”
“Same reason you opened an agency like this.”
Kadin wondered if he could finish that sentence with a leading except. “You won’t get a license to kill working for Dark Alley Investigations.”
“I don’t need one. I just need freedom and unconventional resources, which I am sure you understand.”
That, Kadin couldn’t argue with. But he wouldn’t hire anyone he didn’t check out, and this man seemed to be withholding something.
“I’ll let you know.”
The man reached out and shook his hand. “I’m looking forward to working for you.”
Kadin watched Lucas leave, wondering how he could be so certain.
* * *
After his new pilot took him to Bismarck, Kadin waited outside the office building where Penny’s father worked. He’d known the pilot since college and hired him as soon as he’d decided to open Dark Alley. He needed a plane so he could transport equipment and weapons without incident, and the small, private airstrip a few miles outside Rock Springs afforded him convenience and secrecy. The owner was another of the first friends Kadin had made when he moved.
Penny had been sickeningly easy to find. And she still hadn’t noticed him parked across the street. She kept watching the front doors of the engineering company where Alias worked, sometimes biting her nail, other times checking her phone and sending text messages, working on the run. A woman like her would never be able to slow down enough to tolerate life in a small Wyoming town. Would she? Why did he even make the analogy? As if he wanted her to slow down enough to live in the same town as him.
Something in him had conjured the thought. Fantasizing she was that kind of woman, one who loved to fish and relished the quiet, unhurried pace of small towns. No chain coffee shops. No tight schedules. Just peace.
Manufactured peace.
He’d created this. He’d moved to Rock Springs to surround himself with the idea of peace and tranquility. But now he realized that everything he’d created for himself was just an illusion.
Just then Penny stared at the front door of the building. Kadin looked there and saw
Alias Cochrane leaving work in business casual. He went to an Audi sedan and drove out of the parking space, family man on his way home. He glanced at Penny, who stared with fixed absorption, lips parted, unmoving, eyes hidden by sunglasses but he imagined them unblinking.
She began to follow her father as he left the lot. Kadin passed Penny and she didn’t even notice him. If he were a killer, she’d be an easy target.
He passed Alias, not caring if he saw him. He wouldn’t know who he was. Kadin already knew where he lived and wanted to get there first.
Was Penny going to introduce herself? Her boldness didn’t surprise him, but her reaction did. He hadn’t expected her to get so emotional over finding out her father’s identity. He hadn’t seen her this overwrought since he’d first met her. And come to think of it, he hadn’t pinned her for an emotional woman then, either.
Fifteen minutes later, he parked on the opposite side of the street and waited until Alias drove into his driveway. Penny stayed in her car as her father finished gathering his things and climbed out of the car. The front door opened and three children came pouring out. His wife stood in the doorway with an adoring smile. Did they have to choose this day to look like a Hallmark family?
He checked Penny’s reaction. Her lips weren’t parted but she watched with a sort of stunned confusion. This could get bad.
Alias went into the house with his beautiful family, kissing his wife on the way inside with a loving hand on her waist. Even Kadin felt the sting of such perfection, uninterrupted by life’s cruelty.
Penny got out of her car.
Yup. Things were going to get ugly. That perfection was about to receive a good dose of reality.
He couldn’t watch her do this alone. Getting out of the rental, he walked across the street to intercept her. She saw him and stopped short.
“Kadin?”
He reached her and stopped. “What are you doing, Penny?”
“What are you doing? You actually followed me here?”
“You shouldn’t have left without me. Someone is still trying to kill you.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Come on. There’s a better way to do this.”
“There was a better way for him to leave my mother, too,” she snapped, shrugging him off.
“How did he leave her? Did she ever tell you?”
Penny lowered her head and then looked toward the house. Finally she turned back to him. “I’m going to meet him.”
Kadin wasn’t going to stop the inevitable. She’d made up her mind.
“Okay.” He stepped aside to allow her room to pass on the sidewalk. “I’ll go with you.”
“No.”
“I’m going with you.” He walked beside her toward the curving path up to the front door of perfection.
She hesitated, knuckles poised before the door.
“It’s not too late to leave. Spend some time thinking about this,” he said.
“I’ve thought about this long enough.” She pounded the door and then rang the doorbell once.
He half expected her to ring it over and over again.
Less than a minute later, the door opened and Alias’s wife appeared.
“May I speak with Alias?” Penny said.
“Who may I say is calling?” the woman asked, soft spoken, polite, peaceful.
“His daughter,” Penny said.
The woman tried to conceal a sharp breath, her eyes going wide and her exhale shaky. She didn’t know.
Kadin had predicted this. Reality would come crashing down on the Hallmarks today.
“U-um...o-one moment, please.” She left the door open and walked with her hand to her mouth into the kitchen, where Kadin heard the excited voices of kids blurting out the events of their day and Alias chuckling fondly.
“Kids, go wash up for dinner,” the woman said. When she didn’t get an immediate response, she demanded, “Now!”
“Honey,” Alias protested.
She said something low that Kadin couldn’t hear. But the kids scurried up the stairs and out of sight.
Alias approached the door, staring at Penny, while his wife trailed behind, hands clasped and face tight with distress. She didn’t want to witness this, but the scandal of Alias’s firstborn child at the door drew her.
Alias looked from Penny to Kadin and back to Penny. “Uh...h-how did you find me?”
Kadin felt like pinching the bridge of his nose. If Alias meant to make peace with his estranged daughter, he’d just gotten off to a rotten start.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked.
The disconcerted man nodded once. “You’re my daughter.”
“What’s my name?”
Alias swallowed and ran his tongue over his lips. “Jenny.”
“It’s Penny.”
“Penny. I knew that. I...” He rubbed his face briefly. “Y-you caught me off guard. My wife didn’t know about you.”
“Why didn’t you tell her?” Penny asked.
His wife looked expectantly to her husband, obviously injured that he’d married her and started a family with her without being completely honest.
“I...” He looked at his wife. “Honey, I...” He reached for her hands, taking them in his.
“Daddy?”
Kadin saw the youngest of the three peek around the corner of the stairs.
“Go up to your room, sweetie,” Alias said.
Alias’s wife withdrew and stepped back. “I’ll let you talk in private.” With a look at Penny, she turned and went to the young girl at the foot of the stairs, ushering her up and out of sight.
“I can explain,” Alias said to Penny. “You have to understand that your mother and I were very young when she got pregnant.”
“So that made it all right to walk away and leave her with all the responsibility?” Penny looked up at the clean, fresh paint of the front porch and then beyond him. “So you could go on and have an easy life?”
“We were so young...”
“Did you ever care that you had another daughter?” Penny said, not in an emotional way. She asked out of pure curiosity, as though she sought understanding more than a father.
“Of course I did.”
“You forgot my name.”
Alias sighed and rubbed his face again. “I left before you were born. I went to college.”
So, he’d forgotten?
Penny’s eyebrows rose mockingly.
Had he not been caught unprepared, he might have remembered her actual name. Damn, this had to be rough on Penny.
“Your mother knew I had plans to go to college.”
Penny folded her arms, turning the mocking into something even more cynical.
“Look, I’m sorry. I know I made a mistake. I was only thinking of myself. I was eighteen. What do you want from me? Can we talk tomorrow?” He glanced back. “You shouldn’t have come here like this.”
With a scoff, Penny said, “I wasn’t going to come here. I wasn’t even interested in who you were until I read about you in Kadin’s background report.”
Alias looked his way. “Wha—” He glanced back at her. “What background?”
Pivoting, Penny stepped down from the porch.
“Hey...wait! I do want to talk.” Her father came after her.
Penny kept going.
“I have a security clearance,” he said to Kadin. “Is she going to cause trouble?”
His long-lost daughter came to see him and all he could think about was what kind of trouble this would cause his clearance? Still selfish, it would appear.
“How could your own daughter cause you trouble with that?” Kadin hissed, and then before waiting to hear his reply, he turned and left to go after Penny.
“I do care,” Alias called. “I
just didn’t know how to approach her. After so many years had gone by, I thought it was too late.”
Kadin didn’t acknowledge him.
“I have thought of her!” Alias called again.
Penny had reached her car and spun a U-turn before Kadin could catch up to her, then sped off down the street. He cursed and ran to his own rental, racing after her.
* * *
Holding a fingernail polish brush, Penny drew stars on a napkin while she waited for her toenails to dry. She sat on the floor of her hotel suite, knees bent and cotton stuffed between her toes. The TV played a chick flick, she had the lights set dim. Today had accomplished nothing. Nothing but deeper confusion and stirred up angst. Rather than settle her down, seeing her flesh-and-blood father gave her silly thoughts that she hadn’t been enough for him, he hadn’t loved her. That was what had her painting stars on a hotel napkin. Of course his running away had nothing to do with her. He and her mother had been too young. Yes, he’d been a coward for running. A selfish one. But kids made mistakes. Sometimes really big ones.
Her cell vibrated again. If she could mute that, she would, but work might call. Kadin wouldn’t stop calling. Why had he come here, anyway? He’d caused her enough turmoil.
A firm knock on her door announced his arrival. She’d been expecting him. A man like him would find her. He’d found her in North Dakota. Why not find her at her hotel?
She stood and walked on her heels to the door. Once she swung it open, his gaze ran down her body, pausing on her toes and then going back up bare legs to the bright, floral cotton nightie that hung to mid-thigh.
“It’s comfortable,” she said.
His gaze lifted from her breasts, eyes glowing beneath the brim of his hat. “Uh...” He cleared his throat. “May I come in?”
She extended her arm and moved aside, shoving aside the reminder of his image in that picture of him leaning on the tailgate of his truck. “Sure. Join the party.” She waddled back over to her spa on a towel and sat, lifting her glass of pinot noir.
“Is this a pity party?” he asked, sitting down on the floor facing her.
A Wanted Man (Cold Case Detectives Book 1) Page 16