by Lisa Jackson
Fear skittered down her spine and inside she was suddenly as cold as death. Her fingers, clenched around the hidden knife, began to sweat, and her heart was trip-hammering out of control. What did she know about this man?
Nothing but what he’s told you.
It could be a pack of lies.
It could be the truth.
But he’s all you’ve got, Jillian.
Be he saint or sinner, he’s all you’ve got.
“Were their tires shot out?” she asked, her voice a whisper that seemed to echo off the rafters high overhead.
He shook his head, but his skin had paled slightly and she couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or lying through his teeth. “I don’t know. But maybe. The police always hold back details, in case some nutcase claims responsibility.” His eyes darkened a bit, his nostrils flaring. He rubbed his chin as he walked to the windows and glared through the panes. “To weed the goats from the sheep.”
“The sheep being a killer in this case?” she asked, barely able to force the words past her teeth.
“Yeah. I guess so.” He was dead serious when he asked her, “Do you think you were targeted by this guy?”
“I don’t know.” How much could she tell this man, a virtual stranger?
He still looked through the window, his eyes thinning, as if he were trying to see further into the blizzard, catch a view beyond the pale. “Why the hell were you driving up on that ridge in the storm?”
“Why were you?” she responded.
He turned quickly, but his expression was hard as ever. “I was trying to find an alternate way to town for supplies. I was on my snowmobile and the storm was getting worse, but I did hear something.” He shook his head and rubbed a hand around his neck as he let out his breath and walked to the fire.
He’s hiding something, Jillian sensed, and her skin prickled in dread. He’s playing the same kind of cat-and-mouse game with you as you are with him.
She felt her heart drop.
“I thought…I mean, it was hard to hear because the engine on my Arctic Cat is pretty loud, but I thought I heard a rifle shot. Didn’t sound like a car backfiring.” His eyes found hers and she saw something in their gray depths, something dark and secret. She remembered someone near her car at the accident, a dark figure hovering nearby.
He walked to the fire again, his legs blocking the view of the flames, causing the room to darken. To shrink. While the wind never let up. Just kept shrieking.
“Okay,” she said quietly, not wanting to irritate him. “So you heard the shot, then what?”
For a second he didn’t answer and the soft hiss of the fire slipped through the room. “Then,” he finally said, “there was the sound of the crash, breaking limbs, groaning metal, someone screaming.”
Her throat turned to sand. Memories of the car’s horrific spin and plunge through the gaping white canyon cut through her mind. “Yes,” she said hoarsely.
He came a little closer, closing the distance between them. “Do you think you were a target?” he asked again.
She wanted to lie, but didn’t dare. He was too close. Her fingers squeezed around the crutch handle as well as the knife. “I…yeah, I think so.”
“And who would be out in the middle of the worst storm in a decade, lying in wait with a rifle, ready for target practice?”
She tensed inside. Wondered if she were talking to the very man who had taken aim at her, a sharpshooter who had intentionally shot at her.
“Tell me, Jillian,” he insisted, near enough now that she could feel the heat of his body, see the pores of his skin, notice the cruel turn of his lips. “Who do you think would want to kill you?”
Chapter Eleven
MacGregor’s question hung in the air between them while the dog, at last having given up bristling all over, turned in a circle in front of the hearth before settling onto a rag rug near the heat.
Her heart was pounding.
He was so damned close.
She thought about whipping out the knife, of telling him to back off, but she didn’t, not yet. Best to hold the weapon in reserve, she thought.
“I have no idea who would want to kill me,” she stated.
“Really?” MacGregor didn’t bother to hide his disbelief, but he backed up a couple of steps, giving her some space, allowing her to let out her breath and hear something more than the pounding of her heart in her eardrums. “You don’t have any enemies?”
“None that would want to murder me.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Yes.” But was she? Dear God, the man was making her paranoid.
“Someone took a shot at you.” He unzipped his coat and slid his arms out of the sleeves, as if he’d finally warmed up. Something jangled in his pocket. Coins? Keys? A metal dog whistle?
“Or they were taking potshots at cars. I don’t think it was intentional. At least, not at me.”
“No?” Again, he was openly sarcastic and she felt a dread as cold and sharp as the icicles hanging from the eaves of this cabin.
Just who the hell was he?
It could be that he’s part of some kind of elaborate plot to kidnap or even kill you, and so far it’s working, isn’t it? She reined in her thoughts in a hurry. She’d never been one to believe in conspiracy theories and wasn’t about to start now.
But Aaron had been.
He’d always been certain someone, probably some kind of government agent, had been out to get him. He’d believed that John F. Kennedy had been killed by a group affiliated with Russia, Castro or the mafia, and he had been certain that D. B. Cooper, the skyjacker who had jumped out of a plane in the Northwest in the early seventies, had received help and somehow miraculously survived. Jillian, though, had always been a realist.
Until now.
Until she was trapped by a snowstorm with a stranger in the wilds of Montana.
Until she might possibly be the victim of a killer in this frigid killing ground. Had this man shot out her tire then “rescued” her, only to eventually murder her? It took all her restraint not to slide a glance toward his gun cabinet, though she wondered what kind of rifles were locked inside.
She clasped her hands together tightly. “You think someone was trying to kill me? Me, personally?”
“I don’t know.” He threw his jacket over the back of the couch and bent down to unlace his boots. “Do you?”
“I pissed off some people in my life, like I said. My sister, for sure. But not enough for anyone to want to kill me.” She watched as he kicked off a boot, nudging the heel of one with the toe of the other, then unzipped his ski pants, beneath which he was wearing jeans. The Goretex-looking outer layer of pants wound up beside the jacket. Now, at least, he looked thirty pounds lighter, but still big and strong enough to be intimidating.
“You should lie down,” MacGregor said, shoving a hand through his hair. “Elevate the ankle.”
It was true enough; her whole leg was aching now and she was tired from balancing herself against the table with her crutch. But the thought of going back into the bedroom, lying on the cot alone while listening to the wind howl, her mind spinning with questions, her imagination running wild with what he was doing, didn’t cut it.
“I think I’ll just sit here.” She pointed to the ancient chair and ottoman. Without waiting for him to answer, she hitched her way to the chair and sank down.
“How about I get us each something to drink?”
“Like what?” She settled into the chair and kept her knife in her sleeve. She wasn’t about to relax. Not yet.
Harley climbed to his feet and trotted, toenails clicking, into the kitchen after MacGregor. Through the archway, he said, “I’ve got coffee…and…” She heard him rooting around in the cupboards, doors opening and closing with soft thuds. “Well…no tea…but I do have some packets of instant soup. Or whiskey. That’s about what we’re down to. Whiskey over snow. We’ve got lots of that. Kind of an alcoholic snow cone.”
Was he kidding? “I think I’ll pass on the frozen drink,” she called toward the open doorway, but her stomach rumbled at the mere mention of food. How long had she gone without eating? Hell, she couldn’t remember her last meal.
He returned with a coffeepot that he set in the glowing coals of the fire. “This’ll take a while to heat,” he explained as his dog, with a hard last glare and snarl at Jillian, turned several circles before lying down on his rug again. His black-and-white head rested on his white paws as he stared at her.
“You never answered my question,” he reminded her. “What the hell were you doing driving in the blizzard?”
He hung his ski wear on pegs near the fireplace, then turned to her. “In the middle of the worst storm to hit this part of the state in a decade?”
“I was headed to Missoula,” she admitted after a moment.
“What’s there?”
“Not what. Who. And the answer is, my ex-husband.”
MacGregor considered it. “Maybe there’s someone who might want to kill you.”
“The divorce was amicable.”
He skewered her with a disbelieving look. “Yeah, right. And so why were you risking life and limb, driving through the Bitterroots in a snowstorm, to visit your ex?”
“I…I needed to talk to him.”
A dark eyebrow raised.
“A phone call wouldn’t have worked. I needed to see his reaction.”
“When you told him what?”
“When I asked him if he sent me pictures that are supposedly of my first husband. My dead first husband.”
He sat back on his heels. “Your ex–second husband sent you pictures of your dead first husband?”
“Yes, well, I think so. It could be a wild goose chase. I thought he died on a hiking trip in South America.”
“Your first husband…who’s dead. You think. But you’ve seen pictures of him, from your second husband.”
“Or someone who could be Aaron’s twin.”
“There a third husband in there?”
“No,” she answered dryly. “Just the two.”
“But now you think husband one might still be alive.”
“I don’t know. I had the pictures with me. They were in my notebook case.”
He walked to a built-in cupboard and withdrew her purse and laptop carrying case, both of which he brought to her chair and set next to the ottoman. Something about seeing her things again nearly brought tears to her eyes. It was as if she suddenly realized the desperation of her situation, how far removed she was from her life. Clearing her throat, she refused to break down, but she had to blink rapidly.
MacGregor asked, “Want me to get the photos out?”
“I assume you’ve already seen them.”
He nodded, not denying a word of it, as he took another trip to the cupboard and returned with her suitcase and the tattered remains of her grandmother’s quilt.
Again her heart squeezed and she wondered if she’d ever get home again.
“I did look through all your things. I was trying to figure out who you were and who I should call.”
“You have a phone?”
“A cell. But it’s not working. Neither is yours.”
She didn’t doubt him, but opened her purse with one hand and scrounged for her phone, searching past the lipstick tubes, pens, wallet, checkbook and—
“It would be easier if you dropped the knife.”
Her head snapped up to find him staring at her. For a split second she was certain he could see to the bottom of her soul. The filet knife felt suddenly heavy and bulky. She swallowed hard. Noticed that the dog had closed his eyes and fallen asleep. “I—uh…”
“Just drop it from your sleeve. Or do you want me to take it from you?”
“No…uh…” Deliberately, she set the knife on a small scarred table that held a single kerosene lamp, a fishing magazine and two books on astronomy.
“So now why don’t you start at the beginning?” he suggested.
How foolish she’d been to think she could trust him. And how ultimately dependent she was on him. She pulled out her cell phone and turned it on, hoping beyond hope that she would have service. Of course, she didn’t. No connecting bars registered and the battery was nearly dead.
Just as he’d said. She felt more vulnerable than ever.
“I have tried to call out,” he said. “Every damned day. That’s why I leave sometimes. To try and find a signal.”
She wondered about that. The times she’d thought she was alone, the hours when he’d been out of the cabin in the middle of a blizzard. It just hadn’t made much sense.
“I don’t get much service to begin with and I think some of the towers have been damaged by the storms.”
“Great.”
“I could have told you that the minute you woke up, but I figured you wouldn’t believe me.”
That much was right.
“So now,” he prodded. “About your husband?”
Jillian sighed. She stared at him and time stretched. And then she decided to go for it, just tell him everything. She began with her marriage to Aaron, what had happened in Suriname, then a fast-forward through her second marriage to the weird messages and finally the photographs, which, of course, he’d recovered from her car, as they’d been tucked in a pocket of her computer case. While she explained, he listened and tended the water heating in a coffeepot on the coals of the fire. He asked a few questions, but for the most part just let her speak, his face grim and taut.
When she’d finished, he poured hot water into a cup filled with instant coffee crystals and asked, “So now you believe your first husband, Aaron, is alive.”
“I think someone wants me to believe it.”
“To lure you here?” he asked.
She took a sip of the coffee. The hot liquid slid down her throat and hit her stomach hard. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
“But the man in the picture looks enough like him that you came?”
“Yeah, I guess.” She was shaking her head at her own folly. “I know, it seems kinda crazy now.” She shoved her hair out of her eyes. “Or really crazy.”
“Was the marriage to Aaron in trouble?”
“No!” she said with more passion than she’d intended. “Well, I don’t think so. I mean, he had no reason to disappear that I know of.”
“Did he have bad debts?”
“We didn’t owe more than we could pay.”
“Did he have life insurance?”
“Yes, and it took a while, but they finally paid me. That’s how I bought my townhouse.” Why in the world was she confiding in him?
“And until you saw the pictures, you were convinced he was dead. He didn’t come after you for the money.”
“This letter and the phone calls—they came out of the blue. And now I think they all might have been a wild goose chase.”
“To lure you here,” he said again, “so someone could kill you?”
“That sounds…ridiculous, doesn’t it?”
He shrugged, then rocked back on his heels and frowned. “I’m a hunter. I was in the military. There are lots of ways to kill a person and do it quickly, maybe not even get caught, but shooting out a tire and hoping the car will free-fall into an icy ravine isn’t a sure thing.”
“As evidenced that I’m still here,” she agreed.
“Right, and the killer knows you survived. Or, at least, I’m assuming he checked the car.”
“Maybe not. He could’ve thought the job was finished.”
“Or been frightened away by me.”
“Why not just shoot you, too?”
“He might not have been able to get a shot off. And anyway, we can’t assume you were the ultimate target. As you said, there’ve been other women killed around here. A couple of them, I think, and they, too, were forced off the road, like you, though I don’t know all the details.”
“We talked about the serial killer thing before,” she reminded him, and tr
ied to ignore the panic she felt rising inside. “Are you trying to say that this killer knows his victims, or at least enough intimate details of their lives to get them here?” Dear God, she couldn’t believe the words that passed her lips and yet…. “Do you know the names of the other women?”
He shook his head. “No. Why? Do you think you might know them?”
She glanced nervously to the windows and the darkening landscape beyond. “I think I read one of their names, but it didn’t ring any bells.” She forced herself to look directly into his eyes. How did she know he wasn’t the killer? That he wasn’t toying with her? It didn’t seem that way. In fact he seemed downright concerned.
She swallowed hard.
Could she trust this man?
Did she have a choice?
The answer was no.
Like it or not, she was stuck here, at least for a while. But she didn’t have to stay. If she could get herself mobile, able to walk just a little, and the weather broke. He’d mentioned he had a snowmobile. She’d driven one before, while she and Aaron were on a ski trip to Colorado. If push came to shove, she could get it started and drive the damned thing to civilization, or another cabin, or any damned where.
She just needed a key.
Mason Rivers was a prick.
And a prick who was hiding something, Pescoli thought as she pulled into her driveway, cell phone at her ear. She’d just driven home through the blizzard to make sure the kids took everything they needed for the weekend visit with their father. Lights were on inside the house, but Jeremy’s truck wasn’t parked in its usual spot.
“My secretary said you were trying to reach me,” Rivers said guardedly, after brief introductions.
No shit, Sherlock, Pescoli thought, but kept it to herself.
“You’ve heard about your ex-wife?” Regan hit the button on her garage door opener.
“I was out of town, but a colleague brought in the paper saying that her car had been found at the bottom of a canyon.”