Hiding in Park City

by RaeAnne Thayne

  He was keeping mum about a lot of things these days. He refused to complain about missing out on all the action in the field or about having to pore over old case files or even about having to catch up on a month’s worth of Cale’s paperwork.

  As much as he despised desk work and being planted in this office instead of out in the field where he belonged, it sure beat hell out of the alternative. He would gladly take a few more months of riding a desk just as long as he didn’t have to spend another minute staring at the four walls of his bedroom in Park City.

  He had been back at work a week now, since the day the doctor removed his casts. After the first day back, he decided if he ever broke a limb again, he would just beg the doctors to shoot him and put him out of his misery. He refused to take another day of sick leave.

  The FBI was where he belonged. Here he had a purpose, a mission. He wanted nothing more than to slip back into the persona he was comfortable with, the man he had been before the accident—a hard-nosed FBI agent completely dedicated to his career, to closing cases, to finding justice.

  A man who never had to deal with distractions like a mother who had suddenly barged into his life and seemed to have no intention of allowing herself to be pried out again or a brother who seemed determined to have a relationship again after twenty years.

  Or a beautiful blue-eyed neighbor and her sweet little girls and her problems, who disappeared without a word and left this damn gaping hole in his heart.

  He missed Lisa so much he thought he would go crazy with it. He couldn’t go ten minutes without thinking about her, without worrying about her blood sugar levels and whether she was sleeping enough and how she was keeping up with the girls.

  He hated it. Part of him even thought he might hate her a little bit for putting him through this. He wanted to forget her, but no matter how much he tried to remind himself that she had made the choice to walk away—that she had turned her back on whatever they might have been just on the verge of discovering together—he couldn’t seem to shake her from his mind or his memories.

  Gage turned back to the field notes from one of the cases Davis had worked during his time away. He was trying to see if his partner had missed anything during the interrogation of a suspect in a child prostitution ring when Davis rapped on the open door and peeked his head inside.

  “That the Bamburger file?” Davis asked.

  Gage nodded. “Nasty piece of work there. I would have had a tough time not breaking the bastard’s neck during the interview.”

  “Yeah, I have to admit it was a struggle to keep my hands off him. I had to play nice, though, since Potter was watching.”

  As Davis continued standing in the doorway, Gage began to pick up on the tension radiating from him. “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Finally Davis walked into the office. “I think you need to see this fax that just came over. It took me a few minutes to put the pieces together but you might be quicker than me.”

  He tossed a paper on the desk. Gage picked it up, registering that it was a watch bulletin sent out by the Philadelphia field office at the request of a private investigator.

  The picture on the fax was blurred, but showed a solemn woman with long, straight, light-colored hair above the name Alicia Connelly DeBarillas. He narrowed his gaze, trying to place why something about the woman’s features seemed familiar, but came up empty.

  “We can play twenty questions here or you can fill me in.”

  “Check out the data sheet Philly sent along with it.” Davis handed him another fax. After only a few lines, Gage’s gut contracted as if he’d been slugged.

  He gazed back at the picture, his insides suddenly numb. It was still grainy and indistinct, but now he could see the resemblance in the eyes and the bow-shaped mouth. Chop that light hair off, dye it brown and take away ten pounds or so and this Alicia Connelly DeBarillas was a dead ringer for Lisa Connors.

  Even without having the picture to compare her to, he would have known it was her, just by reading the data sheet. DeBarillas was an emergency room nurse with diabetes from the Philadelphia area involved in a custody dispute over her daughters, Gabriella and Anna, ages five and three. She had been missing approximately two months, he read, right around the time he gained a new neighbor.

  Gage swore long and low, a hot rush of betrayal sweeping through him. This was far worse than thinking she had just run off after their night together. She had played him for a fool. A helpless, invalid fool too stupid and too trusting to ever suspect a sweet-faced woman like her had been lying through her teeth.

  What reason did he have to even think for a minute that Lisa Connors was anything but what she appeared to be? A single mother trying to get by on her own. He never would have suspected she was a fugitive, running from a custody battle over her daughters.

  With whom? He wondered. The bulletin didn’t say. Maybe her husband hadn’t really been killed by a drunk driver. Maybe that was another tale she had spun. Maybe the guy was somewhere back east searching as diligently for his daughters as Gage’s parents had looked for Charlotte.

  He felt sick thinking of it. How much of what she had told him was truth and how much was a lie? What could he believe?

  Had the passion between them been real or feigned? Betrayal coated his throat in thick, greasy layers.

  Now he understood why she left. While he had been stuck at home recovering from his injuries, she probably figured he hadn’t posed much of a threat to her. But when he had told her he was returning to work, she must have known there was a good chance he would eventually connect the dots between Lisa Connors and this Alicia DeBarillas.

  “I think we had better go pay a little visit to your lovely neighbor,” Davis said.

  A whole spate of emotions thrashed through him, and he wanted to throw something. The urge to topple this whole damn desk—computer, paperwork and all—was almost overwhelming.

  “She’s not there,” he growled. “She packed up her girls and took off a week ago.”

  “Any idea where?”

  Gage shook his head. “None whatsoever.”

  “Well, she’s not facing federal charges, apparently. Pennsylvania only gave us the heads-up as a courtesy so we can be on the lookout for her. I guess that means she’s not our problem.”

  Gage shoved away from the desk and grabbed the crutches he was still growing accustomed to. “She’s my problem. I’m going to look for her.”

  He wasn’t about to let her get away with kidnapping those little girls and disappearing like the bastard who took his sister.

  * * *

  Hell was a decaying two-room apartment in North Las Vegas in the middle of a July heat wave.

  Though it was after ten o’clock at night, the temperature outside hovered around a hundred degrees and it wasn’t much cooler than that inside Allie’s apartment. A tiny air-conditioning unit rattled and coughed in the window but was about as effective against the heat as a pea shooter against a Sherman tank.

  She didn’t know when she’d ever been so miserable.

  Allie sagged onto the lumpy couch that came with the apartment. It wasn’t only the heat that bothered her, though, that weighed her down, left her limp and exhausted.

  She could have coped with living in an oven, if her life here had any other redeeming qualities. But she hated this apartment with its grimy windows and ugly seventies furniture, she hated working as a maid at the dismal Four-Leaf Clover Hotel and Casino, she hated having to leave her daughters with a woman she barely knew.

  More than that, she was scared.

  She supposed she could finally admit it here in the solitude of her living room with the girls asleep in the bedroom, their bed an air mattress on the floor where it was a little cooler.

  No, she wasn’t scared. She was petrified. Since leaving Park City three weeks ago, her diabetes had flared out of control. She hadn’t had such wildly fluctuating levels since those awful months after Jaime died. Nothing she did seeme
d to rein it in.

  She had adjusted her diet, she had monkeyed with her insulin, she had done everything she could think of to control it, but nothing seemed to be working.

  Just that afternoon she had finally gathered her nerve and gone to see a doctor. It cost her nearly two hundred dollars cash for him to warn her in a smug, condescending tone that if she didn’t take better care of herself, she would find herself in the hospital within the week.

  What would happen to her girls if she ended up being hospitalized in this strange city where she knew no one? Just thinking about it left her shaky and weak.

  Maybe Irena and Joaquin had been right. Maybe all this time she had been fooling herself to insist that she could care for them by herself, given the uncertainties she lived with daily as a diabetic.

  At least with their grandparents they wouldn’t have to live this crummy, hand-to-mouth existence, living in this kind of hole-in-the-wall apartment building.

  They would be safe, secure, would never want for anything, even if Irena and Joaquin ended up taking off with them to Venezuela and she never saw them again.

  She couldn’t bear this. She couldn’t. What was she supposed to do? She gazed out the window at the dismal urban landscape, all strip malls and crumbling apartment complexes and concrete, with hardly anything green in sight except for a few stunted cacti and a palm tree or two.

  She should never have left Park City. There they had friends and a backyard to play in and a comfortable bedroom, where cool mountain breezes blew in at night.

  But though she might wish with all her heart to be back in that little cottage, she knew it had been impossible to stay. Gage would have found out the truth, and she still would have lost the girls.

  Gage. Oh, how she missed him. She pictured him the last time she had seen him, sleepy and naked and gorgeous, and had to press a hand to her heart at the physical ache there.

  How could she have come to this? In love with the one man with the power to destroy her world? If only she had met and fallen in love with someone safe, someone she could have confided in. Someone who would understand why she’d made the choices she had.

  But she had been destined to love a hard, dedicated FBI agent who would not look with a shred of kindness on a woman who had virtually kidnapped her own children. Not with his own family history.

  “Mama?” Gaby whimpered suddenly, poking her head out of the bedroom. “Can I get a drink of water?”

  To her horror, Allie suddenly realized silent tears were coursing down her cheeks. How long had she been crying? She wiped at them with a surreptitious hand, hoping Gaby wouldn’t notice.

  “I thought you were asleep, honey.”

  “I was but I woked up. It’s too hot.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Gaby studied her for a moment, that sweet little face cocked to one side and her big dark eyes concerned. “Mama, why are you crying?”

  She didn’t know how to answer. To her shame, she wanted to gather Gaby against her and weep into her hair, but she knew she couldn’t impose the burden of comforting her on a child.

  “Do you have an owie?” Gaby asked. “I can kiss it better.”

  Only my spirit, honey, she thought. And my heart. My heart has been shattered into a million pieces and I don’t have the first idea how to put it back together.

  With fierce effort, she choked back the sob welling in her throat. “No owie. I’m fine. I’m hot and I’m tired, that’s all. Let’s both get a drink of water and then we’ll go to bed.”

  Together they walked to the refrigerator where Allie found the pitcher she kept full there. She poured a glass for Gaby, who chugged it as if she’d been stuck in the vast Nevada desert for months.

  “Mama, I don’t like this place very much,” Gaby suddenly said, her voice small and forlorn, as if she were confessing a terrible secret. “It always smells funny.”

  Allie had to agree. If hopelessness and despair had an aroma, it would probably be the sad scent of the Joshua Tree Apartments.

  “It’s just different than you’re used to.”

  “I liked our other house. With Gage and Ruth and Jessica and Gage’s nice mommy. Why can’t we go back there?”

  How was she supposed to answer that? She knew there were no words a five-year-old would understand so she didn’t even try. “We’ll like it here after we’ve been here a while. Now back to bed or you’ll be too tired to play with Anna tomorrow.”

  To her relief, Gaby didn’t argue. With one last hug, she went back into the bedroom. After Allie tucked her in again, she returned to the other room. On that lumpy couch again, she hugged her knees, wishing with all her heart that she could avoid the inevitable. She couldn’t see any way around it, though, and the knowledge pierced through her like a thousand nails.

  She had to turn herself in.

  It would mean losing the girls to Jaime’s parents and how would she ever survive that? She wouldn’t, she knew. She would shrivel up and die without them.

  But she had to. Keeping them in these conditions, with her medical condition so precarious, was cruel and selfish.

  She had to think about what would be in their best interest. She finally knew she could no longer avoid the grim realization that the answer to that question wasn’t to live constantly on the run with someone who might end up hospitalized—or worse—at any moment.

  Just how did she go about turning herself in? She had no idea but she knew she would have to do it tonight or she feared she would lose her resolve. Should she just phone the nearest police department and say, Hey, come get me?

  Here was another chapter she would have added to the imaginary fugitive handbook she’d been writing since leaving Philadelphia—when you realize the game is up, how do you fold your cards and get up from the table?

  She could call Gage, she supposed. He would probably be able to alert Las Vegas authorities to pick her up. She shivered, imagining his reaction to that kind of late-night phone call. He would hate her for deceiving him. He would be livid. No, she couldn’t face him.

  What about Twila Langston? As much as she respected the woman who had represented her in the custody dispute with the DeBarillas, she doubted her attorney would be able to help her out of her predicament. No one could. But at least Twila might be able to tell her the legal steps she needed to take to turn herself in.

  It was past 1:00 a.m. in Philadelphia, but she knew Twila would take her call. Throughout the custody proceedings, they had become friends as well as having a good attorney-client relationship. Twila was probably sick with worry about where she had gone.

  With her heart beating an uneven rhythm and her insides quivering, she crossed to the phone. She had no trouble remembering the attorney’s home number and she dialed the digits with shaking fingers.

  She paused before hitting the last number. This was it. With this phone call, her life would change irrevocably. She would lose everything she held most dear in the world. Did she have the courage to go through with it?

  She had to, for her daughters’ sake. Almost defiantly she started to lift her finger to finish poking in the number just as the sound of the doorbell rang through the small apartment like a funeral knell.

  CHAPTER 17

  Allie stared at the closed door, then back at the phone. Indecision wrangled within her. Should she complete the call to her attorney or answer the door? Maybe this was an omen that she wasn’t supposed to turn herself in yet.

  No, she couldn’t take the easy way out, tempting though it might seem. She knew exactly what she had to do, and no late-night visitor could deter her from it now that she had found the courage to go through with it.

  The doorbell rang again, followed by a heavy, insistent knock. She frowned and gazed back at the phone. At this rate, whoever was out there would wake up the girls and she would have to spend several more hours trying to settle them down again in the heat and misery of this dismal apartment.

  Who could possibly be banging on her door a
t this hour? She knew no one in Las Vegas but Carla Galvez, the downstairs neighbor who watched the girls, and she would have no reason to come over this late.

  With a sigh, Allie carefully hung up the phone, with a promise to herself that she would just see who might be here so late at night. Then she would call Twila and set the wheels in motion for her surrender.

  She moved to the door and craned to look through the tiny peephole. At first, all she could see was what looked like a broad male chest covered in a maroon T-shirt, then she thought she glimpsed the silver gleam of aluminum crutches to the side.

  Her breath rushed from her lungs in a whoosh. Impossible! It couldn’t be. Of course Gage wasn’t the only person in the western United States on crutches—but who else would be knocking on her door?

  With hands that trembled, she worked the dead bolt and yanked open the door, forgetting about the security chain. Through the narrow gap, she spied two men, both large, both intimidating.

  And both very familiar.

  Gage and his partner, Cale Davis, stood on the walkway outside her door. In utter shock, barely able to think straight, she fumbled with the security chain but eventually managed to work it free so she could thrust open the door.

  “G-Gage!”

  For several seconds she could do nothing but stare at him, fighting a wild urge to leap into his arms.

  “Mrs. DeBarillas.” His voice was hard, like shards of glass from a broken window spilling onto a city sidewalk. Hard enough that Allie checked her body’s instinctive sway toward the safety of his arms.

  This man didn’t offer safety. Far from it. He was tough and dangerous and bitterly angry.

  And he knew her real name, which meant he likely knew everything.

  “I…what are you doing here?”

  “May we come in, Mrs. DeBarillas?”

  With effort, she wrenched her gaze from the heat of Gage’s expression to his partner, who was studying her with far more compassion in his eyes. “Yes. Of course, Agent Davis. Come in.”

  She swung the door open wider and stepped aside to let them enter. The apartment immediately seemed to shrink to closet size with two large males taking up so much space.