Arctic Christmas Ambush

by Sherri Shackelford

  Shane took the envelope and shut the door as Mark turned away.

  Kara was at his side in an instant. “What is it?”

  He peeled open the flap. “Let’s find out.”

  Inside was a postcard. The back was blank save for the words To, From and Postage Here. There was no stamp. No address.

  He flipped over the card and Kara gasped.

  The front was a gaudy hue of yellow with large block letters containing a different picture in the body of each. There were orange trees and palm leaves and a sunny beach scene. It was the sort of postcard a harried traveler picked up at the airport.

  The text read: Greetings from Florida.

  Below that, someone had scrawled a message in red sharpie: An eye for an eye is never enough.

  EIGHT

  Kara sucked in a ragged breath. “I don’t understand.”

  His face grim, Shane carefully set the postcard on the narrow table beside the door. “This was planned. It had to be. It’s not like you can buy a postcard from Florida in the gift shop.”

  “I don’t get it.” She held up her hands as though warding off the truth. “I don’t get any of this. How did someone find me? My records are sealed. Why come after me now? Now that Nick is dead? What’s the point?”

  Not once had she ever contacted anyone from her old life. She’d been using the same identity for so long, she barely remembered who she’d been before. How did someone else?

  “I don’t know,” Shane said. “This feels off.”

  A scorching wave of anger singed her. “I’m contacting the marshals immediately.” She spoke through clenched teeth. “If someone leaked my identity or my location, then the information came from the marshals’ office.”

  She was furious at the marshals but more furious at herself. A part of her had known all along she was responsible for Walt’s death. She simply hadn’t wanted to face the truth. If she held on to the anger, she could forestall the grief and shame for another few hours. Anything to alleviate the pain. The guilt was rolling across her like a slow-moving glacier, grinding everything in its path to dust.

  “Sit,” Shane ordered gently. “Let’s think about this before we jump to any conclusions.”

  “How can we not jump to conclusions?” She threw up her hands. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  Only two days ago everything had been normal. Right. Then the bottom had dropped out of her world. She felt as if she might shatter at any moment. She perched on the edge of the sofa and hung her head, praying she’d wake from the nightmare.

  A gentle hand touched her chin, and Shane urged her to meet his gaze. His touch was soothing, his understanding reached through her, warming her. She’d always thought being alone was the better choice. There was safety in solitude. At least that’s what she’d thought. A chill swept through her. Having someone share her burden was a luxury she didn’t deserve.

  “No matter what happens,” he said, “Walt’s death was not your fault.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. You are not responsible for someone else’s action.”

  Her gut knotted. When she’d heard Nick Amato had died, she’d taken her first full breath in fifteen years. She’d let herself relax her guard. Kodiak Springs was another fresh start and a new beginning. She was going to put down roots this time. She was finally going to have a home.

  “Why didn’t he kill me?” she asked in a watery voice. “Why did it have to be Walt?”

  This end was inevitable. Every good thing in her life had gone bad, one way or another. It was only a matter of time before this interlude of happiness ended. Every time she found her footing, it seemed like something came along and knocked her back down.

  “I don’t know why Walt was killed,” Shane said. “All I know is that something about this doesn’t feel right.

  “Walt was killed because he knew me. That’s why. I’m the only connection. This proves it.”

  “But why the cloak-and-dagger with the postcard? Why not simply finish the job?”

  “To let me know I’m next.”

  “To what purpose, though? The more bread crumbs he leaves behind, the more he risks getting caught. This feels personal. Immediate. Who in Nick’s life held that kind of a grudge for fifteen years?”

  “What if he’s not dead?” She recognized she was grasping wildly at straws, but she didn’t care. “What if Nick, I don’t know, faked his death and now he’s after me?”

  Shane hoisted an eyebrow. “If he was smart enough to fool a prison guard, a medical examiner and an embalmer, he’s not going to be dumb enough to trap himself in Alaska at an isolated resort. He’d need plastic surgery, as well. I studied the case. I saw his picture. You could spot that nose from across a football field.”

  His doubt gave her pause. She touched the spot on her forehead where he’d kissed her. For a moment when he held her, she’d thought she saw hurt in his eyes. That didn’t make sense. When they’d argued, he hadn’t seemed the least bit fazed by walking away from her. He’d always been independent and self-contained, so the idea that something she said could hurt him rocked her back a step.

  How had everything in her life gotten so off balance? No one was behaving the way she expected them to, least of all Shane.

  “Wait a second.” She narrowed her gaze. “I don’t get it. This morning you were certain this was about me. Now we have proof and you’re waffling.”

  Why the sudden change in Shane’s opinion?

  He threaded his hands behind his head, then lowered his arms to his sides once more. “All I can do is trust my gut. Someone is making a concerted effort to let us know your cover has been blown.”

  “He wants to see me suffer before he kills me.”

  “Except he already tried to kill you.” Shane gestured toward her leg. “You’ve got the bullet wound to prove it.”

  They were both frustrated. Kara felt as though someone had mixed up the pieces of two different puzzles and put them in the same box. They were finding patches of evidence that fit together but also appeared to be totally separate.

  There was only one way to make certain they hadn’t missed anything. She had to put all the pieces on the table.

  She pushed aside the sorrow that threatened to overwhelm her.

  “If this all leads back to Nick Amato,” she said. “Then I need to tell you everything. Not just what you can read in a report or in the papers. All of it.” Well, almost all of it. There were some details that she’d never surrender. Not to anyone. “I want to talk about my case. The one that put me in WITSEC.”

  His expression softened. “Even if we discover the why, I’m not sure that’s going to help us find the who. The killer could be anyone at this point.”

  “I want to do this.” What was the point of hiding anymore? She’d already lost the person who mattered most in her life. “I should have told you everything. If something from my past is the key to solving Walt’s murder, we have to consider every detail. No matter how small.”

  He was wavering. She watched the play of emotions across his face until Sergeant Capital T Taylor prevailed. The officer in him knew she was right—the postcard had forced her hand.

  “Okay,” he said with a decided lack of enthusiasm. “We can talk. I’ve read the newspaper reports already. The minute this gets to be too much, we stop. Agreed?”

  Immediately after the murder, she hadn’t been able to go a day without seeing Jack’s face. Now weeks went past without the memory surfacing. She feared that if she spoke about what happened that day, Jack would be with her again. In the present.

  In her nightmares.

  “Agreed.”

  Shane moved to the seat across from her. He pulled out his phone and swiped at the screen, then set it on the low coffee table between them. She had an unsettling echo of déjà vu.

  Shane pressed
a button to start the recording. “Do you give your permission for me to record this?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  Another time, she might have laughed at the odd turn of phrase.

  “Tell me about that day.”

  Her appearance in court had been the last time she’d spoken about the case. There’d been no reason to relive that awful day. Attached to the horror and grief was an underlying sense of guilt that she hadn’t completely understood. Not until now.

  Kara sucked in a fortifying breath. “We moved around a lot growing up. Me and my mom. Sometimes she’d have a boyfriend, sometimes she didn’t.” Seeing the question on Shane’s face, shame scorched through her. “I never knew my real dad. I don’t even think my mom was certain who he was. When we moved to Jacksonville, Florida, things were mostly the same. Then mom started dating Jack. He repossessed cars for a living. He was good at it. He taught me all the tricks of the trade.”

  “Like how to get a car in neutral if you don’t have the key?”

  “Yep. He was the only one of mom’s boyfriends that was halfway normal. Didn’t take her long to break up with him. She never liked the nice guys.” The wind had picked up again, and Kara stared at her reflection in the window. “When I turned eighteen, I went to work for Jack. Mostly clerical stuff.” Her stomach knotted. “He repossessed the wrong car one day. Seemed like a regular job. Turned out the car belonged to Nick Amato’s son, and there was something in the car Nick wanted back.”

  The harder she fought against the emotions attached to the memories, the deeper they pulled her down. Most times when memories from her past surfaced, they felt disconnected, as though she was looking at another person. In an instant, however, everything abruptly became real and immediate.

  “So Nick came looking for the car,” Shane prodded, startling her from her reverie. “What happened then?”

  She felt herself slipping into the past and feared if she slipped too far, she’d be stuck in a dead-end life again. Forever this time.

  “I’d gone outside to smoke a cigarette.” The nicotine helped alleviate the worry. She’d been arrested for felony shoplifting, and the idea of doing time was weighing heavy on her mind. “They used to keep a Dumpster out back behind a wooden fence. One day the Dumpster just disappeared. I guess someone stopped paying the bill. Didn’t bother us any. We set up a table and a couple of chairs in the spot. It was our unofficial breakroom.”

  The air was hot and thick and smelled like putrid garbage and overflowing ashtrays. As though the stench of the missing Dumpster was permanently embedded in the asphalt. The bell over the front door rang, and she heard it open and shut. Instead of stubbing out her cigarette, she took another long drag. Let Jack handle this one. She had other things on her mind.

  The public defender had called her that morning with a plea deal. Six months in lockup, one year probation. She was considering the offer. She’d done some time in juvie and knew what to expect. Copping a felony had her worried, though. When she was a kid, she couldn’t wait to be an adult. No more social workers. No more living with her mom. No more fending off her mom’s latest boyfriend. Now, barely four months past her eighteenth birthday, she’d botched it good. Every job application asked the same question: Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

  She’d be permanently marked and stuck in a revolving door of dead-end jobs for the rest of her life. She couldn’t work for Jack forever. He was already talking about getting out of the business.

  The sound of breaking glass startled her from the sagging bands of plastic that passed for a seat on her rusted chair. Some instinct told her to stay hidden behind the privacy fence.

  Jack stumbled backward out the door, his hands raised. She followed his progress through the narrow slats of the fence. Two men stalked his escape. One of them was tall and beefy with flat, lifeless eyes. The other was stockier and short, his hair thinning. He wore khakis and a button-up shirt. He might have been a retiree in a bowling league if not for the gun in his right hand.

  Her scream died in her throat and she stood frozen.

  Jack stuck out his arm, his palm toward her. He was signaling to her to stay put.

  Jack pleaded for his life, the words so jumbled and fast she couldn’t make them out. His fear stretched like a living thing across the distance, surrounding and suffocating her. Everything happened in an instant.

  The smaller man aimed the gun at Jack’s head and pulled the trigger.

  She pressed both hands against her mouth. Hard. Neither man even glanced in her direction. They must have thought there was still a Dumpster behind the rickety privacy fence.

  She recited the tale to Shane without revealing her arrest or the deal she’d made with WITSEC. Chances were, she’d have to be relocated and start all over again. She wanted Shane to remember the person she was now, not the person she’d been all those years ago.

  “That’s all of it,” she said, her voice flat. “Turned out, the bald guy was Nick Amato, and he was a suspect in the shooting of a cop in Miami. Only they didn’t have enough evidence to make it stick. They wanted him bad enough to make me a deal.” As part of her agreement to testify and disappear, the shoplifting charges had disappeared, as well. “I entered the program. Earlier this year, Nick had a fatal heart attack. The marshals called a couple weeks later and said the threat level was deemed practically nonexistent. Technically, I can leave the program whenever I want. I even considered doing just that. Nothing would change but the designation on my file. The records remain sealed. My current identity stays in place. Nick was the only one who ever threatened me. End of story.”

  “What about the second guy?” Shane asked. “The one who was with Nick when Jack was shot.”

  “Nick tried to pin everything on him. Even claimed he was the shooter. Nick planted the gun in his car to sell the story. The police had him wiretapped, though. The guy wasn’t too happy. In exchange for his testimony, the prosecutor lowered his sentence. If he wanted revenge on anyone, it would have been Nick.”

  There was no change in Shane’s posture or demeanor. Instead of assuming his interrogation pose, he was relaxed back on his seat, his hands folded in his lap. A far cry from how he’d looked this morning.

  That wasn’t exactly fair. He’d appeared sympathetic, almost regretful, when he heard her story. Not that his opinion of her changed anything. Walt was gone and someone who had crawled out of the wreckage of her past life was responsible.

  Shane’s expression was intense, though she didn’t think his interest was aimed at her. He appeared to be lost in thought.

  “I spoke with the marshal this afternoon,” he said after a lengthy pause. “Your contact in the program. He seemed confident there was no threat to you. I explained the situation and he said he’d check a few sources and get back to me. I haven’t heard back from him yet.”

  She’d been transferred to Tom five years ago when her original contact retired. Nothing had altered much. Just the name and number she called when she needed to check in.

  “Clearly, this changes everything.” She indicated the postcard. “Someone knows something.”

  “Someone knows something. But who? That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I’ve gone over the hotel guest list and the employee list. The ABI is going over it, as well. No one registered at or working at the resort has thrown up any red flags.”

  “What if he’s not staying here?”

  “There’s a finite number of places to hide. There’d have to be a source of heat. There’d have to be water and supplies. Unless...”

  “Unless he’s got help.”

  “That would explain why no one in the hotel has raised any alarms.” He wearily pinched the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “I’ll have security do another search of the outbuildings. Then I’ll have the security footage reviewed once more. This place is covered with cameras. One o
f them must have picked up something.”

  “I just realized your only help is a passel of suspects.”

  “That occurred to me a while ago.” He stifled a yawn. “Everyone is a suspect which means no one can be trusted. I’ve downloaded all the original footage for ABI to search. When I need the staff involved, I have them work in teams. If someone is trying to conceal something, that should make it more difficult.”

  “I see the problem.”

  Shane stopped the recording and slipped the phone into his pocket. “I’ll give the marshal another call and let him know about the postcard. You’ve been in the program too long to slip up. There’s a chance the leak came from the marshal’s office. Stranger things have happened.”

  If there had been a leak in the marshals’ office, did that make it better or worse? She’d been searching through the past few months of her life, trying to think of anything she might have said or done to reveal her identity. Nothing came to mind.

  The only change had been Nick Amato’s death which lowered her threat level. Even when she was considered at high risk, she’d only spoken with Tom once or twice a year when she checked in with him. Walt was the only one who knew about Nick’s death besides the marshals.

  A dull pain throbbed in her temples. There was no way Walt had anything to do with this. He knew the risk involved better than anyone.

  Her headache grew worse. “Walt said the marshals didn’t make mistakes.”

  “Everyone messes up.”

  That was an understatement. She hadn’t stopped making mistakes in her life, but she’d tried to make fewer stupid mistakes. The kind of mistakes that got people arrested.

  Her attention drifted to the mockingly cheerful postcard. She felt boneless and drained. She’d put on a good show, but seeing that card had bled the fight from her. First Jack and now Walt.

  A nightmare thought struck her. What if something happened to Shane? At the moment he was the lone law-enforcement officer nearby.

  He ran one hand along his beard and drew his fingers to a point. “Maybe Nick had a relative no one knew about. Another son or a brother.”