Operation Reunion

by Justine Davis

  Teague nodded, but his usual friendly smile was missing when he spoke. “They remember him, all right.”

  Kayla leaned forward eagerly. “They do? Did he say where he was going?”

  Teague hesitated for about three seconds, and Dane got the sense he was trying to find a better way to say what he had to say. And he found himself, despite it all, waiting uneasily for what was coming.

  “They remember him,” Teague said at last, “because he cleaned them out when he left.”

  Quinn leaned back. Hayley sighed. Kayla frowned. “What?” she asked, clearly puzzled.

  “He emptied the Bingo box.” Teague’s tone was remarkably level, but his sentiments on the action were still obvious. “Two hundred and fifty dollars. Stole every last penny.”

  Chapter 13

  “Are they sure it was him?”

  Kayla sounded doubtful, and it dug at the raw spot inside Dane that knew they were over for good. The knowledge hadn’t reached his heart and gut yet, but his intellect knew in that cold, dispassionate way that was the beginning of the human mind learning to accept the unacceptable.

  “Oh, please,” Dane said, unable to hold back. “Don’t defend him. Why would a guy who stole the money his eight-year-old sister saved up for a bike feel a qualm about stealing from senior citizens?”

  Color flared in Kayla’s cheeks. “I wasn’t defending him. I was just asking if they were sure.”

  “They were,” Teague said, his voice more sympathetic now, as if, although he despised what her brother had done, he felt sorry for Kayla. Whether it was for having to deal with this news, or for just having a jerk of a brother, Dane wasn’t sure.

  Hell, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. The brief interlude when it had seemed they might make it, when she’d been ready and willing to put all this on the shelf where it belonged and go on with their lives, had apparently been only that, an interlude. A precious, beautiful, intimate interlude, destined to end.

  Chad Tucker had stolen something much more valuable than the contents of that money box from him and left him with only the sad remnants, memories of the life he’d thought was going to be forever. He’d always assumed they’d get married, had even figured her twenty-fifth birthday would be the day he’d formally ask her. He wanted her to have a chance to live enough to be sure, although he’d been sure for years. But by the time that birthday had rolled around, he’d been so tired of all things Chad, he hadn’t proposed after all.

  “There was a witness who saw him take it and run for the back door,” Teague was saying. “By the time the local sheriff got there, he was long gone.”

  “Did you talk to the sheriff’s office?”

  “Yes. They looked up the report for me. Nothing much there except the usual conflicting eyewitness descriptions. But I talked to several people who were there that day. They all agreed the guy in our image was him, but there was nothing that helps figure out where he is now.”

  “Anything else?” Quinn asked.

  Teague’s mouth quirked. “I felt kind of bad, bringing it up again. Apparently there’s an ongoing disagreement between the folks who wanted him hunted down and arrested before he spent it all on drugs, and the ones who thought if he needed the money that badly they should have just given it to him. It was getting kind of heated when I left.”

  Dane winced inwardly. That sounded a little too close to the arguments he and Kayla had had over her brother. Maybe there really was no middle ground, anywhere.

  To her credit, Kayla didn’t try to defend Chad once she’d heard Teague’s story. She sat silently, looking troubled. His instinct was to comfort, as it always had been with her, but he quashed the urge. It was going to be a long, hard battle to kill the habits of more than a decade, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

  But he was starting to accept that it was going to be necessary.

  “It’s your call, Kayla,” Quinn said. “Do we keep going?”

  “I...” She hesitated, flicked a glance at Dane. He said nothing. He already knew what she was going to say.

  It’s not your business anymore, he told himself. And that alone jabbed at him sharply. Disengaging was going to be a painful process.

  “I can’t quit now, not this close.”

  And there it was, Dane thought.

  “Kayla,” Hayley began.

  “I know,” Kayla said. “It could come to nothing, but it’s still the most definite information I’ve had in all this time. Every other time, nobody remembered him, not even at the post office where he mailed the notes.”

  “This all would have been easier if he’d used email to contact you,” Quinn said. “We could have tracked that, found an IP, and Tyler would have had it nailed down in a hurry.”

  “He could have. He obviously looked at her support group’s website to get the P.O. Box, and the email address is right there. But he didn’t,” Dane said, beyond caring now that he sounded as bleak as he felt. “Because he doesn’t want to be found. Not even by Kayla. Maybe especially not by her.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, clearly stung.

  He told himself it didn’t matter. That he didn’t care anymore. And while even as he thought it he knew the latter wasn’t true, he was afraid the former was.

  “He’s been toying with you for ten years,” he said, letting out some of his frustration. “Just when you start to get past it, another one of those damn notes comes. Never enough for you to find him, just enough to remind you he’s out there. To make sure you never forget.”

  “I don’t want to forget!”

  “You think he doesn’t know that?”

  Dane was aware that Hayley was staring out the window, clearly trying to ignore them. Quinn, however, was listening to every word, not in the manner of someone who enjoyed hearing other people’s disputes but more like someone who wanted every tiny bit of data in case it might help.

  Dane wondered what Quinn would get out of this exchange. And it was a measure of the devastation he was feeling inside that he didn’t really care.

  “What do you want me to do?” Kayla demanded. “Just pretend he’s not out there? Maybe stay home, spend his half of the insurance money? Maybe you’d like that, is that it?”

  Under normal circumstances, Dane would have laughed that ridiculous accusation off, but nothing was normal about how he was feeling right now.

  “What if you did find him?” he asked. Now that it had occurred to him, he wondered if she had ever thought beyond the immediate goal herself. “You talked about bringing him home. Did you ever think what that would mean? That the first people waiting to welcome him would be the police?”

  Kayla’s eyes widened, and the color drained from her cheeks. She was too smart for it not to have occurred to her, but her expression told him she’d put this in the “deal with it when it happens” category.

  “Did you think that because they didn’t have the manpower and resources to go on an out-of-state manhunt that they’d just forget about him?”

  Kayla turned to look at Quinn. “But...you’ll help me prove he didn’t do it, right?”

  “We’ll help you find the truth,” Quinn said gently but firmly. “I warned you from the beginning you might not like what we find.”

  Kayla lowered her eyes to her coffee mug, as if the last bit of dark liquid held the answers she wanted to hear.

  “And you agreed to accept what they found,” Dane reminded her.

  “I know that.” There was a snap in her voice.

  “But you won’t, will you?” Dane said wearily. “You’ll just go on and on, throwing your life away, throwing our lives away.”

  Her head came up sharply. “That’s not true.”

  “How long are you going to live in complete denial, Kayla?”

  “I’m not in denial. You think I don’t know we may never find him, may never be able to prove he’s innocent?”

  “No. I think you’ll never face the real truth.” Dane knew he was headed into no-
return territory, that if he continued he’d be looking at nothing but ashes. But wasn’t he anyway?

  “And what truth might that be?” Quinn’s voice came from across the table, sounding calm and merely interested. Dane never took his eyes off Kayla. She was glaring at him, and in that moment he let go of the last, tiny shred of hope.

  “That Chad did it,” he said flatly.

  Chapter 14

  Kayla was still shaking. She tried to tell herself it was anger that was causing the tremors that gripped her, but deep down she knew better. Oh, there was anger, but it was dwarfed by a rush of other emotions she couldn’t even begin to sort out, not yet.

  Dane thought Chad was guilty.

  Had he always? If so, how had she not known that?

  She’d known he had never believed in the hunt for Chad the way she did, but he’d supported her, at least until recently. She’d even admitted he had a right to feel the way he did; when the tenth anniversary of her parents’ murders and Chad’s disappearance had rolled around, she’d been a little stunned herself to realize how long it had been and how relatively little she’d accomplished in those years.

  And she had meant everything she’d said. She’d meant her promise that she would accept whatever Foxworth found or didn’t find and move on. She’d been so relieved when Dane had agreed to give them another chance and had spent the past few days beyond grateful that he had come back. Nothing meant more to her than Dane and what they’d built between them.

  Except that it had apparently all been built on a lie.

  She hadn’t said a word since Dane’s flat declaration. Nor had he. At least not to her.

  He had spoken to Quinn privately. The man had taken Dane aside, no doubt to quiz him on his accusation. She’d watched, still a little in shock. She could only imagine what Dane was telling him.

  Meanwhile Hayley had gently reassured her that this changed nothing, that Foxworth would continue as long as she wanted them to, while Teague made an awkward escape as soon as he could, looking uncomfortable with the sudden flare of emotion. She couldn’t blame him. She’d like to escape herself.

  When the little town was dry of information, including the tiny clue Teague had gleaned from one of the seniors that Chad had talked about Seattle before he’d absconded with the money, they headed back to the small airstrip.

  It was no less awkward there when Dane jumped at the chance to sit up front with Teague. She reminded herself that the suggestion he do so had come on the flight down here, before any of this had happened, but somehow that didn’t make it seem any less a pointed display of the new, seemingly unbridgeable distance between them.

  They’d been in the air for half an hour when Hayley, who had been talking quietly with Quinn in the back-facing seats, got up and crossed the small cabin to sit beside her.

  “He’s just tired of it,” she said. “It’s been ten years.”

  “He promised,” Kayla said, aware she sounded a bit like a thwarted child but unable to help it at the moment. “He said he’d see this through with me.”

  “Apparently he thinks he has. And he does have a point.”

  She didn’t want to hear any defense just now, but she didn’t want to antagonize the only people left on her side either.

  “This lead may be more detailed than you’ve ever had before, but it’s still three months cold. We know more, and that will help, but I’m not sure how much closer we really are.”

  Kayla winced. Maybe they weren’t on her side either. Maybe she really was alone in this.

  “Quinn said we’d keep going as long as you wanted us to. He meant it. It’s only been a week, so we’ve really only just begun.”

  Soothed slightly, Kayla tried to pull herself out of the emotional murk. “What’s the longest you’ve spent looking for someone?”

  “Well, I don’t know all the Foxworth history yet. I do know there are some cases that have gone for more than a year. And two that are still open after longer than that.”

  She glanced over at Quinn, who was reading through his own notes taken during the hours spent canvassing the small town.

  “Those are the ones that eat at him. He hates not being able to at least give people the kind of closure he never got.”

  “He’s a remarkable man,” Kayla said, meaning it.

  “Yes, he is,” Hayley agreed, her voice soft, full of love and admiration and respect. All the things she herself had always felt for Dane.

  Until now.

  “I won’t say he didn’t mean it,” Hayley said, obviously seeing Kayla’s gaze flick up front to Dane and then quickly away. “I can’t read his mind. But I’m guessing he feels like he’s been putting his life—your lives—on hold for ten years, and now he’s thinking it’s never going to end.”

  “I think he pretty much ended it today.”

  “Doesn’t have to be that way,” Hayley said. “You can get past this.”

  “Get past him believing my brother is guilty?”

  Hayley gave a half shrug. “I got past Quinn kidnapping me.”

  Kayla seized on the diversion. “Teague said something about that. It was really true?”

  Hayley nodded. “In the middle of the night, Cutter and I both, in that blessed black helicopter of his.”

  “And those were really bullet holes?”

  “Yes.” Hayley’s expression changed; whatever memory had just struck her, she didn’t like it much. “And I’d be happy to tell you the whole, annoyingly heroic, self-sacrificing story, but right now I think you need to focus on one thing.”

  “Finding Chad,” Kayla said with a nod.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of deciding how high a price you’re willing to pay.”

  This time it was Hayley who glanced forward to the copilot’s seat where Dane sat, giving every appearance of being engrossed in Teague’s explanations of what was going on, and no doubt asking very intelligent questions about the “slick, new avionics” Teague had been so eager to show off.

  “He’s a good man, Kayla. They don’t come along every day.”

  Don’t lose a good man chasing after a bad one.

  Someone had told her that once. Crystal’s mother, she thought. Although she obviously hadn’t meant it to refer to Chad. Or maybe she had; Crystal had always had a bit of a crush on him.

  Kayla felt the old ache and tried to quash it. Crystal had been her best friend. Or at least she’d thought she was her best friend; the girl, and the friendship, had vanished after that bloody night. In adult retrospect she was sure Crystal just hadn’t known how to deal with such trauma, hadn’t wanted to be around it. It was a dose of harsh, grim reality delivered years before a young mind knew how to cope. Kayla didn’t blame her, not anymore, but it still hurt to have been abandoned that way.

  Only one person had stayed, only one person had been there through it all, supporting her, helping her on every step of the awful path she’d had to walk.

  And he was sitting a few feet away, yet at the moment as far away as the moon.

  Don’t lose a good man chasing after a bad one.

  Dane was definitely a good man. She could never deny that, no matter what happened between them.

  She just couldn’t accept that her brother was a bad one.

  Chapter 15

  Teague had gone into such detail that by the time they landed, Dane felt as if he should be able to fly the darn plane himself. But he’d given all the information less than his full attention. Because it was hard to concentrate when your whole life had just fallen apart.

  He wished he hadn’t said it, but at the same time he was glad it was out. He’d been thinking it for a long time.

  Do you really think he did it, or are you convicting him in your mind because he’s ruining your life without even being here?

  Quinn Foxworth’s words echoed in his head. And Dane wasn’t really sure of the answer.

  “I’ve been where she is,” Quinn had said. “And I wanted the person who murdered my par
ents dead as much as she wants to find Chad.”

  “And you got that, eventually.” Even as he’d said it, Dane knew it wasn’t a good analogy; Quinn, he suspected, was the kind of man who would want to do the job himself.

  “After he got to spend three years at home with his family, three years that we and the families of the other victims never got, I’ll never get over that.”

  “But look how you channeled that,” Dane had countered. “Into something really good.”

  “Kayla’s work is something good.”

  He was still chewing on it as they piled into the car they’d come to the airstrip in early that morning. Funny how different things had been then. If he could have imagined how it would go, he never would have gotten on that plane.

  He couldn’t deny Quinn’s words. She was doing good work, and she had credibility with grief-stricken fellow travelers that couldn’t be denied. It made her very effective.

  It also drained her. In fact, he thought now as they went about the business of deplaning, the real problems had started about then. At first he’d been glad, no, delighted that she’d found something to do other than search for her brother. But the work did take a lot out of her, and he suspected there simply wasn’t enough energy for all three: the work, her obsession with Chad, and him.

  He’d just never thought it would be him who would lose. He’d always thought she’d get past it, get over it, that it would gradually fade.

  He told himself to snap out of it as they reached the Foxworth buildings. It hadn’t faded, and it was time to accept it never would.

  He and Kayla had come in his car, so there would be an uncomfortable trip back to her place. And then he would, once more, gather up what things he had there—only this time they wouldn’t be going back.

  They got out of the big SUV. Dane heard a bark, and Cutter came dashing toward them, he wasn’t sure from where. The dog greeted Hayley and Quinn joyously and gave Teague a nudge that seemed almost teasing. Then he turned to Dane and stopped. The animal looked from him to Kayla, who was standing a careful three feet away. Cutter came forward, stood between them for a moment, then sat.