Fugitive Father

by Jean Barrett

  So there it was. Noah had to force Ellie Matheson to accompany him. And not just because she was the key to Joel. He couldn’t leave her behind to spill his destination to the cops. But traveling with her was going to be no picnic. He would have to anticipate her every move, not let himself be affected by—

  Her hair. He could feel his gut tighten every time he looked at that long, long hair of hers. It was brown but not plain brown. In the right light, like now, it had fire in it. Damn distracting spilling down her back like that.

  “Your hair,” he said curtly.

  “What about it?” she asked, flinching over the roughness in his tone. He had swung around from the sink. She could see a muscle twitching in his angular jaw as he stood there judging her hair.

  “You’re going to have to do something with it. It’s too noticeable hanging loose that way, and I don’t want either one of us attracting attention on the road. All right, out of the tub and back to the bedroom.”

  He was despicable, Ellie thought, grinding her teeth as she preceded him from the bathroom. Barking orders at her every other minute, and now he expected her to bind her hair. On the other hand, she decided when she reached the mirror in her bedroom, it could be worse. He could have come at her with the scissors.

  She watched him in the glass as she dressed her hair in a thick, single braid that descended down her back. To her relief, he was finally covering himself, pulling on the jeans and the sweatshirt. Her ex-husband had a very slender build. His jeans were tight on Rhyder. Good. She hoped he was uncomfortable in them.

  He grunted something that she took to be approval for the braid when she turned away from the mirror. “You have a flashlight somewhere?” he asked.

  She knew better this time than to express her puzzlement. “In the bedside drawer.”

  He helped himself to the flashlight, told her to collect their discarded clothing, and gestured her out into the hallway.

  “This one of those old-fashioned laundry chutes down to the basement?” He indicated a metal hatch partway up the wall near the bathroom door.

  “Yes.” He was far too observant. Getting away from him was not going to be easy.

  “Open it.”

  She lifted the trapdoor and held it while he directed the beam of the flashlight into the chute, satisfying himself that an empty laundry basket was in position at the bottom.

  “Dump the coverall in there first.”

  She stuffed the soiled jail uniform into the chute.

  “Now your things.”

  She followed the coverall with her tunic and leggings.

  “That ought to do it,” he said as she released the small door.

  She had to admit that he was both resourceful and thorough. He had just effectively disposed of the telltale coverall, burying it under her own garments.

  The expression on her face must have betrayed her, because he wore that warning look again. “I believe in covering my tracks, Ellie. You might remember that.”

  She didn’t answer him. He started to wave her toward the stairway. That was when the front doorbell sounded.

  Chapter Three

  He dragged her with him, his long legs carrying both of them swiftly across the bedroom to a front window that overlooked the street. His eyes warned her to be silent, and she was too afraid of the gun in his hand to disobey him. She watched breathlessly as he stood to one side and carefully lifted the edge of the shade. Peering into the night, he muttered a savage curse.

  Ellie glimpsed the flashing light of a patrol car at the curb before he dropped the shade. The police must be here to check on her again, just as that first officer had promised. Hope swelled inside her and then was rudely checked when Noah’s grip tightened on her arm. His directions to her were terse and emphatic.

  “We’re gonna answer that door, Ellie, and you’re going to satisfy the cop out there that you’re just fine. You tell him you were on your way to bed, planning to catch a couple of hours of sleep before you hit the road. And you make clear they don’t need to check on you again, because you’ve decided to be under way by midnight You don’t want to hang around the house with that fugitive still on the loose. Got it?”

  She nodded mutely.

  “You’d better make it good,” he warned her, “if you want everyone to stay healthy.”

  The doorbell pealed again, insistently this time, as they descended to the parlor. With the revolver clutched in his hand, Noah flattened himself against the wall at the side of the front door where he could hear the exchange and watch her every move without being seen.

  “Keep the door on its chain,” he whispered. “And be convincing. Real convincing, Ellie.”

  She turned the porch light on, opened the door as far as the chain would permit.

  “Just looking in on you again, Ms. Matheson, like we promised. Everything okay?”

  He was younger than the officer who had called on her earlier. He had a boyish face that made him seem barely out of his teens. Ellie remembered the deputy that Noah had shot during his escape, remembered how she’d been told that he, too, had been young. She didn’t dare to issue a warning through the crack, verbal or otherwise. Not with her captor standing right there with the raised revolver.

  She assured the officer on the porch that she was fine, that she had neither seen nor heard anything suspicious. Then, in a flat voice, she briefly repeated Noah’s instructions.

  The officer didn’t ask to come into the house. He accepted her explanation, leaving her with a cheerful, “You have a good trip, ma’am, and be careful on the road.”

  Ellie felt sick as she shut and locked the door behind him. She had just sent what might be her only opportunity for rescue on his way again in the patrol car.

  “Douse the porch light, the ones in here, too,” Noah hissed.

  She obeyed him, plunging the parlor into a darkness that made her nervous even with the gleam of the lights from the front of the house and the glowing embers of the fire that had dwindled to almost nothing. He slid to the window, peered through a gap between the shade and the frame. She knew he was making sure the police cruiser had pulled away.

  There was a tense, endless silence in the room after he drew back from the window. She watched him there in the shadows, waiting for his next move. He finally made up his mind.

  “Get the rest of your things. We’re leaving now.”

  He was worried by the arrival of the police at her door, fearing they might return to watch the house. She knew there would be no arguing with him.

  He accompanied her back upstairs to collect her toilet case, followed her from room to room to make sure she turned off all the lights. Minutes later, after having checked her purse and handed it to her, he ordered her behind the wheel of the van. Then he joined her on the passenger side. She looked at him numbly as he slapped the Cards baseball cap on his head.

  “There, all set Just a happy husband off on vacation with his loving wife.” He reached up and poked the garage door opener clipped to the visor. “Let’s roll, Ellie.”

  She started the engine and backed out of the garage. There was no point in wasting her breath on any banal objection about how he couldn’t possibly hope to get away with this. She could only pray he wouldn’t get away with it, that they would be stopped before they ever left St Louis and that he would be recaptured before he had hurt anyone else.

  But there was no sign of a squad car as they traveled east through the city, no evidence of pursuit. No one in the other vehicles they passed displayed the slightest interest in her silent passenger, who was slouched low in the seat, the baseball cap pulled down over his forehead to minimize the risk of detection.

  It wasn’t until they crossed the Mississippi on the interstate bridge, and Ellie glimpsed in the rearview mirror the familiar Gateway Arch receding behind them, that despair settled on her in earnest. A despair triggered by the realization that she was his hostage. Forced to run with a fugitive whose intimate closeness she found absolutely daunting.


  As if sensing her panic, he stirred beside her, mocking her with a low, lethal, “It’s just you and me now, Ellie.”

  DETECTIVE LEW FERGUSON sat behind the wheel of his beat-up sedan, squinting through the smoke of his cigar as he watched the house in Webster Groves. There wasn’t anything to see. The place was silent and dark, not a glimmer of light anywhere.

  He’d rung the bell a few minutes ago, even tried the door. Nothing. Everything indicated it was locked and deserted. The radio reports he’d been monitoring all evening from the squad cars said Ellie Matheson was safe. Said Noah Rhyder had never come anywhere near her. Said Matheson was on her way to the Ozarks by now.

  Yeah, and Lew wasn’t buying it. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something about this homely house of hers didn’t smell right. That’s why he went on sitting here in her driveway, smoking a bad cigar and wondering if he ought to risk breaking and entering. Tempting, real tempting, but they’d have his ass if he tried it. He wasn’t supposed to be here at all. Wasn’t supposed to come anywhere near this case again.

  Lew couldn’t accept that. The Buchanan murder had belonged to him, and Noah Rhyder had been his collar. He’d been hot as a firecracker on the case, and then they had taken it away from him. That smart-mouthed partner they’d saddled him with had brought misconduct charges against him, claiming he’d planted false evidence in his eagerness to get Rhyder. The review board had had no reason to dig into the past and had finally cleared him, but by then the case had gone to trial.

  He should have left it at that, but Rhyder was an itch he’d never gotten to scratch. And now…well, now the bastard was loose again, and Lew had another chance at him.

  “You don’t know it yet, Rhyder,” he whispered into the darkness, “but I’ve got an old score to settle with you, and this time you don’t get away from me.”

  He didn’t care what it cost him in the department. His need to personally recover the fugitive was burning a hole in him. He wanted Rhyder.

  “Whatever it takes,” he promised himself.

  Lew wasn’t worried about his fellow officers beating him to Rhyder. If it happened, okay, but so far nobody was being smart about this manhunt. They weren’t concentrating on the guy’s major vulnerability. His kid. It was why Howard Buchanan had been murdered, not because the old man had caught his son-in-law cheating on the books The prosecution had hammered away on that one. Lew knew better. He knew that Rhyder had wasted Buchanan because Grandpa was determined to get custody of the boy. And the kid was still his father’s weakness, which brought it all back to Ellie Matheson.

  Up until this afternoon, anyway, the boy had been with her in that house. Lew’s connections had informed him that the uncle had the kid now, though nobody knew where he’d taken him. Lew wasn’t certain how much Rhyder had been told, but one thing was for sure. He had to know the Matheson woman was a last link to his kid, so it figured he would have tried to get to her. Only he hadn’t. Then why, Lew wondered, was he wasting his time sitting here?

  He was stubbing out the cigar when a compact pulled into the driveway next door. A woman emerged wearing hospital scrubs. Probably a nurse returning from her shift. Lew was immediately interested. Neighbors saw things. Maybe this one had.

  Heaving his bulky figure out of the car, he approached her, prominently displaying his ID so she wouldn’t be alarmed by the presence of a stranger at this late hour.

  “Detective Lew Ferguson, ma’am. I’m in charge of the Rhyder case,” he lied.

  She peered at his ID by the glow of the street light, saw that he was legitimate, and was ready to trust him. “Is that lunatic still on the loose? I heard about his escape at work.”

  “We’ll get him back,” he assured her confidently. “Thing is, I need to speak to your neighbor, Ms. Matheson. She was in charge of Rhyder’s little boy and might be able to provide us with some useful information. Nobody at home, though. You have any idea where I could locate her?”

  “Ellie? She was scheduled to leave first thing in the morning for a vacation in the Ozarks. We always watch each other’s places when one of us is out of town.” She glanced at the tall house. “If she didn’t answer your ring, then she must have left already.”

  “That’s probably just what she did do.” Lew smiled, maintaining the casual pose that often got him results. “Only the place is as black as a coal mine. Guess she’s not in the habit of burning a security light.”

  The neighbor frowned. “There should be a light showing. She always leaves one lamp on a timer. You think something could be wrong?”

  “Naw, most likely forgot to set her timer. Still, the situation being what it is, it wouldn’t hurt to check out the place. Just to be sure. I’m assuming you have a key.”

  The woman hesitated. “I guess Ellie wouldn’t mind our doing that.”

  “Under the circumstances, she’d probably appreciate it.”

  “All right.” She fished through her purse, producing a key. “It’s for the side door. Ellie would have left the front door on its chain.”

  Lew followed her across the Matheson driveway. She unlocked the door and was just pushing it open when the phone in her car started to ring.

  “It must be the hospital. There was a patient I was worried about. I told them to call me if there was any change.”

  “You go answer it,” Lew told her. “I’ll have a quick look-through on my own.”

  She looked uncertain for a second, then made up her mind. “There’s a light switch just inside on the left.”

  The woman hurried toward the phone in her compact. Glad of her absence, Lew located the switch and entered the house. He found himself on a street-level landing where a stairway turned. The steps on the left mounted to the kitchen, those on the right descended to the basement.

  Pausing for a second, he listened carefully. The place was silent, not a stir. He proceeded with caution, his police special in his hand. Moving from room to room, turning on lights as he went, Lew investigated the house from top to bottom. He’d been right to sense that something had happened here tonight. The house told him the whole story.

  In the kitchen he found the busted back door. In the empty garage he saw the logs spilled on the floor. In the bathroom upstairs he found traces of dark hair in the sink. And down in the basement his eye caught the edge of a sleeve peeking out of a laundry basket. A sleeve whose dirt didn’t entirely hide the blaze orange underneath.

  Noah Rhyder had been here all right, must have managed to grab Ellie Matheson. So where were they now? But Lew knew the answer to that one, too. He could feel it in his gut. They had to be somewhere out there in her missing van. On their way to his kid, wherever that was. He’d stake his badge on it.

  Procedure demanded that Lew return to his car and radio a report to headquarters. Have them get an APB out on the Matheson vehicle, along with a caution that Rhyder had probably altered his appearance. Yeah, that’s what he was supposed to do. Only there was no satisfaction in that. He wasn’t going to share Rhyder. He was going to bring him in on his own.

  Lew would find some way around it all, some way to get the department to forgive him. If not…well, he was prepared for the consequences.

  “Detective Ferguson, are you there?” It was the neighbor at the side door, sounding nervous as she called out to him.

  He’d have to go up there and soothe her. Tell her that nothing was wrong and everything indicated Ellie Matheson had safely departed for the Ozarks. Then he would need to find out where Brett Buchanan had taken the kid. Lew knew someone who ought to be able to give him an address. With a little persuasion, that is.

  ELLIE DIDN’T KNOW what time it was. The clock on the instrument panel no longer worked, and the interior of the van was too dim to read her watch. Nor was she about to ask her passenger. She preferred his silence, unnerving though it was. But it had to be well after midnight.

  They were somewhere in Illinois, traveling southeast on the flat, monotonous interstate. Endless cornfie
lds bordered the highway, the autumn harvest stripped from most of them. They looked as bleak in the headlights as Ellie felt. She wasn’t sleepy, though. She supposed it was fear that kept her alert.

  That alertness eventually paid off. When she finally began to wonder about the length of her unwanted companion’s silence, she cast a furtive glance in his direction. His chin was down on his chest, his eyes closed. He had drifted off.

  Her gaze cut back to the road. The traffic at this hour was very thin, but she couldn’t afford to let excitement make her careless. Maintaining a steady speed, she checked on him again. No way to be certain of it, but he seemed to be more than just dozing. He looked like he was solidly asleep. The revolver was there on his lap, but his hand was no longer clutching it.

  This was it! Her chance to get the gun away from him! But she couldn’t just snatch it while they were under way. She would have to stop, try to ease it from his lap before he realized what was happening. A sign a few miles back indicated a rest area ahead. Perfect. There would be phones there, maybe other people. If she could just manage to pull off without rousing him…

  She began to reduce the speed of the van in slow, easy stages, careful to avoid any sudden change that would disturb him. Her gaze was busy the whole time watching the highway, checking on her passenger, scanning the roadside for a signpost announcing the approach of the rest area. She must not miss it.

  There! Just a half mile more to go!

  Seconds later, she crawled along the exit lane, gently braking the van as she reached the parking area fronting the low brick building that housed the rest rooms. The van coasted to a stop under the tall security lights. Shifting into park, she eyed the man beside her. His eyes were still closed, his breathing slow and even.

  There was no other vehicle in the parking lot. They were alone here. She was disappointed in that, but she could see a public phone on the wall near the entrance to the building. She gazed at it longingly, regretting that she had never equipped the van with a phone.