Besides, if drugs were flying into the airfield, they wouldn’t need bait. All they had to do was stakeout the landing strip. Sooner or later, the crime boss or one of his men would show.
At the opposite end of town, Mick pulled into the plowed parking lot of a fast food restaurant and shrugged his shoulders to release the tension building there. He checked his texts, saw that Dez had taken the kid sledding. Probably a good idea. If their fight last night was any indication, they had a case of cabin fever. The kid would feel the same. Nate needed to get out and release some energy. So did Dez. Mick went inside and ordered several sandwiches for lunch before giving Blake a call. Maybe the other detective would have an idea of how to handle this with Dez.
“We’re on the way up,” Blake said when he answered.
“We?” He damn well better not be bringing Vicki along with him. She’d just had surgery for a GSW.
“Me and Logan. The shit is about to hit the fan. Logan’s background checks picked up some interesting information.”
“I’ve got some, too.” He laid it out about the airfield.
Blake cursed and carried on a side conversation. “Is Dez with you?”
“No, she’s with the kid.”
“Stay close. The task force briefing this morning announced that Dez has taken Nate into hiding in that quiet little town of yours.”
“What kind of games are they playing? Yesterday, her picture was plastered all the hell over the place. Wanted for questioning. Now they know where she is? How did they find her?”
“We’re trying to track it. The good news is, Stiles is spinning it like she’s protecting the boy, which is the truth. It would have been easy to spin it that she’d gone off the reservation. Either way, with the information public, we have to assume the news spread to Sully. Stick together. Get out of town if you can.”
Mick’s heart pounded. No way they were getting out of town, even with the snow chains. The cashier called Mick’s number, announcing his food was ready, but he held back. “The roads are closed.”
“We’ll think of something. Get to her. We’ll conference call in twenty minutes.”
“Do you know where Sully is?”
“He fell off the grid, which is bad news for you. I left Victoria with Sofia and another officer we can trust. You need backup.”
Mick moved into a secluded section of the restaurant. “What else did you find?”
“No can do, bro. Not over an open line. We’ll be there in a few hours.”
“No one’s getting through, Blake. Haven’t you been watching the fucking weather?”
“Then we’ll follow a snowplow. Stay low until we get there.”
Mick agreed, and then snapped his phone shut. He grabbed the burgers and headed out, his heart pounding. Dez and Nate were out sledding. What if someone found them?
…
Dez positioned her body between Nate and the Jeep. They tramped through the virgin snow nearest the house. Her breath came in rapid white puffs in the cold air. She was thirty seconds from a panic attack, and she’d never had one in her life, but she’d never had to protect a child before. The risks to Nate made her hyper-vigilant. By the time they hit the front door, Dez was shaking. She couldn’t even get to her gun because she was bundled up for the cold. If the person in the car made a move, they were toast. She pushed Nate through the entry, and then locked and bolted the door. The pain in her chest hurt like a heart attack.
Damn it. She needed to clear the house. What if someone was already inside?
“Stick behind me.” Dez tossed her gloves on the floor and dug through the packed snow between her jeans and boots to pull the gun free. Melting ice made the cold metal slippery in her hand. She cleared the rooms on the main level before heading upstairs. Each room, clear.
Thank God. She’d been a complete idiot to take Nate out of the house.
“Is everything okay?” Nate shook from head to toe, from fear or cold or just plain exhaustion.
“Fine. Go ahead and take off your coat and gloves. Warm up.”
He followed her orders, but when he started to remove the snow pants and boots, she stopped him. “Leave them.” If they had to run, she needed to keep him warm. Where the hell was Mick?
“Do me a favor.” She motioned for him to follow her into Aunt Peg’s room with the window overlooking the front. The Jeep was still parked, the engine not running. The opposite side of the street was blocked by the giant snow berm caused by the snowplow. Maybe the car was a neighbor?
“What do you need me to do?” Nate asked.
She pulled out her phone and handed it to the kid, never once taking her eyes off the car. “Text Mick for me. Tell him: hurry your ass.”
He glanced at her sharply, his blue eyes filled with mischief and a little fear. “I should say that?”
The kid cracked her up. “Yeah, say that. Hurry your ass.”
The smile was pure boy given permission to type the word ass. His little fingers moved on the screen, sending the text before handing the phone back to her. “What’s wrong?”
The kid deserved to know. “See that car?”
He stepped closer and peeked through the sheer white panel. “Yeah?”
“I don’t know who is in it, and I need to make sure it’s someone safe.”
He nodded his head, but his eyes took on a shadowed sadness.
“Nate, I need to go out and identify the driver, if there is one. Can you stay here?”
“Can’t I go with you?” The plaintive question brimmed with fear.
“It’s safer if you stay inside, where it’s warm, but—” Shit, she didn’t want to scare him, but forewarned was forearmed. “Keep watching out the window. If anything bad happens, you put on your coat and gloves and climb out the emergency ladder like we practiced. Stick to the edge of the forest until you get to the sheriff’s house. Aunt Peg is there.”
“You’re a police officer, right?”
Dez nodded. She glanced out at the car, but it hadn’t moved. She thought she saw an outline of a person in the front seat but wasn’t sure from this distance.
“So no matter what, you’ll be okay?” The final words cracked his voice.
She glanced down to see tears welling in his eyes. She hugged him into her side, smashed his little face in the cold winter coat. “I’ll be okay, but only if you do exactly like we planned. I have to know you’re safe or I might make a mistake.”
“So I’d be helping you?”
“Exactly.”
“You know,” he said, his lips lifting slightly. “That’s like my mom turning off the internet for my own good.”
Dez laughed, felt it strangle in the knot in her throat. “Okay, well for both our good, you do your job and I’ll do mine.”
He nodded solemnly. “My mom thought the ice cream man kidnapped me once.”
“Yeah?”
“Her face looked like yours right now.”
Christ, the kid was going to kill her. She couldn’t even answer because emotion clogged her throat. She nodded at him and headed downstairs. The wind hit her when she opened the door and stepped outside. She kept the gun tucked into the oversize sleeve of her winter coat as she angled toward the car, staying a dozen feet away as she circled to the driver’s side.
The shadow in the front seat didn’t move.
Dez stepped closer. If the driver wanted to shoot her, he could have by now. When she reached the side, she knocked on the window. The person didn’t move. Cupping her hand against the window, she leaned into the glass to see inside.
Bile climbed up her throat as she took in the scene. Dez leaned away from the vehicle. They were so screwed.
…
Mick’s phone buzzed the second time in as many minutes. He pulled his phone out and looked at the display. The first was from Blake. They’d hit a roadblock where the snow was too deep to pass safely. They were looking for a snowplow. Blake wasn’t joking around. He wanted to get to them in a bad way. Must be some serious
shit. The second text was from Dez.
Hurry your ass.
He laughed. The woman was short tempered. He was shooting off a reply when the second one popped up.
And bring an alibi.
Mick slowed the truck and pulled to the side.
Are you kidding me?
He waited several minutes for a reply.
Not kidding. I’m an idiot. Lose the phone, too.
Mick pulled the truck back onto the road with a rock in his gut.
…
Dez’s feet tapped rapidly against the floor, a nervous tick she squelched the second she recognized she was fidgeting. She didn’t need intuition to tell her she was fucked. No way was the dead body in her front yard a coincidence. At minimum, she’d be the first suspect. She’d called in the report, had easy access to a weapon, and her boot prints led right to the murder scene. Texting Mick added another layer of suspicion. Their joking comments on the phone earlier looked incriminating as hell. Talking about evidence and needing an alibi. Big effing joke until they really did.
The phone wasn’t a smoking gun, but it wouldn’t help her cause and she didn’t have time to ditch it in a secure location. Thinking like a criminal burned her ass, but she needed to destroy the phone and its contents. She cleared the history and lit the SIM card on fire. The SIM card melted like plastic—no getting information from it now—but the melted plastic was another piece of evidence making her look like she was hiding something.
Criminals got arrested for stupid moves like she was making. What was she going to do with her phone? If she went outside to bury it, a rookie cop with zero experience could follow her very obvious tracks in the snow. The gun had to stay inside, but what if they searched the house as part of the murder investigation? Not they. The sheriff. Shit, she couldn’t even refuse to let him in without a warrant because Aunt Peg would invite him in.
“Think, think, think.” She pounded the phone against her forehead, willing her mind to come up with a solution. Thinking like a criminal wasn’t her forte, but she’d been a teenager in this house. As a teen, she’d hid quite a bit from her aunt, especially early on. “That’s it.”
Dez opened the basement door. It was one of those creepy affairs with squeaky wooden stairs and a bare bulb hanging from the rafters in the middle of the dim space. The shelves lining the gray cement walls held row after row of paint for Aunt Peg’s art, a planting table Peg used for her garden, dusty tools that hadn’t been touched in decades. In the back corner stood an old washing machine and dryer that looked like they belonged in a vintage shop.
Heading straight for the gardening table, Dez opened a bag of potting soil and mixed the destroyed SIM card into the moist, dark dirt. Unless someone sifted the dirt, they wouldn’t find it, and she was betting the sheriff didn’t have a dedicated forensic team in this little mountain town. Carefully, she sealed the bag of soil back the way she’d found it.
Now, where to hide the phone? The paint. She thought about dropping the phone into a partially filled can, but it seemed cruel to destroy her aunt’s art supplies. It was like poking holes in Peg’s passion for life, and Dez had done enough to cause Peg trouble. Before she’d gotten pregnant, Dez had played around with smoking, which she’d obviously had to hide from Peg. There was only so much honesty her aunt could take. Dez had hidden her cigarettes down here to avoid a confrontation.
Dez moved to the fuse panel and tucked her phone behind it, wedged between two short pieces of two-by-four. A pack of Marlboro’s dropped out. Great. Trading one vice for another. She tucked the cigarettes into her jacket pocket next to her backup piece, a compact twenty-two that normally resided in her ankle holster. Her hands shook with the need to hurry back upstairs to meet the responding officers when they arrived.
She was halfway up the stairs before another thought struck her. Even with a badge, she’d have to surrender her weapons until they ruled them out as the murder weapons. And she couldn’t leave Nate vulnerable. She needed a gun. If she surrendered her Glock, her registered service weapon, they wouldn’t need to know about her twenty-two.
Dez stomped back down the stairs. She walked to the washer and dryer and pulled the dryer from the wall to stash the gun in the vent tubing. Snapping the clasp back into place, Dez stepped back and moved the dryer to its original spot. The floor was unmarked, didn’t show any signs she’d moved it. There were no footprints in the dust showing she’d been down here. She clicked the light off and ascended the stairs. They squeaked as she stepped, and she felt the irrational fear of a boogieman climbing up to get her ass.
The boogieman didn’t exist, but what happened in that Jeep was proof positive that evil existed, even in a small town.
…
Mick drove around a squad car and the sheriff’s four-wheel drive in order to pull into Peg’s driveway. Yellow crime scene tape blocked off a huge chunk of real estate around a green Jeep parked where Mick’s truck had parked that morning. Boots had trampled a path around the crime tape and up to Peg’s bright red front door. It was like walking into an alternate universe. The trip to the airfield hadn’t taken long, but something big had definitely gone down.
Deputy Doug from the night at the bar nodded as Mick stepped out of his truck. Vern stood off to the side taking pictures with a serious looking camera. Mick gave Doug a friendly wave, because, yeah, this was normal.
Nate nearly tackled him when he walked through the door. The boy wrapped his arms around Mick’s midsection and buried his head in Mick’s coat. Something was seriously off. Mick pried Nate’s fingers free. The boy looked up from a tear-stained face, his eyes red rimmed. “There’s a dead body,” he whispered. A hiccup shuddered his slight shoulders.
Jesus, how long had he been gone? The body out front had to relate to the case, but who?
Mick draped an arm over the kid’s shoulder and steered him into the kitchen where Jerry was leaning against the counter, drinking coffee from the same thermal cup he’d used the day before. Peg, her face as pale as the white cabinets, sat at one end of the kitchen table while Dez sat at the other.
“You kids have a party while I was getting lunch?” He tossed the fast food bag on the table. “Neighbors call the cops to break it up?”
Dez frowned at him. “The Jeep was out front when Nate and I got back from sledding. Did you see it when you left?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s parked in my spot, so it’d have to be after I left, not long ago, I might add. What happened?”
“Hold on.” Peg grabbed the bag of food off the table. She offered a burger to Dez who shook her head no. “Nate, why don’t you and I go upstairs to eat.”
“I’m not allowed to eat in my room,” he said, his voice low.
“My house, my rules,” Peg said. The stern tone of voice and look on her face must have stemmed any further debate, because Nate let her pull him from the room.
The sheriff didn’t speak until a door slammed closed in the upstairs hall. “I thought the boy’s name was Micah.”
Dez shared a look with Mick. The jig was up. A pack of cigarettes dropped to the pale linoleum floor when she dug in her pocket. Mick bent to pick it up. “When did you start smoking?”
“When I was sixteen.” Her face turned as red as Nate’s cap. “I found it when we were looking for sledding gear.” She glanced up at Jerry. “Don’t tell Peg.”
“She knew you were smoking,” Jerry said absently. He didn’t look up from the notebook he was scribbling in. “Did you really think she couldn’t smell it on your clothes?”
“Well.” She shrugged. “I was sixteen. You think you’re too smart to get caught when you’re sixteen.”
“You’re not doing much better now.” Jerry glanced up from the notes to give her a stern glare. “Time for you to tell me what the hell’s really going on here.”
Mick removed his coat and draped it on the back of a chair. He didn’t like the direction of the questions. The sheriff might be dating Peg, but that didn’t automaticall
y make him a good guy. He had probable drug trafficking going through the local airfield. Wayne still worked at the airfield despite an APB out for his arrest that Blake had arranged earlier. Those details made Mick a suspicious man.
No one said a law enforcement officer was all good all the time. Apparently, Dez didn’t share Mick’s opinion. She handed her badge to Jerry. “I’m a police officer. Nate is a witness. We brought him up here to keep him safe.”
“How’d that work out for you?” Jerry asked, taking a close look at the badge.
“Until today, pretty good.”
Jerry made some notes before handing the badge back. “You changed your name to Destiny Harper. Peg would like you changing to her last name, and if you’re working as a police officer, I can see why you didn’t want your daddy’s name. Why Destiny?”
“Justice never really fit.”
“But you’re working as a cop?”
“Being a cop has nothing to do with justice. You know that. And before you say anything, I’ll tell you flat out, my being a cop has nothing to do with my father.” Dez tucked the badge in her pocket and zipped it closed, her hands shaking. “I honestly don’t believe your victim has anything to do with my case.”
Jerry looked between them. “I’m not as convinced, seeing how we haven’t had a murder in our county for the past four years.”
Mick moved closer to see Dez’s whole body shivering. Mick lifted her, sat down on the kitchen chair, and plopped her on his lap. The fact that she let him said something for her mental state. He pulled her against his chest, and she trembled. This was not hard-ass Dez. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?”
“DB in the vehicle out front,” Jerry said, his attitude so calm he might have been swapping stories over Peg’s breakfast burritos.
“I got that much from the kid when I walked through the door. Someone want to tell me who and why?”
Jerry looked pointedly at Dez. “Why don’t you run it down for me, starting with how a police officer from the city is hiding in my town without notifying me?”
Mick squeezed her thigh to caution her. They didn’t have enough background on the sheriff to know if he was clean, but she shoved Mick’s hand away. Her upper body rose and fell as she took a deep breath. “I’m on loan to an FBI task force. Our suspect is classified. What I can say is he’s an organized individual who’s been active in the drug trade for years, possibly decades. For reasons I’m not at liberty to divulge, he’s after Nate. I won’t let that happen.”
Unstoppable (The Untouchable Series) Page 14