“I almost did,” he said removing his jacket and shoes then closing the door. “Something tells me if I had, you’d have blown me off.”
She felt the heat creep onto her face at his accurate assessment. “Probably. I guess the rain isn’t helping much, and I’m really sore, so I thought I’d stay off it for the day.”
“I didn’t realize it gave you that much pain. I mean, I saw you limping yesterday, but I guess I never even considered you’d have a wheelchair—a walker, maybe.”
“A walker doesn’t really take the weight off. I talked to Cal this morning. The kids are doing better. He’s going out to talk to them later. See if they can tell him anything more. Since you’ve come all this way for nothing, let me offer you a cup of coffee.”
“Sure, but I haven’t come for nothing. I figured we could spend the day together. Since Mike isn’t around to take you for groceries, I thought I could.”
“That’s kind of you, but I’ve got laundry to do, and the hip is really sore. I’ve got enough food to last a few more days. Maybe I can have a rain check for after school next week?”
She went into the kitchen, and he followed her. After she poured coffee into two mugs, she handed him the cups and wheeled herself over beside the sofa.
Jackson placed the drinks on the coffee table.
Expecting him to sit on the sofa, near her, she gasped when he pulled the lap quilt away, exposing her missing leg, clearly visible given the mid-calf skirt she’d chosen to wear today.
“My God. Your leg…” Jackson stared, mouth agape at the empty space where her leg should’ve been.
She grabbed at the quilt to cover herself once more.
He held it out of her reach. “What happened to your leg?”
A few snarky comments flitted through her head and died at the look of compassion rather than shock on his face. “I lost it in the accident,” she answered softly. There wasn’t any point in trying to lie about it now.
“You said you had an artificial hip,” he admonished. “You didn’t mention it was the whole leg.”
“It’s not the whole leg, just most of it,” she said defensively. She could see him trying to put the pieces together, no doubt adding up another lie to the crimes against her.
Then instead of getting angry as he had on Friday night, he dropped onto the sofa in front of her and reached for her hands. “What happened, Emily? And don’t tell me nothing, or that it’s none of my business. I want the whole truth.”
Resigned, she blinked away the tears of regret in her eyes. Once she told him everything, which she suddenly decided she was going to do, he would leave her alone, and whatever fairytales she’d dreamed up last night would be well and truly dead. “I guess there’s no point in prevaricating now since my supervisor is going to call you on Monday morning to tell you everything. I’m tired of playing games, Jackson. I hate lying, and there’s no point in doing it any longer. You were right on Wednesday night. There was a plan in place, but I have no idea what’s going to happen now, since things aren’t making any sense. Cal knew about it, but we purposely kept you and everyone else, including his deputy, out of the loop. My name is Emily Jacobson Shepherd, and I’m not with the FDA. I’m a DEA agent on the trail of one of the most dangerous and deadly meth cooks we’ve ever encountered. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you the truth, but the more people who know what’s going on, the more danger they’re in.”
Jackson let go of her hands and stood, and she thought he was going to leave, but instead he picked her up gently and sat her on the couch and then sat beside her. “I don’t care about that right now. I want to know what happened to you.”
“I’m getting to that, but if you’re going to know that part, you need to know the rest,” she said and swiped at the tear that had slipped from her eye. “After my brother died from what I thought was a meth overdose, I decided to put my career as a registered dietitian on hold and go to work for the DEA to find and stop the man responsible for making the drugs that led to his death. At the time, I didn’t realize he’d been murdered. You see, the Chef gets his lab and distribution center set up, and then kills everyone who can identify him. No one knows who he is or what he looks like.”
“If you don’t know that, how do you expect to find him?”
“By following the steps he takes to set up a kitchen, but this time, something has gone wrong, and my arrival may be one of the reasons he’s altered his plans. Seven years ago, my brother Jimmy was a concert pianist, tremendously gifted, but very nervous when it came to performing. Meth can give you energy, but it can also make you feel as if you can conquer the world. I think that’s why he started taking it, but for some reason, he was going to stop. He’d checked himself into a rehab facility in Sacramento, and then a week later, he was found dead in his room. They found traces of meth in a baggy, and I thought that was what had killed him.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, but why do you say he was murdered?”
“Because what he’d been given is what my husband termed a superdose—meth laced with arsenic. Jimmy was the first one to die that way, and then, other bodies started showing up every eighteen to twenty-four months with the same meth and arsenic combination. It’s what those boys were given, and that’s why I was so upset. Superdoses are the Chef’s endgame. Once his network is up and running, he disposes of the one or two people who can identify him. Preventing that from happening was why I was sent here, but those boys were in bad shape, and I blamed myself.”
“If those kids survived it’s because you were here, and it’s a good thing. They would’ve died without your information, right?”
“Probably. I thought my being here and Mabel’s publicity had made him decide to move on ahead of schedule, but that didn’t make sense. The body those kids found is at the crux of all this. When I went to the river to see the recovery scene, someone shot at me…”
“You mean shot at your car.”
“No, at me. I found evidence that the man was killed or at least had his hands cut off and teeth removed about a hundred feet farther upstream. I was looking at some dried blood when I was shot at. I’m not sure how the person knew I’d be there.”
“My God. You could’ve been killed! When I thought it was one of Mabel’s friends shooting at you, I couldn’t figure out how the person would know to follow you there. How did he?”
“Cal and I aren’t sure, but we suspect he may have cloned my cellphone or hacked it. I’d been to the sheriff’s office and Kevin had programmed the coordinates into my GPS, and then I called Mike Reynolds to meet me at the river. He didn’t pick up but I left a message.”
“Why would you call him?” he asked, frowning.
She thought heard annoyance in his voice, almost as if he were jealous. “Because he’s an undercover FBI agent. That’s why he asks so many questions. He’s working his own case, but he’s my backup here. I usually work—no make that worked—with a partner, but he was killed.”
“So you guys aren’t dating?”
There was so much relief in his voice she almost laughed. “No, we aren’t, but that would’ve been good cover for us. He had to leave the area because of a family emergency, and I’m not sure whether they’ll send someone else or I’ll be on my own until he returns. Cal is convinced Kevin wouldn’t be involved with the Chef and wants to assign him to me, but I’m not sure I want him hanging around. If he makes anymore sly comments like he did when we met, I swear I’ll deck him.”
Jackson laughed and settled her more comfortably against him. “Well, you’ll probably see more of him at the school. I think Deputy Dunderhead is in love with my new math science teacher.”
“You hired three new teachers. They’ve all been in the same area as the Chef the last couple of years. I’ll have to check them out.”
“So that’s what was bothering you Monday night. I guess I can ease your mind on that count. Micah Thomas is a she, so I doubt she’s your Chef. Her full name is Rebecca Micah Thomas, and she was bo
rn with a silver spoon in her mouth. Becoming a teacher wasn’t what daddy wanted for her, so she struck out on her own and waited tables at a bar in Lansing, Michigan to put herself through school. Once she did, and Daddy Dearest saw she wasn’t going to back down no matter what, he reopened the purse strings, hoping she’d crawl back home. That car was a bribe, so you can cross her off the list.”
She nodded. Micah might be a science teacher, familiar with chemical compounds and if she’d been a man, money or no money, she would have made the ideal chef, but somehow Emily couldn’t see Barbie donning a hazmat suit and breaking a nail. I’m not being kind, but even though Jackson acts as if he’s not interested in her, how can he not be? “She may be in the clear, but what about the others?”
“You know Harlan is a retired football player. He made a lot of money while he was part of the show, even more with the endorsements he still does every now and then. He also makes personal appearances. His brother’s an investment banker and manages Harlan’s money. His wife was an army captain until she developed pancreatic cancer last year. He decided to take up teaching because he loves the game and coaching is a way to be part of it now. He turned down an offer from UCLA to come here and work with younger kids so he could spend quality time with his daughter.”
No doubt, Harlan had done well for himself, but a lot of athletes got into drugs, especially after they’d been injured.
“All right. He was a good player, and now that you mention it, he did a commercial for some kind of pain reliever a year or so back, but that still leaves Mr. Curry.” Jackson shook his head. “Then Randal Curry plays his cards close to his chest. He never signs permanent contracts. He’s a decorated war hero who retired five years ago. He was part of an elite squad, and most of his record is classified. Before 9/11 he was a teacher, but his wife was killed in the north tower of the World Trade Center. When he retired he went back to teaching, choosing to work in towns from which people had died fighting for freedom—I mentioned the Olsen’s had lost their son in Afghanistan. Randal doesn’t stick around because he has thousands of places to go. He thinks of his year here as giving the community a little of what they gave their country. I’ll show you all their files tomorrow, but tell me about your leg.”
She swallowed. If what Jackson said was true, she’d done the man a real disservice by doubting his integrity. “When I joined the DEA, I was stationed in California where I learned about the superdose and how my brother had died. I asked to be assigned to the Chef’s case. Since he’s aligned with the Mexican cartel, I was sent to El Paso and paired with Alex Shepherd. He’d been after the Chef for three years, basically from the time my brother was killed. Alex was a great agent, single-minded, and focused on his job. Being thrown together day in, day out, we fell in love and got married. Kyle Kavanagh, our supervisor wanted to separate us, but by then, between us, we were the experts on the Chef, and the bodies kept piling up. When he killed again on a reservation in the northern part of the state, Washington wanted him brought down and that meant putting us on the job.”
Jackson’s brows rose at this detail but he didn’t interrupt her.
“We were making progress, and Alex had figured out there was at least one other person helping the Chef, keeping him informed and one step ahead of us. Then, I got pregnant, and they had to bring in another trainee. I was going to be flying a desk for a while and hadn’t been in the field for weeks. Before the raid, Alex had some kind of breakthrough about the Chef. It was why he insisted I be there with him that night. We were all excited, but it was a trap. The Chef had bugged the offices, fed us the phony information, and knew exactly how and when we were coming in. You see, Alex had somehow learned something critical, and needed to be eliminated.” She swiped at her tears.
Jackson gave her a handkerchief. “Why on earth would your superior allow a pregnant woman on a drug bust?”
“You know, Mike asked the same question when I told him about it last week. Kyle didn’t want me there, but Alex was so sure this was what we’d worked on for the last three years…I was supposed to stay in the rear behind the others, and I did, or at least I thought I did, but I wasn’t far enough back as it turned out. Alex and Tim, his new partner were the first ones in. followed by another agent and myself. One of them must’ve activated a trip wire on the way in. We were just inside the building when two pressure cooker bombs went off, and since a meth lab is basically an explosion waiting to happen, it blew. Somehow, I got thrown out of the building, but I sustained a lot of shrapnel damage. The others were all killed, incinerated in the fire. I never got to say goodbye.”
By now, she was sobbing and when Jackson pulled her up off the couch and onto his lap, the floodgates broke, and she cried the way she had almost three years ago when she’d learned the full extent of what she’d lost. Jackson didn’t say anything. He sat there holding her pressed tightly against his chest, rubbing her back, as she let it all out. She wept for the son she’d lost, for the husband she’d loved, and for two other men cut down in their prime. It seemed like hours before she ran out of tears, and her body settled into the sup-supping hiccups common after an emotional storm like that one.
“Feeling better?” he asked, still rubbing gentle circles on her back.
“A little. I’m sorry about that. I haven’t shared all the details with anyone in a long time.”
“Saying I’m sorry seems trite now. Since you don’t have a child with you, I’m assuming you lost the baby?”
“Yes. I was six months pregnant, but there was too much trauma, and our son didn’t survive. I had to have an artificial joint put in my hip—I didn’t lie about that—but they had to take my leg about ten inches down the thigh. There was too much damage to save it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you had a prosthetic leg that first night we met? It doesn’t change anything.”
“But it does. Kyle was afraid that if the Chef realized how vulnerable I was, it would increase the danger I’m in.” She sighed. “And he’s right. When I was being shot at, I was helpless. My leg is one of the best available, but there are certain things it can’t do.”
“Like swimming,” he said, remembering what she’d told him.
“And crawling. I basically had to drag myself across the clearing to find shelter. I had a gun and never even shot back.”
“If this guy had your office bugged in El Paso, wasn’t it a mistake to send you here? You may not recognize him, but surely he’d know you. Is that why he tried to run you off the road? It was him, right? Not a friend of Mabel’s.”
“Probably, but you’re wrong about one thing. He wouldn’t have recognized me. Go into my bedroom. There’s a photograph on the dresser.”
He stood, but instead of putting her down as she expected, he carried her into the bedroom with him and over to the dresser. “Who are they?” he asked, looking down at the wedding picture and creasing his brow in confusion.
“She’s me, and that’s Alex. As my mom likes to point out, I have the same eyes.”
“Why is he in uniform?”
“Alex was in the Reserves, on active duty when we were married, so he wore his uniform. At times, I thought he’d done it to impress my dad since Alex outranked him, and Dad didn’t like the idea of my marrying a man that much older than myself. I was only twenty-three to his thirty-eight.”
“Why did you have plastic surgery?”
“Because of the damage to the left side of my face in the explosion. A team of plastic surgeons did the best they could to fix it. I still have trouble accepting the stranger in the mirror is me and of course, I lost a lot of weight during my convalescence.”
Jackson stared appraisingly at the picture and then smiled. “You were cute, but you’re beautiful now.”
She chuckled. “Thank you, I think. If you carry me over to the bathroom, I’ll put on my prosthesis.”
“You don’t have to, not for me. Your hip still hurts doesn’t it?”
“A little, but that’s not why I�
�m not wearing it.”
“Then why?”
“Put me down, and I’ll show you.”
He placed her on the side of the bed,
She raised her skirt until the stump of her leg was visible. “I did a lot of walking, lifting, and bending last week, but then my little adventure in the woods didn’t help either. I stepped in a gopher hole or something on the edge of the bank and wrenched it. That’s what hurts,” She indicated the redness. “That’s why I needed the moleskin to line the cuff where it’s a little loose.”
“I’ve got something that’ll help,” he said picking her up. “Let’s get your coat.”
“I can’t go out like this,” she cried.
“You’re right. What was I thinking? Can you manage in the bathroom like this? No leg though. Just do what you have to do, fix your hair and your lipstick while I put your chair in the truck. We’re only going to the homestead. I have a whirlpool tub and some salve that’ll do wonders.”
“Jackson, you don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend to be my friend. I lied to you, deceived you—”
“Did you? You didn’t tell me the whole truth because you couldn’t. Are you going to implement that Healthy Living Program when school starts?”
“Of course I am.”
“And do you have an artificial hip?”
“You know I do.”
“Then how did you lie? Withholding information, because it’s necessary to do so, isn’t lying. I’m glad you shared it all with me and now, I’ll share something with you. I’m your colleague, your de facto boss, and your friend, but from now on, I intend to be your partner. With Mike gone, you need someone to watch your back. Now, hurry up. I’m starving, and I have a fancy picnic sitting in the truck waiting for us to share, along with a bottle of Pinot Grigio.”
“Thank you,” she replied and sniffled. “I’ll only be about ten minutes, but don’t take the chair. I can manage with the crutches.”
Secrets and Lies (Hearts Of Braden Book 4) Page 21