Cold Pursuit (2019 Reissue)

by Carla Neggers

  Elijah put the flowers on the small drop-leaf table near the window overlooking the lake. Three of her colleagues who’d stayed in the cabins in October had referred to the decor as early junkyard, but they’d enjoyed the setting—the woods, the lake, the hills. They’d hiked, fished, gone canoeing, read books in the quiet.

  That was before Jo’s bad week. She doubted any of her fellow Secret Service agents would head to Vermont anytime soon, even if she did fix up the cabins.

  She avoided looking at the iron four-poster bed in the alcove—it was the same bed she and Elijah had found so useful fifteen years ago.

  “How long are you planning to stay?” he asked.

  “Until the dust settles in Washington.”

  Jo bent down and grabbed the bananas from the top of her box. How long would she be here? As she stood up straight again, she tried not to wince in front of Elijah, a matter of personal pride, but she knew she’d failed.

  “Still hurting?” he asked with no detectable amusement or sarcasm.

  “Not really.”

  “Baking soda and water might help.”

  Now she detected a note of amusement and sarcasm. “Thanks. I’m fine.”

  She had heard every conceivable homemade remedy in the past seventy-two hours, ever since she’d fallen victim to a prank orchestrated by the sixteen-year-old son of the vice president of the United States. Charles Preston Neal was a notorious handful. He had invited his cousins and friends over to the madhouse that was the vice president’s residence for an elaborate simulated firefight with realistic-looking fake weapons. Jo was assigned to Marissa Neal, the eldest of Charlie’s four older sisters, who lived nearby and was there for a visit.

  Five minutes into their firefight, Charlie had pointed at his cousin Conor, who was about to shoot, and yelled, “I think it’s a real gun!”

  Jo had reacted instantly, jumping into action to save Charlie and his friends from possible injury or death. But the “weapon” turned out to be another of the authentic-looking toy pistols and rifles in the boys’ extensive arsenal. She’d intercepted a barrage of airsoft pellets zipping toward Charlie and took the dozens of tiny, fake rounds meant for him.

  Trying to live down the spray of pinprick welts on her left arm, side and hip would have been bad enough, but Charlie had collapsed in hysterical laughter, and that was it. Jo pulled him up by the ear and gave him an uncensored piece of her mind.

  That was what one of his cousins or friends—no one knew which one—had secretly captured on video and put on the Internet.

  Hence, today’s drive up to Vermont.

  Vice President Neal had mandated the boys all take a police-sanctioned safety course if they were to have any more simulated battles in the backyard, and he’d personally sat them down at the kitchen table and had them write notes of apology to Jo. There was no telling how many of them were in on the prank, but Charlie clearly was the ringleader.

  But the damage was done. The video was out there forever, with Secret Service Special Agent Jo Harper grabbing the vice president’s son by the ear and giving him a piece of her mind.

  Not one of the finer moments in her career.

  Marissa Neal was sympathetic, having fallen victim to her brother’s pranks herself. Jo’s quick action a few weeks earlier had saved Marissa from severe burns and possibly death when a gas stove had exploded in a cabin she and friends had rented in the Shenandoah Mountains. A simple accident. It wasn’t publicized, much less splashed over the Internet.

  “Dyeing your hair these days, Jo?”

  She frowned at Elijah. “What?”

  “I like the copper,” he said, then nodded to the flowers. “That must explain Charlie’s choice of colors for your lilies. They go with your hair.”

  “He has an IQ of a hundred and eighty. He knows how to manipulate people.”

  “Maybe he has a crush on you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  The youngest of five and the only son of a busy, popular vice president, Charlie was also desperate to be noticed, desperate to matter. As a Secret Service agent, and one not directly assigned to him, Jo couldn’t let that be her concern—but she couldn’t help but notice, either.

  He was also fair-haired, good-looking, exceptionally bright and surprisingly unworldly given his wealthy, high-profile family background.

  Elijah pushed open the screen door and glanced back at her. “You really can’t tell a toy gun from a real one?”

  “Go ahead, Elijah, have your fun. Yes, I can tell. That’s not why I got hit.” She set the bananas on the two-foot cracked Formica counter in the bare-bones kitchen area. They’d be mush by morning. “It doesn’t matter. Charlie and the rest of those kids are all safe.”

  “You did your job,” Elijah said.

  “That’s the way I look at it.”

  His eyes stayed on her for a fraction longer than she found comfortable. “Didn’t know I was back, did you?”

  “No.”

  She returned to the box and saw that she’d made a mistake in packing the three cartons of yogurt she’d had in her fridge. They were squished now, and ten hours in her trunk couldn’t have been good for their contents.

  Thinking about yogurt gone bad wasn’t enough to distract her from the man standing in the doorway.

  “I heard you were wounded,” she said, raising her gaze to him. “You’re okay now?”

  “Never better.”

  His response was classic Elijah. Jo had never met anyone more resilient. Most of his years as a Special Forces soldier were clouded in mystery and the subject of much speculation in Black Falls. Even with her high-level security clearances, Jo doubted she could find out the specifics of the April firefight. She’d heard that a bullet had nicked his femoral artery, a highly dangerous injury. He could have easily bled to death.

  According to her sister, he was evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in southern Germany, and only when he was out of danger had his family informed him of his father’s death. Beth had heard the story straight from Rose Cameron, Elijah’s younger sister, who had flown to Germany to be with her brother.

  “But he already knew,” Beth had said. “No one had to tell him.”

  Jo suspected that one look at Rose’s face probably had been enough for Elijah to figure out the bad news for himself.

  “I’m sorry about your father.” She ran a finger along the delicate edge of a dark maroon lily. “I had no idea he planned to leave me this place. I never asked him for anything, Elijah. Ever. He didn’t owe me.”

  His expression was unreadable. “That doesn’t seem to be how he saw it, does it?”

  She resisted comment. To get into a discussion about Drew Cameron now, after her long day and lousy week, in the very cabin in which he had discovered her and Elijah as teenagers and changed the course of their lives, made no sense.

  “Thanks for delivering the flowers,” she said.

  “Anytime. And relax. Give yourself time to heal.” He grinned suddenly. “I hear those airsoft pellets sting like hell.”

  “Funny, Elijah.”

  “You haven’t seen the video, have you?”

  “No, and I don’t intend to.” A colleague had brought his personal laptop to her desk to show her two-minute video, but his battery had run out. Her one stroke of luck all week, as far as she was concerned. “You have?”

  “A.J. and I had a couple of beers the other night and watched it start to finish at least three times.”

  “You did not.”

  “Okay. Six times.”

  The screen door creaked shut as he headed out, laughing.

  After he left, Jo checked the card tucked among the lilies.

  Thank you for your willingness to save my life.

  Someday I’ll make amends. Charles P. Neal.

  She sighed and told herself she was glad there hadn’t been a real gun. No one had been seriously hurt that day. The rest didn’t matter.

  On her drive north, Jo had tried to be optimis
tic and thought of the various ways that being in Black Falls would do her good. She could go for runs in the fresh, crisp northern New England air. She could watch the last of the leaves fall off the trees. Wait for the first real snow. Watch the birds migrate for warmer climates.

  Listen for bats in the rafters and avoid her nearest neighbor.

  She got busy unpacking before she could change her mind and load up her car again and head to Montreal or Buffalo—anywhere, she thought, that would put her more than a couple hundred yards from Elijah Cameron.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Jo was already bored with unpacking. She opened a bottle of merlot, poured herself a glass and took it outside, crossing the dirt road and heading down to the lake.

  She stood on a rounded boulder and sipped her wine. The sky was almost dark now. The air was frosty, and the landscape had the stark, empty feel of November, so different from the warm spring afternoon when she’d walked among the cherry blossoms with Drew Cameron.

  She hadn’t told anyone—family, friends, colleagues or, most of all, Drew Cameron’s three sons and daughter—about the strange visit two weeks before his death.

  She could see him now as they’d walked along the Tidal Basin. He’d surprised her when he’d shown up at her apartment and asked her to go with him to see the cherry blossoms. He was alone—A.J. was working nonstop at the lodge, Elijah was deployed to parts unknown, Sean was in southern California making money and Rose was off with her search dogs, picking through the remains of a string of Midwestern tornadoes.

  The brown flannel shirt Drew wore was too warm for early April in Washington, but he hadn’t seemed to notice. Surrounded by the stunning pale pink blossoms, the hard-bitten man Jo had once blamed for helping to ruin her life had startled her further by asking if she was okay these days.

  “You’ve never married, Jo,” he’d said.

  “I’m only thirty-three.” She’d laughed. “There’s still time.”

  “I guess things are different now. Elijah’s never married, either, but I don’t think he ever expected to live this long. I’m not saying he has a death wish or anything. He’s just being practical.” Drew had paused, his face lined with deep wrinkles as much from a life spent mostly outdoors in the mountains he loved as from age. “We Camerons are a practical lot.”

  Uncomfortable with his seriousness, Jo had gone for another lighthearted remark. “I don’t know that moving to Vermont in the middle of the Revolutionary War was all that practical. Then staying there. Your ancestors could have cleared out and joined the westward expansion.” She’d caught a falling cherry blossom in a palm and smiled at him. “Taken a flatboat to Ohio or something.”

  “Harpers got to Vermont before any Camerons did.”

  “Not all of us Harpers stayed,” she said.

  “True. Jo, there are days…” He’d hesitated and gazed up at the cherry trees and the cloudless sky. It was one of those rare, glorious early-spring afternoons in the nation’s capital. Finally, he’d shifted back to Jo, with tears in his eyes. “I wake up on cold mornings and see the grandchildren you and Elijah should have had. They’re as clear to me as you are right now. They line up in front of my bed and look at me as if I did something wrong.”

  Jo had needed a moment to collect herself. She hadn’t expected such words—such an image—to come from Drew Cameron. But she’d sensed his pain, his age, and however much she’d hated him in the past, blamed him for the way he’d humiliated her at eighteen, she couldn’t hate him then. “Don’t torture yourself,” she’d said quietly. “I’m happy. Elijah’s happy—”

  “I keep dreaming I’m going to lose him.”

  “Mr. Cameron…Drew…”

  “I wake up in a cold sweat, Jo. My heart pounds and I can’t go back to sleep. I know he’s going to die over there. I don’t know what he’s doing, exactly—he tells me what he can. But it’s dangerous. And he’s not going to survive.”

  Jo had crushed the cherry blossoms in her palms and dropped them on the walk. Drew Cameron wasn’t a worrier. She doubted there was a Cameron ever born who was. They were action oriented and forward looking. They didn’t brood—they didn’t dwell on those things they couldn’t do anything about.

  Like keeping a son at war safe from harm.

  Jo was unable to fathom Elijah dying young. He would always be the devil-may-care teenager she’d promised to love forever.

  Except it hadn’t worked out that way.

  “It’s natural to worry,” she’d told his father, “especially given the nature of Elijah’s work.”

  “I’d give my life for Elijah,” Drew had said simply.

  “He knows that. Come on. Let’s look at the cherry blossoms.”

  “Jo…”

  She had never seen him—maybe any Cameron—so openly emotional, but every instinct she had told her why he had come to see her. She’d stopped, staring out at the Tidal Basin as she spoke. “You did what you thought was right when you broke up Elijah and me and kicked him out of your house. There’s nothing for either of us to forgive.”

  “Will you still think that if he’s killed?”

  “Have faith.”

  They’d continued their cherry-blossom tour in near silence, and Jo couldn’t help but imagine what the children the usually stolid man next to her claimed to have seen looked like. How many of them were there? Were they boys, girls—a mix?

  Did they have Elijah’s deep blue eyes?

  She hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask Drew to describe them.

  She’d fallen for a bad boy and a Cameron all those years ago, and he’d left her for the army. There was no going back.

  When Jo received word of Drew’s death on Cameron Mountain and Elijah’s narrow escape in Afghanistan, she had thought back to that eerie conversation among the cherry blossoms and wondered if, somehow, Drew had gotten his wish—if he had, at least in his own mind, exchanged his life for his son’s.

  It wasn’t a conversation she intended ever to have with Elijah or any Cameron.

  Recent evidence to the contrary, she did know that some things needed to be left unsaid.

  She jumped down from her rock and decided to resume unpacking.

  But when she returned to the cabin, she dug out her cell phone and checked the signal. Weak. She tried her boss’s direct line, anyway.

  Deputy Special Agent in Charge Mark Francona picked up on the second ring and sighed. “What?”

  “I’m in Vermont,” Jo said. “How long do I get to stay in exile?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Jo Harper.”

  “Jo who?”

  Click.

  Despite his enormous responsibilities and straight-as-an-arrow professionalism, her boss had a peculiar sense of humor.

  On the other hand, maybe he was being serious.

  Jo flipped her cell phone shut and dropped onto the ratty couch. She stared up at a dusty picture of a trout on the cheap wood paneling above the old propane heater.

  Maybe, in his own way, Francona was trying to tell her that the sand was running out of the hourglass on her Secret Service career, and she’d be stuck in Black Falls forever.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Elijah grabbed a neatly split, perfectly dried log from the two cords of wood he’d had delivered at the top of his driveway. He felt no pain or even residual stiffness in his right thigh where he’d been shot. He had tied on a tourniquet himself that long, bad night to stem the bleeding and keep on fighting.

  He hadn’t expected to live. The Special Forces medic who’d treated him, and later his doctors, had said it was a miracle he hadn’t bled to death.

  He didn’t believe in miracles.

  A sudden cold wind blew up from the lake. Even if it took until midnight, he wanted to get the wood stacked tonight.

  His help, in the form of two teenagers, apparently had deserted him.

  It was dark now, the pines and naked birches and maples on his hillside black silhouettes against the star-
sprinkled night sky.

  Jo had gone back inside with her glass of wine or whatever it was she’d stood on her rock drinking.

  Through the trees, he saw a light come on in her rat heap of a cabin.

  Having the Secret Service next door was a complication he didn’t need when he was on the hunt for answers, but Elijah figured he didn’t have much choice in the matter—and at least Jo was easier to look at than the three agents who’d stayed in the cabins a few weeks ago when he’d just arrived back home.

  It wasn’t until last week, on a solitary hike up Cameron Mountain, that he’d flat-out decided he didn’t have the full story behind his father’s death in April.

  Just as he was starting to push for answers, Jo had to get herself into trouble in Washington and turn up on the lake.

  Elijah grabbed more logs. He’d switched on the lights in the lower level of his home, but even so, it was a dark night. He pictured Jo at ten, freckle-faced and full of mischief, scrambling up a tall oak on the lakeshore to cut the rope to his tire swing. He’d sailed out over the water. By the time he swam back to shore, she’d lit out. He never did catch up with her.

  He pictured her skinny-dipping in an isolated cove on a chilly fall night at fifteen. He remembered her mortification when he’d stumbled onto her. Then her anger as she’d pelted him with a rock.

  Those turquoise eyes of hers.

  And he pictured her at eighteen, whispering to him in the moonlight. “I love you, Elijah. I’ll love you forever.”

  She’d long since come to her senses.

  He’d been a sucker for Jo Harper for as long as he could remember.

  He took his load of logs to the lean-to he’d built on the front lower level of his house, under the deck, and lined them up side by side. When he’d bought his five hillside acres three years ago, he hadn’t even considered that it didn’t have any lake frontage. He’d expected the adjoining acreage to stay in the family. He’d worked on his place whenever he could get back to Black Falls, clearing the land, building his post-and-beam house. It was nothing fancy, but he was satisfied with the results.