by Kim McMahill
“What would you be happy to do for Uncle Moss?”
“This,” he replied as he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. His lips moved slowly over hers until he felt her arms slide up around his neck. He deepened the kiss, and her response sent fire through his body. Even without his heavy coat on, he knew he would be burning just as hot. She fit against him like they were made for each other. When he finally let her go, she looked up at him with a wicked smile that made him itch to grab for her again.
As if sensing his intention, Grace took several steps back. “I’m fairly certain that wasn’t what Moss asked you to do for him.”
“Maybe he said something about giving you a hug for him, but I started tuning him out when he decided I needed driving instructions. Anyway, I didn’t want to disappoint an injured old man, so I winged it.”
Grace studied him for a moment. Maybe he won’t walk out on me, but even if he does, I might as well make the most of every moment we have together. She smiled and moved within reach.
Logan needed no further encouragement. He pulled her toward him. With one arm firmly around her waist, he ran his fingers through her hair. “Yes, those curls are just as soft as they look,” he moaned as his lips descended to hers, cutting off any response.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Frank cursed the snow covered roads and low visibility forcing him to drive his large SUV over South Pass at a snail’s pace. He glanced in the rearview mirror at the pathetic young scientist’s inert form, still out cold from his encounter with chloroform. The only thing keeping the limp body upright in the seat was being sandwiched between two broad-shouldered men wearing dark glasses and with stern expressions on their faces.
Shaking his head in frustration, Frank returned his attention to the treacherous highway. The greedy double-dippers of the world never learned. They always thought that when they received payment for being a traitor they could enjoy the spoils of their deceit, but loose threads were seldom left unclipped. More often than not, those taking a shortcut to wealth ended up being a complication and an unacceptable risk he was forced to mitigate. At least the materialistic fools provided him with job security and a steady, healthy income.
Some parts of his job were starting to bother him more all the time, and he worried he might be losing his edge. Kathleen Parker would have been eliminated eventually with the rest of her colleagues, but she wouldn’t have seen it coming, unlike the auto accident.
The knowledge she was likely terrified during those moments as headlights bore down on her, ramming her car repeatedly until she lost control and catapulted over a steep cliff, and may have even suffered before dying, didn’t set well with him. What a waste of a decent, smart young woman, and from his experience, they were a fairly rare commodity that should be protected, not discarded.
Even if he didn’t get fired after this job, or worse, he might think a little harder about retiring, not that it was always a choice in his line of work.
Then there was Dr. Clark. Somehow he had slipped away undetected. Frank’s contact had ranted and raved about how angry their employer had been with the news of Dr. Clark’s disappearance. She hadn’t fired him, making Frank more determined than ever to finish the job and salvage what he could of his reputation.
He was ordered to neutralize Grace Talbot and retrieve her copy of the data as quickly and efficiently as possible. He was then informed that ample resources had already been dispatched to track down Dr. Clark, so at least he was no longer his problem. Frank knew his employer had many powerful friends and connections in nearly all branches of law enforcement, so he had no doubt the situation would be remedied soon. If Dr. Clark went to the police for help, which was the most likely scenario, they would have no trouble silencing him forever.
A snore from the passenger’s seat drew Frank’s attention back to the current situation. Victor had been his right-hand man for years, but this would be his last job, having failed to nab Dr. Clark after running Kathleen off the road.
The error was Victor’s first failure while in his employ, and it would be his last. Frank had planned to go after Dr. Clark himself, but securing the slumbering prize in the backseat had taken longer than he’d anticipated due to the scientist’s lengthy and futile attempt to make sure he wasn’t followed home.
What an idiot. Did he actually think I hadn’t already tracked down his home address? Frank thought as he glanced into the review mirror.
The endless expanse of white in front of him and on both sides of the road made Frank’s vision blur. He wiped a hand across his tired eyes to chase away the fatigue and shook his head in disgust. These corporate jobs were usually no-brainers. The brilliant targets he was assigned to eliminate were normally easy pickings, lacking any street smarts to detect and avoid problems. Somehow this operation had turned into a real cluster, but it was nothing he couldn’t fix.
Frank slowly maneuvered the large vehicle off the road at the first plowed pull-out. He sat for a moment, watching the snow swirling outside and listening to the wind howl an unmerciful song. Not having the luxury to wait out the weather, he nudged Victor’s bulky shoulder.
“Wake up. You drive while I get a couple hours of sleep. As soon as we meet up with Sam and Vince we won’t have the opportunity to rest until we clean up the fiasco they’ve created in Wyoming.”
“You got it, boss,” Victor replied, rotating the kinks out of his neck and popping his jaw before reaching for the door handle.
Wind tore through the vehicle, replacing the warm interior air with a frigid blast as both men opened the front doors at the same time. Bracing himself against the fury, Frank quickly made his way to the passenger side, slipping on the icy roadway as he and Victor passed by each other, each trying to keep a hand on the vehicle’s hood for support while navigating the treacherous ground.
A moan escaped the sleeping scientist as the icy wind slapped across his bare skin, but Jonah didn’t wake, nor did his statue-like sentries flinch or alter their expressions. Frank was relieved. He was in no mood to listen to any sniveling or futile pleading, and he didn’t want to drug him again. If Grace and the deputy were holed up, armed, and cautious, they might need the hostage to smoke them out while keeping the violence to a minimum.
Victor eased the vehicle back onto the road while giving his boss a cautious glance. “Any word on Dr. Clark?”
“No longer our problem. Just drive.”
Frank checked his cell phone…still no reception. Being out of contact with the world was an uncomfortable feeling. If the situation in Wyoming had changed, he needed to know immediately. He didn’t want to drive into an ambush or continue on if Grace was on the move. Heading out in this weather wasn’t likely, but not out of the question. People from this area probably didn’t think the conditions were bad.
The last Frank had heard from Sam and Vince was that the target remained at the ranch, along with a local sheriff’s deputy, and her uncle was still in the hospital but was now under guard. Frank wasn’t worried about one rural county deputy with no backup for miles, but he couldn’t help but wonder if they were wrong about the old man and local law enforcement.
If the sheriff still believed the fire was an accident, and the rancher knew nothing about the research, why provide security? Once he cleaned up the mess at the ranch, he feared he would need to make a trip to the hospital to finish the job. He cringed at the thought of another nonessential casualty which only complicated the job. The more the body count rose, the more difficult it became to make the deaths look like accidents.
He returned his cell to his pocket and closed his eyes, hoping to get a bit of rest before reaching their destination. Dealing with so much incompetence drained his energy and tried his patience. He shouldn’t even be out in this godforsaken country in a snowstorm, but here he was, driving on roads so slick he could hardly stand up when he got out of the vehicle.
The operation had been multi-faceted but relatively simple. Sam and Vince were to release the pig
s and keep an eye on them until they succumbed to the weather or predators, which under these conditions wouldn’t have taken long, procure the supplements, and destroy any records located at a remote ranch manned by two oblivious old men.
Jonah had been well paid to copy the research data at the lab and then crash the computers, including the back-up hard drives. Once both phases were complete, Frank had devised the perfect lab mishap to remove the three scientists working on the project along with Dr. Clark.
If everything had gone as planned, no one would have connected a lab accident in Utah with a couple escaped pigs in a snow storm in Wyoming. But the fire and death at the ranch had scrambled the whole scenario. Grace’s hasty, unscheduled departure was responsible for the data being copied before the drives could be destroyed. Frank had no idea what had survived the fire. The unnecessary killing had drawn unwanted attention from the sheriff’s department. Dr. Clark had disappeared, and Grace couldn’t be eliminated until she divulged the location of the copied data. If the data wasn’t with her, remedying the situation would become even more problematic.
Frank loathed failure, and unfortunately, his employer had an even lower tolerance for it. Once he finished this operation, he would disappear to someplace warm where he could elude anyone trying to find him and hopefully stay alive.
He feared he had already messed up too many times to expect to remain on the payroll. If fired, he’d be deemed just another potential security risk too dangerous to remain at large.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Curse the luck,” Logan muttered as the ringing forced him to let go of Grace. He snatched the phone out of its cradle. “What!” he snarled into the phone.
Grace eased into the nearest chair, fearing her legs wouldn’t support her weight, and listened. She could tell by Logan’s quick resumption of a polite professional tone the caller must be Sheriff Harris. When Logan hung up and dropped into the chair opposite from her, she knew the news was bad.
“What now?” Grace asked as she reached across the table and took his hand.
“The sheriff got permission from a friend up the South Fork, who’s snow-birding for the winter, to use his place, but when he sent a deputy up to check out the logistics and turn on the utilities he found the road was drifted shut. There’s a plow en route, and he’s looking for other options, but with the rate of snowfall and the increasing winds, he doubted the road could be cleaned out enough to get a horse trailer in by nightfall.”
“What does he want us to do?”
“Leave all the animals behind and head into town. Sheriff Harris wants us to hole up at his house, but the animals are another story. He doesn’t have space for your small traveling farm, and he doesn’t want to involve any of the vets, horse boarders, or private citizens in case our arsonist and murderer decides to make another appearance. The plan was for us to slip through town as quickly as possible and lay low someplace with no residents nearby or nosy neighbors, but that plan got shot to pieces by the weather.”
“You know I won’t desert the horses, pigs, cats, and dogs. Lady is due to foal in just a couple months, and this is her first. If it was summer, I could leave them overnight, but with another storm moving in, I can’t abandon them. Besides, we still don’t know for certain if anyone has any intention of coming after me. We could be seriously exaggerating the potential danger. Maybe Kathleen’s accident was just that, and maybe there is a logical explanation for Jonah’s absence. I didn’t think to ask Stephen if he checked the lab. Sometimes Jonah goes into work at odd hours if an idea strikes him.”
Logan squeezed her hand and looked into her eyes. The determination he saw left no doubt she wouldn’t leave without the animals. The only way he could make her desert her pets would be by force, and that would be a little melodramatic under the circumstances. Bottom line, there had been no attempts on Grace’s life, and the evidence linking the other incidents to crimes was circumstantial.
“Maybe we are overreacting, but my gut says we’re not, and for some reason the sheriff agrees. He talked to the investigating officer, and the man refused to consider Kathleen’s wreck was anything but an accident. The officer claimed he had no grounds to investigate why Jonah wasn’t home or why Dr. Clark took a road trip. He insisted there was no evidence of foul play. The Billings Police are providing a guard at the hospital, and working to find the individuals who dumped the car rented with a stolen ID.”
“That’s something. I’d bet if the men driving the rental, who Harold and Red helped in the road, were found, we’d get some answers,” Grace replied.
“I think we should at least head to my house. It’s probably the second place someone will look for you, but we’re less likely to get snowed-in there. My road is shorter, flatter, and I’ve got the plow. At the rate it’s been coming down the past few hours, I don’t think it’s wise to wait any longer, and the wind has really picked up.”
Without further discussion, Grace shouldered her duffle and followed Logan to the truck. After placing his bag behind the seat, Logan began unhooking the trailer.
“What are you doing? Didn’t we decide we take the animals or stay put?” Grace asked in alarm.
“I thought we’d see if we can get to the highway with just the truck before we try to pull the trailer out, and if there are any snow drifts, we can bust a track through before we’re loaded down.”
Grace nodded, realizing the wisdom in a trial run. She hoisted herself into the passenger seat of her uncle’s old one-ton and cranked up the defroster. When Logan got in, he looked at her with concern, and she feared they had waited too long to flee.
As they eased toward the first gentle rise, the truck crawled over with little difficulty, but as they crested the hill Grace gasped. Snow had blown in between the berms, filling the lane with two feet of light snow on the level and occasional drifts even deeper.
The truck picked up speed as they descended. Hitting the first significant drift, snow fanned to both sides in high arcs, slowing the heavy vehicle’s momentum as it barreled toward the highway. Grace held her breath as the truck’s motor strained, churning through the deepest, heaviest snow. When they reached the pavement, it was obvious no snowplows had been through recently.
“We can’t pull a trailer loaded with horses through this, and it would be stupid to be on an unplowed highway with a load of animals with daylight running out.”
“Well, if getting out is this tough, I doubt anyone will attempt to get in,” Grace replied.
“I hope you’re right, because it doesn’t make sense to put ourselves in a dangerous situation without being certain there is a reason to.”
After several tries and nearly getting stuck, Logan turned the truck around and headed back to the ranch in defeat.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“That miserable, greedy, no-good, chauvinistic, little jerk.”
“Nice visit with the investigator?” Nick asked.
“I couldn’t get the investigating officer to confess, but if he isn’t on someone’s, other than the police department’s payroll, I’ll strip naked and run a lap around the Temple in broad daylight,” Devyn replied.
“I’m sure the male population of Salt Lake would enjoy watching that tight little tushy and those long legs jogging around our great city’s most iconic feature, but I doubt the church president or our boss would share in their enthusiasm.”
Devyn dropped into her chair and heaved an exasperated sigh, ignoring Nick’s comment. A day of tracking down witnesses, battling an inept and arrogant investigator, and she had nothing to show for her efforts.
“There were two witnesses who saw a beat-up, older model pickup force Kathleen Parker’s car off the road. I talked to the two witnesses and they are positive about what they saw, but when I followed up with the investigator, he claimed it was too dark, and they were too far away from the scene to be reliable witnesses. He admitted there might have been a second vehicle involved, but at this point he has no way to be sure the dr
iver even realized Kathleen veered off the road.”
“You didn’t punch him, did you?”
Devyn stuck out her tongue at Nick. “I was this close,” she said while holding her thumb and forefinger up, an inch apart. “When he said, if you can believe this, that women tend to get nervous and twitchy when driving at night. Since she was a scientist, he doubted she went out much in the evening, so she likely lacked much experience driving on nighttime roads and overreacted to a passing car and overcorrected. I nearly showed him how ‘twitchy’ my right uppercut can be.”
“Ouch.” Nick flinched in mock fear. He knew Devyn well enough to duck, avoiding the stress ball she kept on her desk for, he assumed, the exclusive purpose of nailing him when he taunted her. Nick dodged the projectile aimed at his head, reached up and snagged the squishy ball out of the air, and flashed an annoying smile he used whenever he bested her.
“Okay, smart guy, what did you come up with?”
“The CEO and all the scientists involved are all squeaky clean, but I uncovered some interesting anomalies in the Vice President of Product Development’s background. Janice Green has only been with UVN about seven months, and her resume lists two other positions with pharmaceutical companies in the past five years. According to human resources, the two former employers were contacted and each provided stellar recommendations, but when I contacted those companies, they claimed she had never been employed with them. They also denied any knowledge of a Janice Green or of receiving a call from UVN concerning an employment check. Her overseas employment prior to the two companies she claimed to have worked for most recently is bogus. The foreign employment reference was validated by human resources when they hired her, but I can’t find any evidence the company ever existed. The phone numbers she provided for all her references have all been disconnected.”