by Paula Graves
“That happen a lot?” he called after her.
She turned, flashing him a wry grin. “Didn’t used to. But we’ve seen our share of troubles the past few years.” She headed down the mountain on foot, disappearing into the thick woods beyond the clearing where his cabin sat.
He let himself inside, taking in the rustic wood décor. It was definitely a cabin, but the furniture looked large and comfortable, and the television in the front room was enormous and appeared to come with satellite hook-up.
Exploring further, he found the hot tub she mentioned, along with a surprisingly roomy kitchen area with new appliances and a sunny breakfast nook next to a window overlooking the wooded rise of the mountain behind the cabin.
Definitely better than the motel room, he thought.
Resisting the siren call of the hot tub, he unpacked his things from the car and took them inside. Rick Cooper had checked the motel room and all his belongings for listening or GPS devices before they’d let him take any of his things with him, so at least he didn’t have to worry about someone tracking him down any time soon.
But the show of Coopers at the motel still had him worried. How hard would it be to connect the Coopers to the Cooper Cove rental properties? Surely they’d think to look here at the cabins for him, sooner or later.
And then what? Kill him for his notes?
He had copies of everything, stashed in a safe place that wouldn’t easily be tracked to him. He even had left instructions with his lawyer on what to do if something happened to him. Paranoid, perhaps, but if the last four years had taught him anything, it was that even if you kept your head down and tried to stay out of trouble, trouble still had a nasty way of finding you.
This time, however, he planned to be prepared.
* * *
“WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW about this guy?”
On the other end of the cell phone line, Megan’s sister Shannon sounded more miffed than worried, probably because Jesse, Isabel and the rest of the Coopers had left her out of the trip to Evan’s motel room.
“We don’t know much,” Megan admitted. “Vince mentioned his name in some of his letters home.”
“Is someone going to run a background check? I could help with that.”
Megan smiled as she tucked the phone under her chin and reached up to pull a can of chili from the grocery store shelf. Though she was an employee of the security agency along with the rest of them, computer tech and archivist Shannon never got any time in the field. She’d recently become vocal about wanting to do more field investigative work and had gone so far as to line up several Information Technology grads for interviews with Jesse recently without consulting him first.
He hadn’t been amused. Maybe leaving Shannon out had been his way of driving home his authority at the agency. Megan personally thought her baby sister should get the chance to prove herself in the field, just as the rest of them had.
“Call Jesse and offer your help,” Megan suggested.
“Yeah, that’ll go over well,” Shannon grumbled. “Where are you, anyway?”
“Piggly Wiggly in Maybridge, picking up supplies for our visitor,” she answered, grabbing more cans of soup from the shelves. “We all agreed he shouldn’t be out and about much. Someone could be targeting him.”
The hair at the back of her neck prickled, and she turned her head to check behind her. Down the aisle, about twenty feet away, stood a man in black jeans and a dark green long-sleeved T-shirt. The sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and when he reached up to pull something from the shelf, she could see a tribal symbol tattoo on the inside of his right arm.
He never looked at her, but she had the sense he was acutely aware of her presence.
“Sure, Jesse lets you play babysitter with some stranger in danger, but I don’t even get to help with a background check.”
“Shannon, I’m on your side. You know I am.” Megan moved quickly around the corner, skipping the next two aisles and heading down the third one, her nerves still jangling. “But if you don’t stop whining about being left out, that could change.”
“I know I sound like a broken record, but I’m twenty-six years old. Jesse was a lot younger than that when he went overseas armed with a big gun to face down a whole world full of people who wanted him dead because he was an American. Maybe I should’ve joined the marines and then he’d take me seriously.”
“Maybe if you didn’t sound like a bored teenager when you asked him to let you do things—”
Shannon made a growling noise of frustration. “Okay. I’ll work on that. And I think I will offer to help with the background check. It’s mostly desk work. He can’t get all crazy about me doing that, right?”
“That’s the spirit.” Megan dropped a box of crackers into her buggy and slanted a quick look over her shoulder. The man with the tattoo was at the other end of the aisle, gazing at the products on the shelves in front of him.
Was it a coincidence he’d skipped the same aisles she had?
She turned the corner again and backtracked, moving down the previous aisle. She walked at a leisurely pace, pretending to study the products, though she saw none of them, her attention focused on the sound of footsteps behind her. She reached the end of the aisle, turned and glanced back at the aisle she was leaving.
Tattoo man was halfway down the aisle, gazing with earnest interest at an array of spices.
Megan was nowhere near finished with the shopping she’d planned, but she detoured straight to the checkout counter and paid for her selections. She saw no sign of the tattooed man while she was paying the bill, nor did she spot him outside in the parking lot when she loaded the groceries into her Jeep Wrangler and drove east toward Gossamer Ridge.
She didn’t spot anyone following her, but just in case, she went home instead of heading up the mountain to the cabin where Evan Pike was staying. Parking out front, she carried the bag of groceries inside in case anyone was watching.
A blast of refrigerated air washed over her when she let herself in. She braced herself for Patton’s exuberant hello, listening for the clatter of his claws on her scuffed-up hardwood floors.
But there was only silence.
“Patton?” Megan stepped farther into the house, her heart pounding. The silence was almost tangible, like a hand squeezing her throat until she couldn’t breathe.
She set down the bag quietly and detoured into the bedroom to retrieve her Ruger. But before she reached the bedside table where she kept it, she found Patton lying on the floor beside her bed.
Unmoving.
Chapter Four
The Gossamer Ridge Pet Clinic seemed to blend into the side of the mountain, hewn of the same russet stone that made up the prominent rock faces that had been visible on the drive down the mountain. Rick Cooper parked next to a blue Jeep in the parking lot, got out and hurried up the walk, leaving Evan to catch up.
Rick had surprised him a few minutes ago with news of the break-in at Megan’s house. The dog, he said, was alive but unresponsive. Megan had sent him to pick up Evan. “Said you’d want to be there,” Rick had told him tersely on the way out.
Inside the vet clinic, Evan spotted Megan at the front counter, talking to the woman behind the desk. She turned at the sound of the door opening, relief evident in her gray eyes. “Patton’s going to be okay. Whoever broke in shot him with a tranquilizer dart, but he’s already coming around.”
Evan released a pent-up breath. “What about your place? Did they take anything?”
“I didn’t stop to check,” she admitted. “I was afraid if I didn’t get him right to the vet…” She raked her fingers through her hair. “They want to keep him overnight to make sure he doesn’t have any ill effects from the tranquilizer, so I guess I might as well go home now and see what the damage is.”
She seemed angry but not sick with worry, which meant she hadn’t yet realized just what she might find missing when she finally made it back home.
But Evan had. If they�
��d bothered to tranquilize the dog, this break-in was more than a warning. They’d been looking for something in particular and needed time to find it.
He had a sick feeling he knew exactly what it was.
Within a minute of arriving at Megan’s house, his fear was confirmed. Megan emerged from her room, fire dancing in her eyes. “The only thing missing is a box of letters from Vince.”
“I’m so sorry,” Evan said, heartsick. Beyond the setback to his investigation, losing those letters had to be like losing part of her husband all over again.
She frowned. “You knew what they came for, didn’t you?”
“I suspected,” he admitted. “Once Rick told me the place had been tossed. They want the evidence I’m looking for. I’m sorry about those letters—”
To his surprise, she started to laugh. “Talk about working in mysterious ways.”
“What?”
Her laughter faded to a smile. “When you showed up this morning, wanting to see the letters, it put me on guard. I wasn’t sure you wouldn’t try to steal them yourself—”
“You don’t think I had anything to do—”
“No,” she said quickly. “I don’t. But I decided to put his letters in a safe place. Before I went grocery shopping, I ran the letters over to Cooper Security and put them in one of our safes.” Her grin was downright smug.
“But you said they took his letters—”
“Teenage stuff. I’ll miss them, but they’re not the same as the letters he wrote after we married and he went off to war.” Her smile faded. “So I guess I should thank you.”
“For being so untrustworthy you hid your letters from me?”
“Yes.” Her smile flitted back to life, stoking the slow burn in his gut that seemed to flicker to life whenever she flashed her pretty teeth at him. He’d never considered wiry redheads his type, but his body seemed to have other ideas.
“We should get you back to the cabin before people start noticing the stranger in our midst,” she said quietly, glancing toward the uniformed officers guarding the front of her house while detectives continued gathering evidence inside.
“You’re not kin to them, too?” He nodded toward the uniformed officers, his voice equally hushed.
She cut her eyes at him. “Very funny. I know them by name but not well enough to trust them with my secrets.”
“You think we could be dealing with inside infiltrators?”
“Money opens doors.” She glanced at the police officers again. “Some folks around here barely make ends meet. If you’re right about the SSU being behind Vince’s death, somebody paid them well to do it.”
“Barton Reid?” Evan knew the former State Department official had been working out of the U.S. Embassy in Kaziristan at the time of Vince Randall’s death. MacLear also had agents in the country then, which was why MacLear’s secret operatives were his prime suspects in Randall’s death.
That, and the fact that some of Vince Randall’s men had mentioned the sergeant had been spending a lot of time by himself in Tablis over the last couple of weeks before his death. More than usual.
More than necessary.
“Reid was trying to build himself a power base outside the law,” he added. “Maybe now he’s trying to cover his tracks to avoid jail time and even get back some of his power.”
“No way the State Department takes him back. They can’t look past the scandal, even if the case never goes to trial.”
“I wasn’t thinking about power at State.” Evan flattened his hand against the middle of her back, nudging her toward the empty kitchen. The second his fingers touched the skin-heated cotton of her T-shirt, he felt a jolt of desire as powerful as a kick in the gut. He looked down and found Megan gazing up at him with wide gray eyes, her cheeks pink and her lips parted.
She was standing close enough to kiss, and damned if he didn’t want to do it.
He dropped his hand from her back and stepped away. But putting distance between them didn’t quell his simmering desire.
He cleared his throat, keeping his voice low. “Barton Reid may be rebuilding the SSU as his own personal army, without the veneer of MacLear to give them the air of legitimacy.”
“We think the SSU are freelancers.” Megan moved toward him, her voice as quiet as his own. “We know Khalid Mazir hired some of them to kill my sister-in-law Amanda so she couldn’t connect Mazir to al Adar.”
Evan nodded. Khalid Mazir, the son of a beloved Kaziri democratic reformer, Zoli Mazir, had chosen violence and power over his father’s love for law and compromise. Khalid had nearly deceived the peace-hungry citizens of Kaziristan into making him president before Amanda Cooper had identified him as the terrorist who’d abducted and tortured her while she was working for the CIA.
“But who told Mazir about the SSU?” he asked. “How would he know they were still out there, willing to kill for money?”
Megan’s eyes narrowed. “He must have heard it from the man who once owned the SSU, lock, stock and barrel. Barton Reid.”
Evan nodded. “He knew the Mazirs well. Including Khalid.”
Megan tilted her chin toward him, giving him a tantalizing view of her soft, full lips. “Reid wanted Khalid Mazir in power, which means he almost certainly had something on him, something he thought he could use to control him.”
“Maybe just knowing he was a terrorist was enough.” Evan dragged his gaze from her lips and spotted one of the police officers passing close to the doorway to the kitchen. “They’ll be looking around awhile longer. Want to get out of here?”
She followed his gaze as the police officer settled close enough to the kitchen that he would surely overhear anything they said above a whisper. Her brow furrowed. “I’ll tell Kristen we’re leaving.”
Evan took a deep, bracing breath as she walked away, willing his body back under control. The way her well-toned legs flexed beneath the tight denim of her jeans didn’t help.
She returned with a backpack slung over one shoulder and a large black Ruger clipped to her waistband. As he eyed the weapon, she motioned for him to follow her out the back door.
“Where are we going?” he asked as she bypassed the driveway and headed into the woods butting up to the back of the house.
Over her shoulder, she flashed him a mysterious smile.
* * *
MEGAN LED EVAN PIKE halfway up the southern face of Gossamer Mountain. To his credit, he kept pace without any sign of struggle. Maybe he’d come by those lean muscles honestly after all.
Where she was taking him, they could at least speak with some semblance of privacy. While she didn’t think Jimmy Long had been trying to eavesdrop, she knew the young cop and his wife were struggling to make ends meet, with a baby on the way. If someone offered him a grand to tell what he overheard at Megan’s house, could he resist the much-needed money?
“It’s a valid worry,” Evan agreed when she shared her thoughts with him a few minutes later as they paused atop a rise. “Money talks—the military’s known that for years.”
“A man will do things he wouldn’t normally do if it means he can take care of his family.” She pulled two bottles of water from her backpack and handed one to Evan.
Evan eyed the backpack. “You should have let me carry that part of the way—”
“You can carry it back when we’re really tired.” She grinned and took a couple of swigs of water, gesturing toward the downhill path. “Come on, we’re almost there.”
The sounds of the creek burbled through the dense woods, guiding the way down the twisting footpath. They hiked around a stone outcropping and the creek came into view, snaking through the woods like a shiny brown serpent.
“Missacoula Creek,” she said aloud, descending to the water’s edge, where several flat boulders formed a natural bench along the bank. She sat on one, discarding shoes and socks to dip her feet in the cool waters of the creek. She sighed with pleasure.
“Not much chance of being overheard here.” Evan sat
beside her, his gaze dropping to her bare feet. “You come here often?”
“Not often enough,” she said with a sigh. “Down a hundred yards that way, the creek widens out to create a deep hole. The water’s so clear you can swim with your eyes open and see little bluegills and pumpkinseeds swimming around you.” Just the thought of it made her happy, a sweet reminder of days spent there with her brothers and sisters.
“Sounds like fun.”
“My dad used to bring us out here in the summer when we were younger. He was a cop, and he didn’t have a lot of days off to play with us, so he always tried to make it special, especially after Mom left.”
“I’m sorry.” At the questioning look she shot him, he added, “About your mother.”
“It was a long time ago. And it’s not like we never see her. She drops back in every year or so to see how we’re doing.” Megan knew her brothers and sisters found it harder to forgive her mother than she did, but she’d figured out a long time ago that their parents were still in love. They’d never divorced, despite Jean Cooper staying away from Chickasaw County sometimes for a year at a time, because neither wanted to be with anyone else. Even if they couldn’t live happily together.
“My parents weren’t even speaking by the end of their marriage.” A bleak tone threaded through his low voice.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was always a difficult marriage, but it fell apart completely after my brother’s death,” Evan said quietly. “He was a relief worker. A drug cartel kidnapped him, and the charity he worked with couldn’t ransom him. So they killed him instead.” The haggard look on his face suggested it hadn’t been an easy death.
Megan supposed it wouldn’t have been. She’d heard stories about drug cartels before—one had hounded her cousin Luke and his family for years. “It wasn’t the Cordero gang from Sanselmo, was it?”
He shook his head. “At least I’d know they were dead or captured now.” He managed a grim smile. “Justice served, thanks to your cousins, I hear.”
“My brother Rick was in on that raid, too,” she said, remembering that tense time almost a year ago when a South American drug lord had kidnapped her cousin’s son. “He helped hunt them down and get Mike back.”