Secret Agenda

by Paula Graves

  They were done in under two minutes. Evan chanced a quick walk to the edge of the dirt road, looking toward the turnoff. No sign of the SUV.

  He looked back at the hidden Ford. If he didn’t know it was there, it wouldn’t be obvious. They might see it if they backtracked, but he was betting they’d go down the road a way first, using the SUV’s superior off-road capabilities to catch up to the car on the bumpier unpaved road.

  “Do we hide in the car or out?” Megan asked as he returned.

  “Outside the car,” he decided. If the SUV flew past, then they could run for the car, sweep off the branches and escape the way they’d come. If the SUV came slowly, and spotted the car, the pursuers would take a slow approach, suspecting a trap. That would give him and Megan a head start into the woods.

  “Hope you’re a good woodswoman,” he murmured as he helped her pull their supplies from the Taurus’s trunk.

  “I’m a Cooper,” she said, as if that answered the question.

  The sound of a vehicle approaching quickly broke through the muted forest sounds. He caught Megan’s arm and pulled her into a crouch behind a large wild hydrangea bush.

  Through the trees, he spotted flashes of black as the SUV blasted past their hiding place. Megan started to move as soon as the vehicle was past, but Evan held her in place. “Let me scout first.”

  He weaved through the woods until he reached the roadside. Risking a quick glance down the road, he spotted the rear end of the SUV as it took a curve with a spray of red dust.

  “Go!” he called to Megan, racing to meet her at the Ford. They ripped the camouflage away, leaving a few smaller twigs that wouldn’t budge. The car was already moving as Evan threw himself into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind him.

  “How long before they figure out they’ve been had?” he asked breathlessly, fumbling with the seat belt.

  “That road ends in about a mile. So we have maybe a minute or two before they backtrack.”

  “Then they’ll look for us along the road first, right?”

  “Maybe.” Megan slowed as they reached the side road. “Which way do they expect us to go?”

  He thought about it. “Back the way we came.”

  She nodded and took a right, heading farther down the side road. “This road will take us to I-85 west. We’ll take I-85 to I-65 and head north.”

  “Back to Gossamer Ridge?”

  She shook her head. “To Nashville. Somebody doesn’t want us to find out what’s in that box Vince gave to Donald Gates. So let’s find out why it never got to me.”

  * * *

  AS SOON AS THEY FELT comfortable that they’d slipped the notice of the black SUV or any other pursuer, Evan told Megan to stop as soon as she could find a place to pull over. She turned off the highway at the next service station they came across and pulled up to the air pump Evan pointed out to her.

  “We need air in the tires?” she asked, confused.

  Evan reached into the backseat and pulled his briefcase from the floorboard. He dug inside, finally pulling out what looked like a contract. “Well, hell.” He slammed the briefcase shut. “The rental company puts GPS trackers on their cars.”

  “You think that’s how they found us?” Megan asked, the sensation of being watched creeping up the back of her neck.

  “I doubt it. They must have spotted us leaving Gossamer Ridge and just followed us to Fort Benning. Knowing your history, and since they seem to be pretty sure what we’re looking for—in general, at least—”

  “It wasn’t hard to figure out we’d go to Fort Benning,” she finished for him. “But now they have the license plates. If they have any connections to the rental agency at all—”

  “We can’t risk it. We have to get the tracker off this car,” Evan agreed.

  “Rental car company isn’t going to like it.”

  “Probably never be allowed to rent a car again.” He sighed. “You seem to have a little more experience with GPS trackers—do you think you’d know it if you found it?”

  “Depends on how complicated the system.” She opened the car door and bent to press the hood latch. “Maybe you should get out and pretend to be putting air in the tires. We don’t want to be memorable in case anyone comes by asking questions.”

  He got out and made a show of checking the tire pressure, while she looked around under the hood. She spotted a small box on the inside of the Taurus’s right front fender.

  “Cooper Security will cover your expenses,” she said as she surreptitiously dropped the tracker in the nearby garbage bin. “Let’s fill up and go.”

  Within an hour and a half, they were passing through Birmingham. Megan started looking for an exit with a good selection of fast-food places, ending up in a northern suburb, where they made a quick bathroom stop at a hamburger joint and got their food to go.

  Walking back to the car, Megan felt delayed reaction beginning to set in. Her limbs were shaky.

  “Are you good to drive for a while?” she asked Evan.

  He nodded, his eyes narrowing. “Are you okay?”

  “Just starting to get tired. Long, stressful few hours.”

  “Maybe we should head back to Chickasaw County instead. Get a full night’s sleep and start fresh in the morning.”

  She shook her head. “I want to reach Nashville before nightfall. Scope out where Donald Gates is living now and work out how we plan to approach him.” Her cell phone vibrated in her purse, interrupting her train of thought. She checked the display. It was her brother Jesse. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “I could ask the same of you,” Jesse drawled flatly. “You promised to call and check in.”

  “I was a little busy.” She glanced at Evan, wondering how much she should tell her brother about their encounter with the SUV. Evan’s poker face didn’t offer any advice, so she decided to go with a variation of the truth. “We thought we were being followed for a while, so we changed routes. We’ve got a lead on who might know something about the missing package, so we’re heading there this afternoon.”

  “Heading where?”

  “Nashville,” she answered. “And I need you to get me an address from this phone number.” She read Donald Gates’s cell phone number to him.

  “I’ll call you back in a few.” Jesse hung up.

  Megan looked at Evan, who was watching her with a look of bemusement.

  “’Thought someone was following us’?”

  “Trust me, we don’t need the Cooper Cavalry rushing to the rescue right now.”

  “Except when you need an address or a posse.”

  She couldn’t argue with that.

  “You’re lucky to have them watching your back,” he said, a faint tone of envy in his voice. She wondered if he was thinking about the brother he lost.

  “I know. I guess I take it for granted that I have a great family around to cover my tail.” She shouldn’t complain so much. Without her family, she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to get through the past four years without losing her mind.

  At the car, Evan slid behind the wheel, while Megan settled into the passenger seat, kicking off her sandals and tucking her feet up under her on the seat. Buckling up, she turned to look at Evan. “Is this turning out the way you thought it would?”

  “Coming to Alabama? Or my investigation of Vince’s death?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “I don’t know if I had any expectations,” he said carefully. “I’d hit so many walls already.”

  “How long have you been looking into it?” she asked, surprised she’d never thought to ask him that question before.

  “Going on two years.”

  She stared. “And it took you this long to come to me?”

  He glanced away from the road long enough to meet her questioning gaze. “At first, it was just the vaguest of questions. A faint suspicion something was wrong with the official story.”

  “And you already felt guilty.”

  His gaze tangled with
hers again for a second. “Yes.”

  “If that’s what’s driving you—”

  “It’s part of it, but not all of it,” he said firmly. “Not even most of it. Not anymore.”

  “Good. Because then I’d have to feel guilty, and who needs that?” She smiled, but her humor faded quickly. “Even if it wasn’t the SSU who shot Vince, I’m certain it wasn’t al Adar. Nobody sends goons to cover up a war casualty.”

  Her phone rang minutes later. It was Jesse with an address. She jotted it down. “Thanks. Got it. Now, one more favor? There’s a death I want you to look into.” She told him about the hit-and-run crash that had killed Merriwether.

  “You don’t think it’s an accident?”

  “That’s what I need to find out.”

  “I’ll look into it.” His voice darkened with warning. “You be careful, okay?”

  “I will.” She hung up and turned to Evan. “He worries.”

  Evan’s brow wrinkled as he pulled onto the interstate. “So do I.”

  By the time they reached Nashville, they’d made three fruitless attempts to reach Donald Gates on the phone. He didn’t seem to have an answering machine or service, either.

  “What do you think?” Megan asked, turning to look at Evan as they stopped at a traffic light near the Ryman Theater. “Find somewhere to stay tonight and try to call Gates tomorrow? Or go see him tonight?”

  “Let’s go see him. Get it over with.”

  The address Jesse had given them turned out to be a modest bungalow-style house in the McFerrin Park neighborhood. It was an older home, a little on the shabby side compared to some in the area, and rental signs scattered through the yards of nearby houses suggested Gates might be renting, as well. Megan hoped he hadn’t moved already without leaving a forwarding address.

  In the waning afternoon light, the house lay quiet and dark. Megan checked her watch and saw it was after six. Was he working late? Or had he gone out for drinks after work?

  She climbed the shallow steps to the front stoop and knocked on the door. It moved the second her knuckles touched it, swinging open with an eerie creak.

  Almost immediately, a sickly smell wafted onto the stoop from inside. Megan’s gut twisted into a knot.

  Next to her, Evan growled a low profanity. He, too, knew immediately what the odor meant.

  Someone inside the house was already very dead.

  Chapter Nine

  When Evan had been a little boy, he’d stumbled onto a body in the woods behind his house. Drug overdose, as it turned out. The man had been lying out in the elements for at least a week. It had taken second and third looks for Evan to figure out what he was seeing, but he’d known from the smell that whatever lay in the underbrush was long dead.

  He could still remember the smell.

  Donald Gates hadn’t been dead quite that long. Over twenty-four hours, almost certainly, based on the smell of decay, but he was still in the early stages of decomposition. Still recognizable, despite the discoloration from the onset of cyanosis. He’d been shot—chest and leg. The leg shot he could have survived, at Evan’s best guess.

  The chest shot was straight through the heart.

  Evan stood still for a moment, listening. It wasn’t likely that the person who’d shot Gates was hanging around after so many hours. But he waited through a minute of silent stillness before he backed away from the kitchen, avoiding the blood and other fluids that had leaked from the body and pooled on the floor underneath. “We need to call the cops.”

  Megan stood in the doorway with her hand over her nose and mouth, her sickened gaze fixed on the body moldering on the linoleum floor. She moved her hand away long enough to ask, “Is it Gates?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We can’t call the police yet.” She squared her shoulders. “We have to look around to see if he still has the package Vince gave him to send to me.”

  “You’re talking about disturbing a crime scene—”

  “This could be my only chance to find it!” She turned to him with desperate eyes. “I won’t disturb anything—”

  “The police will find your fingerprints—”

  “I have latex gloves in the first-aid kit I packed.”

  He stared at her, realizing she wouldn’t be deterred. “Fiber and hair evidence—”

  “I’m looking around for other possible victims.”

  He met her challenging stare, torn between doing what he had been taught was the right thing to do—and what he knew, gut deep, was the only thing they could do.

  If the police found the package, they’d take it in for evidence, and it might be months before Megan was allowed to have whatever lay inside.

  Assuming the package was here in the first place. Or that the killers had left anything to find.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “But in ten minutes, we’re calling the police.”

  They covered the small house methodically, each taking different rooms. About five minutes into the search, Evan heard Megan call his name from a small spare bedroom in the back. He hurried down the hall and found her standing over a brown cardboard box that lay on the floor of an open closet. She was gazing at the box as if she’d just found the Holy Grail.

  “It could be just a box,” he warned.

  “Read what’s written on the side.” She pointed.

  He walked around until he could see the boldly inked block letters that read “PATTON.”

  “Vince wrote that,” she said with conviction. “Do you have a pen on you?”

  As he handed her the pen, he saw that the box top had already been untaped and opened. There might be nothing left inside at all.

  Or it might be booby-trapped, he realized just as she bent to push the pen under the flaps to open it.

  “Wait—”

  But she’d already tipped up the flap. Inside, nothing sprang out or exploded, and Evan exhaled, bending closer to see what was inside.

  It was a stuffed toy, a blue fox with bright gold eyes, about the size of a squirrel. Megan reached into the box and pulled it out, holding it up, her eyes bright with tears.

  “It was a toy for Patton,” she said softly, meeting his gaze with a disconcerting mixture of delight and despair.

  Evan stared at the plush toy, feeling flattened. This was what Vince Randall had sent home to his wife? A toy?

  Some smoking gun.

  “I’m taking this home with me,” she said flatly, in a tone that invited no argument. “It has nothing to do with why Gates was killed.”

  “It’s probably exactly why he was killed,” Evan disagreed.

  “It won’t tell the police a thing,” she said in a tone that reminded him of a cat’s growl. “It’s the last thing Vince sent me, Evan. And for whatever reason, Gates kept it from me.”

  And if the cops took it as evidence, it would be ages before they gave it back to her.

  “Okay. But don’t let anyone see you take it outside.”

  She pulled up the hem of her T-shirt, revealing a flat, toned stomach that might have sparked some very masculine fantasies if Evan weren’t standing in a house that smelled like days-old death. She slipped the toy into the waistband of her pants, under her arm, and dropped the shirt hem down again, effectively hiding the toy.

  She headed quickly to the front door. Evan followed, emerging into the afternoon heat with palpable relief. He breathed deeply, letting the fresh air fill his nose and lungs, and longed for a shower to wash away the lingering smell of death that seemed to permeate his clothes and skin.

  Megan went to the car and sat in the passenger seat, bending out of view. She sat up again and reemerged from the car, returning to where he stood on the walkway, dialing 911. “I put the toy in my bag and also put my Ruger in its case. You may want to do the same with your Kel-Tec.”

  Good point, he conceded. His North Carolina CCW—license to carry a concealed weapon—was honored in Tennessee just as it was in Alabama, but having a weapon on him when the police arrived to investi
gate a gun homicide would be downright stupid.

  He finished giving the dispatcher the location of Gates’s house and went to the car to stow away his weapon.

  The Nashville police cruiser arrived about ten minutes later, lights and sirens off, since Evan had made it clear to the dispatcher that the victim had been dead for a while. One patrolman stayed outside with Megan and Evan while the other took a look around inside. The one inside returned, grimacing, and called for the crime-scene investigators.

  While waiting for the evidence technicians, one of the officers asked them what their business was in the area.

  The other officer drew Evan away, effectively separating him from Megan. It was common practice, separating the witnesses so they couldn’t get their stories straight, he knew.

  Of course, he and Megan had had ten minutes of waiting to get their story straight already. “Private Gates was in the army with Mrs. Randall’s late husband,” Evan told the officer. “She wanted to talk to him about her husband’s last hours—Private Gates was on patrol with him when he died.”

  “And what’s your connection?”

  “I worked as a Pentagon liaison with Sergeant Randall’s unit when he died. I helped her track down Private Gates.”

  It was the truth, if an incomplete version, unencumbered by the slowly unfolding conspiracy of silence his investigation had begun to uncover. Raising those allegations now would do little to solve Donald Gates’s murder. But they would almost certainly complicate things for Evan and Megan, perhaps even force them to stay in town overnight, undergoing further questioning.

  Evan didn’t think Megan could take much more today. She’d held together well enough inside Gates’s house, focused on the mystery she’d come to Nashville to solve. But the disappointing outcome, and the stresses of the last two days, had begun to take a visible toll.

  Her face, fair to begin with, had taken on a pasty pallor that made her freckles stand out in bright relief. Dark circles bruised the skin beneath her eyes, and her shoulders slumped as the officer walked away and joined his partner on the front stoop of Gates’s house.

  Detectives arrived within a half hour, a tall, broad-shouldered black man in his forties and a younger, thinner white man in his mid-thirties. The older man wore a suit that looked as if it was about to melt into his skin under the heat of the Nashville afternoon, but the younger detective had shrugged off his jacket and was in shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. While the uniformed officers waited outside with Evan and Megan, the detectives took a look inside.