Return To Sender

by Merline Lovelace

  Harry had lost a friend that day. His best friend.

  He’d been tracking Johnson ever since. After months of frustrating dead ends, chance information from a snitch had established a tenuous link between Johnson and the Gunderson woman. She’d slipped through their fingers several times before Harry finally traced her to Albuquerque. Through the damned dog yet! Harry didn’t even want to think about all the calls they’d made to veterinarians and grooming parlors before they got a lead on an elderly woman with a Scandinavian accent and a black-and-white shih tzu!

  They’d no sooner found her than she’d almost slipped away again. Harry had barely set up electronic surveillance of her home when the same dog groomer who IDed her alerted him that Inga Gunderson had canceled her pet’s regularly scheduled appointment. She was, according to the groomer, going out of town. Harry had been forced to move in...and had gotten nothing out of the woman.

  Then Sheryl Hancock had stumbled on the scene.

  With her tumble of blond hair and sunshine-filled green eyes, she would have made Harry’s pulse jump in the most ordinary of circumstances. The fact that she provided a definitive link to Paul Gunderson sent it shooting right off the Richter scale. He shook his head, still not quite believing that the Gundersons had been using the U.S. mail to coordinate their activities all this time.

  The mail, for God’s sake!

  In retrospect, he supposed it made sense. Phones were too easily tapped these days. Radio and satellite communications too frequently intercepted by scanners set to random searches of the airwaves. For all the heat the postal system sometimes took, it usually delivered...which was more than could be said for a good many other institutions, private or public. The card sitting in Inga Gunderson’s box right now could very well hold vital information. Every nerve in Harry’s body tightened at the thought of studying its message.

  He cornered the judge and did some fast talking to obtain an amended warrant. A quick call to his partner to check on Inga Gunderson’s status confirmed what Harry already suspected. The woman refused to talk until her lawyer arrived. Since the man was currently cruising the interstate somewhere on the other side of Amarillo, it would be some hours yet before he arrived and they could confront the suspect.

  “Everything we’ve got on her is circumstantial,” Ev warned. “I don’t know if it’s enough to hold her unless we establish a hard connection between her and Richard Johnson or Paul Gunderson or whatever he’s calling himself now.”

  “I’m working on it. Just sit on the woman as hard as you can. Maybe she’ll crack. And give me a call when her lawyer shows.”

  “Will do.”

  Harry hung up, more determined than ever to get his hands on that postcard.

  “Box 89212?”

  Buck Aguilar glanced from Sheryl and Pat Martinez to the man facing him across a sorting rack. Oblivious to the tension radiating from the marshal, the postal worker handed Pat back the amended warrant.

  “Closed that box this afternoon.”

  He picked up the stack of mail he’d been working before the interruption. Letters flew in a white blur into the sorting bins.

  His face a study in disbelief, Harry leaned forward. “What do you mean, you closed it?”

  At the fierce demand, Buck lifted his head once again. Slowly, his gaze drifted from the marshal’s face to his boots and back up again. From the expression on the mail carrier’s broad, sculpted face, Sheryl could tell that he didn’t take kindly to being grilled.

  “Got a notice terminating the box,” Buck replied in his taciturn way. “Closed it.”

  The clatter of wheels on concrete as another employee pushed a cart across the room drowned Harry’s short, explicit reply. Sheryl caught the gist of it, though. The marshal was not happy. She waited for the fireworks. They weren’t long in coming.

  “What did you do with the contents of the box? Or more specifically—” Harry sent a dagger glance at Sheryl and her supervisor “—what did you do with the postcard that was in there?”

  “Returned to sender. Had to. BCNO.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Buck glanced at the marshal again, his eyes flat. Spots of red rose in his cheeks, darkening the skin he’d inherited from his Jacarillo Apache ancestors. Sheryl and the other employees at the Monzano branch office knew that look. Too well. It settled on her co-worker’s face whenever he was about to butt heads with another employee or an obnoxious customer. Since Buck stood six-four and carried close to 250 pounds on his muscled frame, that didn’t occur often. But when it did, the results weren’t pretty.

  Pat Martinez replied for him. “BCNO means ‘Box closed, no order.’ Without a forwarding order, we have no choice but to return the mail to sender.”

  “Dammit!”

  “You got a problem with that, Sheriff?”

  Buck’s soft query lifted the hairs on Sheryl’s neck.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a problem with that. And it’s ‘Marshal.”’

  The two men faced each other across the bin like characters in some B-grade Western movie. The Lawman and the Apache. At any minute, Sheryl expected them to whip out their guns and knives. Even Button sensed the sudden tension. Poking his nose through the straps of Sheryl’s purse, he issued a low, throaty growl.

  Hastily, she stepped into the breech. “Maybe it’s not too late to retrieve the card. What time did you close the box, Buck?”

  His gaze shifted once again. Infinitesimally, his expression softened. “’Bout three-thirty, Sher.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  Although it seemed impossible, the marshal bristled even more. “What does ‘oh, dear’ mean?”

  She turned to him, apology spilling from her green eyes. “I’m afraid it means that the contents of Mrs. Gunderson’s box went back to the Processing and Distribution Center on the four o’clock run.”

  “You mean that postcard left here even before I went chasing downtown after the blasted amended warrant?”

  “Well...yes.”

  Harry stared at her, aggravation apparent in every line of his body. For a moment, she wasn’t quite sure how he’d handle this new setback. Finally, he blew out a long, ragged breath.

  “So where is this distribution center?”

  “The P&DC is on Broadway, but...”

  “But what?”

  Sheryl shared a look with her supervisor and coworker. They were more than willing to let her handle the thoroughly disgruntled marshal. Bracing herself, she gave him the bad news.

  “But the center uses state-of-the-art, high-speed sorters. It also makes runs to the airport every half hour. Since we rent cargo space on all the commercial carriers, your postcard would have gone out—” she glanced at the clock on the wall “—an hour ago, at least. Depending on how it was routed, it’s halfway to Dallas or Atlanta or New York right now.”

  A muscle twitched on the side of MacMillan’s jaw. “I suppose there’s no way to trace the routing?”

  “Not unless it was certified, registered or sent via Global Express, which it wasn’t.”

  “Great!”

  A heavy silence descended, broken when Pat Martinez handed Harry his useless warrant.

  “I’m sorry about sending you downtown on a wildgoose chase, Marshal, but I won’t apologize for the fact that my employees followed regulations. If you don’t need me for anything else, I’ll get back to work.”

  “No. Thanks.”

  Buck moved off, too, rolling his empty hamper away to collect a full one from the row at the back of the box area. Sheryl and Button waited while Harry rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, flattening his cotton shirt against his stomach and ribs.

  At the sight of those lean hollows and broad surfaces, a sudden and completely unexpected tingle of awareness darted through Sheryl. Content with Brian, she hadn’t looked at other men in the year or so they’d been dating. She’d certainly never let her gaze linger on a set of washboard ribs or a flat, trim belly. Or noticed the tight fit
of a pair of jeans across muscled thighs and...

  “Are you hungry?”

  Sheryl jerked her gaze upward. “Excuse me?”

  “Are you hungry? I skipped breakfast, and Ev and I were too busy taking physical and verbal abuse from the Gunderson woman to grab lunch. Why don’t we have dinner while we talk about these postcards?”

  “Tonight?”

  The tightness left his face. A corner of his thick, luxuriant mustache tipped up in a reluctant smile. “That was the general idea. I know I made you miss your... appointment...with this guy you’re sort of engaged to. Let me make it up to you by feeding you while I squeeze your brain.”

  “Squeeze my brain, huh? Interesting approach. Does it get you a lot of dinner dates?”

  “It never fails.” His smile feathered closer to a grin. “Another example of my charming bedside manner, Miss Hancock. So, are you hungry?”

  She was starved, Sheryl realized. She was also obligated to provide what information she could to the authorities, represented in this instance by Deputy U.S. Marshal Harry MacMillan.

  Still, she hesitated. When she’d called Brian a while ago to apologize for standing him up, he’d sounded more than a little piqued. Sheryl couldn’t blame him. In an attempt to soothe his ruffled feathers, she’d promised to cook his favorite chicken dish tonight. They’d fallen into the routine of eating at her apartment on Tuesdays and his on Fridays. This was supposed to have been her night. Oh, well, she’d just have to make it up to him next week.

  “I need to make a phone call,” she said, hitching her purse and its furry passenger up on her shoulder.

  Graciously, MacMillan handed her his mobile phone. With both dog and man listening in, Sheryl conducted a short, uncomfortable conversation with Brian.

  “I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting all this time, but something’s come up. I’m going to be tied up awhile longer. Yes, I know it’s Tuesday night. No, I can’t put this off until tomorrow.”

  She caught MacMillan’s speculative gaze, and turned a shoulder. “Yes. Maybe. I’ll phone you when I get home.”

  Sheryl ended the call on a small sigh. Brian’s structured approach to life usually gave her such a comfortable feeling. Sometimes, though, it made things just a bit difficult.

  “Trouble in almost-paradise?” Harry inquired politely, slipping his phone back into his pocket.

  “Not really. Where would you like to eat?”

  “You pick it. I don’t know Albuquerque all that well.”

  She thought for a minute. “How about El Pinto? They have the best Mexican food in the city and we can get a table outside, where we can talk privately.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Sheryl led the way to the rear exit, absorbing the fact that he was apparently a stranger to the city.

  “Where’s home? Or can you say?”

  As soon as she articulated the casual question, she wondered if he would...or should...answer. She had no idea what kind of security U.S. marshals operated under. He’d told her not to talk about the case. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to talk about himself, either.

  Evidently, that wasn’t a problem.

  “I’m assigned to the fugitive apprehension unit of the Oklahoma City district office,” he replied, “but I don’t spend a whole lot of time there. My job keeps me on the road most of the time.”

  Another wanderer! They seemed to constitute half the world’s population. Sheryl’s minor annoyance with Brian’s inflexibility vanished instantly. He, at least, wouldn’t take off without warning for parts unknown. She led the way outside, blinking at the abrupt transition from dim interior to dazzling sunlight.

  “I’d better meet you at the restaurant. I’ll have to go by my apartment first to drop off Button. Unless you want to take him back to your place?” she finished hopefully.

  “I can’t,” he replied without the slightest hint of regret. “I’m staying in a motel.”

  She sighed, resigning herself to an unplanned houseguest. “Do you know how to get to El Pinto?”

  “Haven’t got a clue. Just give me the address. I’ll find it.”

  She chewed her lip, thinking perhaps she should suggest a more accessible place. “It’s kind of hard to locate if you’re not familiar with Albuquerque.”

  He sent her a look of patented amusement. “U.S. marshals have been tracking down bad guys since George Washington pinned gold stars on the original thirteen deputies. I’m pretty sure I can find this restaurant.”

  “I stand corrected,” Sheryl said gravely.

  She drove out of the parking lot a few moments later, with Button occupying the seat beside her. Harry trailed in a tan government sedan. Following her directions, he turned south at the corner of Haines and Juan Tabo, and she headed north.

  By this late hour, Albuquerque’s rush-hour traffic had thinned to a steady but fast-moving stream. The trip to her apartment complex took less than fifteen minutes. As always, the cream-colored adobe architecture and profusion of flowers decorating the fountain in the center of the tree-shaded complex gave her a quiet joy. Sheryl had moved into her one-bedroom apartment soon after her last promotion and loved its cool Southwestern colors and high-ceilinged rooms. It was perfect for her, but the pale-mauve carpet hadn’t been pet-proofed. After unlocking the front door, she set the shih tzu down in the tiled foyer.

  “We have to establish a few ground rules, fella. No yapping, or you’ll get me thrown out of here. No taking bites out of me or my furniture. No accidents on the rug.”

  Busy sniffing out the place, Button ignored her.

  “I’m serious,” she warned.

  Once she’d plopped her purse down on the counter separating the kitchen from the small dining area, she pulled a plastic bowl from the cupboard and filled it with water.

  “It’s either me or the pound, so you’d better... Hey!”

  With regal indifference to her startled protest, the shih tzu lifted his raised leg another inch and sprayed the dining table.

  Obviously, Button didn’t believe in rules!

  Sheryl went to work with paper towels, then scooped up the unrepentant dog. A moment later, she set him and the water dish down on the other side of the sliding-glass patio doors. Hands on hips, she surveyed the small, closed-in area. The leafy Chinese elm growing on the other side of the adobe wall provided plenty of shade. The few square yards of grass edging the patio tiles provided Button’s other necessary commodity.

  “This is your temporary residence, dog. Make yourself comfortable.”

  After sliding the patio door closed behind her, she heeled off her sneakers and padded into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Then she shucked her shorts and tank top and pulled on a gauzy sundress in a cool mint green. She had her hair unbraided and was pulling a brush through its stubborn curls when a series of high-pitched yips told her Button wanted in.

  Too bad. He’d better get used to outdoor living.

  She soon learned that what Button wanted, Button had his own way of getting. Within moments, the yips rose to a grating, insistent crescendo.

  The brush hit the counter with a thud. Muttering, Sheryl retraced her steps and cut the dog’s protests off with a stern admonition.

  “I guess I didn’t make myself clear. You’ve lost your house privileges. You’re going to camp out here on the patio, Buttsy-boo, or take a trip to the pound.”

  Ten minutes later, Sheryl slammed the front door behind her and left a smug Button in undisputed possession of her air-conditioned apartment. It was either cave in to his hair-raising howls or risk eviction. In desperation, she’d spread a layer of newspapers over the bathroom floor. She could only hope that the dog would condescend to use them. The next few days, she thought grimly, could prove a severe strain on her benevolence toward animals in general and squishfaced lapdogs in particular.

  As she shoved the car key into the ignition, a sudden thought struck her. If even half of what Harry had told her about Mrs. Gunderson’s activities was
true, Sheryl could be stuck with her unwanted houseguest for a lot longer than a few days.

  Groaning, she backed out of the carport. No way was she keeping that mutt for more than a day or two. Harry had to have stumbled across some relative or acquaintance of Mrs. Gunderson during his investigation, someone who could take over custody of her pet. She put the issue on the table as soon as they were seated in El Pinto’s shaded, colorful outdoor dining area. Harry stretched his long legs out under the tiled table and graciously refrained from pointing out that it was her insistence on taking the dog with them that had caused her dilemma in the first place.

  “There’s nothing I’d like better than to identify a few of Inga Gunderson’s friends and acquaintances.”

  Sheryl had to scoot her chair closer to catch his reply over the noise of the busy restaurant. A fountain bubbled and splashed just behind them, providing a cheerful accompaniment to the mariachi trio strumming and thumping their guitars as they strolled through the patio area. Harry had chosen the table deliberately so they could talk without raising the interest of other diners. Even so, Sheryl hadn’t counted on practically sitting in his lap to carry on a conversation.

  “As far as we know,” he continued, “Inga doesn’t have any acquaintances here. She made a few calls to local businesses, but no one’s phoned her or visited her.” His gold-flecked eyes settled on his dinner partner. “Except you, Miss Hancock.”

  “‘Sheryl,’” she amended absently. “So what will happen to her?”

  “We have sufficient circumstantial evidence to book her on suspicion of smuggling. The charge might or might not stick, but she’s not the one I really want. It’s her supposed nephew I’m after.”

  Despite Harry’s relaxed pose, Sheryl couldn’t miss the utter implacability in his face. He slipped a pen and small black-leather notebook out of his jacket pocket, all business now.