by Beverly Long
Like hell.
“You shouldn’t be walking,” she added.
“I’ll be okay,” he said. There was no way to take crutches out into this snow and his ankle was feeling pretty good. “Go back to your bedroom. Keep your gun with you. I’m just going to take a quick look.”
She said nothing. Then, she puffed out a breath. “Just be careful, okay?”
He smiled. “I’m always careful.” And before he could think too much about it, he leaned forward and kissed her forehead. Her skin was soft and warm and she smelled like his sheets.
It was an innocent gesture but the first time that he’d touched her.
And in the dark cabin, it seemed almost intimate.
And he was pretty sure she felt it, too, when she brought the palm of her hand up to softly stroke his face. “Don’t be a hero,” she said.
He reached up, put his hand over hers. His throat suddenly felt a little tight. If he was right about Laura, she might need a hero. But first, he was going to make sure they were safe tonight. “Lucky will protect me,” he said easily.
He placed his gun on the table while he quickly put on his coat.
“You’ve had that gun the whole time,” she said.
It wasn’t a question but he answered it anyway. “Yes.”
“Did you have it on you last night, when I stopped you at the door?”
He wasn’t going to lie. “Yes.”
She let out a loud sigh. “Thanks for letting me think I had the upper hand. I guess,” she added.
She’d had the upper hand ever since he’d heard her voice and taken one look. The little girl in the other room had simply sealed the deal. He picked up his gun. “Go back to the bedroom,” he said softly.
He waited until she was behind the closed door before he opened the front door. Lucky tried to shoot past him into the snowy night. “Stay with me,” he said sharply.
The dog stopped. Didn’t crowd his legs but didn’t get ahead of him, either.
There was snow almost up to his door. The steps to the front porch were completely covered and, more important, not disturbed. There were no telltale footprints, human or animal.
But something had spooked Lucky. And his racing between the front and back door was very unusual, as if he was having trouble isolating the threat.
Rico stood and listened. The snow had stopped—likely one of those intervals that they’d predicted. The wind was calmer, too.
As he steadied his flashlight on the surrounding woods, he couldn’t help but think that it was pretty spectacular. The big pines were heavy with snow, and it looked like something from a photograph. Visit Colorado. He could almost see the tagline.
But stay the hell out of my space, he added. He stepped into the snow. Lucky came with. It was slow going because at times, it was as deep as his thighs, and Lucky was sinking in to his belly. But he and Lucky picked their way around the perimeter of the cabin, forging a path about ten feet beyond the structure.
Nothing to look at there. He glanced at his dog, to see if he seemed calmer. And was surprised to see Lucky looking up. He did the same. And couldn’t see anything that made him suspicious.
But because he’d worked for years in security, he was well aware of the use of drone technology to do surveillance on a person or property. And it might not be anything he could hear or see, but dogs were more sensitive to sounds. Ask anybody who’d ever been in a hot-air balloon. Humans were oblivious when the balloon was going over but dogs went crazy.
He finished his walk around the cabin, now not expecting to see anything. He shone his light toward his garage and to the shed where he kept his tractor. There were no tracks in the snow to either building. Plus, both were always sturdily locked. There was no need to look inside. He leaned down to pet Lucky. “Good boy. Now go do your thing.”
Lucky shot off into the dark and came back a couple minutes later. Rico opened the door and they both went inside. “Let me get those paws,” he said, motioning for Lucky to stay by the door. He grabbed a stack of old towels from under the sink, left there for just this kind of thing, and wiped down his dog.
By the time he was finished, he realized that Laura had opened her door and was standing there. She held her rifle.
He smiled at her. “You were supposed to stay behind a closed door,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked, ignoring his remark.
“I’m not sure. There’s no sign of any tracks, human or animal.”
“But there was something,” she said.
“Lucky doesn’t generally get spooked for no reason. It’s possible,” he said, deciding to tell her everything, “that it might have been a drone. Everybody and their brother seems to have one these days. Lots of aerial photography getting done that way.”
“Night photography?”
“Could be,” he said. “Especially after a big snow. The mountains take on a whole new look.”
She nodded.
And he was fairly confident that she wasn’t concerned about any amateur photographer. But the look in her pretty eyes told him that she had other reasons to be concerned that a drone had been flying overhead.
He wanted to ask, maybe even demand, but something told him that would be a mistake. “Good packing snow,” he said conversationally. “The temp is hovering around twenty-nine or thirty, and that’s making for nice moist snow.”
“I can almost see the snow family now,” she said.
“I’m not making the cat,” he said.
She smiled. “She’s got a good imagination, doesn’t she?”
“She does.” He paused. It felt odd yet familiar to be in this room, talking to her about a child sleeping in the other room. Had he imagined such conversations? Hoped for them? “You should go back to bed,” he said gently.
“I don’t think I can sleep,” she confessed. “And I don’t want to disturb Hannah, who has managed to stay asleep through all this. I’ll just sit out here for a while.”
“I’ll stir up the fire for you,” he said. He added some logs and some kindling and threw a match on it.
By the time it was burning nicely, Laura was on the couch, with a blanket pulled over her. Lucky had jumped up next to her, lying on the edge of the blanket by her feet. “Thank you,” she said.
He should go to bed. That would be the smart thing. But he was jealous of his dog.
He walked across the room, into the kitchen, and turned on the teakettle. Made both of them a cup of herbal tea. Carried it back to her and took a spot on the other couch.
And sat down to watch the fire.
After a few minutes, Laura turned to him. “There’s something magic about fire, isn’t there? When you watch it, it crowds out everything else in your head.”
He understood what she meant. The flames were mesmerizing. “When I redid the interior of this house, it was one of my must-haves.”
“This might be the biggest fireplace I’ve ever seen,” she said.
He smiled. “Yeah, it’s possible that I got carried away. I have one in my condo in Vegas but probably half the size. It does the trick, though.”
“Vegas is warm most of the year. Do you still use your fireplace?”
Oddly enough, he’d used it a lot lately, in sort of the same way as they were doing right now. When his issues with Mora Rambeilla were heating up, he hadn’t slept well and many nights he’d gotten up and started a fire. “I had this client,” he said. “That gave me some sleepless nights. I used it a lot then.”
“Tell me about him,” she said.
He got the impression that while the fire was doing its job and crowding out concerns about a drone or some other kind of invisible visitor, there was always a corner of the mind that refused to let it all go. She wanted a story that would be the final push. He didn’t normally talk about work, took seriously the confid
ential nature of what Wingman Security did. But he suddenly found himself wanting to share. He wouldn’t use last names. “She, not he. My client was a woman. Her name was Mora. And she seemed pretty normal when she initially contacted Wingman Security, requesting protection. She was...something. Early fifties, almost six feet tall and fifty pounds overweight, and, as my mother might have said, a little rough around the edges. My father would have defined her as a bull in a china shop.”
“Mora,” she repeated. “Lovely name.”
“Ten years ago, Mora inherited a plastic fabrication business from her father, who had started it as a one-room shop in the 1950s. She acted as the COO/CEO and according to her, things went pretty well. So well that about five years ago, she was able to hire a group of engineers from a rival company. A couple years go by and suddenly, there are legal issues piling up on her desk—patent infringement, trade secrets violations, confidential disclosures. Every few months, something new. It went on for years. She forwarded them to her lawyer until the death threats recently started arriving.”
“Death threats.”
Despite the heat of the fire, he saw her shiver.
“That’s when she called Wingman Security. We insisted she call the police. Security is in our wheelhouse, but investigating death threats is clearly a matter for law enforcement.”
“And she did that?”
“Well, that should have been my first clue. She seemed a little reluctant to involve the police. I vacillated between thinking that she wasn’t really as concerned as she professed to be about the threats, or that she had some idea of who might be making them and, for some unknown reason, didn’t want to expose the culprits.”
“What did you do?”
“I confronted her.” Pretty damn diplomatically if he had to say so himself. “She said she was concerned but didn’t want the public disclosure that a police report would require.”
“I said we wouldn’t take the assignment if she didn’t report the threats to the police. She agreed and followed through on it. She continued to maintain that she had no idea who was behind the threats but when they were identified, she hoped that they liked prison. I believed her.”
“The legal challenges must have come from the rival company. Were they also responsible for the death threats?”
“The police didn’t think so.”
“Was Mora single or did she have a family?”
“An ex-husband and three kids—twin sons and a daughter—all in their thirties. I wasn’t sure who was the most unhinged of the four, but they were all missing a few screws. A conclusion drawn from multiple interactions more bizarre than the last.”
“Fascinating,” she said. “Give me an example.”
“My role was to ramp up the security at both her business and her residence. I even personally escorted her to some public events. That’s when I encountered her ex. We were at an art auction. It was a charity thing, raising money for the homeless in Vegas. Mora starts to bid on an item. It looks as if she’s going to be the winning bidder when all of a sudden, somebody new enters the bidding. From where I’m at, I can’t see the person but I can tell from Mora’s body language that she’s immediately irritated. Then she tells me it’s her ex-husband. They’d been divorced for about five years.”
“Around the time she starts getting really successful.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Anyway, the back-and-forth bidding goes on for a while and the price is getting pretty high for what I think is a damn ugly picture of some cows huddled around a maple tree.”
She smiled. “Oh, no. Really? Cows?”
He nodded. “When it gets over ten thousand dollars, I actually try to stop Mora. But she’s practically breathing fire by this point.”
“Did she get the painting?”
“He dropped out at $12,900. By now, I’d worked my way around the room and I had a close look at him. He was happy. It was so obvious to me that the ex had simply been running up the bid. He didn’t really want the picture. But he wanted Mora to have to work for it, to have to really open her checkbook. But when I mentioned that later to Mora, she said that I was wrong. I didn’t argue the point because by then, I had figured out that it didn’t matter what his motivation was. All that mattered to Mora was that she’d beaten him.”
“Amazing. Given that at one time, she must have loved him.”
“She was quirky like that. And I have to admit, more than once I considered backing away from the assignment. But I’d developed a fondness for Mora, even though others might have viewed her as difficult to like. Her tongue was sharp and her reactions exaggerated, but I suspected it covered up an insecure, almost shy woman. Her heart was good—she was glad that the homeless would benefit from her purchase. And if she bested her ex in the process, so much the better.”
“But you never thought the ex was behind the threats?”
“I reported the interaction to the police because I wanted to make sure they had the guy on their radar. But they didn’t find anything that led them to believe that he was involved.”
“What about her adult children? Their spouses?”
“None of them were married. The twins both still lived at home with Mora.”
“In their thirties?”
“Yeah. I know. Anyway, both worked in the family business, although I think work might not be the best word. Let’s just say that both spent time in the office. The younger one, Duggar, was in marketing, and Gilly was in product development.”
“Duggar and Gilly. I guess it’s lucky they aren’t serial killers.”
“They were unpredictable. Duggar pulled the fire alarm once at the company.”
“Was there a fire?”
Rico shook his head. “No. And initially he denied that he did it. But Wingman Security had put some hidden cameras in the hallway because it led to Mora’s office and we had him on tape. I showed Mora and we confronted Duggar. Then his story changed, said he’d done it because he wanted to make sure that the employees took alarms seriously and would evacuate quickly.”
“Weird,” she said.
“Very. A manipulative personality. Gilly rarely talked. I tried several times to engage him but it was as if he didn’t understand the social norm of casual conversation. Once he told me about his weekend—he’d been camping in the woods or something like that, but that was about it. He might have worked in product development but I got the idea that he wasn’t even clear about what the company’s products were. The odd thing—I mean, it was all odd—but the unexpected thing was that Duggar seemed to listen to Gilly. It was as if he rarely said anything, so when he did, it must be important and right.”
“What about the daughter?”
“Tributary. Well, at least she lived on her own. But I got the impression that Mora was still supporting her. She was writing a reality television show.”
“About being named Tributary and having Duggar and Gilly for brothers?”
“I have no idea,” he said.
“Did the police finally figure it out?” she asked.
He shook his head. “One day, Mora called me and suddenly ended the assignment. Without explanation. I, of course, pressed for details and all she would say was that it was ‘better this way.’ A check for services rendered arrived by the end of that week, along with a generous ten percent bonus.”
“But you didn’t want to let it go?”
“I went back to the police. All they would say was that they had not identified the source of the threats and there was no reason for Mora to think that the threats had been mitigated.”
“Did you try to contact her again?”
“We’re not in the habit of begging clients to keep us on. She’d made her decision. Maybe my male pride was hurt that she’d so unceremoniously dumped Wingman Security.”
She was quiet for a minute. “I think you could have easily g
otten past that—getting dumped. But you’re still worried about her. You don’t want something to happen to her.”
She’d so quickly gotten to the root of the issue. He shrugged. “I don’t. But I’m not sure what I can do about it.” He was quiet for a minute. Then turned to her. “Well, I spilled my guts. Your turn.”
* * *
Was he serious?
Earlier, when he suggested that a drone might be flying overhead, she’d about jumped out of her own skin. Was it somebody looking for her?
Only the knowledge that she was literally snowed in kept her from throwing her stuff in the car, grabbing Hannah and running. Forever. Never stopping.
But flight wasn’t an option. She’d looked out the window when Rico was outside. As far as she could see, it was a blanket of white. She was going nowhere.
So instead, she’d focused on taking deep breaths while he’d been building the fire and by the time it was going, she felt a little calmer. Was actually processing information.
A, there was no way for anyone to know she was at the cabin. Melissa would not have told anyone. She was confident of that.
And B, if she was snowed in, then everybody else was snowed out.
And C, she couldn’t afford to appear freaked out because Rico was too smart—he would read something into her exaggerated reaction and start asking questions that she definitely didn’t want to answer.
She was pretty sure she couldn’t go back to sleep, so sitting in the dark, staring at the fire, seemed like a good solution. She hadn’t counted on company. But his story had been very interesting.
She knew that if something ultimately happened to this Mora, Rico was going to feel terrible. His suggestion, however, that it was her turn, was ridiculous. “Thank you for the tea,” she said, deciding that she was simply going to ignore his suggestion.
“A cup of tea helps everything,” he agreed.
“That sounds like something my grandmother would have said.”
“If I only had a cat and an afghan blanket.”
She could put him in bunny slippers and face cream and he’d still manage to look like a macho guy. He’d been so confident when he’d put on his coat to go outside. He hadn’t looked as if anything scared him.