by Harper Allen
“That’s settled, then.” She made a face. “As long as I can roust Joey and get him moving. I’ve discovered he’s a dawdler in the mornings, so I should go upstairs and wake him now.”
“Who’s DeWitt?” Del pushed himself from the counter and glanced at the clock on the wall. “Fill me in on the way to the barn, Connor. I’ll get that antibiotic for you to give to Joanna and then I’d better be on my way. The day’s awastin’.”
Not as far as she was concerned, Tess thought happily as she and Connor exchanged quick grins and he followed the ramrod-straight figure of the tough ex-Marine outside. She would be spending the better part of this day with Virgil Connor, and spending it showing him a little of her own world. That wasn’t a waste, that was a plus. And it was even more of a plus that Joey would get the chance to see something of his heritage.
But her idea of a perfect day obviously wasn’t Jess’s, she thought in amusement as she paused in the doorway of the library, the mug of coffee she’d brought for him in her hand. Unaware of her presence, he was humming happily under his breath, his gaze locked on the computer screen in front of him.
“Any luck?” She crossed the floor to the oak table and set the mug carefully down beside him.
“Thanks. I meant to get up and get some myself an hour ago, but things started happening and I forgot.” Jess looked up with a rueful grin. “Guess what? It was a glitch, and not some evil firewall thrown up by our archnemesis Arne Jansen. I felt like a fool when I realized it, but I’ve fixed the problem now. I expanded our search to include Vincenzi’s known employees, but I haven’t come across Malden and Petrie yet.”
He glanced back at the monitor, and a frown crossed his face. “Dammit, it’s screwed up again. How did that happen?”
“What?”
Tess leaned over his shoulder and saw the same rapidly changing images as she’d witnessed the previous night. As he had when he’d hacked into Connor’s record, Jess had stopped one program and frozen the image on the screen, although it wasn’t large enough to identify.
“Oh, when I was doing a couple of dry runs to see if the glitch had been fixed, I threw in Tye’s name and mine and a few others, Paula’s included. The freakin’ program’s somehow picked up on those names and mixed them into the search on Vincenzi’s employees. Well, Paula’s, anyway.”
He made a motion and the image jumped to full screen. “Harlan Geddes. I’ll probably have to weed out Harlan Crawfords and Harlan Adamses, too. That blows big-time.”
Tess gripped the back of his chair, feeling suddenly unsteady. “That’s Petrie. That’s one of the hit men who tried to kill us at the motel.”
It was foolish, she knew, but just seeing the man’s face sent a shiver down her spine. In the photo—obviously cropped from a larger one and taken at some social function—Petrie was wearing a dinner jacket, and a woman’s hand was draped lightly over his shoulder, although the female herself had been cut from the picture. The man she had last seen lying dead on the walkway outside the motel was grinning for the camera and holding up a glass as if in a toast.
I should have switched his shoes, too. Just for a moment the ridiculous notion seemed eminently reasonable. Joey said their chindis would follow us, and he was right.
“I doubt Petrie was his real name.”
Connor’s voice behind her drove the shadows away. She cast him a grateful look, and as he came up beside her he caught her hand and gave it an unobtrusive squeeze while Jess told him what had happened.
“But you haven’t, right?” Connor’s question cut across his too-detailed explanation. “You haven’t found any Harlan Crawfords or Harlan Adamses or Hawkins or whatever.”
“Well, no,” Jess began, but again Connor interrupted.
“Then how can you be sure this bastard’s name really wasn’t Geddes? It’s not that unusual a surname.”
“Occam’s Razor?” Jess looked unconvinced. “I guess it’s possible.”
“Who or what is Occam and why does his razor have anything to do with this?” Tess asked, her gaze focused on the photo.
“It’s a fancy name for the theory that says if there are two explanations for something, the less complicated one stands a better chance of being right,” Connor said dryly. “I’m surprised the C-Man knows it. I’m less surprised he didn’t call it what everyone else does—KISS. Keep it simple, stupid,” he added to Jess in a growl.
“I just throw those obscure phrases around to impress you, old buddy,” Jess grinned.
“So this razor theory says it’s more likely the program’s working fine, and it’s just coincidence one of Vincenzi’s hit men had the same name as Paula?” Tess said thinly. “I think we can make it simpler yet. Jess, can you enlarge the photo more? It doesn’t matter if you lose some of his face, so long as you keep his shoulders in.”
She felt rather than saw Connor’s sharp glance, but she didn’t take her attention away from the monitor. As Jess complied with her request she leaned forward and pointed a trembling hand at the image. Even at such a moment she’d remembered her Dineh heritage enough not to point with her finger, Tess thought disjointedly. Some of the inherited strictures were as much a part of her as—
“That braided gold bracelet—see it there, on the woman’s wrist draped over his shoulder?” she said shakily. “That’s Paula’s bangle. That’s Paula’s wrist.”
“Which means…” Jess’s sentence trailed off. Connor finished it for him.
“Which means that’s Paula’s ex-husband, Harlan Geddes,” he said savagely. “Also known as the late Agent Petrie.”
“I WAS THE FOOL who led her straight to the Double B, complete with giving her directions for getting there.” Connor struck the heel of his hand on the steering wheel of Greta’s sporty red four-by-four. “I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
Tess glanced behind him at Joey sitting in the extended cab’s back seat. He was engrossed in one of the games Jess had given him, but she kept her voice low just the same.
“She’s your partner and you trusted her. I trusted her.”
“Because she made sure we did, with that phone call to me just after the attempted hit on us at the motel.” He wrenched the wheel to avoid a rut in the hard-baked road. “She had to have been there. She must have been watching from somewhere close by just to make sure everything went as it was supposed to, and when she realized it hadn’t, she needed to salvage what she could from the situation, fast. She needed us to leave before the real agents Jansen was sending arrived.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “She played me all the way down the line,” he said tightly. “Right up to and including suspecting my own area director.”
“But how did she trace us to the motel that night?” Tess answered her own question. “The busboy at the diner. He either phoned the local police and talked to someone who was in the pay of Vincenzi or, if he did get through to the Agency, relayed his message to a dirty agent.”
“Or it’s Occam’s Razor again. When she discharged herself from the hospital, what would have been more natural than to ask which route her partner had been assigned to search, and head out to join up with me? If she’d walked into that diner and flashed her ID minutes after we left, the busboy would have spilled his story directly to her, and after contacting Vincenzi and telling him to start putting the arrangements for a hit in motion, she caught up to us on the highway and tailed us.” He swore softly. “We saw it all clearly enough, but we were looking at it through a mirror. Paula tilted that mirror just enough so that it showed us Jansen’s reflection and not hers.”
“Except for one thing.” Tess shook her head. “The wound she sustained during the safe house hit on Danzig. Bill must have gotten that shot off when he realized she and Leroy intended to kill him and then go after Joey, but how could Paula have counted on—”
“Bill’s gun hadn’t been fired,” he contradicted her. “He didn’t even get the opportunity to unholster it, which makes it unlikely that Leroy was an innocent
in all this, as well as Danzig. Since he’s dead now, too, that possibility had occurred to me.”
Tess stared at him. “You’re saying she stood there and let Rick point a gun at her head to avert any suspicion that she’d been working with him, trusting that he’d aim it in exactly the right place to inflict nothing worse than a scalp wound? I don’t buy that, Connor. Whatever else she lied about, there was no love lost between her and Leroy. And if it did happen that way, who killed him and dumped his body?”
“Vincenzi himself? One of his paid killers?” His shoulders lifted in frustration. “We don’t have to dot all our is and cross all our ts right now. The one thing we can’t argue with is the link between her and Vincenzi. Divorced or not, it’s obvious she still moved in her husband’s circle.”
“Or maybe it was just as much her circle as his,” she amended thoughtfully. “Paula didn’t do all this as a favor to her ex-husband’s boss, Connor. She had a vested interest in having MacLeish killed, and when that went wrong, trying to silence Joey. She had to have had mob connections as far back as when MacLeish was considering running for office on his cleanup platform, and she could well have been involved in the murder of Huong and the attempt to make it look as though Mac had committed suicide.”
“And just like at the motel, she was hidden in that alleyway, watching to make sure Dean Quayle carried out the murder assignment she’d given him?” His gaze narrowed. “She was the third person Joey sensed there that day. She was Skinwalker. She couldn’t assume he wouldn’t one day recall some detail that would point the finger at her.”
Tess opened her mouth and then closed it again. He was right, she thought. They didn’t have time to argue every detail, and at the present moment the topic of Skinwalker was a distraction they could ill afford. She glanced sideways at him, taking in the grim set of his lips, the tense grip of his hands on the steering wheel.
Last night there hadn’t been one inch of her skin those hands hadn’t stroked, one curve of her body they hadn’t explored. Those lips had brought her to ecstasy time and time again, and in turn had cried out her name when he’d followed her over that same ecstatic edge of desire.
And after each shudderingly intense climax had sated them, after the last tiny explosion of sensation had left her those three times, he’d held her in his arms, stroking her hair and wrapping one leanly muscled leg around hers as if he needed to keep her as close to him as he possibly could.
He hadn’t said he loved her. But in every small and tender gesture, he’d shown her what he wasn’t yet ready to put into words. She’d harbored the hope that their time together today would have taken him a step nearer to tearing down the defenses he’d erected long ago, defenses he no longer needed.
But their time together today would more likely be devoted to contacting Arne Jansen and persuading the area director to listen to what Connor had to tell him, she thought worriedly.
“You can bet Paula’s been more than helpful in planting suspicions of me in Jansen’s mind, the same way she did with us about him,” Connor had said to her and Jess at the ranch. “And let’s face it, I set myself up as the perfect patsy by cutting all communication with the Agency four days ago and disappearing with a federal witness and an unknown woman. Even the two dead bodies at the motel make it look like I’m an out-of-control killer, since Paula would have been sure to remove any phony ID before the authorities arrived. I don’t want to be on the phone presenting my case when it’s possible she’s on her way here right now with a few of Vincenzi’s hired guns.”
“She’s cool, all right,” Jess had agreed, his normal good humor nowhere in evidence. “It took nerve to show up here yesterday, listen to the case you presented against Jansen—a case she knew that with a minimal amount of digging would be proven to be evidence against her, not him—and then make the decision to drive off and get reinforcements, rather than risk taking you and Del on by herself.”
“Nerve?” Tess had known her tone was thick with revulsion, but revulsion was what she’d felt. “It took more than nerve to befriend a child, knowing all the while she intended to sanction his death. At some point Joey’s going to have to learn the truth about her. What’s that going to do to him?”
“Shake his faith in people,” Connor had said quietly. “But you’ll be beside him to restore it.”
As if he hadn’t been able to help himself, he’d reached out and cupped one palm lightly on the side of her face, his touch warm. For a moment he’d kept it there, his gaze holding hers, and then with reluctance he’d turned back to Jess.
“We need to get Joey away from here as fast as possible, and the Dinetah still seems our safest haven for now. Paula’s never met you, and even if she does show up she’s got no idea we suspect her.”
“I get you.” Jess had nodded. “I’ll fill Del in on the situation when he comes back from Last Chance. Better yet, I’ll phone a couple of businesses in town and leave a message for him to call me. He said something about stopping at the feed store, so I’ll try to catch him there. If the lady shows, I play the dumb visitor who don’t know nuttin’ about nuttin’.”
“It’ll be a stretch, but do your best.” A corner of Connor’s mouth had lifted. Lightly he’d punched his friend’s shoulder. “That thing last night. Water under the bridge, agreed?”
“Agreed.” Jess’s smile had held a touch of relief. “You guys be careful out there. Tell Joey I’ll look after Chorrie for him till he gets back.”
Except it wasn’t likely Joey would return to the Double B anytime soon, Tess thought as the red four-by-four pulled off the dusty road and into a graveled parking lot in front of a small, square white building. Once Jansen was persuaded that Connor was to be believed, a phalanx of agents would sweep down upon Joanna Tahe’s clinic here and whisk the nine-year-old back into protective custody, but with one important difference from the last time he’d been in their care: this time she was going to be with him. If she had to call in the whole of the Navajo Nation to back her up, she vowed, she wasn’t going to let her nephew be separated from her again.
“Ever,” she murmured out loud. Beside her, Connor shot her a quizzical glance. “A private conversation with myself,” she said with an attempt at a smile. “What’s the plan?”
“The plan is I use the phone in Joanna’s office. Like I said, this conversation’s going to take a while, so you and Joey might want to wait inside the clinic while I’m talking with Jansen.” He frowned. “I’d have liked more privacy, but on the Dinetah, cell phones are pretty much useless.”
He was right, Tess knew. Aside from the atmospherics created by Mount Taylor, transmission towers were few and far between here in the Four Corners region. But Virgil Connor had a lot to learn about nine-year-olds if he thought Joey would be content to sit in a roomful of babies and their mamas, especially when he was already staring out the four-by-four’s window at the game of hide-and-seek taking place in the field beside the clinic. The participants were children his age, Tess saw as she alighted from the truck, and likely the siblings of the babies inside, sent out to play while their mothers waited to be examined by Joanna.
She had a few things to learn about nine-year-olds, too, she told herself wryly twenty minutes later. When Connor had disappeared into the clinic and she’d asked her nephew if he wanted her to accompany him over to the group of hide-and-go-seekers, he’d looked at her in consternation.
“They’ll think I’m a big loser if I have to have my aunt with me, Tess. I’ll be okay, I promise.”
And he was, she thought with a small smile, watching him running for the boulder by the side of the clinic that seemed to have been designated home base, and getting there a step ahead of the youngster who was “it” in this round of the game.
Tough little Dineh you raised, Darla, she thought, blinking against the sudden tears prickling at the back of her eyelids. But how could he not be? Whoever his father was, his mom was the bravest woman I ever knew. I’m going to make sure your son under
stands that when he’s older, but for now it’s enough that he’s finally come home—that we’ve finally come home.
It did feel like home to her, she realized in faint surprise. In this big country that some might see as frighteningly vast and in places inhospitable, she’d felt more at peace with herself than she ever had in the city. Maybe it was the fact that she’d come to know Connor here, maybe it had something to do with the way Del had welcomed her and Joey, but she had the feeling there was more to it than that.
This is the Four Corners. The four sacred mountains stand sentinel around me—Tsisnaajini, Doko’oosliid, Debe’ntsaaa and Tsoodzil. Of course I feel at home here. I am home.
“And so is Connor, whether he realizes it or not,” she murmured, a smile playing around the corners of her lips as her gaze idly searched the group of children scattered around the boulder for Joey’s familiar grin. “I wonder if he’d ever consider leaving the Agency and joining Del and Tyler Adams in running the Double—”
She couldn’t see him. Her gaze sharpened and darted from child to child, quickly rechecking. A boy ran out from behind the whitewashed clinic and she released the breath that had caught in her lungs, but as she exhaled she saw he wasn’t Joey.
It was a game of hide-and-seek. He had to be hiding, naturally, and when his aunt came tearing across the parking lot his cherished tough-guy facade would be badly dented. Even as one part of her mind was arguing with the other, Tess sprang into action.
Gravel spurted up from her sneakers as she ran across the parking lot to the boulder just past it, and with an effort she slowed her pace as she approached.
“Hello, little sister.” She stopped a few feet away from a girl with ribbon-tied braids halfway down her back.
“Hello, auntie.” Despite her respectful greeting, the child looked properly cautious. Tess fixed a smile on her face.