by Harper Allen
“Joseph Tahe contacted Del on the walkie-talkie to report some trouble with the horses in the far corral, since when something like this happens, Del checks into it himself so the gate doesn’t get left unguarded. He asked Connor to ride shotgun, in case it was a wolf. As for Jess, he’s in the library working on the computer.”
“Snakes. Wolves. Worst of all, moths.” Paula pulled a face. “I’d rather go up against bad guys any-day.”
“Is that why you joined the Agency?” She’d wanted to be alone, Tess thought, but maybe it was better to take her mind off her unhappiness by chatting with Paula. Despite the difference in their ages, the female agent’s blunt good humor made her easy to converse with.
“I joined the Agency because I thought I could make a difference. I guess I have, but not as much of one as I wanted.” The navy pantsuit had been ruined by the afternoon’s encounter with the rattler. Under a sweatshirt of Del’s Paula’s shoulders lifted. “I don’t know if I ran into a glass ceiling or what, but a few promotions passed me by. Now I’m wondering whether our boy Arne had anything to do with that.”
“He’s killed to protect his career. Stalling a colleague’s progress wouldn’t be morally indefensible to him,” Tess said dryly. “In fact, with him gone you might even have—”
She stopped and tipped her head to one side. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” At the counter Paula hefted the coffeepot hopefully, and set it back down. “Empty. Darn.”
“I thought I heard something scratching on the porch.”
Tess rose and went to the screen door. Flicking on the verandah light, she looked down as the scratching came again, this time accompanied by a plaintive whimper.
“Chorrie!” Opening the door, she gathered the puppy into her arms, almost losing him as he tried to cover her face with doggy kisses. “Joey’s been worried sick about you!”
“Let me guess—you’re going to march him upstairs and plop him on Joey’s bed, right?” Paula observed with a grin.
“Of course.” It was the first real smile she’d felt like giving in hours, Tess thought. She was pretty certain Joey’s would be bigger when he woke up to find Chorrie snuggled beside him. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
It had been more of a struggle than usual to persuade her nephew to go to bed tonight. Her promise to help him mount a full-scale search in the morning hadn’t gone far to ease his agitation over his missing puppy, and Tess had been sure she’d seen tearstains streaking his sleeping face when she’d gone in to check on him a couple of hours ago.
She pushed open his bedroom door gently. Enough illumination was shafting through the raised window from the full moon outside to see the huddled figure of his body under the covers, and carefully she set Chorrie down beside him. The pup nosed under the covers, pounced on something and presented it to her, his tiny tail wagging.
It was Joey’s medicine bag. Firmly she pried the soft leather from Chorrie’s gums, and then grabbed at the rawhide thong to save it from being chewed as well. A few golden grains of pollen escaped and drifted to the sheets.
The puppy jumped from the bed and trotted to the door, whining disconsolately.
“Chorrie, come back here!” She hissed the command out in a whisper. When the animal didn’t obey she gave up with a sigh. Slinging the medicine bag’s thong around her neck, she put a light hand on the blanket-covered hump. “Joey? Joey, wake up. There’s someone here to see—”
The hump was suspiciously soft. She pulled the covers back.
The next moment she was racing down the stairs to the kitchen, Chorrie tucked under her arm. Setting the dog on the floor, she sped past a startled Paula to the counter.
“Do you have any idea how this thing works?” she asked tersely. She stared in frustration at the array of unmarked buttons on the walkie-talkie as Paula moved to her side.
“I can probably figure it out. What’s the matter?”
“Joey’s gone.” She slapped the gadget into Paula’s palm. “Call Joseph at the gate. Tell him to notify Connor and Del to get back here right away. I’ll be out searching the barns.”
“You’re sure he’s nowhere in the house?”
“He’s not in any of the other bedrooms, and if he’d come downstairs he would have walked right past me. His bedroom window was open. He had to have climbed onto the porch roof and then down the tree beside the house.” Tess turned toward the door. “Tell Connor to hurry, Paula.”
“Don’t worry, I—”
Beside Paula the telephone rang shrilly. Tess’s gaze flew to the other woman’s in sudden hope, and swiftly she lifted the receiver from the cradle.
“Hello?”
“You’re the aunt, right?” The voice on the other end of the line was brusque. She gripped the receiver more tightly.
“I’m Joey’s aunt, yes. Have you found him? Who’s this?”
“I’ve found him. I’ll make sure you never do, Ms. Smith, if you don’t follow my directions to the letter. Do you still need to ask my name?”
Tess froze. From somewhere a long way away she seemed to hear her own voice rasping out a reply to his question. “No. You’re Arne Jansen, aren’t you?”
Beside her she saw Paula stiffen.
“Area Director Jansen,” he corrected curtly. “And if you know that, you know that you and Virgil Connor have caused me quite a bit of trouble over the past few days. Here’s what I propose.”
The man talked as if he were doing nothing more sinister than addressing a Monday-morning briefing, Tess thought sickly. Jansen’s very lack of emotion was more terrifying than if he’d been ranting at her.
“I’m willing to hand your nephew over in exchange for Connor. Joey’s released unharmed, you get to walk away, and Connor, along with the threat he poses to me, is eliminated. I know Agent Connor. He’ll see his death as a reasonable sacrifice in the line of duty, if it means the child lives.”
Her mouth felt so dry she could hardly reply. “I don’t believe you’d let him and me go free and be content with Connor.”
“That’s because you’re not in our line of work. Put Connor on the line. He’ll understand why I’m making this deal.”
“He…he’s out in the barn.” Jansen’s deal seemed to hinge on Connor’s presence, Tess thought frantically. She wasn’t about to tell the man she had no idea where he was right at this moment. She heard him give a sharply impatient exhalation.
“For God’s sake. Listen—Joey’s no longer a threat to me, and neither are you. From the beginning the boy insisted he saw some kind of boogey-man in the alleyway where that bungler Quayle was killed. I thought he’d seen me. I still think he saw me, but after reading the reports of his conversations with the agents while they were guarding him, it seems he’s spinning wild stories about ghosts and wolves. Even if he ever does point the finger at me, he’s no longer believable—just as you haven’t been since the Joy Gaynor incident.”
“I still don’t trust you,” Tess said woodenly. “Connor’s not the only credible witness against you. Since you’ve tracked us to the ranch, you’re obviously aware that Del Hawkins and Daniel Bird have been working on this investigation alongside him, and unless you’re planning to kill them, too, Connor’s death wouldn’t help you.”
He didn’t know Paula was allied with them, she thought. He didn’t seem to know about Jess. She didn’t need to give him information he didn’t have, and that included the fact that Daniel had found John MacLeish.
“The fabled Double Bs.” There was a dismissive note in his voice. “Rag-tag survivors of a force that was disbanded after one of their number turned killer in the jungles of Vietnam. Daniel Bird’s a convicted felon who’s just been released after serving a murder sentence. Hawkins never made a secret of the fact that he thinks MacLeish was innocent of the murder of his wife ten years ago. He’ll come off as a zealot who’ll accept any alternative rather than break faith with a former brother in arms. No, Connor’s the only one I have to worry about.
”
He took an audible breath. “Do I tell you where you and Agent Connor meet me, or do I hang up the phone right now?”
“Don’t hang up!” Tess swayed against the counter. “Tell me where we’re to meet you. Connor and I will be there.”
His instructions were given clearly and crisply, as if he were winding up the same Monday-morning briefing he’d seemed to be conducting all along. It couldn’t be coincidence that the area he’d chosen for the hostage handover was the very stretch of road where she’d had the accident, Tess thought as she hung up the phone. Somehow Jansen had known about the incident.
But he didn’t know about Paula. And that was going to be his undoing.
“He’s got Joey and he’s willing to give him up in exchange for Connor,” she said, holding up a palm to forestall the urgent questions she could see in Paula’s eyes. “We’ve barely got time to make it to the handover point, and we certainly don’t have time to find Connor. That doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters! As soon as he sees you’ve come alone, he’ll probably kill you and Joey!” Paula’s features tightened in alarm. “What were you thinking, Tess?”
“I was thinking that I’ll get you to ride shotgun with me, just like Connor’s doing for Hawkins right now,” Tess answered, grabbing the four-by-four’s keys from a hook near the door.
“Except you’ll be hiding out of sight on the floor—and you won’t show yourself until you hear a signal from me telling you that you’ve got a clear shot at Jansen.”
Chapter Sixteen
All in all, a lousy evening, Connor thought as he pushed open the screen door and entered the kitchen. Having to put down an animal was never a pleasant task, but the mare had been too badly savaged to deem it anything but a mercy to put her out of her suffering. They hadn’t caught the wolf that had done it.
Del and he had gotten into an argument on the way back here, and Joey’s pup was still missing, and none of those mattered a damn compared to what had passed between him and Tess earlier.
She’d given him his walking papers. There’d been some small relief in having the moment over, although it was the same kind of relief a man might feel after days of apprehensive waiting for medical tests to come back and finally being told he was going to die. Del hadn’t understood the analogy at all.
“You told the woman what?” he’d exclaimed, hand shifting the truck’s gears down as they jolted across the field to join up with the road leading back to the ranch.
“I told her we should see how it went before making any big promises to each other,” he’d replied. “Dammit, you did the same with Greta. You went out with her for years before you finally popped the question.”
“And I came this close to losing the woman I loved because of my pigheadedness,” Del had retorted. “Every time’s she’s away like this I get an inkling of what my life would have been like without her, and I’m tellin’ you, boy, I break out in a cold sweat. I’ve already made up my mind that when she comes home tomorrow I’m going to tell her that from now on when she needs to attend a showing I’m going with her.”
“What about during the months your bad boys are here?” Connor had given the older man a wry smile. “I know you, Del. You won’t ever shut down that part of the ranch’s operations.”
“I don’t intend to. Tye can take it over, and I’ll get someone to run the Appaloosa end of the business. Maybe you.”
“Ain’t gonna happen. I’ve got a job already.” His reply had been prompt—too prompt, he’d realized as Del had peered sideways at him.
“A job you’ve outgrown—or might have, if you hadn’t blown it with Tess tonight. I always thought I helped you out some, that year you spent at the Double B, but I knew you had a long way to go before you became the man you could be. Tess was making you that man, Virgil. You were beginning to open up. I guess that scared the hell out of you, so you put the kibosh on it as fast as you could.”
Del had it all wrong, Connor thought as he passed through the kitchen and along the hall to the library. He hadn’t been scared, he’d wanted to be prudent. It would have been easy for him to have told her what he’d known she wanted him to say; easier yet to hear the same words from her. And if somewhere down the line, maybe not right away, maybe not in the first month, maybe not even in the first year, but at some time, they’d found out it wasn’t working, then just the fact that those words had once been spoken would—
Would tear your heart apart. Would shatter your world. It’s bad enough now, losing her when you never really had her, but it’s a damn sight better than losing her later, isn’t it? And you were afraid you would lose her one day. You’d convinced yourself you would, and you’d seen what losing love did to the man you worshiped when you were his son. Del’s right. You were too damned scared to take what she was offering you.
He stopped stock-still in the hall. Was it true? Had he really just made the biggest mistake of his life because he hadn’t been able to believe in something he couldn’t touch, couldn’t see, couldn’t prove—but something that had been all around him nonetheless?
“The womenfolk back inside the house, too?” Jess came out of the library, Chorrie in his arms.
Connor blinked at him. “What?”
“Tess told me she and Paula were going Skinwalker hunting, and asked me to watch the dog for her. I figured that meant they were scaring themselves silly telling Navajo ghost stories and drinking white wine on the porch. They’re not?” Jess looked confused. “Then where’s Joey? The mutt peed on the carpet, but when I took him upstairs, Joey wasn’t there. I assumed he’d woken up and wandered outside to be with Tess.”
“When that billionaire playboy gets back I’m going to tear a strip off—” Del’s angry growl broke off as he came up behind Connor and saw Jess in the library doorway. “You’re here. Then who took Greta’s four-by-four out for a spin?”
“I think Tess and Paula did,” Connor said grimly. He grasped Jess’s arm and marched him back into the library. “What exactly did Tess say when she told you they were going out? How did she sound? Upset?”
“I don’t know, I was working on the computer, for heaven’s sake.” Jess shook his hand off. “Dammit, Connor, you know what I’m like when I get into it. The house could be falling down around me and I’d hardly notice. Although I did hear the phone ringing just before she came in to tell me she was leaving,” he added dubiously. “Or maybe that was the call that came just after she’d gone. I actually took a message, so don’t go telling me I don’t do anything for you, dear boy.”
“Dear boy? Winston phoned? She went to meet Winston?”
It didn’t make sense, Connor thought worriedly. Of course, with Jess, it often didn’t. He took a deep breath.
“What was Winston’s message?”
“That the security guard had gone on duty that night at eleven sharp,” Jess answered patly.
“Eleven?” Del was still wearing his cowboy straw. He pushed it back, scratching his forehead. “That can’t be right.”
“That’s what the man said. Eleven.” Jess looked annoyed. “Hell, if the two of you think I’m so incompetent I can’t remember a simple number, here’s the proof.” He fished in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a scrap of paper. “I wrote it down. See—eleven. Like eleven bells, eleven lords a’leaping or whatever the fu—”
“Like News at Eleven,” Connor said slowly. “Like Paula telling us Rick Leroy was ogling News at Eleven’s blond anchor babe while she was playing cards with Bill that night in the safe house. Except that by eleven when that guard went on duty, Leroy was past the point of ogling anyone. He was already dead, and his body had been dumped in the newly poured concrete at that construction site.”
“But why would Paula lie about a thing like that?” Jess’s brow furrowed. “Jansen’s the bad guy here, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, Jansen’s the bad guy,” Connor said tightly. “Except he’s not the only bad guy. Geddes has been in this with him all
along—and right now she’s taking Tess straight to him.”
“TESS!” Joey tried to run toward her, but Arne Jansen’s grip on his collar jerked him back. Under a renegade swath of black hair, dark eyes glared up at the area director. “I told you she’d come for me,” he said defiantly.
“And you told me you’d be coming with Connor.” Ignoring the small boy he was restraining, Jansen directed his words at Tess. “You lied. The deal’s off.”
With his sandy, thinning hair and his slightly paunchy figure, the middle-aged man in front of her gave no outward physical clue of the terrible crimes he’d committed, Tess thought, her mind racing. He started to turn back to his vehicle, an unmarked sedan similar to the one that had rolled down this very gully a week ago.
She needed to stall Jansen. During the drive here Paula had warned her she probably would, had guessed the director’s first reaction would be exactly what it had just been. With the rough terrain and the glaring headlights washing the scene in dazzling and distorting light, even for a crack markswoman these wouldn’t be optimal conditions for a take-down, and they needed Joey completely out of the line of fire before Paula would risk a shot.
She was waiting in the four-by-four right now, scrunched down on the floor in front of the passenger seat. The window on that side was open, and she was only waiting for Tess’s shouted signal before she rose up and took aim at Jansen.
Skinwalker was the signal, Tess thought edgily. She wished now she’d chosen something else.
And she wished Connor was here with her.
Arne Jansen might believe that he would have had no trouble eliminating Connor if he’d shown up, but her money would be on Connor, she realized. Somehow he would have found a way to save Joey and defeat the area director. But her and Paula’s plan could work, too.
Except she had to stall Jansen right now, or their plan would fall apart.