Covert Kisses

by Jane Godman

  “Everything seems quiet around here.”

  “You’re right, it does. But not so quiet I’m tempted to drive out to an abandoned coal mine and investigate Mrs. Martin’s mysterious lights and spooky noises.” He eyed Cameron hopefully. “I don’t suppose you’d care to go out there and work your charm on her? Reassure her the police department has everything in hand?”

  Laughing, Cameron declined the offer. “I’m going away for a few days. Call me if you need me for anything. Doesn’t matter what time of day or night.”

  “Any problems and yours is the first number I’ll call. I have you on speed dial, just like always.” With a wave of his hand, Chief Wilkinson returned to his perusal of Mrs. Martin’s letter.

  What the hell is going on here? The question surfaced again, and Cameron’s overwrought brain still refused to provide any answers.

  His last stop was the lake house, the home he and Carla had shared. All at once, it seemed like someone else’s place, like it belonged in another lifetime, the familiar things suddenly unfamiliar. Hurriedly, Cameron packed a bag with clothes and other essentials, threw a few more groceries into another bag and dashed back to the car.

  The problem of Laurie’s phone conversation with her chief in San Diego gnawed away at him constantly as he drove. He couldn’t believe her captain would not have instantly responded to a call of that type from one of his officers. Or that the FBI would not have immediately mobilized at the news one of their agents had been killed. Had Grant managed to get to them? Persuade them Laurie’s call was a hoax? Even so, wouldn’t someone have tried to contact Moreton or Laurie for reassurance, and when they failed to reach them, at least have checked things out? And would Grant be stupid enough to implicate himself that way? The guy had been pretty good at covering his tracks so far.

  The thoughts kept coming on an endless loop until he reached the lockup near Wilderness Lake. It was impossible to get a car any nearer the cabin than this. Cameron had been checking his rearview mirror for the last few miles and, as the road narrowed and became more remote, he hadn’t seen any other vehicles. Nevertheless, he wasn’t taking any chances with Laurie’s safety. The cabin was an hour’s hike from where he left the car, but he took a circuitous route, doubling back on himself several times. By the time the cabin was in his sights, he was high above it, looking down on the wooden building through the trees.

  Nothing stirred around him. The silence and stillness were no consolation. Grant Becker was a skilled hunter. If he was close by, he would be at ease in these surroundings and quite capable of stalking Cameron through the pine trees the same way he would hunt a deer. The thought sent a chill up his spine. Laurie was down there waiting for his return. He had to get to her.

  Cameron held his breath as he moved stealthily out into the open ground, half expecting a shot to ring out and catch him in the spine. Nothing happened and he exhaled in a long, grateful sigh as he reached the cabin door. His imagination was working overtime. Just one more score he needed to settle with Grant when he got the chance.

  “Laurie?” He called out her name as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. There was no reply. It took about thirty seconds for him to ascertain that the cabin was empty.

  Chapter 9

  Laurie glanced at the screen in frustration. Her phone had stopped being a means of communication. Now it was just a clock, and it was exactly two minutes since she’d last checked it. Cameron had been gone for much longer than she’d anticipated, and rather than risk going completely stir-crazy, she had come outside and wandered a little way from the cabin into the forest. Her gun was tucked firmly into the waistband of her jeans, but she didn’t feel afraid out here. She felt more comfortable than in the cabin, where every creak of the wooden frame had her eyes skittering left and right, making her fearful Grant Becker had found her hideaway and was on his way inside to get her.

  She was in danger of allowing him to dominate her through fear even if he couldn’t get to her in person, and she decided she’d rather risk a face-to-face confrontation in the open than cower in a corner. Sitting on a rock, looking down the majestic valley, Laurie wanted this thinking time to review what she knew of the murders and Grant’s part in them. Instead, her mind stubbornly refused to shift away from Cameron and the events of the previous night.

  How did this happen? How, in the space of a few days, had she gone from being the ultimate professional, married to her job, to being so utterly, hopelessly attracted to the man she had been sent here to investigate? She tried to analyze it. Was it their unique situation? She’d never been in this sort of danger before, and he had come to her rescue. Was she seeing him as a modern-day knight in shining armor? Was it because they’d been unexpectedly thrown together? Was she—heaven forbid—subconsciously trying to step in and replace Carla because she sensed that might be what he needed?

  This isn’t reality. She had to keep reminding herself of that. We’ve never been granted the opportunity to get to know each other. The person I think I’ve fallen for doesn’t exist. If we met under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t look at him twice. Okay, that wasn’t strictly true. Any sane woman with a pulse would look at Cameron twice. But I wouldn’t be feeling like this. I wouldn’t be driven to distraction by this restless, burning longing for a man I met a few days ago.

  “Laurie.” Cameron’s voice jolted her back down to earth. Whom was she kidding? As she rose from her rocky seat, she knew she was in deep trouble. It didn’t matter how long she’d known him, what the circumstances were or what was coming in the future. This man held her in the palm of his hand, and there was no chance she was getting away anytime soon. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  Although she smiled up at him, he didn’t return the expression, and she saw the depth of his concern in his eyes. For a second, she put herself in his place. He’d lost Carla to Grant, and now Grant was coming after Laurie. I don’t mean as much to him as she did—no one could—but it must hurt like hell to be reminded.

  “I’m sorry.” She tried to keep her voice upbeat but failed miserably. “It felt claustrophobic in there on my own.”

  His face softened. “Let’s go back and get a drink while I tell you about my strange morning.”

  Once they were back inside the cabin, Laurie listened with a growing sense of disbelief as Cameron recounted the story of what he’d seen at the Paradise Creek vacation village and his subsequent conversation with Chief Wilkinson.

  She felt the color draining from her face. “I don’t understand. I spoke to Captain Harper myself. Even though he wasn’t happy with me when I told him I wanted to stay in Stillwater for a few days, he told me he was going to inform the FBI about Moreton as soon as he got off the phone.”

  “Talk me through that conversation. Start to finish.” Cameron carried the coffee cups out onto the porch. Laurie sat on the bench, tucking her legs under her in a defensive position. “How did he sound when you spoke to him?”

  “It’s hard to say. The reception was so bad.” She frowned. “In fact, I couldn’t hear anything at all that first time.”

  “First time?” Cameron’s gaze became intent.

  “Yes, I didn’t really think much of it with everything else that was going on. I called Captain Harper’s number, but the line was so bad all I could hear was a buzzing noise. I ended the call and a few minutes later he called me back.” Lifting a hand to her mouth as a thought struck her, she turned wide eyes to Cameron’s face. “Oh, dear Lord. It wasn’t him, was it?”

  “Check the call log on your phone.”

  With fingers that weren’t quite steady, Laurie checked the last number to make an incoming call to her phone. She held it up to show Cameron. “No caller ID.”

  Cameron took a sip of his coffee. “Interesting, but it’s not conclusive. When the signal was bad, your captain could have called you back f
rom another phone rather than using his own cell. How did he sound?”

  “It was hard to say. His voice was faint. There was still interference, like there was static on the line.” She looked up, her brow furrowing as she concentrated on the memory of that call. “I told you about the cursing, right? That was unusual. The captain has a temper, but I’ve never heard that sort of language from him before. He’s usually always professional. Is it possible Grant intercepted my call to Captain Harper somehow?”

  “From what you’ve told me, I’d say it’s not only possible, it’s highly likely. If he was hacking your phone, he’d have been alerted as soon as you tried to make your call to Harper. All he needed to do was use some sort of jamming equipment so you couldn’t hear anything and were forced to hang up. Then he called you back, pretending to be Harper.”

  “I’ve been having problems with my phone signal.” Laurie did her best to remember when it started. It came back to her now. “Ever since the night we went to Dino’s. The night I first met Grant. He could have been hacking my phone since then, but to do that he’d have needed my number.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Did you give your number to the vacation rental company?”

  “Yes, they needed it for housekeeping and to give me directions when I first arrived. But surely they wouldn’t give it out, not even to a police officer.”

  “No, but Grant must have found a way of getting into their office on the vacation village site. He had to have a key to your cabin. He got in there to leave the first arrangement of flowers and then he got in the second time to kill Moreton,” Cameron reminded her. “He could have found your number at the same time.”

  Laurie took a moment to think about that. About her sleeping in that cabin while Grant Becker had the key to the door in his pocket. About him turning the key over between his fingers as he planned how he was going to kill her. Then another thought took over. She turned wide eyes to Cameron. “So we are still the only people who know Moreton is dead?”

  “It looks that way.” His face was grim as he sipped his coffee.

  Laurie assimilated the impact of those words. The bottom line wasn’t good. Two days ago, when she had believed she was calling Captain Harper, not only had she told him Moreton had been murdered, she had also told him where the agent’s body was. Now the body had vanished and she was back to having nothing except allegations and hunches. Her captain had no idea what she was doing here in Wyoming. The exact nature of her undercover work for the FBI was a closely guarded secret.

  The only people she knew for sure she could trust were Moreton and Mike Samuels. One of those was dead, and with her laptop gone, she had no way of contacting the other. If she called Captain Harper now and outlined her suspicions against Grant Becker, she knew he would listen to her, no matter how wild her story sounded. He had known her since she joined the force, had nurtured and supported her as one of his most promising junior officers. But there was no way he would respond with a knee-jerk reaction to what sounded—even to Laurie’s own ears—like a crazy accusation against a well-respected sheriff from another state. No, the captain would do what he always did and play by the rules. Which would involve Laurie coming out of hiding and exposing herself to danger. The situation would be exactly the same if she tried to call the FBI. And, anyway, how the hell was she supposed to start that conversation with a telephone operator in the nearest field office?

  She was aware of Cameron watching her as though he was attempting to follow the thoughts flitting across her face. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed.

  “Grant has had his own way for too long over all of this. It’s time to take the fight to him.”

  * * *

  “The common denominator is how these women look, right?” They had eaten dinner and were sitting across from each other at the table. Cameron was making notes on a pad. Laurie nodded. “So it seems likely he sees them, they have the right look, he sends them flowers and then he snatches them and kills them?”

  “That seems the most obvious scenario.” Laurie took another surreptitious glance at the darkening window.

  “Stop worrying. He isn’t out there,” Cameron assured her. “Back to our scenario. What if there is more to it? What if he needs to have some interaction with them, as well?”

  Her smile peeped out, making his heart give that extra beat it reserved just for her. “I thought I was meant to be the cop around here?”

  He threw out his chest, striking a macho pose. “I’ve watched a lot of movies. I know how these things work.”

  She laughed, and he was pleased to see her starting to relax. The realization she had no credible way of contacting the authorities about Moreton’s death and the missing girls had hit her hard. “Okay, continue with your theory, Detective Delaney.”

  “If he did have some interaction with them before he killed them, we might be able to link him to at least one—hopefully more—of them.”

  “There’s just one problem with that. None of these women are officially dead.”

  “I’ve thought of that.” Cameron held up his pad, pointing to the words he’d just underlined. Find the bodies.

  Laurie slumped in her seat. “Just like that? In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a very big state. Searching it would take longer than forever. Particularly as we have no way of knowing where to start.”

  “Nobody has been looking until now. At least not officially. And nobody has been looking for bodies,” he reminded her. “Grant has been safe because no one has made any link between him and these girls. Now he has a double problem.” She raised a questioning brow. “You’re a cop and I know him just about as well as anybody does.”

  “Okay.” She took a sip of the wine he’d poured for them both. It was a bottle he’d snatched up from the lake house before he left, one of his favorite vintages, and the mellow flavor was helping Cameron relax. He hoped it would have the same effect on Laurie. “Tell me about our suspect.”

  Cameron thought about Grant Becker. Big, dependable Grant. That was the way he’d always viewed him. Yet, even as a child, he’d known there were things in his friend’s life that were troubling. He tried to find the words to paint Laurie a picture of the man he’d more or less grown up with. “We met in the sandbox on the first day of school and have been friends ever since. My mom would bring him home from school with us and he’d stay for dinner two, maybe three, times a week. I never went back to his house.”

  “Why was that?” Laurie’s eyes were fixed on his face.

  “At first I never questioned it. You don’t as a kid, do you? You just accept things. As we grew older, I realized his home life wasn’t good. His dad was a drunk. Grant would have bruises. Oh, he always had an explanation for them. He walked into a door...fell down a stair.”

  “You think his dad beat him?”

  “That was what I figured at the time, when I was old enough to think about it at all.” Cameron took a slug of wine. “I was wrong. His dad left home when we were ten and the bruises continued. That was when I knew it must have been his mom who was beating him.”

  “Didn’t anyone do anything?”

  “I know my own mother went to see the school principal a few times.” Cameron’s lips quirked into a smile at the memory of the fiercely protective woman who had reared him. With enough maternal love to spare for every child in Stillwater, Sandy Delaney hadn’t been able to bear the thought of her son’s friend being subjected to cruelty. “But while Grant stuck to the story his injuries were caused by accidents, there was nothing anyone could do. Short of sending him on summer camps for underprivileged children and hoping he might open up to someone, of course. And I know what you’re going to say. If Grant was abused by his mother as a child, that placed him at risk of becoming an offender—potentially a killer—as an adult.”

  Laurie lifted her wineglass to her lips, s
ipping the light-colored liquid slowly. “It’s not my area of expertise. While I know most serial killers have experienced childhood trauma of some sort, not all victims of child abuse go on to kill. Many grow up to lead fulfilling lives. But abuse can impair self-esteem, interfere with the ability to function adequately in society, succeed academically and form healthy relationships. Take that to the extreme and serial killers will often fail to keep a job for any period of time and rarely have a successful intimate relationship.”

  “Academically, and in the workplace, Grant has always been an overachiever. In school, his grades were consistently well above average, in spite of anything he might have been dealing with at home. When he left school he joined the police force and was fast-tracked onto a criminal justice degree program. Once he’d completed his degree, he pretty much straight away ran for office. That about sums up his determination. And you’ve seen how he looks. Muscles like those don’t come easy. He’s a big guy anyway, but he works hard to maintain all that physical strength and endurance.”

  “What you’re describing isn’t necessarily someone who is functioning adequately in society,” Laurie said. “It sounds to me like Grant has always had a hell of a lot to prove.”

  Cameron considered that statement. “I never really thought of it like that. I guess you could be right, except...well, couldn’t you say the same thing about me? I worked hard at school, got a degree, built up my own business and got elected to public office at a young age. How is Grant so different from me?”

  “That brings me to my next question. Does he have the ability to form healthy relationships?”

  “Growing up, I think I was his only friend. In recent years, he and Vincente have become friendly. They are both single guys with a few interests, like hunting, in common.” He considered the matter. “Although when we saw them together at Dino’s, I was surprised. I thought the friendship had fizzled out recently.”

  Laurie shook her head. “The question was not so much about friendships, although they are important. I meant intimate relationships.”