by Anne Woodard
She’d bought the map when she was first getting to know the area. It helped her keep track of their position now, but it wasn’t perfect. According to the map, the trail they were on didn’t exist.
Even if she’d had the right kind of vehicle, she would have hated to tackle a road like this herself, but Rick seemed as comfortably at home as if he were cruising down the freeway.
Twice the trail branched, and twice he climbed out to study the signs.
When they got to the third crossing, Rick came to a hard, gravel-crunching halt and slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “Damn!”
The rocky trail they’d been following dead-ended into a paved two-lane mountain road.
For a moment, Rick simply glared at the asphalt strip that cut past them, then he again got out to study the rock-studded dirt track. This time he focused on the few feet closest to the road. When he climbed back in, his jaw was set at a dangerous angle.
“He went right, up the mountain.” He glanced at her. “I don’t suppose you know what’s up that way? Where he might have been heading?”
Maggie shook her head.
“Not for sure. If we’re where I think we are, this road peters out a couple miles farther on in a subdivision. You know, one of those places where someone breaks up old ranch property into dozens of forty-acre lots and everybody builds big, expensive houses, then makes a point of not knowing their neighbors.”
“The perfect kind of place for a drug dealer to conduct his business.”
“’Fraid so.”
Rick absently drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “There’s always the chance we’ll spot a black pickup truck parked in somebody’s drive, but assuming we don’t get that lucky, the best I can do is check out every single dirt road or drive in the place. Or…”
He eyed her consideringly. “I don’t suppose your friends in the agency would be willing to do a little research for us, find out who owns what property, see if there are any connections to known or suspected drug dealers?”
“They might, but it will have to wait until we get back to town—cell phones aren’t much good up here in the mountains. Anyway, there’s no guarantee they’ll find anything. Nothing’s led us up here so far. I only know the area because I drove around a lot when I first got here, learning the lay of the land.”
He put the truck in gear. “You can’t find grizzlies if you don’t know the range they’re hunting.”
Gravel spat from beneath his tires as he pulled onto the road.
They didn’t get lucky. No black trucks that they could see, and most of the drives were paved or covered with gravel. The only dirt drive with tracks that might have been what they were looking for led to a house under construction and a battered white pickup with a ladder mounted on a rack at the back. In most cases, they couldn’t even see the houses, which were set deep in the heavily wooded lots for maximum privacy. Maggie hadn’t realize how hopeful she’d been until they’d circled back to their starting point, no further along than when they’d started. After all these years in law enforcement, she ought to be used to disappointment and dead ends, but when a young woman’s safety was involved…
Her hand curled into an involuntary fist. She felt like hitting something. Hard.
Focus, she told herself. Think.
“All right,” she said. “We go back to town, get some help digging up information on who’s up here, see if they can come up with any useful connections. Then we—you and I—go see Jerelski. I’m just a friend, trying to be helpful,” she added, thinking out loud.
She glanced at Rick. “We’ve been careful not to let him know we suspect him, so you looking for your sister is the perfect cover. Especially since you talked to some of her other professors yesterday. We’ve checked out his student assistants, but it wouldn’t hurt to check again. And the people connected with his import business. We’ve been watching them and they all look legit, but maybe there’s something we missed. I’ll talk to Bursey, see if he can put a couple of his people on looking for Tina full-time. Maybe—”
“No.”
Rick’s curt objection shattered her train of thought. He pulled off the road and set the brake, but left the engine running.
“How soon do you have to be back in Fenton? For your job at the coffee shop, I mean?”
Maggie glared at him, irritated. She wanted to get moving, not sit here and talk.
“Five o’clock. But I left word this morning that I might be late.”
“It’s still early,” he said, clearly thinking out loud. “Only a little after eight. If our guy really came up here last night—and the tracks he left say he did—there’s a chance he’s still here.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know where. What are we supposed to do? Knock on every door and ask if anyone drives a black pickup?”
“When you’re looking for bears, sometimes the best thing you can do is sit and wait for them to come to you.”
He twisted around to face her.
“I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it.”
Chapter 7
R ick was right. Maggie didn’t like it.
She didn’t like sitting and she didn’t like waiting, and his idea required she do both. That the sitting was done atop a rocky outcrop shrouded by bushes whose branches alternately poked or scraped some portion of her anatomy every time she moved didn’t help any.
Worse, the rock wasn’t really big enough for two. Which meant that Rick Dornier was way too close for comfort.
For the fifth time in as many minutes, she pushed aside the obscuring branches to get a better view of the entrance to the subdivision where they’d lost their quarry. She’d been on stakeouts before, but this was the first time she’d ever risked a bruised rump and bug bites to do it.
“You’re certain he won’t spot us here?”
“No.”
“No!”
“Chances are he won’t spot us. Chances are he won’t go down that dirt track where we left the truck, either. But I can’t be absolutely certain of either.” He shrugged. “Either way, I figure it’s a chance worth taking.”
Maggie jumped at a sudden stab of memory—of Rick’s body, half-naked and still wet from his shower, of the easy play of masculine muscle and bone beneath the warm, damp skin.
She shifted uncomfortably on the too-small rock they shared. “You choose the perfect spot, but the wind shifts and the bear gets your scent anyway sort of thing?”
“That’s right.”
“But you’re absolutely sure you can spot his tracks in the dirt we dribbled across all those driveways?”
He grinned, clearly amused by her skepticism. “I’m absolutely one hundred percent sure of that.”
He made it sound so simple.
Maybe it was…for him.
Maggie shifted again, annoyed. She wasn’t used to having to depend on someone else’s skills like this.
Still, she had to admit they had a better chance of figuring out which house they were looking for by using his approach than through any of the methods she would have used. Always assuming, of course, that the truck really had come this way last night, that its driver was the man they were looking for, that he was still here, and that he really did know something about Tina’s disappearance.
Which was an awful lot of assuming.
Better than doing nothing, which was what she’d done for Greg, she reminded herself grimly.
In the forest behind her, a bird called softly, then fell silent. The air was laced with the scent of earth and growing things. It was such a peaceful place she could almost have managed to forget why they were there in the first place.
To Maggie’s relief, Rick made no effort to chat. He didn’t fidget, either, or check his watch every three minutes, as she did, or keep parting the bushes so he could get a clearer view of the empty road they were watching. He simply sat there, to all appearances a man with no worries and no desire to be somewhere else doing something different.
And yet he wasn’t a passive lump on the rock, either. She had the sense that he was, simply, there. In every sense of the word. Alert. Aware. Patient, not passive.
Though he was leaning back against the rock, one arm casually propped on top of his bent knee, gaze seemingly fixed on nothing at all, she would bet her next paycheck that he would be on his feet in an instant if danger threatened. He’d proven that last night in the alley behind the Cuppa Joe’s.
Evidently sensing her silent scrutiny, he brought his gaze back from whatever he’d been staring at and turned it on her, instead.
“You okay?” he asked. “Not too uncomfortable?”
“I’m fine,” she lied. She leaned forward a bit to avoid the pointed bit of rock that was poking her in the back. “Tina told me once that you two grew up apart from each other, that you’d only gotten back in contact a year ago or so. How’d that happen?”
He shifted a bit, looking for a more comfortable spot. “Our folks went through a really ugly divorce when I was about twelve. Tina was barely a toddler, so she doesn’t remember the fights, but there were a lot of them. Dad was a rancher. Mom was a big-city girl who didn’t realize that marrying a cowboy wasn’t quite the romantic adventure the movies made it out to be. She hated the life and couldn’t convince him to change, which made him hostile and her bitter.”
He spoke quietly, but beneath the soft words Maggie sensed regret and the remembered pain of a boy caught between angry, warring parents.
“Mom never forgave me for staying with Dad when they split. I never went to visit them. Tina never visited us.” He shrugged. “With more than ten years difference in our ages, it was easy to forget there were two of us, sometimes.”
“Tina didn’t forget,” Maggie said softly. “She talked about you a lot. Bragged about you, really.”
He looked up, clearly surprised. “She did?”
Maggie nodded. “You’re a hero to her, you know.”
That seemed to trouble him more than please him. It may have been nothing more than shadows, but Maggie thought he flushed under his tan.
“I’m not much of a hero, I’m afraid,” he said. “Since Dad died, I’ve been so busy running the ranch along with my research and my classes that I was doing good to send her a card for Christmas. But then, a couple years ago, she started calling pretty regularly. Last spring, she asked me down for a visit, and since then we’ve stayed in touch a little better.”
“That’s good.”
He yanked up a stalk of grass. “Not good enough. I had no idea she was in any trouble, that there was any problem. Maybe if I’d called more often…”
His voice trailed off, the words of self-blame and guilt unspoken.
But they were still there, Maggie knew, even if he hadn’t said them out loud. She knew enough about both to know that. She didn’t tell him that, though. From firsthand experience, she knew he’d have to come to terms with them on his own.
“Tell me about your brother,” he said.
Maggie stiffened involuntarily. “He’s dead.”
“Not in your memories, he’s not.”
He said it so gently that she couldn’t take offense.
Besides, he was right. For her, Greg was still alive and always would be.
“He was funny,” she said softly, remembering. “Funny and smart and kind. He and my dad used to go fishing, just the two of them, but Greg always threw back whatever he caught. He couldn’t bear to kill the things.”
She drew her knees up, then wrapped her arms around them, pulling the memories close. It had been so long since she’d thought about the good parts, the happy times.
“He liked Rocky Road ice cream, nachos and three-cheese pizzas.” She laughed. “He loved three-cheese pizzas. When he was about five or so, he went off on a kick with knock-knock jokes. Drove us all crazy for months, pestering us with the darned things. Then he got hooked on comic book superheroes and drove us crazy with those. He’d even make his own comic books. Mom thought he might be an artist, but I think it was the stories that appealed to him more than the art.”
Beside her, Rick sat quietly, listening, letting her tell the story in her own way without judgment.
He was, simply, there, and that was enough. It gave her courage for the rest.
“Our folks died in a car crash when Greg was fifteen. I was twenty-two at the time so I was named his guardian. I’d finished college and joined the police force, which meant I was putting in a lot of long hours, but Greg was old enough not to need a baby-sitter. I figured I could handle it. That we could both handle it.”
She frowned at the leafy screen in front of her, remembering.
“At first, everything seemed fine. Greg had had some problems in school even before our parents died, but it was never anything big. My folks suspected that it was mostly because he was so bright that school was pretty boring. He’d cut a class, maybe, or sneak out to cruise with his friends when he was supposed to be doing his homework. Nothing worse than that. Nothing I wouldn’t have done at his age, if I’d had the nerve to do it.
“He was already deep into drugs when I realized that things weren’t fine at all, that our parents’ deaths had shaken him far worse than anyone suspected.”
She gave a bitter little laugh. “Ironic, isn’t it? I was a cop. I could have told you all the signs to watch for if you suspected someone was using or dealing, but I couldn’t see anything with my own brother.”
Maggie looked up to find Rick watching her, eyes dark with compassion and understanding.
“He was nineteen when he died,” she said, fighting against a sudden constriction in her throat. “Nineteen years, seven months, six days. I counted, once.”
The sound of a truck coming their way shattered the moment as effectively as a bucket of ice water dumped on her head.
Maggie gasped, then shook herself, struggling to regain control. She ought to know better than to let down her guard like that. The job came first. The job always came first. It had to.
She carefully avoided glancing Rick as she scootched forward to get a better view of the road below.
A dusty black pickup truck exactly like the one they’d followed the night before passed beneath their vantage point, headed into town. From this angle, she couldn’t even see the license plates.
“That’s him,” she said, and gratefully scrambled to her feet. “Let’s go see what we can find.”
The truck had come out of a driveway half-hidden in a thick stand of aspen and spruce. Whatever the drive led to was invisible from the road.
Rick parked the truck farther up the road, where anyone entering or leaving the property would be unlikely to see it.
After her emotional revelations earlier, Maggie had been distant, cold and supremely focused. He hadn’t tried to break through her wall of reserve.
The sight of that black pickup had brought the present back with a vengeance. Now all he could think was, Not Tina. Please, please, please, not Tina.
He dodged a low branch, then scrambled up a rocky little slope. To the right and slightly behind him, he could hear Maggie moving forward, too. Though she lacked his familiarity with the woods, she wasn’t doing too badly at keeping quiet. Her DEA training, no doubt.
He didn’t much like the implications, but if she could help him find Tina, it wouldn’t matter where she’d learned her skills.
The house was large, the modern five-thousand-square-foot version of a rugged log cabin that probably had three baths and twice as many bedrooms. And a Jacuzzi, Rick thought sourly. Definitely a Jacuzzi.
One side of the house was built into a large rock outcropping on the ridge, which gave the occupants a panoramic view, yet kept the house virtually invisible to anyone on the road below even without the dense screen of spruce and aspen. From what he could see of the recently graveled parking area in front, the place wasn’t used much—the drive had a just-raked smoothness that wouldn’t have lasted long under heavy use.
A rich man’s weekend getaway
, he thought, disgusted, and tried not to think about what that might mean for Tina.
There were no cars visible, though the doors on the three-car garage were all shut. No telling what was behind them.
The downstairs windows visible from this angle were uncurtained, but the blinds on all the upper floor windows were drawn, revealing nothing. Good enough. They would manage.
Maggie knelt beside him and silently surveyed the area.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” she said after a moment.
All the emotion that had been in her voice when she’d talked about her brother was gone. She was a professional now and on the job, her private life and even more private emotions carefully locked away, out of reach.
The message couldn’t have been clearer if she’d hung a huge Keep Out sign around her neck.
Right now, that suited him just fine. Later, though…
Later, he reminded himself, was for after they found Tina.
“There’s no real cover that I can see,” he said. “But if we come in from around that side of those rocks, we’ll be able to get to the front porch without too much risk of being seen from the house.”
“And then what? We knock on the door and ask if Tina’s home?”
“You got a better idea?”
She frowned, considering, then shrugged. “I’ll go first.”
She was already halfway there before he thought to wonder if she was carrying her gun.
No one challenged them when they stepped onto the porch. Except for the faint, slightly discordant ring of wind chimes stirred by the light breeze, the house was silent.
Cautiously, Rick peered in the first window. A study or den of some sort. Empty except for the kind of handmade wood-and-leather furniture that would have cost him six months’ pay to buy. It didn’t look like it’d been used much.
The double front doors were wide slabs of carved pine, also expensive, and securely locked. On the other side, two big picture windows revealed a living room that was furnished similarly to the den, and similarly empty. The dining room, family room and kitchen partially visible at the back of the house seemed equally unoccupied.