Elusive (On The Run Book #1)

by Sara Rosett

  Not at the car.

  Not on the sidewalk or the parking lot.

  Zoe took off again, cutting through the landscaped portion of the ground, her feet slipping on the white gravel. She’d gone two steps when she heard a crack. She looked back and saw the man laid out on the ground, flat on his face, Jack standing behind him. Pieces of the flowerpot that had been outside the door were scattered around them like candy from a broken piñata.

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen you do,” Zoe said, astounded.

  “Is that a compliment?” he asked, a smile creeping into the corners of his mouth.

  “Definitely.”

  Dallas

  Friday, 4:55 p.m.

  JENNY had her ankles crossed and tucked onto the base of her rolling office chair. She swung her knees from side to side and gnawed on the lid of her blue Bic pen as she contemplated the stacks of paper spread across her desk that represented everything she knew about Zoe Hunter.

  Jenny glanced at her phone, willing it to ring. She’d left three messages with Mort. He was furious. She’d pointed out that it wasn’t her fault if the police weren’t smart enough to listen to traffic reports. That probably hadn’t been her best move, she thought with a sigh.

  It was her fault that Zoe had gone to ground. No one could find her, and Mort was upset—rightfully so—that his number one source of possible information had dried up. Jenny did feel guilty for tipping Zoe Hunter off. Well, sort of. There had been something in Zoe’s face, a look of fear and disbelief that struck Jenny. It made her think of a small animal trapped by a predator. That look made her want to dig into this story and find out if Zoe was as innocent as she appeared or if she was only an excellent actress.

  Her gaze switched to the newspaper clipping that she’d thumbtacked to the fabric of her cubicle wall. “Vinewood Man’s Disappearance Draws Questions as Business Partner Found Murdered.” It had run this morning. She ran her finger over her byline, the corner of her mouth twisting down on one side. She didn’t have that sense of accomplishment—that charge—that she’d imagined she would feel with her first published news story.

  She sighed. It really was the worst possible start to a journalist’s career. You didn’t become part of the story. You reported on it. Of course it was her first person account of her interaction with Zoe that had interested the news editor. “Lead with that,” she said. “And keep that boring financial stuff to a minimum,” she’d instructed after hearing Jenny’s pitch for the article.

  She was still in obits, of course. There were no openings for a reporter, but she had the inside edge on this story, and she wasn’t about to give it up. And there was Mort. Jenny thought it was probably good for him to get worked up about something—it had been so long since he’d shown any emotion—but she really wished he wasn’t furious with her for blowing his investigation. So, besides pursuing the story for herself, she was also trying to make up for her blunder. She was spending every spare minute she had searching for Zoe.

  She hadn’t gotten very far, despite scraping in every possible source she could think of. The police and Mort were holding things tight. Even Victor had drawn a blank.

  Jenny shoved the “childhood reality star” stack to the side. Her gut told her this situation had nothing to do with Zoe’s time on a “deserted” island with her mom and step-dad. That left her with the stack of info about GRS, which she’d already been through and could practically recite by heart.

  The final stack was much smaller: the personal life. Jenny crunched down, leaving another indention in the pen lid as she flicked through the papers. Zoe’s name came up on the tag line of a few photos that had appeared in the paper: she’d participated in a breast cancer 5K run, and she’d obviously taken classes at Greenly University because she was pictured in a group of students participating in a campus cleanup day. She’d run ads in the newspaper for her business, which looked like a virtual assistant business, but she called herself an “Information Specialist.” She specialized in copy-editing and listed several popular Smart Travel Guides as her credentials, but it appeared no job was too small or too off the wall for her. In her experience section, she listed everything from dog walking to property management.

  She’d married Jack Andrews in Vegas. The divorce paperwork was filed about a year later, and despite the divorce, both their names were still listed on the property in Vinewood.

  Jenny swiveled her knees some more and switched her attention to her computer monitor. The Internet was a Godsend for research. The official documents and public records were like a sketch or outline. It was a person’s Internet footprint that provided the color and brought the sketch to life. Zoe probably didn’t realize it, but her photos she’d posted on-line, her Facebook account, and her business website all gave glimpses into her private life.

  Jenny rotated the lid of the pen as she clicked on Zoe’s Facebook profile picture. Posed in front of an outdoor fountain, she was smiling widely, her arm thrown around someone’s shoulder who had been cropped out of the photo. Bright sunlight glinted on her red hair and highlighted a few freckles on her pale skin. She looked like a relaxed, fun person with just a glint of mischievousness in her hazel eyes.

  The business website photo had the professional gloss of special lighting and a muted background. While her long, red hair was arranged smoothly behind her ears, her casual oxford shirt and jeans along with her relaxed stance seemed to announce she didn’t take herself too seriously. Her short bio seemed to confirm it. “Jill of all trades. Digital problem solver. A runner with a serious dessert addiction.”

  Jenny flicked through the pictures Zoe had posted on-line. There were a few of her among friends at dinner or events like 5K runs or parties, but most of the photos were vacation photos of Las Vegas—there were shots of several famous spots along The Strip, including the iconic “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign and the Bellagio fountains.

  Jenny’s cell phone buzzed and she lunged for it. She had a text message from her hair stylist. “Did you come through for me, Sheila?” she asked, as she pulled up the message. Sheila worked at The Salon, which was pricey for someone like Jenny—someone on an entry-level salary—but she managed to swing a few haircuts there because Sheila cut and highlighted the hair of several important people. Not people who were famous or wealthy, but people who worked for famous and/or wealthy people. It’s amazing how much your personal assistant or your housecleaner knows about you, Jenny thought. Sheila liked being “in the know,” and she liked to show off her knowledge, which worked out great for Jenny because Sheila also liked to pass that info on to Jenny.

  The text message was a series of exclamation points, which meant Sheila had big news. Yesterday, after Zoe Hunter skipped out on her and Mort, Jenny had considered cancelling her haircut appointment, but she’d gone, and the whole tale of how she’d messed up had come pouring out. Jenny dialed Sheila’s number and gnawed on her pen lid until Sheila answered, waiting as she went outside of The Salon for a break. “Okay,” Sheila finally said, “now I can talk. You’re not going to believe this. That woman you told me about, the one who ran off? She used an ATM in Amarillo yesterday.”

  “Wow...how did you find that out?” Jenny asked, scribbling down the info.

  “The bank manager’s personal assistant was in today to get her highlights touched up. She said there was a huge uproar at the bank this morning with the police wanting to know if she’d used her ATM card. She had.” Sheila sucked in a breath. “But this is even better. Her ex-husband’s account got a huge deposit at the beginning of the week. Millions of dollars. Millions. And now it’s gone. It was all my client could talk about. Her office has been overrun with bank officials and the FBI.”

  Jenny thanked her and made a mental note to up her tip next time she went for a haircut.

  Jenny chewed her pen and clicked back and forth between some of the open windows in her screen. She enlarged the profile photo and studied the background. Yep, those were the Bellagio
fountains behind Zoe. She was married there, had vacationed there, and she’d driven to Amarillo...which would be on the way to Vegas. It wasn’t much to go on. Lots of people got married in Vegas, Jenny reasoned, but there was something tugging at her, a gut feeling. She reached for the phone.

  The reporter from the Las Vegas newsroom wasn’t incredibly helpful. “You can’t look up the crime report yourself?” Jeff McCord asked with a long-suffering sigh.

  “Sure, but I wanted to see if there was anything that stood out—from a local angle.”

  There was silence for a few seconds, and Jenny thought he’d hung up, but then she heard his chair creak, and he said, “Damn computer. They’re great, except—”

  “When they don’t work,” Jenny finished.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, and she heard a small smile in his voice. “Finally. Okay,” he said, drawing out the word. “I’ll send this to you, but it all looks routine. A couple of burglaries, a few DUIs, a house fire up in Henderson. That’s about it. Pretty quiet for a Thursday in Vegas, actually. What were you looking for, specifically?”

  It was Jenny’s turn to sigh. “I don’t know...something unusual,” she said, thinking that short of calling every hotel in Vegas, there was no way to know if Zoe had gone there, and Jenny was sure that wherever Zoe was, she was taking pains to avoid interacting with the police.

  “In Vegas, unusual is normal,” Jeff said. “Like this one. Guy drove onto the sidewalk today and ran into a barrier in front of The Venetian. Wasn’t even drunk. No one hurt, but the car was totaled.”

  “Well, thanks for looking,” Jenny said.

  “Sure. E-mail is on the way to you—and if you find anything, you’ll send me an e-mail, right?”

  “You don’t even know what story I’m working on,” Jenny said with a laugh. At the beginning of their conversation, he’d been too busy to listen to any details.

  “Hey, for all I know, you might be the next Bob Woodward.”

  “Unfortunately I’m feeling a bit more like Bob Hope right now, but I’ll call you if I find anything,” she said before hanging up.

  He sent the e-mail, and she saw it was all routine stuff, just as he’d said. She grabbed her peanut butter and jelly sandwich and headed for the break room. When she returned forty minutes later, she had a message on her phone. A reedy, masculine voice announced, “My name is Chris Felty, and I saw your story in the online edition of the Sentinel.” He stopped to clear his throat, but his voice still sounded thin as he continued, “I’m on vacation, but I always check the paper for the comics and the word puzzle.”

  Jenny had picked up her pen at the beginning of his message, but she put it down again. She’d heard from other reporters about their encounters with wacky readers, but she hadn’t expected an oddball to contact her after her first story. He rambled about his blog and how he traveled three to five times a year, writing online reviews for hotels and travel websites. “So anyway, I was taking a video of the hotel with my phone when it happened. It was the darndest thing. The car hopped the curb and headed right for them.”

  “I’m sorry, who?”

  “The redhead and that guy they thought was dead.”

  There was a beat of silence. “Really?”

  The man was tapering off. “Yeah...so anyway, if you’re interested...I posted the video on my blog and on YouTube. Any chance you could link to it? Will there be a follow-up story?”

  Jenny pulled the tooth-marked cap off her pen. “Oh, I think so.”

  Las Vegas

  Friday, 6:14 p.m.

  “CHOW Mein?” Zoe asked as she and Jack stood over the stubby man’s inert body. The gooey film of the sauce covered his face. A red gash on his chin showed where he’d hit the concrete after the flowerpot connected with his head.

  With his still-gloved hands braced on his hips, Jack shrugged. “You use what you’ve got.”

  Jack had rolled the guy onto his back, and they’d pulled him back into the apartment, Jack lugging his shoulders and Zoe lifting his feet. He was still out, his head lolling to one side. A few noodles clung to the man’s neck. Zoe looked away. She had the same feeling she’d had when she was fourteen and went ice-skating with Helen for the first time. Unlike Helen, who had clung to the waist-high barrier and inched her way carefully onto the ice, Zoe had stepped confidently on to the ice, pushed off for the center of the rink, imagining herself skating for a gold medal, and promptly felt both feet fly out from under her. She had that same disconnected, out of control feeling.

  “You use what you’ve got? Since when do you use what you’ve got? You’re a by-the-book kind of guy, not a make-things-up-as-you-go-along kind of guy.”

  “Surprised you, have I?” Jack said, as he placed a hand under her elbow. She let him steer her to the couch. She plopped down on the dirty cushions without cringing, which showed just how unsteady she felt.

  “Feel okay?” Jack asked, squatting down so that he was at eye level with her. She blinked and focused on his silver blue eyes. He was so close she could see each dark eyelash. She noticed he had a few new crinkles at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there before. The stubble of his beard was darker than his hair and she had the strangest urge to touch the scar on his chin.

  “If you feel like you’re going to faint, put your head between your knees,” Jack said matter-of-factly.

  “I’m fine,” she said abruptly, leaning back. “Fine.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. Obviously hearing the sharpness in her tone, he stood up.

  “Fight or flight—pretty strong instincts. You’re coming down off the adrenaline high.” Was there a trace of a grin at the corners of his mouth? Zoe stared at him, but his face was serious as he picked up the gun from where he’d kicked it inside as they were dragging the stubby guy back over the apartment threshold.

  With a few quick movements, he’d removed the silencer, emptied the cartridge of bullets, and tossed them under the couch. Zoe doubted they’d ever be found. No one in their right mind would look under the disgusting couch in this trashed-out apartment. He tucked the gun into the back of his waistband, then leaned down and began to methodically search the stubby guy’s pockets.

  “One thing to keep in mind,” he said conversationally, “don’t freeze. When something like this happens,” he nodded his head at the man stretched out on the grimy carpet, “it’s like that poem. If you can keep your head when everyone is losing theirs...well, you’re more likely to be okay.”

  “How do you do that? Not freeze? All I could think about was the gun and what could happen.”

  Jack gave a half shrug as he struggled to remove the man’s wallet from his back pocket. “I don’t know. You just don’t let the fear paralyze you. You think about what options you have, not about the worst thing that could happen.”

  More than ever, Zoe wondered who Jack was. Body snatchers seemed to be the only explanation for his cool aplomb as he took whatever came his way in stride. She would have thought Jack would be freaked out in a situation like this without his precious calendar and a to-do list to work through. She took a deep breath and tried to shake off her questions about Jack and, instead, focus on the guy laid out at their feet.

  “Do you recognize him?” Zoe asked. Despite the sticky coating of chow mein on his face, Zoe knew him. “He’s the guy who had tried to run us down outside the casino, then shot at us in the parking lot.”

  Jack nodded. “He held a gun on me at the office, too.”

  “But you said in the car you didn’t know him.” Zoe edged forward on the cushion. She felt better. Her legs were hardly trembling at all, and she didn’t feel as though she couldn’t get a deep breath.

  “I didn’t get a good look at him outside the casino—there was a glare on the windshield, and he was too far away to see his features in the parking lot. I was more focused on driving than making a positive ID at that point, too.”

  “So he followed you here from Dallas?” Zoe asked.

  “He followed someone,�
�� Jack said a bit grimly.

  Zoe frowned. “You think he followed me? How would he know who I was? And how would he know I’d take him to you?”

  Jack merely raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know. I don’t know how he knew who I was or where I worked, or how to get in there, or that I had a gun. There’s a lot I don’t know.”

  Zoe ignored the sarcastic sting of his words, thinking of only one thing. “Where’s the other guy? You said there were two in the office. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know that either, but I got the impression that this guy—the older one—was in charge and the other guy—he was a teenager—didn’t like the way things were going. Apparently, he wasn’t informed that murder would be involved. He was okay with assault—he was the one who knocked me out—and armed robbery, but not killing. Maybe he’s gone.”

  Another possibility hovered in Zoe’s mind, but she didn’t voice it. She didn’t want to think about the likelihood of another death. She picked up the black moleskin journal and shoved it in her pocket. She didn’t want to lose it again.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Connor’s journal. It was in the couch cushions. It must have fallen out of his pocket. It’s got all sorts of notes about dates and people. We’re taking it with us.”

  Jack had opened the wallet and was looking through it as she talked. “Okay,” he said.

  Zoe gave him a long glance. He was only half-listening. His attention was focused on the cards he’d pulled out of the stubby guy’s wallet.

  It was her turn to ask, “Are you alright? You look kind of gray. If you feel faint, put your head between your legs.”

  Jack shot her a fleeting look, acknowledging her joke, but there was a strained look about his face that almost made Zoe regret her words. He ducked his head, rubbing the part of his wrist that wasn’t covered with the latex glove across his forehead, as he muttered, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Las Vegas

  Friday, 6:37 p.m.