She flipped through more files and wrote down a few business-building ideas. She wouldn’t have time to go through them all but, if nothing else, Trevor could experiment with these suggestions. Or not. It was up to him, but she’d make sure Riggen left the files in the cabin before they drove away. Satisfaction wound through her and quieted some of her inner turmoil.
She pulled a thin hard-back ledger from the bulging bottom file and ran her index finger over the book’s spine. The dates listed were old, too old to care about. Opening Riggen’s duffel, she stuffed it back inside, but her fingernail snagged a sheet of paper, tearing the corner free. She hissed under her breath. Hopefully it was nothing important.
She tried to tug the rest of the paper from its home in the ledger, but couldn’t. She opened the book and found a packet taped inside the back cover. She peeled away the tape and reunited the torn pieces. It was a thin collection of photocopied documents. Glancing through the pages, surprise hardened her stomach to granite.
She darted a look at the door of the cabin. Riggen couldn’t possibly know about this packet. She gawked at the information in her hands, devouring the words that were never meant for her. She didn’t come up for air until her car door opened.
Turning to Riggen, she brandished the torn packet like a battle cry. This betrayal put her confused feelings on the back burner. The pages fluttered in her hand like a butterfly about to take flight. She thrust it at him. “Your brother’s been lying to you.”
Her heart stopped. The man who took the packet from her shaking hand wasn’t Riggen. Raindrops plopped great big water spots on the paper in his hands as Trevor’s brows snapped together.
“What are you doing?” she screeched as she jerked her head to look down the driveway. She couldn’t see Jones’s lights.
His eyes shifted from her face to the cabin and back. “Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”
She shrank away, fear melting her insides. Where was Riggen? She inched closer to the steering wheel. “Leave what alone, Trevor?” The horn was so close.
His hand closed around her wrist like an iron cuff and he yanked her across the seat toward him. “Don’t play stupid and don’t even think about trying to get his attention.”
He pushed aside his damp flannel shirt to expose the dull black butt of a gun. “Get out of the truck.”
It was as if she were moving in Hi-Def. She could feel the grain of the torn paper in her hand, hear the beat of water against the metal truck roof, see the conflict in Trevor’s gaze.
She crumpled the fragment with its terrible secret into her fist and climbed from the Bronco, her foot slipping in a puddle. Trevor kept one eye on her face while he flipped through the intact pages.
The pages that contained a will, which she suspected Riggen had never seen, and a letter from Mr. Price to the family lawyer.
“What are you going to do?” she whimpered even as her fingers played around the crumpled edges of the torn fragment. She dropped the wad to the rain-sodden ground, praying Trevor didn’t see, and then booted gravel over it.
Whatever Trevor read in the packet flushed his face like a strawberry in summer. He stuffed the papers in his waistband before pulling his gun from his holster. He cocked his head in the direction of the tree line. “Walk. If you make a noise, I’ll shoot him.”
Her face went cold as every last drop of blood drained from it. “You won’t get away with whatever it is you’re planning. Riggen’ll figure it out.”
His nostrils flared. “Walk,” he growled before jamming the gun into her side.
Her unsteady legs undermined any effort to obey, but he dug his fingers into her bruised biceps and pushed her across the muddy gravel drive. She winced, stumbling toward the tree line.
When they hit the dark opening, he muscled her onto a barely visible path. The overgrown trail ascended the mountain in front of them and she gasped for breath. Rain streamed into her eyes and her side cramped.
They climbed in tense silence for what seemed to be half a mile, then she heard the sound of a slamming door. She stopped, hunched over and braced herself with her hands on her knees.
Her head was pounding with the effort of breathing. She couldn’t drag enough of the thin air into her beaten lungs. The anguished sound of Riggen shouting her name bounced through the mountain pines behind them and reverberated in her skull. That was the tormented sound of a man who cared. Really cared. For her.
Tears blinded her and she staggered into a boulder that dominated the path. The hard point of Trevor’s gun prodded her back, exploding a rash of shivers up and down her spine.
He shoved her around the rock. “Don’t stop.”
Riggen’s cries faded into the distance as Trevor led her farther into the dark and wet wilderness of Pikes Peak.
* * *
Riggen stood next to the open door of the Bronco, his phone in one hand and a random file from Price Adventure Excursions in the other. Papers, bills, ledgers. Everything he and Rosche had taken from the office was now strewed across his front seat in a confusing array, but Liz was nowhere to be found.
He threw another sopping stack of papers onto the seat and dialed the PD before sprinting down the driveway to Jones’s car. He shouted into the deserted landscape as he pounded the gravel. His cries were muffled in the sheets of pouring rain.
“Warn a man if you’re going to holler in his ear.” Carr had picked up. And he didn’t sound any happier than he had earlier.
Riggen exhaled. If Liz had wandered off, she’d respond. But if Kris had somehow known they were here and gotten hold of her... He couldn’t bring himself to finish the thought.
“Liz is missing.” He careened to a stop next to Jones’s patrol car. The door was hanging open. Taking a deep breath, he looked inside.
“From where? When?” Carr shouted in his ear, but Riggen’s attention zoomed in on Jones, who was slouched over the patrol car’s armrest.
“My cabin and I’m not sure. Jones is down.” He threw himself into the car and felt for the man’s pulse. It was faint and thready, but it was there. He turned his attention back to Carr. Liz hadn’t just wandered off. “She was taken anytime from ten minutes ago to now.”
“We’re on the way.”
Riggen hung up and analyzed the scene, taking in the bloody mess that was Jones’s head. He ran his hands over the man’s head and shoulders. It looked to be a simple head wound, but it was gushing.
Pulling Jones toward him, he looped the man’s arm across his own shoulder. If he had to drag the man to safety, he would. Jones groaned and then his eyes fluttered open.
“Who did this?” Riggen pulled the man toward the cabin.
Jones’s faltering feet were steady but slow. “Didn’t see.” He groaned as his foot collided with a tree root and he stumbled. “Saw lights through the rain. Opened the window to check it out. That’s all I remember.”
Riggen nodded and helped the man climb into the front seat of the Bronco.
Liz’s phone lay discarded in the gravel next to the truck’s door. He pushed Jones’s foot inside and bent to pick up the device. As he did, a wad of paper caught his eye, wedged just under the tire and protected from the rain by the undercarriage of the truck.
He stooped to pick it up then flattened it out. There was handwriting on it. Faint, as though someone had copied it on a copy machine, but he recognized it. His hands trembled as he read the message from Dad.
Disbelief hammered him with whitewater force. Update for last will and testament? It had a date on it, scribbled underneath the script. The night Dad died. Riggen straightened and looked more at the other files.
Within minutes he had flipped through them. He recognized most of them and shoved them to the floor in frustration. Jones dodged the avalanche of files with a moan. They were nothing more than bills and invoices. Nothing here resembled a will. As far as he
knew, Dad hadn’t changed the will that had made him and Trevor fifty-fifty partners in the business and equal inheritors of the estate.
He glared at the open files. This was a waste of time. What he needed to be doing was finding Liz, and that wouldn’t be done by looking through old paperwork.
But then a name flashed at him from the havoc on the floor. Pikes Peak Mustangs.
* * *
Trevor nudged Liz aside. Flashes of lightning filtered through the thick forest canopy to illuminate a small lean-to nestled off what once must have been a well-worn trail. He unlocked the door and stood back.
She glared and dug her heels into the soft pine-needled carpeting. She wasn’t moving another step. He pointed his gun at the doorway. “Inside.”
They’d been climbing so long. She wrestled each new breath into her raw throat. Battering pain in her skull blinded her. She was experienced enough to know altitude sickness was taking hold.
“No way.” She shook her head, wincing at each excruciating throb. The doorway loomed dark in front of them. Whatever he had planned for her, he could just do it out here. She scrambled backward but crashed into his chest.
He seized her shoulders and catapulted her across the threshold. She fell headlong into the darkness, sprawling onto a grimy wood-slat floor.
Dust filled her mouth, sparking a fit of uncontrollable coughing. She’d had no water since before the expo other than the rain that had drizzled into her mouth. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the air. She clawed at her throat.
Trevor shoved a water bottle into her hand before striking a match. She chugged it as a clouded gas lantern bloomed to life. He kicked the door shut and sank into the only chair in the ramshackle space. Tucking his gun in his holster, he propped his feet on a mattress that had seen better days. Mud dripped from his boots to the floor.
He didn’t talk until she had stopped coughing. “I didn’t want it to come to this, Liz. Why didn’t you listen and leave Colorado?”
She hugged the water bottle to herself and edged away until her back hit the wall. Cold fear drenched her.
“I tried to warn you.” He hefted himself from the chair and it creaked in the silence between them. He leaned over her, pulling a rope from the wall above her head. Then with one smooth motion, he hoisted her from the floor and into the seat he had just vacated.
After tying her hands and feet to the chair, he stalked to the door. “Wouldn’t recommend screaming. No one can hear you and you can’t afford the breath.”
She didn’t know what was more terrifying: that he might leave her in this forsaken place or that he might stay. Thunder rocked the shack and his feet were on the threshold before her mind thawed. Get him talking. Distract him. Befriend him. Remind him she was human.
She wiggled her hands behind her back, trying to loosen the ropes. “You warned me and I did listen. We were leaving today. You can still let us go.”
He let out a mirthless laugh. “Let Elizabeth Hart go? The woman who took down Sammy Malcovitch and the Sagebrush? Do you really think I’m stupid enough to believe you’d keep your mouth shut about this?” He waved the packet in her face then walked away, pushing the door open. Damp air rushed into the shack and flickered the light of the lantern.
She pulled against her restraints. The rope cut and burned her wrists. “Wait!”
He stopped, his back to her.
“Where are you going?” Her voice broke on the question.
“To tie up loose ends.”
TWENTY
Frustration turned to frantic fear as night fell on Pikes Peak. He had no idea where Liz was. Riggen turned her phone over and over in his hands as he paced the gravel driveway. Numbness gave way to the heart-crushing realization that he had failed again.
Blue strobe lights pulsed in the darkness and the cacophony of police radios broke what should have been a peaceful silence. At least the storm had let up. Once morning set in, Search and Rescue could start scouring the mountain.
Rosche jogged up to him, holding the file he’d found on the floor of his Bronco. She waved it in the air in front of him like a flag.
When he finally focused on her, she wasted no time. “These invoices show Price Adventure Excursions has been paying Pikes Peak Mustang Corporation a healthy chunk of money every month for the last five years.”
He stopped moving and looked at the file. “How healthy?”
She flipped through the invoices and pointed to the figure. Searing betrayal gripped him. He crushed the phone in his hand. Now wasn’t the time to think about how Trevor was playing him for the fool or how hard he had worked while his brother had leaked their money back out to Sammy Malcovitch and company.
Concentrate on action, soldier. He shifted from one foot to the other. “And we know that Pikes Peak Mustangs leads back to Kris Dupree.”
“Not only that.” Rosche nodded to an SUV parked a few feet away. He followed her to the front of the vehicle. Her laptop was open on the hood.
She shoved the file under her computer and banged on the keyboard. Tax records popped up on the screen. “Pikes Peak Mustang Corporation owns the Juniper.”
“Where Kris was employed, and the entire reason Liz came back to Manitou in the first place.”
She nodded.
He massaged the back of his neck. “But how and why is Trevor connected to this mess?”
“That, I don’t know,” she answered. “But there’s more.”
How much more could he take? He flipped the phone over again and depressed the power button. Lucas’s face smiled up at him and he rolled his neck to the side. He’d handle whatever betrayal he had to, to get Liz back to their little boy. “Okay. What else?”
“I went back through old title records on a hunch and—get ready for this brain twister—Pikes Peak Mustang Corporation owns the company that acquired the corporation that ran the—”
“Sagebrush,” he interrupted.
“You guessed it.”
“Every string of the web ties Malcovitch and Dupree to Trevor.” He scrubbed his face. “Do we have a location on either Trevor or Dupree?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. We’ve tried to ping Trevor’s cell, but he must have it powered down.”
“And Jones didn’t find anything when he investigated the Dupree sighting?”
“Nada.”
Cool mountain air blew across them. The storm had plummeted the temperature, but all he could feel was the heat of his every nightmare. He had tried to protect Liz and now she was gone. Another mistake that harmed the woman he loved.
He watched Rosche slam her computer shut and lean against the SUV as the reality that he loved Liz flooded his entire being. He loved her regardless of whether he deserved her or not.
He barely heard Rosche’s voice as she continued. “The question we’re looking at now is who has her? Trevor or Kris?”
The hair on his arms raised. “Or both?”
Her eyes gleamed in the flashing lights and she pointed an index finger straight at him. “Kris has been one step ahead of us this entire time. Could it be because Trevor has been feeding her information?”
He shook his head. There was too much to process—the connection to Dupree and Malcovitch, the ambiguous note about Dad’s will. And always Liz. He needed to compartmentalize but he couldn’t. His past sins were ruining everything, and he wasn’t big enough to fix the mess.
God doesn’t work that way. Liz’s voice drifted through his heart like a calming balm. He rubbed his temples. If God didn’t work that way, then how did He work? Riggen closed his eyes and pushed himself to remember. Searched his memories for Dad’s voice.
Life is a mist. Live for God. It’s the only thing that lasts. But the memory didn’t stop there. Dad’s words circled him, joining Liz’s to fill him. Put God first and everything else will be taken care of.
Put God first? He shook his head. He’d only ever put himself first. He’d put his desire to be a hero first. He’d put his fear first. He’d put his wrong ideas about God first. He’d put his need to protect his family first. But put God first? A harsh laugh fell from his lips. Never.
He placed a hand on each side of his head and squeezed until his racing thoughts slowed. He had always thought he knew best. He had run headlong into making decisions that hadn’t been his to make. For what? He slumped back against the SUV, seeing his heart for the first time. A God like that would never tell you to right a wrong with another wrong...
Liz was right. A God like that would never make a self-centered move. No. A God like that did the opposite. He took the punishment for Riggen’s mistakes on His own back and then left the decision of whether or not to accept that gift in Riggen’s court.
Forgive me, God. I’ve been such an idiot. You first. It starts now. Peace flowed over his body like a warm shower as he submitted the control he’d never actually held to the God who held it all.
When he reopened his eyes, Rosche was peering into the darkness of Pikes Peak. “If Kris and Trevor are working together, maybe we should start looking at this from your brother’s point of view. If I were Trevor, where would I feel safe? Where would I hide?”
A flash of inspiration fired into the new quietness of his mind. He shoved Liz’s phone into his pocket and barreled across the driveway. He knew exactly where Liz would be and, with God’s help, nothing would stop him from saving the woman he loved. “Follow me.”
* * *
Be strong and courageous. Liz cringed as rope fibers bit into her bleeding flesh with knifelike precision. She twisted her wrist. Tugged. Her wet hand slipped free and she bit back a scream, her brutalized emotions boiling too close to the surface.
Treacherous Mountain Investigation Page 17