by Megan Crane
“So the story you just told, about roaming around from town to town, getting work where and how you could, it was actually the two of you?”
Isaac didn’t look over his shoulder to see the look on Griffin’s face when he asked that question. He could hear it. Ice-cold.
“Yes.” Caradine sat straighter in her chair but still didn’t drop her knees down. As if she still wanted the barrier. “Lindsay was only twenty, and she’d never done anything but sit around in my father’s house, waiting to be bartered off as it suited him. She had a harder time adjusting.”
She considered her own words. “That’s not entirely fair. My father also sent her out on dates, which she survived somehow, so she wasn’t exactly a hothouse flower.”
“How unpleasant were these dates?” Bethan asked.
“There’s the kind of man who likes to break his toys, as we discussed. But without a go-ahead to use a strong hand, there’s the risk of disrespecting my father. It’s a very precise calculus, after all. How much will he care if you break something that’s still his?”
Isaac didn’t have it in him to think—to imagine—Mickey Sheeran’s broken toys. It made his ribs ache. “So you both ran. You both got on a bus to Cleveland.”
Caradine sighed. “Everything I told you is true, but I did it with Lindsay. Who I promised I’d never mention. Between the two of us, we could cover whatever our daily expenses were and stash some away. But after the second time we got robbed, because we had to keep it all in cash, and on us, I figured there had to be a better way.”
“You took self-defense classes?” Blue asked. And sounded almost proud, since he was the one who taught the women’s self-defense class here in town when he wasn’t on an active mission. It had turned into a staple for the community.
And Caradine was always there, training herself into a lethal weapon.
“I couldn’t afford a class,” she said. “And I really didn’t want to go to one where people would learn my name, because I was still having trouble keeping track at that point. We changed them all the time. Every time we got spooked and ran again.” She dropped her knees then, and crossed her arms instead. “What I would generally do was find a scary-looking dude in the bar where I worked and beg him to teach me what he knew. That’s how I learned to shoot. And do some nasty things with a knife. And a box cutter. A fine, upstanding gentleman in Daytona Beach, Florida, told me that you didn’t need moves if you could open a vein. I took that to heart.”
“You’re not going to hear any complaints from me,” Bethan said then, at the door. “We do what we have to do.”
Caradine nodded. “That we do.”
Neither one of them smiled, but Isaac thought it felt like a moment of communion. One he had to step in the middle of to get the conversation back on track.
“But you split up,” he said.
“We thought they found us a few times,” Caradine said. Carefully, he thought. “We’d see a familiar face, and even though it was almost always a stranger, the fear would get its teeth in us and we’d take off. Because it was better to run than to be wrong. We were pretty sure no one was looking for us, but again, Who would want to bet on that and be wrong? But then we had a real scare.”
“Someone found you?” Isaac tried not to jump all over that. Or ask why she hadn’t led with that. “Who was it?”
Caradine regarded him in that cool way that made his jaw flex. In case he’d forgotten who he was talking to.
“Walking away from a life is hard.” She sounded almost philosophical, which got his hackles up. “We were young. Kids, really, and remarkably sheltered. In the sense that we only really knew what life was when my father was controlling it. Sometimes, especially if there was some drinking, we got . . . indiscreet.”
“Since when are you indiscreet?” Isaac asked softly.
Caradine’s mouth curved slightly, and once again, he wished they were alone. He wished he could fix whatever needed fixing so they could sit together, him and her, and talk about that curve awhile.
Even now, with everything that had already changed, that seemed impossible.
He shoved that aside, because she was still telling her story.
“Not me. But that didn’t matter. We were a team.” She shoved a hand through her hair, and maybe only Isaac could see how agitated she was beneath her cool exterior. How the faint tremor in her hand betrayed her. “We’d been in Phoenix for a while. Maybe eight months, which was an eternity for us. Lindsay had gotten close to this other bartender we worked with and thought she was our friend.”
“Did you?” Everly asked.
Caradine’s mouth curved again. “Whatever she was, she liked meth a whole lot more than us. So when she ran out of things to sell, she thought she’d tell some folks the story about a pair of sisters. Who escaped from back East after a bomb went off.”
Again, the tension in the room ratcheted up as everyone filtered in that new detail.
“Sisters, a bomb, and back East.” Templeton sounded disgusted. “Why not draw a map?”
“I had a similar response, and it’s as unhelpful now as it was then,” Caradine said crisply. “It happened. Our friend told us, which was the saving grace. She said her dealer knew a guy who knew a guy. And we all know what kind of guys those are. Lindsay and I took off in the middle of the night, as always. Possibly we also learned some valuable lessons about trusting people.”
“When you say ‘we,’ I’m guessing you mean your sister,” Mariah said then. “Because you trust people even less than I do, and I come from some notoriously suspicious country people.”
“We’d gone to ground in Sioux City,” Caradine said, without replying to Mariah. Though her gaze gleamed a little brighter. “Picked out new names, and were gearing up to do the usual dance. Bad bars, under-the-table tips, new temporary lives.” Isaac watched her entire body tense. “But Lindsay was hung up on the betrayal aspect. She couldn’t let it go. That was how she stumbled across a post on social media that our friend had died.”
“Meth?” Jonas asked.
“Not meth.” Caradine didn’t get any less tense. “The news suggested she was a casualty in a drug deal gone wrong. Her dealer, his dealer, and two others. Plus her. All shot execution style. Some with evidence that there was strenuous questioning first.”
“What did you do?” Kate asked, sounding all trooper.
Caradine stared right back at her. “We took off again. But it was clear to both of us that staying together was a liability. I’m sure there are tons of girls who might shoot their mouths off or tell a friend in a bar about how they’re connected back East. It’s the sisters part that makes it more interesting. Clearly someone else agreed.”
No one spoke. Oz typed in the corner, the keys making the only noise in the room.
“Jacinda Hall,” Oz said after a moment. “Twenty-two years old. Her murder remains unsolved.”
“No one’s looking for her killer,” Caradine said, her voice tinged with bitterness. “Remember what I told you about drug addicts. No one cares if they disappear. In most cases, whoever loved them said good-bye to them long ago.”
Oz kept typing. Caradine was still too tense.
“Lindsay and I spent what was left of the summer figuring out what to do. How to split up, where we would go.”
“Did she want to go off by herself?” Isaac asked.
Caradine did that thing that looked like a smile but was far too sharp. “We’d been living on top of each other for five years by then. And here’s the funny thing about growing up with a sociopath. You’re aligned against him when convenient, but that doesn’t make you best friends. We were very different people.” She blew out a breath. “I love my sister. I would die for her. But having almost died for her in Phoenix, I was also interested in a break. So was she. She got a fake ID and a plane ticket to Hawaii. I came to Alaska. That brings us to
five years ago, when I arrived in Grizzly Harbor.”
She didn’t look at him, but Isaac felt it swell between them anyway. That first look. That first night. And everything that came after.
“You don’t keep in touch?” Griffin asked.
“Too dangerous.” Caradine glanced at Isaac. “But we do have a system.”
“Let me guess,” Isaac said. “You don’t call her directly. You get a burner phone and call into a voice mail. That’s what you were doing in Texas.”
She glanced over at Oz. “We both memorized the number. I pay the bills online through a secure server. If necessary, I could probably access the messages online. But on the off chance that anyone’s monitoring the account, we use burner phones and codes. I told her I was compromised when I was in Riverside, but we only check once a month. More, if we want to, but at least once a month. Which means it might be a full month before she checks again.”
“And what will she do when she checks?” Isaac asked.
“She’ll either tell me that she’s also been compromised, or that she’s fine. If she’s been compromised, too, we might figure out how to have a conversation. Find a chat room, somewhere. Or something like that.”
Caradine seemed to relax, slightly. Just slightly. “A couple of years ago she got in touch to tell me that she was moving from one Hawaiian island to another. We like to know where the other one is, at least generally. We like to remind ourselves that as long as we’re alive, we’re winning. Sometimes that’s a direct message on social media somewhere. Other times it’s a code word on an old voice mail.”
She shrugged, and there was that ghost of a smile again. “Never let it be said I don’t know how to make a mean lemonade out of whatever lemons come my way.”
Isaac wanted to touch her but figured she might take off a limb. He stood instead.
“So here’s the situation right now, as I see it,” he said. “Somehow, somebody from your old life found you. Whether they’ve been tracking you since Phoenix or whether this is a separate situation, we don’t know. What we do know is that whoever’s coming after you doesn’t care too much about collateral damage, and I don’t like that.”
“If that’s the opening act, I’m worried about what comes next,” Templeton agreed.
“Or it’s a deliberate overreaction,” Jonas countered. “Maybe the intended audience isn’t Caradine.”
Isaac considered that. Next to him, Caradine shifted position. “If I’m not the intended audience, who is?”
“Never underestimate your average scumbag’s desire to impress the scumbag above him with his commitment,” Jonas replied. “Speaking of boys who like to break their toys. The more toys, the better.”
“Who did you call from Camden?” Isaac asked.
Caradine didn’t smirk, exactly. But Isaac wouldn’t call what she aimed at him a smile, either. “It wasn’t a ‘who.’ There’s a particular bar in Boston that you should really never walk into without a tetanus shot and a militia. I called and said Mickey Sheeran was alive and in Camden, Maine.”
Isaac’s eyes narrowed. “So if I hadn’t carried you out of there, he wouldn’t have followed us, because he would have seen you weren’t an old man.”
Now it was a smirk. “Even Captain America makes mistakes.”
“I’m not convinced it was a mistake.” Isaac rubbed a hand over his jaw. “It seems to me that we have several options. Option one, whoever blew up the house in the first place wants to finish the job. Option two, someone else survived and wants to clean up the mess. Or who knows? Maybe this is how the Sheeran family says hello. Option three, that person is one and the same. Whatever option we go with, we have to factor in Grizzly Harbor. Someone knew Caradine was here.”
“On it,” Oz said from his corner. “But if I had to guess, I’m going to say it’s social media. It always is.”
“I’m not on social media,” Caradine said flatly. “I mean, I don’t post anything. I have a few accounts I don’t use, that’s all. And I’m very, very strict about letting anyone take my picture. Meaning I take the camera and boil it, even if it’s their phone. I’m not an idiot.”
“You only have to be in the background of the wrong tourist’s snapshot,” Oz said, very calmly. “But don’t worry. I’m going to find it.”
“I want to know what option we’re dealing with here,” Isaac said then. “I wanted to know yesterday. Any questions?”
“Option four,” Jonas said in that stark way of his. And standing so still it made the rest of them look like fidgeters on a sugar high. “The sister with the big mouth made a new friend.”
Caradine tensed. Isaac was sure that she was about to flay Jonas alive, but all she did was nod, stiffly. “It’s hard not to make that jump. Believe me, it’s one of the first things I plan to ask her when and if she checks in.”
“What’s your fail-safe?” Blue asked. “She doesn’t check in, what then?”
“She’s my baby sister,” she said quietly. “And as far as I know, my only living relative. What do you think the fail-safe is?”
“This time,” Templeton said, and the chair he was rocked back in slammed into the floor like punctuation. “This time, if you go chasing after her, you’re not going alone.”
He threw a glance around the room, and Isaac saw everyone’s version of a nod. Including from Everly and Mariah, the two civilians, who would be going nowhere.
“Oh, goody,” Caradine said, without cracking even a hint of a smile, though her voice was still much too rough. “When I walked into this room you all thought that I was a murderous sociopath like dear old dad. Now you all have my back. Excuse me while I nurse my whiplash.”
“I’m so pissed at you for lying about who you are,” Isaac told her then, biting out the words before everyone else in the room could jump in. “That’s not going away. And as I said before, I would understand if you’d had to do something horrible because you had to get out of the situation you were in. But don’t confuse that for what’s really happening here.”
He could see her make herself square her shoulders, like she was determined to start the fight again, no matter what. “You mean the interrogation?”
“No, jackass,” Isaac replied gruffly, and he made it worse by reaching over and hauling her stiff, outraged body against his, side to side, with everyone watching. Her worst nightmare, he was sure, and that notion made him cheerful, despite everything. “This is your home. We’re your people, like it or not. And you’ve been feeding us all for five whole years. Why don’t you let us feed you a little in return, for a change?”
Thirteen
Caradine didn’t have much to say after that.
And Isaac let her keep her silence because he knew that she might forgive him some of what had happened here, but if he made her break down and cry in front of a group of people—especially this group of people—she’d gut him in his sleep. Merrily.
She followed Oz back to his tech domain, deeper in the main building, to flesh out the file he’d compiled on her. Isaac made his way to the official command center, talking practicalities with Griffin and Rory as they walked. But once they hit command, he shifted away from this latest version of his Caradine problem and jumped back into the active operations that required his input and oversight.
It was late in the bright June evening when he was finally done handling a tricky extraction across the planet. He left the command center in capable hands and walked out of the lodge, buzzing with an energy he didn’t know what to do with. He’d been so pissed off this morning that he’d skipped his usual workout, and that was always a mistake.
Or, anyway, he told himself that was why he was so restless tonight. The lack of decent exercise. It had nothing at all to do with the woman who was in his cabin, even now.
He knew she was in his cabin and not trying to hike up Hard Ass Pass with nothing but her stubbornness to ge
t her over the washed-out parts. Or swimming for Juneau across the cold Inside Passage. Because he’d sent Horatio to guard her when she’d left the lodge hours earlier, and if she’d left the cabin, Horatio would have barked loud enough to bring him and most of Alaska Force running.
But his dog was nowhere to be found. He stood for a moment outside, there on the porch that overlooked the cove. It was one of those still-blue summer nights, this side of the June solstice. The sky hadn’t even gotten into its eerie stage; it was just light. It bounced off the water in the cove and made the trees seem crisper, more defined.
He ordered himself to calm down.
And disobeyed his own order.
A few moments later, Isaac sensed the approach of two heavy individuals, not that they made any sounds as they exited the lodge. It was the faint creak from the door that gave them away. In the next moment, he recognized their tread against the wood. Or lack thereof.
When Templeton and Jonas flanked him there at the rail, he wasn’t surprised. But he didn’t look at either one of them, either.
“If you could hurry up with the mockery and smug remarks, I’d appreciate it,” Isaac said mildly. “I have things to do.”
“Where to start,” Templeton drawled, sounding so entertained that an actual laugh would have put the whole thing right over the top. Not that such considerations had stopped him in the past. “Where to even begin parsing what happened today.”
“You mean, when we gained a new client?”
“Alaska Force gained a client,” Templeton said. “But I’m pretty sure you gained a girlfriend.”
Jonas didn’t make a noise on Isaac’s other side. He certainly didn’t laugh. But still, Isaac had the impression that he’d done his version of tossing back his head and roaring out his merriment, Templeton-style.
“Why don’t you go tell Caradine that she’s my girlfriend,” Isaac suggested, still keeping his attention on the water out in front of him, because it would give Templeton too much satisfaction if he tried to get in his face. “Make sure you film it. I’d pay money to see how many veins she opens.”
