by Meg Gardiner
He nodded. That was his new job, with the legal group that worked out of the Federal Building in L.A., investigating old cases and miscarriages of justice.
She half turned, stopped, turned back. “Why, Seth?”
He took her in, and she got the impression he was holding on to her image, drinking in the chance to be close to her, because he feared it would be his last.
“I should have told you when I came back. I was under direct orders to keep it quiet. But I should have told you.”
“Undercover,” she said. “While undercover.”
He didn’t actually flinch when she said it. She gave him points for that.
“Need to know, right?” she said. “Protecting the operation, and me, and yourself.”
“Yes.”
In the distance, far down the road in the cataract of haze, flashing lights worked their way toward them. The wind dipped and a faint siren threaded the air.
Seth held close a second longer. “You saved this little girl.” His eyes were dry but yearning. “I love you, Aurora.”
When the black SUV crested the hill, sunshine bounced from the hood and windshield. Behind the wheel, Rory saw the Nightcrawler.
Seth said, “Get in the house. Take Amber.”
He walked around Boone’s truck with the Glock raised, his credentials held out in front of him.
The Nightcrawler swung the SUV around halfway and stopped on the road. He put down his window.
Seth walked toward him. “Federal officer. Get out of the vehicle.”
The Nightcrawler didn’t react. He seemed oblivious to, or thought he was impervious to, the threat of authority and a loaded gun.
He called to Rory. “Your cousin was a tool. Is he gonna live?”
She shrugged.
“You got some balls, girl. Don’t waste ’em.”
He stepped on the gas, spun the wheel, and fishtailed back the way he’d come. Seth didn’t seem alarmed. He lowered the gun and waited.
A few seconds later the Nightcrawler slammed on the brakes as his car was confronted with two L.A. County Sheriff’s cruisers, pummeling up the road toward him. He had nowhere to go.
He tried; Rory gave him credit. He swerved off the road in a wild attempt to escape through the fields. But the eucalyptus hid a ditch beyond the line of trees. He drove straight into it.
When Seth and the deputies reached him, he was out of the SUV, hands flat against the hood, feet spread, shaking his head.
55
Half a dozen L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies surrounded Boone on the road. The scene was an orgy of flashing lights. Down the hill, a couple of miles away, more lights boomed along the road. Looked like the ambulance. Amber, kept back by the deputies, paced on the lawn, hands clenched in front of her mouth. Rory hoisted Addie higher on her hip and walked toward her.
“Boone’s not moving. We got to get him to the ER,” Amber said.
“Will Riss come back here looking for Addie?” Rory said.
Amber stopped. Her hands dropped. Her voice dropped too. “When she thinks nobody’s looking. She’ll do it to make me pay.”
“Pay for what?”
Amber looked dumbfounded. “For everything. Her life. God. Sunburn. Nothing’s her fault. Everything deserves payback.”
Rory nodded. She felt drained. “You’ll need protection. And a restraining order. I know a good lawyer.”
Addie wiped a hand across her eyes and huddled in Rory’s arms. The pain in Rory’s side was coming on stronger, an encompassing throb and burn. She tried to hand Addie to Amber, but Amber backed away.
“No,” she said. “Take her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Get out of here. Get her out of here. Out of Ransom River.”
Rory shook her head. “No. I’m done running from ghosts.”
Amber shook her head violently. She waved at the scene. “Riss did this.” Her voice rose. “She’ll do it again. And again. She won’t stop. We aren’t safe.”
“No. It’s time to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.”
Amber touched Addie’s back and looked at her with sadness.
“Amber,” Rory said. “I have to ask you something and I need to know the truth. Rock-solid straight up.”
Amber turned shining eyes to her.
“Do you think Lee will ever come back for the money?”
“Lee’s dead,” Amber said.
Heat, light, clarity, like the air pressure lifting, seemed to clear Rory’s head. She didn’t feel upset. She felt almost relieved.
“You know that for certain?” she said.
“I’ve never seen a grave, but I’m sure of it.”
“Why?”
“I know my Lee. He’d never disappear for good, not even because he’d pulled a job. He would have gone to ground. He might have hid for a few months. I can even see a year. But twenty?” She shook her head. “Impossible.”
“You’re sure?”
“He was never good at making it on his own. He wanted help from family. He wasn’t a ringleader. He was my man, but he was an accomplice,” she said. “He needed me.”
He needed a woman, Rory thought. “I hate to say it, but—”
“Finding himself a señorita to shack up with down in Mexico? Sure. He liked the women, Lee did. Lots of them.”
Her face was drawn, and she seemed to be trying to give Rory a message. Rory didn’t get it.
“Why are you so sure?” Rory said. “What evidence do you have?”
“He never contacted me.”
“Not once?”
Amber shook her head. “He never called. He never wrote. I know you got postcards on your wall. You really think those came from him?”
Rory shook her head. She already knew that. Those had been emotional lollipops to convince her that Uncle Lee still cared for her.
“He never contacted Riss or Boone either?” she said.
“Not ever.”
The sheriffs’ deputies had cuffed the Nightcrawler and put him in the back of a cruiser. His sleek wormlike form filled the seat. On the radio, the deputies requested a BOLO for Grigor Mirkovic. They spoke to Seth for a moment.
Rory asked Amber, “When was the last time you spoke to Lee?”
“A week before the robbery. He got up, had coffee and three fried eggs and pancakes and maple syrup with rum mixed in it. He said he was going to L.A. for the week, that he had a deal cooking. Then he stuck a sausage between his teeth like it was a cigar and he swaggered out of there and got in his truck and drove away. I never saw him again.”
Rory took a second. “Mindy Xavier.”
Amber looked at the ground and seemed to decide that she might as well keep talking. “Lee shared information with her.”
Rory parsed those words. “You don’t mean he was her informant.”
Amber didn’t quite look at her.
“You knew she was crooked,” Rory said. “Xavier told him the route and timing for the Geronimo Armored courier pickup.”
Amber shrugged. She stared at Boone and scratched her arms with worry.
Rory considered it. At the time of the robbery Xavier must have been a beat cop, maybe a rookie. It was unlikely she’d have been privy to such sensitive information. Not through normal channels.
Rory gathered herself. “Lucky Colder.”
Amber turned to her, eyes widening.
Rory nodded. “He was involved, wasn’t he?”
Symmetry. Lee Mackenzie to Boone and Riss. Will Mackenzie to Rory.
But they weren’t the only ones. An inside man.
Lucky had been involved in the investigation and still worked occasionally as a cold-case detective. Lucky had tried to dissuade Seth from pursuing this. He didn’t want his son digging into it.
The sun caught her eyes. She blinked against a shine so bright it hurt.
Mirkovic knew that her palm print was on the getaway van. Boone knew. That information could only have come from the Ran
som River PD. From the Detective Division.
Behind her, much closer than she’d been anticipating, Seth said, “Where’d you hear that?”
He looked exhausted and was holding a hand against his chest. One of the sheriff’s deputies called to him, “Don’t act like a hard case. Get those ribs X-rayed.”
He raised his chin in acknowledgment but kept his focus on Rory. “My dad?”
She didn’t want to tell him. But it was past time for holding back. She felt like opening a vein and letting her entire life, her entire history, her family ties, her loves and fears, spill and wash away for good.
She looked straight at him. “I think your dad passed along information that ended up with the robbers.”
“I heard that. Why?”
“It’s the only logical conclusion.”
Amber hadn’t denied any of it. She wasn’t telling Rory she was on the wrong track. Rory thought that Amber knew a whole lot more than she was telling. She may have buried it under decades of resentment and disappointment and shame, but she knew.
“There was an inside man,” Rory said. “Somebody who knew the schedule for Geronimo Armored. Seth, this has to have occurred to you.”
He didn’t answer.
“It wasn’t anybody at the bank. The FBI reamed them with a Roto-Rooter tool and got nothing. It wasn’t anybody at the Fed—they only knew when the delivery was arriving, not the exact route of cash pickups on the way. It wasn’t anybody at Geronimo. That leaves the Ransom River Police Department.”
His mouth tightened. “And?”
Rory’s face felt hot. Every instinct told her to swallow the words, keep up her guard, bury it. She forced herself to speak.
“Twenty years ago. Your dad was in bad shape.”
Seth said nothing. But he knew: alcohol, a marriage going rocky, nights of drinking to oblivion.
“He could have spilled the information to Xavier. He could have slipped. He might not even have remembered,” Rory said. She didn’t need to say alcoholic blackout. “And ever since then he’s been trying to make up for those days. Even now that he’s retired. That’s why he’s working so hard on the cold-case file.”
Seth’s lips parted and he shook his head. But he was going pale.
“Lee’s dead, Seth. Amber’s convinced, and so am I. He died a long time ago. Maybe soon after the robbery.”
“And?” he said.
“The other robbers either died or were arrested that night, but that didn’t leave Lee entirely alone. There was somebody else involved in planning the heist.”
And Lee, she now believed, would never have been content to abandon the money and live on his wits in Mexico. Walk away from $25 million, forever? No way. He would have tried to recover it. And because he was never good at making it on his own, he would have sought help. He would have turned to the one other person who wanted it as desperately as he did.
“The inside man,” she said. “That’s who Lee would have trusted to help him get away with the money. But the inside man had a motive to get rid of Lee and keep the entire haul.”
“And you think that’s my father?”
“I think it was Xavier. But she was too junior to have known the schedule.”
Seth looked like he was moments from bending double and dropping to his knees. “No. Rory. That’s…” The shock turned to hurt. He backed up a step.
Amber shook her head. “I know Lucky. No way he’d deliberately sell out. No way he’d pull the trigger on anybody.”
The wind rose, Amber’s dress billowed around her, and her hair fled above her head like Medusa’s. Through her wet clothing Rory felt a limitless chill.
By the wrecker, one of the deputies shouted in alarm. Seth hurried over, one hand cradled to his ribs. People clustered around Boone. In a fog, Rory saw Seth kneel and begin CPR.
But she felt herself disconnect from the scene. She felt the ground seem to dissolve beneath her feet.
Amber cried out and ran toward Boone. She yelled at the deputies to do something. The ambulance siren rose in pitch. It was almost there. Seth bent over Boone and gave him chest compressions. The sun fell bright on his shoulders.
Holding tight to Addie, Rory stumbled toward the house. She felt as though her world had no bottom, nothing to stand on.
In the kitchen she found Amber’s car keys. She went to the garage, started the old engine, put it in gear, and let the road fall away in front of her.
She drove to her parents’ house.
56
Rory rapped hard on her parents’ front door and opened it. Addie sat propped on her hip. The little girl hadn’t spoken since they left Amber’s place. She seemed calm, or perhaps frightened mute. But when Rory stepped into her parents’ front hall she looked around with bright curiosity. The house was warm, a friendly place. Rory smelled corn bread baking. The stereo was playing Alison Krauss.
“Doggie here?” Addie said.
“No, honey.” She’d phoned her neighbor Andi Garcia to get Chiba from her car.
“Can I play with him?”
“Soon.”
The autumn sun was failing in the west, dropping toward the dun-colored hills. She walked into the living room.
“Mom?”
Samantha peered out from the kitchen, a spatula in her hand. “Rory? What’s…”
Addie gazed at her with big eyes. Sam’s expression glazed, like ceramic drying in a kiln.
Then she rushed to the living room. “My God, Rory, you’re all torn up.”
“I’m all right. Where’s Dad? We have to talk.”
She reached to touch Rory’s scrapes and bruises. “What happened to you?”
Rory raised a hand to hold her off. “Not now. Where’s Dad?”
“He’s out back. What’s…” She collected herself and smiled at Addie. “Hi there. I’m Sam.”
Addie buried her head against Rory’s shoulder. Shyly she waved.
Rory said, “This is Adalyn. Maybe she can watch a video and have a snack while we talk.”
Rory’s heart had lodged so high in her throat she could hardly speak. But Sam got Addie a juice box and corn bread and set her in front of a Disney video. Rory called her dad in from the garden.
When Will saw her standing at the kitchen door, he slowed, gathering himself.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said.
“Uncle Lee,” Rory said. “I need the truth. I need all of it. I need it now.”
Rory walked back into the kitchen, where she had a view of Addie in front of the TV in the other room. The little girl had lain down on the floor with her head on a pillow and her thumb in her mouth.
Will said, “Why is Addie here?”
“Later,” Rory said. “Lee. He never escaped to Mexico, did he?”
Wind tingled through the chimes that hung from the eaves. Will seemed to withdraw. Sam’s eyes were edgy. Rory couldn’t tell whether she was close to fight or flight.
“Amber is convinced he’s dead. Is he?” Rory said.
Will fought it. His eyes begged her to back off. He raised a hand, almost like he wanted to stroke her hair, to hold her against his shoulder as she had held Addie. Almost as though he wanted to scroll back through the years, to pin time, to whisper in her little girl’s ear as he had when she was five.
“I have to know,” Rory said. “Boone’s been shot.”
“Oh dear God,” Sam said.
“He tried to kill Addie. He nearly killed Seth. He would have killed me if he could. If he survives, he’ll try.”
Sam put a hand over her mouth.
“And Riss is out there. She’ll try too. She’ll come after me. She’ll come after me because she’ll try to get to Lee. Over the money. The goddamned heist money he stole and brought here to our house. It’s a clusterfuck and I can’t stop it unless I know the truth. I deserve to know,” she said. “Do I call the FBI? Do I hire a PI? Do I go on TV and beg Lee to phone home? ’Cause I’ll do that, unless you tell me it’s pointless.”
; Sam said, “Will.” Her voice had the weight of a thousand years in it.
One last second. Her dad held off. Then the dam broke.
“No. He didn’t…” He cleared his throat.
“He didn’t get away to Mexico that night, did he?” Rory said.
Will shook his head.
“What happened?”
Sam walked to the window and stared at the lowering sun. It edged her face with shadows. “He died.”
Bam, like a cannon shot. “How?” She could barely see. “Where? When?”
Will said, “Don’t cross-examine us. This isn’t a courtroom.”
“No. It’s our family’s history and our future. It’s survival.”
Sam slumped. “Rory. For God’s sake. Don’t make us…”
“Did you know he was dead? All these years?”
“Yes,” Will said, and his face seemed to age before her eyes. “Yes.”
Something in his bearing silenced her. Anguish. Her hands fell to her sides. When her dad spoke again, it was softly.
“Everything I told you about that night was true. He showed up here, wounded. I was horrified. I never dreamed Lee would get himself involved in something so bad.”
He turned to Sam. His eyes were mournful. She stared out the window.
“But he was my brother. I couldn’t turn my back on him,” he said. “That’s why he came here. He knew brotherhood would get him through the door.” He paused. “And that’s when he turned on me.”
“Turned—”
Will walked to the window and put his arms around Sam. She said nothing. She took hold of him. Will exhaled.
He turned to Rory. “How could I ever explain to you—how could I ever go on, if you knew…”
His voice trailed to ashes.
Rory whispered, “Knew what?”
Her mom turned from the window. “It was self-defense.”
Hot tears leaped to Rory’s eyes. “No. Dad.”
Sam spoke in low, emphatic words. “He did it to protect you.”
Will closed his eyes. “I never wanted it to happen. Never. It was…” His lips trembled.
It’s not true. “I don’t understand.” Not true. “Oh my God.” Rory raised her hands, baffled, begging for a denial, an explanation, angelic intervention.
