Out of Time

by Monica McCarty

  Kate tried to hide it, but Scott could see her muscles tense. “Why would I have heard from Colt? He and I have nothing left to say to one another.”

  Scott doubted that Kate believed that any more than he did. “I thought he might have tried to apologize.”

  “Apologize?” she scoffed. “You know him better than that. Colt doesn’t apologize; he attacks. He’s been doing it since he was a kid. What’s that adage they use in football? The best defense is a good offense.”

  It was a military adage as well, known as the strategic offensive principle of war, and it summed up Colt to a T.

  Scott looked at the tired face that was so like his own and tried to think of what to say. In retrospect, it was amazing that it had taken them so long to figure out that they were related. The resemblance between them was pronounced. His hair was a darker shade of blond, maybe, but they had the same color blue eyes, straight noses, and similarly shaped mouths.

  But despite their parents’ knowing each other when they were younger, it had never occurred to him that her father could have been the man his mother had the affair with until Colt had angrily referred to them as “Ken and Barbie Country Club Edition.” Suddenly Scott had seen what he’d never noticed before. The odd nonsexual closeness he’d felt instantly with her suddenly made sense. A later blood test had confirmed what by then he already guessed: Kate was his half sister.

  Scott wished he could say something to make it better for her, but Kate and Colt were going to have to figure it out on their own.

  If they figured it out at all.

  “Do you know where I can reach him?” Scott asked.

  “I have a number, but you’ll probably get ahold of him faster if you go to McNally’s. My guess is he’s been spending the past week with his head in a bottle and listening to Patsy Cline’s ‘Crazy’ on the jukebox, which is the only song that ever seems to be playing there.”

  She was probably right but Scott left a message for him anyway, telling him to call him back and that it was important.

  He was going to call it a night but decided to finish going through the various social media accounts of the dozens of Facebook friends on Natalie’s account. He was lucky it wasn’t hundreds. The account had been active for only about a month before she’d apparently decided better of it.

  He wasn’t surprised. No social media was Spy 101. Operators in Team Nine weren’t supposed to have any—even accounts under false names or aliases. Ghosts couldn’t leave a footprint.

  About an hour later, Kate pushed back from her chair. “You almost done? You might not need it, but some of us actually have to sleep a few hours a night.”

  They had been burning the midnight oil. “Almost.” He’d gone through the names alphabetically and was almost finished. “I just have a few more names.”

  Kate rolled her eyes, as if she’d heard that one before. “I’m going to get some coffee. But we’re shutting it down in an hour. Your shoulder needs rest even if you don’t.”

  His wound was healing just fine, but he knew better than to argue with her. Last time that had forced him to sit through her changing the dressing—again. Which, as she didn’t have much nursing skill and insisted on following instructions off the Internet, was a prolonged experience.

  He was on the last name of his list when she came back in the room. A few minutes later, he jolted up in his chair. “Bingo!”

  Kate looked over. “I take it you found something?”

  Scott turned the screen that he’d been working on toward her.

  Kate had shared the office in the town house with her former fiancé, Sir Percival Edwards, and there were two desks built into an L shape that each housed top-of-the-line computers and multiple screens. His desk had two; Kate’s had three.

  “Look at this,” he said, indicating the picture he’d found on Jennifer Wilson’s Instagram account.

  Kate looked back and forth between the two smiling faces. It was the same smile Natalya had with her sister in the Minnesota picture. With stilettos and a slinky black silk dress replacing the hat, scarf, and fuzzy pink mittens. “Which one is she?”

  Even though Kate had seen a picture of Natalie, he wasn’t surprised she’d asked. The two women looked enough alike to be sisters. They were both knockouts, although Jennifer was curvier, shorter, and had more brown in her dirty blond hair. “The one on the left,” he said.

  Kate squinted at the photo. “Where was that taken? It looks familiar.”

  “You’ve probably been there. It’s the Treasury Bar on the Hill.”

  That was one of the reasons he’d jolted. He’d recognized it right away, too. It was the same bar where he and Natalie had first met.

  Kate nodded. “This Jennifer Wilson could be a good lead.”

  “More than that. Look at the date the picture was posted.”

  He zoomed in so she could see it easier. A moment later she gasped. “May the twenty-fourth!”

  He nodded. “The night before our mission, and a couple days before Natalie was killed.”

  Jennifer Wilson might have been one of the last people to see her alive.

  “And look at this.” He scrolled through the pictures. “It’s the last picture she posted, and before that she posted almost daily.”

  Kate looked at him. “You think she knows something?”

  “I’m going to find out.”

  He’d planned to go to Minnesota to talk to Natalya’s family, but tracking down Jennifer Wilson had just become priority number one.

  * * *

  • • •

  Natalie wanted to scream, but it was another primitive instinct that took over. The urge to survive. To avoid death. To fight.

  She turned and tossed the bag toward the man who’d come up behind her. She knew he’d reflexively try to catch it, and she intended to use the moment of surprise to her advantage with a swift kick to an area that would give her the moment she needed to get past him.

  He caught the bag with a surprised “oof” and she was about to proceed to part two of her escape plan when she noticed the uniform.

  The color slid from her face. The man who’d snuck up behind her wasn’t Mick or a Russian hit man; he was a policeman. Noticing the badge, she corrected herself. Not a policeman, the sheriff, who happened to be a dead ringer for Tom Selleck circa Magnum, P.I. He even had a mustache, although his wasn’t 1980s bushy but trimmed much shorter.

  She was relieved, but only for a moment. When you were on the run, hiding for your life and the lives of everyone you loved, with only a fake ID to protect you, a policeman was almost as bad as a hit man. What did he want?

  He realized he must have frightened her by coming up behind her. “I’m sorry for scaring you. I was parked around front when I saw the car pulling into the garage.”

  Natalie took a deep breath, trying to recover her composure. Act normal. Don’t panic just because a cop showed up out of nowhere.

  She smiled as if embarrassed. “You startled me, that’s all. What can I do for you?”

  She held out her hand for the grocery bag that she’d tossed to him, but he shook it off. “I’ll carry it for you. I’m Brock Brouchard—the county sheriff. We had some reports from neighbors of lights on in the old farmhouse and assumed it was teenagers or squatters. I was in the area so I thought I’d check it out.”

  The sheriff smiled. He didn’t have the Magnum dimples, but even without them, he was a good-looking man in the rugged outdoorsman kind of way. Her mom would say he looked like the Marlboro Man, which was basically how she referred to every ruggedly handsome man.

  “Not a squatter or a teenager,” she said. “Just a renter.”

  “Do you mind if I see proof of that?”

  She knew he had no right to see it, but she also knew that it would get rid of him faster if she just did as he asked. But her heart was pounding l
ike a drum. “No problem. The paperwork is inside.”

  They carried the groceries into the house and she told him to put the bag down on the counter in the kitchen while she went to fetch the lease. When she returned, she could see him, with his observant lawman’s gaze, taking in every inch and detail of the work that she’d done.

  It gave her a moment of hesitation—and caused her heart to beat even faster—when she handed him the lease and driver’s license. The likeness was good—really good—but there were subtle differences if you looked. Most people only glanced at the picture.

  The sheriff was not one of them. He studied the license for a long time before handing it back to her. “You look different.”

  Her racing heart stopped beating with a hard jolt. The words were threatening but the tone was not. She replied in the same offhanded manner as his comment, “Yeah. That picture was a few pounds ago.”

  He looked embarrassed, which had been her intention. If there was one thing a man knew was off-limits in conversations with women, it was weight. “And grew a couple inches,” he said. “It says you are five-five, but I’d put you at five-seven.”

  Way too observant. “That was a typo that I never got around to correcting.”

  He nodded. He seemed to believe her, but his poker face was better than her mind-reading skills. “You can do it when you apply for a new license. That one is about to expire.”

  She didn’t say anything, but a powerful weight of sadness passed over her. She knew that. Jennifer’s birthday was in December. December first, to be precise.

  “So you are from New Jersey?” he asked conversationally.

  But she didn’t want to start a conversation; she just wanted him to leave. The last thing she needed was to draw the attention of the local sheriff, and there was something about the way that he was looking at her that made her think he might be interested in other ways. “Was from New Jersey,” she corrected.

  “And now you’re fixing up the old Lewis farm?” He looked around. “You’ve done a lot of work. All by yourself?”

  She’d been right. Despite the innocuous question, she knew what he was getting at: was there someone else in the picture?

  “Yes, and it’s been exhausting.” Before he could follow up with some other personal question, she added, “It was nice to meet you, Sheriff Brouchard, but I need to put these groceries away and get cleaned up.”

  He nodded. “I noticed the scratches on your arms and knees.”

  Of course he did. She thought about mentioning that it was probably his daughter that she’d saved from a spill, but then thought better of it. It would just prolong the conversation that she wanted to end. “I fell.”

  She could see he was curious, but he took the hint and walked to the door. “Nice meeting you, Ms. Wilson. Hope to see you around.”

  She smiled but not wanting to encourage further contact simply replied, “It was nice to meet you, too, Sheriff.”

  She held her breath until the car turned onto the highway. The cold sweat on her brow and the frantic beating of her heart, however, remained.

  She slunk against the door. That had been terrifying. Not for the first time in the past few months she felt as if she’d dodged a bullet. But that had been the biggest one yet. A sheriff. God in heaven. What if his observations about the license had been more? What if he’d guessed that it wasn’t her? How long would it have taken the people who had tried to kill her to learn that she was alive?

  She was tempted to pack up her car and leave, but she talked herself off the ledge. The ID had worked. She couldn’t panic every time someone asked her questions or a man looked at her. She had to live somewhere, and this place was perfect.

  She liked it here, and she was tired of running. Besides, she held up the ID that she’d shown him. Even if he ran a check on her, he would see that she was telling the truth.

  Her eyes filled with tears. Jennifer Wilson had been a real person. She’d been Natalie’s best friend. And she’d been killed when the person trying to kill Natalie mistook Jennifer for her.

  Four

  Natalie was correct in her initial estimation of Becky Randall. The town manager was a hard person to refuse—or dislike. It had taken Becky less than two days and three phone calls to get Natalie to agree to help her out.

  Becky was trying to prepare for a big meeting with developers who hoped to purchase a large parcel of land as part of the town’s redevelopment plan, and the files were a mess. The previous town manager had purposefully left them that way to help cover his questionable business expense tracks. By the end of the first workday, however, Natalie had already begun to make significant inroads in the files and had just finished organizing the information and research related to the meeting. She’d also handed Becky an additional list of sources and articles she might want to look at. Natalie had seen firsthand what could happen to small farming communities when developers moved in.

  Becky shook her head. “You are a miracle worker. Are you sure you can only work two days a week? I could use you every day for the next month—at least.”

  Natalie smiled, more pleased than she wanted to admit. It was nice to feel that sense of accomplishment again. Of making order out of chaos. She’d been enjoying her renovation work on the farmhouse, but she missed the intellectual challenge of her job at the Pentagon. It was a job she’d never wanted but had grown to love.

  Becky skimmed over the list of resources and notes that Natalie had made in hopes of conveying to Becky the need to proceed with caution in her upcoming meeting with the developers. But the town’s coffers were dry, and from a few things Becky had mentioned, it was clear she was under a lot of pressure from some of the ranking members of the community to back the sale to the developers quickly.

  But quick money came with a cost. A development like that would change the character of the town forever. Natalie had heard a statistic when her father was battling to keep their farm that the US was losing two acres of farmland a minute to developers.

  “Did you ever consider going to law school yourself?” Becky asked. “This almost looks like a legal brief.”

  The question hit home with surprising force. Trying to prevent what happened to her town and her family’s livelihood was exactly why Natalie had gone to Washington. What was that old movie . . . Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? That was her. A naive, idealistic Jimmy Stewart, millennial style.

  She’d accepted the internship with their local representative to fight from the inside for farming communities and after working in Washington awhile had wondered if maybe law school might be for her.

  Instead she’d caught the attention of Mick Evans and the powerful men in Russia that he’d worked for. If she’d stayed in Minnesota and hadn’t accepted that internship, maybe none of this would have happened.

  “I think my father would have disowned me,” she said with a laugh, although it was true. “A legal assistant”—or in her case a politician, which was just as bad in his eyes—“is close enough to the enemy. You can’t imagine how many times I heard that adage about lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas.”

  Becky laughed. “I take it your father didn’t care much for lawyers.”

  “That is putting it mildly,” Natalie said dryly. “He thinks they are all lying, untrustworthy snakes who use the law to make money for rich people and trick honest, hardworking folk who didn’t go to college and learn how to talk fast.”

  “A not completely inaccurate portrayal of some lawyers I know.” Becky smiled. “I should like to meet your father. He sounds like he would get along great with mine.”

  Natalie immediately sobered, a wave of sadness pouring over her. She missed her family desperately. One of the hardest things she’d ever done was letting them think she had been killed. But she knew it was the only way to keep them safe. She hadn’t been able to save Scott, but she wasn’t going to let them
take her family from her, too.

  Instead of answering directly, she said, “I’m looking forward to meeting your father soon. There’s a leaky pipe in the upstairs tub and replacing it is above my pay grade. I have it turned off for now, but when I get around to it, I’ll be calling.”

  Becky grinned. “You may get back in his good graces yet.”

  The two women were walking out of the municipal building together when Natalie saw the man heading up the stairs toward them and nearly stumbled. She bit back a curse, recognizing the sheriff.

  Unfortunately it was too late to turn around or run and hide as he’d already seen them. Although from the look of annoyance that crossed his face, he might have been considering the same thing. His mouth tightened as his gaze lingered on Becky for an instant before shifting to Natalie, where it lightened considerably.

  She didn’t need to be a detective to figure out that the sheriff didn’t much like the town’s manager-cum-ballet-teacher.

  “Miz Wilson,” he drawled, with a tip of his flat brown sheriff’s hat that was only a brim-adjustment away from making the image of cowboy complete. His voice was considerably sharper when he turned to her new friend. “Ms. Randall.”

  “Sheriff Brouchard,” Natalie said.

  Becky rolled her eyes a little before adding an amused, “Brock.” He didn’t seem to appreciate the lack of formality, which Becky explained to Natalie. “We went to high school together. Brock played football with my older brother—although Brock went on to play at college as well.”

  Natalie nodded, not surprised. The sheriff was built like an athlete. “Nice to see you again,” she said to the sheriff. “I’ll see you on Thursday, Becky.”

  She tried to move off, but the sheriff stopped her. “I’m glad to run into you again. It seems I owe you my thanks. Rebecca told me you saved Sammie from a nasty spill. Those were the scrapes I saw on your knees and arms.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Natalie nodded. “It was nothing. I should get going—”