“If they know you couldn’t have killed her, why do you think that they distrust you?” he pressed. “What do they suspect?”
Her shuddering intensified. “I don’t know what to do, Sam. This morning, I went to Misty’s friend, Crystal, but she was too scared to let me stay there. She has a little boy, and—and she’d already heard about the murder. Then Myrtle Lambert, Zoe’s sitter, said I must’ve gotten caught up in some evil, that God’s punishment seldom comes unearned, and I—I must have done something so terrible that I deserved—”
“That’s bullshit,” Sam insisted, unable to imagine someone saying something so cruel, especially in the name of a merciful Creator. “You couldn’t have possibly—”
“He—he cut Elysse’s—her throat—her neck was nearly sliced through. She was my best friend, and I loved her, and he took her life because of me.”
These last words, coming as they did on a choked whisper, finally shattered Ruby, though she’d managed to stay upright through the shock of learning that her family was missing, of finding a dangerous intruder in her home, of discovering her best friend butchered. Stunned, Sam gathered her into his arms and held her, allowing her to sob against him as he tried to think his way past his own horror.
“Ruby,” he said, whispering into the soft hair near her temple. Rubbing light circles along her back, he felt her struggle for control, her effort to weep quietly. He felt, too, his physical awareness of her warmth and closeness, and he hated himself for it. Carefully, he stepped back.
“Please, Ruby, tell me,” he said. “Why would you blame yourself? Why would anyone imagine you’re somehow to blame?”
She wiped her face again and stared at him, eyes wide and, unless he was mistaken, terrified.
He passed her the entire pack of tissues. “What is it?”
Her gaze slid away from his. “I—I haven’t told the sheriff this. I couldn’t, but right after I found Elysse, a man called. The man who killed her. He said he had my family, said he wanted…something I brought home with me. Something from Iraq.”
Sam stared at her, asked harshly, “What kind of shit have you gotten yourself into?” Not to mention me.
It was hard to imagine a young mother, the kind of woman a straight-arrow guy like Aaron Monroe would have married, involved in smuggling. Tough to accept the idea that such a person would risk everything on the chance for a big score. But he reminded himself he didn’t really know her, and that the lure of easy money had made fools of a hell of a lot of men and women. His work in the computer security field, where he’d tracked down numerous embezzlers, had taught him greed had its way with people every day.
“When I was overseas, I had some trouble,” she admitted. “I was driving buses, mostly transporting contractors from secured compounds back and forth to worksites, but Jake Hennessy, my immediate supervisor—what a nightmare. I tried to stay away from him, did my best to keep my distance, but every time I brought the bus in, he’d manage to be right there, brushing past me, rubbing up against me, making disgusting remarks about how my uniform hid too much, how he’d like to get me naked. What he’d like to do and how he’d make me want it. And the more I told him to back off, the tougher I got about setting boundaries, the harder he came at me.”
“Sounds like a grade-A asshole.” Just hearing about it made Sam feel like a jerk for noticing the soft contours of Ruby’s body in those brief moments he had held her.
“I don’t like the idea of whining to management, like it better if I can take care of things myself. But this guy was getting dangerous, hanging around near my quarters, turning up in odd places to try to corner me alone. And I knew it was escalating, that the harassment could turn into rape if I didn’t do something about it, so I went to the company’s command post and asked for an appointment to see someone. But when I explained the reason I was there, this redheaded twenty-something out of Oklahoma, an administrative assistant named Carrie Ann Patterson, starts looking nervous and whispers for me to meet her in the ladies’ room. And that’s where she tells me I should consider other options.”
“Why? I’d think a woman would support another woman.”
“She’d seen too much, she said, women reporting harassment, men and women reporting health and safety violations. Nothing ever happened to the people who got reported, but the ones reporting ended up transferred to more dangerous areas. And more than you’d expect ended up dead. She’d been keeping track, she told me. Keeping records of what happened. She said she was privately talking to some people back home about it—including someone connected to a congressional committee looking into U.S. contractors in the war zone—but she didn’t want me ending up as one of the suspicious deaths on her list. She said she could use my help.”
“So what did you tell her?”
Ruby’s color deepened. “I said I was just a bus driver looking out for my family. I thanked her for the warning, but said I couldn’t get involved. And then I turned around and walked out of there in a cold sweat. Later on, I spoke to a couple of the guys I knew around the compound, some of the male drivers and the truck transport personnel, about my problem with Hennessy. They were helpful,” she said wryly. “Had a talk with Hennessy that took care of the trouble. Told him if that didn’t work, he’d wake up without the necessary equipment to bother any other women.”
“Good for them,” he said.
Ruby stroked the dog’s broad, brown forehead. “I could really use some coffee, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll go start a pot. Be back in a minute.”
When he returned, he found Java on the sofa with her, her head in Ruby’s lap. Both the woman and the dog had closed their eyes. Knowing how exhausted Ruby must be, Sam hated to wake her, so he waited until the coffee finished its drip cycle.
“Ruby,” he said. His hands full of two huge mugs, he nudged Java with a bare foot. “Move it, you big lug. Off.”
As Ruby snapped awake, the Lab shot Sam an aggrieved look and jumped down. “I didn’t mean to—” Ruby started. “How long was I out?”
“Just a few minutes,” he said. “You need more. I imagine you’re running on nothing but adrenaline and fumes now.”
She reached for the coffee, cupping the earthenware in both hands. “And caffeine. Can’t forget that.”
“Black all right?” he asked her. “I have milk, and some sugar, too, I think.”
“This is fine, thanks.” She shook her head as if to clear it and swept the hair from her face. “What was I telling you?”
“How your problem with your slimeball boss was solved,” he said.
She nodded. “I thought that was the end of it until the day I passed by Carrie Ann. She had a bag over her shoulder, and she looked scared as hell. Said she was supposed to go home the next week, but DeserTek was reassigning her down to their operation near one of the most dangerous cities—the fighting was so heavy there, they sure as hell weren’t running buses. But a supply convoy was going, and they told her she had to go with the truck driver or they’d fire her and strand her in-country.”
“They can do that?” Sam asked. “To an American citizen?”
She nodded. “These big contractors are pretty much a law unto themselves. The normal legal protections don’t apply outside of the states.”
Heaving a sigh, she let her head hang forward over the steaming mug. “But I should have found some way to stop them from taking Carrie Ann. Should have hidden her in my quarters and bribed my snitch of a roommate into shutting up about it. I was—I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was too scared to get involved, especially with Carrie Ann panicking the way she was. They came and hustled her off, so damned fast there was hardly time to think. And that was the last I saw of her. The last anybody did except the insurgents who waylaid her transport. She and the driver were both missing for two days. Before they were found beheaded, with their bodies burned.”
“Like Elysse,” Sam said, a chill exploding inside him at the
thought of the way her throat had been cut. She’d been brutally murdered for no other purpose than to intimidate Ruby.
“Before she left, she gave you something, didn’t she?” Sam guessed. “She passed you some kind of evidence against them.”
Ruby nodded. “She pushed a flash drive into my hand. I didn’t want it, but there was no time to argue. And afterward—I thought I could just drop it in a mailbox somewhere after I got home. Anonymously. But now, if I don’t turn it over, he’s going to butcher my daughter and my sister.”
“You haven’t told anyone?” he asked.
“God, no. The call—that call I got last night came from the sheriff’s office.”
“You’re kidding.”
“When he hung up on me, I hit the call-back button. I was desperate to convince him I had to talk to Zoe. But a deputy answered and said Preston County Sheriff’s Office. And the guy who’d called had warned if I told anyone, anyone in law enforcement, he’d know right away and kill my family.”
“Did you check the call log?”
“I did—you can look if you want to. That call definitely came from the sheriff’s office.”
Sam rubbed his thumb along a jaw gone prickly with stubble. “Can’t discount the possibility it was a spoofed call, Ruby. There are services online that let you enter someone else’s phone number on a form, along with the number you want to call. Then the service patches you through, and the fake number shows up on the other party’s caller ID.”
“That’s legal?”
He nodded. “As far as I know, it is. Supposedly for playing jokes on your friends, but a lot of bill collectors and stalkers know about it. And the way it works, if you hit REDIAL, your call would go back to the fake number and not to the real caller. So it’s perfectly plausible this guy’s not law enforcement, just someone interested in keeping you from going to the authorities—which, in my opinion, is exactly what you ought to do. You can’t handle this yourself, no way.”
“You don’t understand. By the time he broke off the connection, Deputy Savoy was already in the neighborhood. He told me the sheriff herself had sent him, said someone had called her personal phone number with an anonymous report of a disturbance.”
“The sheriff?” Sam remembered his father carrying on about the department’s harsh treatment of “undesirables,” from midnight beatings to planted evidence and nudge-and-a-wink public defense in trials where the suspect’s guilt was a foregone conclusion. But as suspicious as Sam was of law enforcement and as much as he’d hated Justine Wofford’s needling, it was hard to imagine her involved in a conspiracy involving murder and abduction. It was especially tough to imagine she’d choose to work with Roger Savoy, a man whose ugly election tactics had provoked many to sympathize with the former sheriff’s widow.
“You have no idea how much money is at stake,” said Ruby. “DeserTek’s the leading competitor for a huge, new government contract—hundreds of millions hanging in the balance. I’m not saying Wofford’s necessarily the one, but you could buy any number of Podunk county sheriffs for a fraction of that price.”
Sam thought about the diamonds sparkling on Wofford’s ears and finger, her sleek, expensive look, and her embarrassment about the condition of her run-down department vehicle. He recalled, too, the regret that filtered through her words as she’d spoken of the child victim of a hit-and-run driver. Could Wofford really be involved with anything that put a little girl at risk?
“Or you could buy off deputies or feds or I don’t know who all else,” Ruby said. “And since all the agencies investigating are coordinating their efforts through that office, I can’t take any chances. I won’t.”
“So you plan to hand over the flash drive?” She’d get herself killed, Sam thought, and he was just supposed to sit by and let it happen? Protect his own ass while this bastard carved up innocents?
Ruby blew her nose. “I’d give it to him a hundred times over, but I…”
She choked up, but he waited her out, fighting the desire to haul her into his arms once more, to make her problems his.
When she looked at him again, her eyes looked bluer than ever against the reddened corneas. “I don’t have that drive, Sam. And there’s not a damned thing I can do to get it back.”
She told him about a snatch-and-grab that had happened at the airport, told him of a theft that sounded random, yet Sam couldn’t help wondering if it had been…or whether someone other than DeserTek had been willing to resort to desperate means to get those files.
C HAPTER F OURTEEN
We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of providence, determined still to do our best to the last.
—Explorer Robert Falcon Scott,
from a letter written shortly before his death
during a South Pole expedition
Tasting blood, Ruby realized she was biting into her own lip. Chewing away while wondering if she’d just made the worst mistake of her life. Bad time to make such a huge decision; shock and exhaustion were playing hell with her thought processes, grief and guilt crashing down her judgment like a wrecking ball.
“They wouldn’t let you live.” Sam looked into her face, into her. “Even if you had the drive and gave it to them, they’d have to kill you to keep you quiet. That’s the whole idea, right? They mean to isolate you long enough to shut you up forever.”
Ruby set down her coffee mug and reached into the purse she’d left beside her on the floor. Pulling a handgun from its depths, she ground out, “Not if I get him first.” Just holding the weapon brought a welcome surge of energy, an antidote to the sense of powerlessness that had swamped her. She’d been so scared for so long, so afraid to act, but what good had being passive done her?
“Whoa, whoa,” Sam burst out, holding up his palm. “Point that somewhere else, why don’t you?”
Ruby redirected the snub-nosed revolver toward the floor, her face burning. Her father, an avid sportsman who had taught her about gun safety, was probably spinning in his grave. “I’m sorry.”
Sam leaned forward to better see it. “Looks like something Humphrey Bogart would’ve carried in an old black-and-white movie. What’d you do?” he asked. “Knock over a museum?”
From some unknown reserve, she mustered up a smile. “Don’t worry. It can still shoot holes in someone.”
“That’s what’s got me worried,” Sam grumbled.
Ignoring him, Ruby argued, “Mrs. Lambert said her husband took excellent care of it.” No need to add that the man had died some fifteen years back, around the time of her own father’s final coronary…and the beginning of her mother’s downhill slide into the bottle.
Sam looked skeptical. “Mrs. Lambert? This is the same woman who thought God must be pissed off at you?”
“Guess she was hedging her bets on that one, in case the Lord was siding with me after all. Either that, or she was glad enough to help as long as I wouldn’t be drawing trouble to her house.” Ruby grimaced. “I can’t really blame her on that count, or Crystal, either. I’m not exactly the safest of companions.”
“Trying to scare me off?”
She held his gaze for a moment that expanded like the morning taking shape outside the window. “You don’t look like you scare all that easy.”
“Oh, I scare, Ruby,” he told her. “Right now I’m scared for you and for your family. I’m scared you’ll all end up dead if you think for half a second you’re going to walk straight into an ambush and get the jump on a professional, or a whole pack of ‘em, for all we know, with that relic you’re holding. And I’m afraid I’ll be the one who ends up taking the fall when it’s all over.”
Ruby held her breath, wondering if she’d guessed wrong about him, if he would simply tell her to get the hell out of his life. But before he said another word, the dog lifted her ears and growled in the direction of the street, where a car or truck door closed.
“Oh, shit,”
Sam told her. “If that’s someone from the sheriff’s office, they’ll have a lot more questions when they see us together.”
But Ruby had already started toward the front door. Peeking around the curtain covering the sidelight, she said, “Unless they’re hiding deputies in yellow DHL vans these days, I’d say you have a delivery.”
When she glanced back at him, he still looked worried, but at least he hadn’t thrown her out like Crystal or Mrs. Lambert. Yet.
“Think I’ll grab another cup of coffee while you get that,” Ruby suggested, to give him the space he needed. “Need a refill?”
When he shook his head, she picked up her mug and purse and made herself scarce, pushing open the swinging door and ducking inside a dated, but clean kitchen.
Sam was right, she knew, that investigators would likely take a dim view of her visit here. Especially the sheriff, who not only seemed to suspect Sam of some involvement but had lashed out at Ruby herself last night while questioning her.
“You’re not telling me everything.” Glaring like a thunderstorm, Wofford had towered above her. “And until you decide to do that, the chances are we won’t find your family—or at least not in time to do them any good. Besides that, Deputy Balderach and your friend Elysse won’t end up with justice, either. You want all that on your conscience, Mrs. Monroe? Can you live with it?”
Ruby had nearly spilled it all then, but something—maybe it was the hardness she saw in the sheriff’s nearly black eyes—warned that she might be testing Ruby, that she might be poised to call the man holding her family. So instead, Ruby had sworn that she’d shared everything she knew. Sworn it and saw either exultation or frustration flash over Justine Wofford’s expression as she turned away, supposedly to attempt to track down Elysse’s stepbrother.
Ruby poured herself a second cup of coffee from the half-full pot on the burner, but this time she spooned in some sugar from a bowl she found beneath one of the painted white cabinets. As she stirred, she heard the front door closing.
Beneath Bone Lake Page 12
