The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy

by Pauline Baird Jones

  For one hit he’d done a version of Victor/Victoria, pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man when he’d been hired to kill a paranoid and heavily guarded government official. The idiot had been trying to take too big a bite out of the drug profits passing through his country’s banks.

  A strange little man, Hayes recalled with a reminiscent smile, who sublimated his homosexual proclivities by making his whores dress like men. In the end the little man had been ridiculously easy to take down. Like so many of his victims, he was only as strong as his weakest link. A most satisfying kill.

  Though not as beautiful as tonight’s kill. How could it match the joy of a nice, clear field with time to enjoy the feel of his knife going through struggling flesh. Time to wash in the blood. Time for the fire that took away his pain. Time to slip away, anonymous once more. Just another Joe on his way to catch the bus.

  A Joe with blood on the hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket. A Joe with a face no one would remember.

  “Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent,” he murmured, “is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?”

  They could seek him where they would. They would find him nowhere. He was wind. He was water. He was, he smiled again, harder to find than a tax cut: a visible invisible man.

  It was so simple. Only the killing was complicated, though he hadn’t meant it to be that way the first time. They say that anyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances. Theory had merged with circumstances when his former employers at the CIA sent the hit squad after him. He’d started the first fire to hide the bloody frenzy, to burn away his guilt. Fled up the rock face of Long’s Peak to escape society’s retribution.

  His fear had been so all consuming that at first he didn’t realize he wasn’t in pain. Hadn’t realized that in killing he’d found a respite from the headaches that had plagued him all his life, something years of doctors and his parents constantly migrating religious beliefs had failed to achieve.

  Freedom from pain was something he could believe in and the pattern that brought that ease became his religion. He wasn’t a serial killer. He killed for a higher purpose. With each death, his belief in his new religion grew. Strict adherence to the pattern not only eased his pain, but he came to believe it protected him from discovery. Somewhere along the way he started to believe it freed his victims, too.

  “‘Let there be light! said God, and there was light! Let there be blood! says man, and there’s a sea!’”

  Lord Byron understood the nature of man, understood the call of blood, the wonder of light-giving fire. Hayes smeared the water-softened blood over his hands. Tomorrow the climb up Long’s Peak would complete the pattern. By then, his employer should have deposited his money in the Swiss bank account and it would be available for him to play with.

  Luckily his religion did not require a vow of poverty.

  He liked the things money could buy. His anonymous existence. Information about his victims. The expensive, high tech equipment that had finally led him to Willow.

  The High Priest needed a High Priestess. Abstinence wouldn’t be part of his religion for much longer. He had been alone too long. Soon Willow would submit to the pattern. The student would become her teacher.

  Hayes turned his hand, letting the water flow across the back where blood crusted in the blonde hairs, turning them dark and stiff. He rubbed up red, thinking how sweet it had been when the woman fought for her life. Blood smelt so much sweeter when it was filled with fear, was more satisfying when it came out hot and fast. It had been a good kill. A very good kill.

  Strange how much he’d needed her death. He’d even dreamed about her in the days before, killing her again and again, only to wake empty with longing for the peace her death would give him.

  Now, finally, it was here. It was done. She was dead.

  The water ran pale pink now, the blood almost gone. He swirled his fingers in the last traces. He would bathe in it if he could—

  He wasn’t ready when his peace detonated. Wasn’t ready when the pain came roaring back like a storm over Long’s Peak, with just about as much mercy. Jagged spikes of agony shot down the sides of his head. He clutched those sides, dug palms into the pain, a low, feral moan squeezed out through drawn back lips.

  It was not supposed to happen this way—

  “…it is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in my flesh!” he cried. “She’s dead. So perfectly dead—”

  She had fought death, fought going into the good night on a river of blood and fire—

  No. She hadn’t.

  He dropped in front of his notebook computer, fumbling for the disk that held the data on Dani Gwynne. A few key strokes brought up her picture for him to compare with his memory of the kill. The differences were slight, but so critically important.

  The difference between pain and peace.

  * * * *

  “Ricky Neuman. Niall McBride. Peg Oliver.” Matt finished pinning the last picture on the cork wall to the right side of his desk. Behind him a bank of windows gave a generous view of the uneven skyline that was downtown Denver, with the jagged splendor of the Rocky Mountains serving as a back drop. Inside the hum of legal activity made a soothing accompaniment to thought. “The survivors of Gwynne’s protection op.”

  “You think one of them did the dirty?” Henry Robb, the youngest member of their team, had a baby face and innocent eyes that hid a good brain, laced with ambition. His already receding brown hair was pulled back into a ragged ponytail that had taken the place of a failed mustache. He’d come to the Marshals Service straight out of college, attracted by the diversity of the Service’s responsibilities and their nearly squeaky clean image. He hated anyone who marred that image more than he hated looking his age.

  “Probably.” Matt paced back to his desk, dropped in the chair and leaned back with his legs stretched out. He’d shoved Gwynne’s file in his out box, but her face refused to be shoved out of his head. She was gone. Her individuality, her humanity had been reduced to a charred bundle awaiting final identification at the morgue.

  It didn’t help. Ugly reality couldn’t so easily exorcise the regret that had dogged him since he walked into the room where she had died or take from his memory the imprint of her questioning face.

  “Neuman seems the obvious choice.” Henry sat on the edge of his desk, rolling a pencil between fingers beginning to lose their nicotine stain. “His girl was clear when Hayes hit.”

  “Yeah. Obvious. That’s why we’re gonna check them all right down to their toenails.” Putting Hayes out of business would scratch Matt’s itch and remove the romance writer from his head. It wouldn’t be easy. They would do the things they always did to find Hayes, but unless they could think of something more than that to do.

  Hayes knew all the things the good guys did when hunting and hadn’t made any of the usual mistakes bad guys did when hiding. So far the most unrelenting search had failed to bring them within sniffing distance of him.

  Just to make sure that hadn’t changed, Matt grabbed the thick mass that was Hayes’ file, separated half for Henry and flipped his share open. “Looks like Hayes has been a busy little hit man during the last ten years.”

  Henry grimaced at a photo from a previous crime scene. “Why’d he move the bodies, then torch them?”

  “Profiler thinks he’s got some kind of skewed religious fixation, based on the way he arranges the bodies, then starts the fire in a circle around them.” Matt flipped through the pages, looking for any indication they had gotten close to catching Hayes since their last encounter. Even some additional personal information might help. There was nothing new except the dead.

  Six inches of what he’d done. A millimeter of what he was.

  “A religious hit man. Now there’s a combo you don’t find very often.”

  “Hayes is an original.” Matt shoved the file away and leaned back, clasped his hands behind his head
so he could apply some pressure where a headache was starting. “We got a boat load of evidence to convict him if we ever catch up with him.”

  “He looks—dull.” Henry held Hayes’ photo at arm’s length, squinted at it, then tossed it back on the file. “How come we got his picture and fingerprints?”

  “He did some contract work for the CIA.”

  “A CIA killer?”

  Matt shook his head. “He didn’t kill for them. His thing was computers. Tracking, hacking, and crashing.”

  Henry looked surprised. “Computer geek to killer-for-hire. Interesting career move. There’s not much personal information here. Spooks keeping the good stuff back?”

  Matt’s grin was harsh. “They’d like you to think that. I got a source inside that says he’s turned his computer skills on them, took out his own file and a hefty retirement fund. Basically, he’s a thief. His first kill was to protect himself. Guess he liked it. The only other solid Intel I’ve got is that Hayes is a fanatic rock climber. Everything else is theory and supposition. SOB doesn’t even have personal contacts that we know of. Does his business by untraceable, coded email, Swiss bank accounts, according to one snitch. Just before Hayes popped him.”

  Matt got up and added Hayes’ photo to the rogue’s gallery side of his bulletin board, stabbing the pin through paper and cork, then turned his attention to the other three faces.

  Ricky Neuman had a good, not perfect record. His first time working with Peg Oliver, proximity had apparently overwhelmed professionalism. The question was, had his attraction for Oliver distracted Neuman from the job? Or was he a rat who decided to keep her breathing after he fell for her?

  Niall McBride had done a decent, though short stint in the Service. Left the New Orleans Police Department because of the residency requirement. Considered a rising star. Getting married before Christmas to a home town girl.

  Then there was Peg Oliver. Picked because she looked like Gwynne in bad light. Top notch service record. Practically the affirmative action poster girl for the Service. Tough job playing dead ringer for the witness. Dangerous, too, unless she knew she would be hurling at the local emergency room when Hayes came calling with his knife and box of matches.

  If he couldn’t get at Hayes directly, maybe his accomplice would lead him to the bastard. He turned back to Henry.

  “Let’s put our three survivors under the big microscope. Toss their lives, turn over every rock. Look down their pants and up her skirt if you have to. I want the rat in the woodpile.”

  “Right.” Henry stood up with a youthful air of determination.

  Matt looked at his watch. “How come we haven’t heard anything from Riggs? Or Alice?”

  Before Henry could answer, the telephone rang. Matt cut the ring in half by grabbing the receiver. “Kirby.”

  “You need to work on your phone etiquette.”

  He tucked the telephone under his ear. “Alice? What took you so long?”

  “Unlike you, I’m not part blood hound.” Her voice in the ear piece was strangely breathless. “She’s gone.”

  “What?” If Peg Oliver wasn’t at the hospital, where was she? With his elbows resting on Hayes’ file, he rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “She checked herself out last night. No one knows when.”

  “Really.” What did it mean? Where did it fit into the little they did know? Three confirmed dead, two in hand and seriously under suspicion, and one missing Marshal with footsteps leading away from a window. Whose footsteps?

  “That’s not all. Oliver did not just happen to get sick yesterday. According to the lab report, she ingested a large helping of ipecac.”

  “Now that’s very interesting. Either someone wanted her out of the way…” Matt leaned back in his chair, rocking slightly. “…or she wanted very badly to be out of the way. If she did it to herself, she gave herself a rough ride. Doc was surprised she could walk. According to him she almost turned herself inside out and upside down.”

  “Doc tell her about the ipecac?”

  “Late last night, before she went AWOL.”

  Oliver’s disappearance opened all kinds of interesting possibilities. Matt frowned, trying to slow his racing thoughts before they ran out of fuel and left him out on a limb. “I’ll put an APB out on Oliver. You head over to the coroner. Squeeze a quick ID on the bodies out of him.”

  Alice hesitated. “You don’t think Oliver went back to the safe house?”

  “Depends which side she was on. It’s what I’d do if I found out I’d upchucked something rotten in Denmark.” Matt kept his voice dryly factual, but couldn’t stop his heart stepping up the beats. If Oliver had gone back to the safe house, they were one body short. Now they had to find out which body. Real fast.

  Alice was quiet, then said, “From what I’ve heard, Hayes isn’t likely to make—mistakes.”

  Matt angled his chair so he could see Oliver’s photo on the board. “They say everyone has a twin.”

  Her heard her quick drawn breath.

  “You see why I need that ID?”

  “Hope no one else does,” Alice said. “I’m on it.”

  * * * *

  Dani had been in hiding long enough to feel strange merging with the stream of people moving along the sidewalks between the sheltering rise of skyscrapers. It didn’t keep her from walking, because she didn’t know how to stop, afraid if she did stop, the things she had seen would breach shock’s cushion and overwhelm her.

  It was an odd sort of panic that spun her forward. A tornado of mixed emotion she was in no shape to sort through. She half expected to look back and find people and buildings tossed and tumbled in her wake. So she didn’t look back.

  A “Don’t Walk” flashed from across the street. Habit stopped her on the edge of the curb. The need to keep moving shuddered through her. She could end the replay of what happened at the safe house before it started. End the one of her baby’s dead body in a miniature casket. End it all against the hard metal of moving objects out in the street. No more fear. No more empty arms. No more guilt.

  She turned from temptation toward a department store window, seeing without really seeing, the bikini clad figures frolicking in stiff poses.

  Dead. They’re dead because of me. Knowledge scalded her insides. Worse than that was the relief at not being one of them. Her throat wasn’t gaping wide. Flames hadn’t licked at her blood and flesh.

  The sun eased up a notch, stabbing light down the canyon between the buildings, turning the window into a mirror that reflected back her own surprisingly normal image. She had been sure trauma would show on her face like neon. Course, she’d never been that good at angst.

  I bend, not break. It had been her mantra for a long time, but she still had her doubts about whether stubborn survival was a good thing or a bad thing. The oblivion of a nervous breakdown had some appeal.

  …all dead…the rumors of my death…

  They thought she was dead. They had to. The other Marshals, Dark Lord for sure. He’d called Peg by Dani’s name in a husky, chilling whisper as he knelt and played in her pooling blood with his long, white fingers. The scream she couldn’t let out then, tried to crowd out her throat. Again she fought it back, not out of fear, she realized with shame. She just didn’t want to cause a scene. A scene.

  She closed her eyes. How pathetic.

  How—infuriating. For six months other people had pulled her strings, run her life. She’d let them and it had almost cost her life, her liberty, not to mention her pursuit of happiness. When had she forgotten the first rule of writing: never let plot drive characters?

  Instead of her reflection she saw two choices.

  She could go back to the Marshals. Or not.

  She couldn’t think of one good reason to go back.

  That left “or not.”

  It didn’t take much imagination to figure her window of opportunity to self determine was small. The Feds and Dark Lord would soon know they had made a mistake. She had to get a litt
le privacy so she could work out a plan—no. She needed a plot.

  She would plot her own survival.

  The beauty of it was, no one believed romance writers could plot anything but sizzling sex scenes. With a bit of luck, by the time they realized she was more than her sex scenes, it would be too late.

  FOUR

  “Are you sure you don’t mind me crashing with you?” asked Dani, speaking to “Rosebud” through the microphone that came with her new lap top computer. The Internet connection had been as easy to establish as the salesman said it would. Amazing. Even better, it was virtually untraceable, after she’d routed it through the local university Internet connection thanks to some email tutoring courtesy of another cyber-buddy named Spook. “It’s such short notice…”

  “You think I’m gonna pass up a chance to meet, “Blossom” in the flesh, just cause I gotta change the sheets on a bed?” Rosebud, a.k.a. Carolyn Ryan answered.

  “Ooh, no pressure.” Dani grinned, suppressing a wince at the sound of this cyberspace nickname, one of several Dani used to hide her identity, being spoken aloud. Some names should stay in cyberspace. Actually, all of them, Dani decided ruefully. Still, it was comforting to find out that Rosebud was as nice in voice as she was in cyberspace. If all the “friends” on her list were as helpful, her exercise in hiding was going to be almost easy.

  Rosebud laughed. “Twenty minutes, okay? Or do you need more time?”

  Twenty minutes seemed like a long time, but Dani agreed and rang off. Like Tennessee Williams’, Blanche DuBois, she would rely on the kindness of strangers.

  This first contact was a good omen, she decided, taking a last look at the nearly unrecognizable face in the mirror attached to the wall behind the desk.

  A shower, minus the Psycho victim overtones of the past months, had taken some of the tension from her face and removed all of the grime acquired during her panicked crawl through the bushes outside the safe house.