Critical Vulnerability (An Aroostine Higgins Novel Book 1)

by Melissa F. Miller

  She’d left him, left their life together, to pursue her dream. She wasn’t a twenty-year-old coed anymore. She was a high-powered federal prosecutor. Would she throw that away for him now?

  He grabbed the thin pillow that Mrs. Chang had insisted on giving him and pressed it over his ears, as if that would drown out his own doubting voice.

  All he could do now was wait. And pray. The rest was up to Aroostine.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Aroostine headed straight for the Buchanan Memorial, skirting the fountains, all turned off for the winter. She raced past the bronze statue of Joan of Arc, down the wide concrete aggregate steps, and through the corner of the park devoted to sculptures of poets. Guided as much by the bright moon and the faint stars as by the amber light filtering in from the street, she didn’t slow her pace until she was directly in front of the statue of Law flanking the memorial to President Buchanan.

  A lump of blankets stirred on a nearby bench.

  “Park’s closed, lady,” a man said, peeking his head out from his warm cocoon to look at her.

  “I won’t be long,” she assured him.

  She turned to the classical sculpture. Its twin, depicting Diplomacy, stood sentinel on the other side of the memorial. She had no use for diplomacy at the moment.

  She stared up at the statue.

  The law.

  It had meant so much to her for so long. It was an anchor that kept her from drifting into a well of uncertainty when she was learning to navigate the world away from her Native community. She loved the absolutes of the law.

  But it couldn’t supplant love.

  She could live without being a lawyer; she couldn’t live with Joe’s death on her hands.

  She exhaled. Her breath hung in a visible puff on the chilled air.

  Her resolve strengthened, she pulled up the video of Joe’s message to watch it one more time before returning to the warmth of the cab.

  She stood perfectly still and stared at the screen. Joe’s words burned themselves into her brain. And then she squinted. As he went off-script with his words for Franklin, he gestured oddly. In her dread and fear, she hadn’t noticed the movements the first time.

  What was he doing? He pointed, first toward the floor, and then out to the log walls.

  She paused the video and her heart thumped in her chest, so loudly she thought it might wake the homeless man on the bench, who’d already forgotten about her and was snoring softly in his nest of blankets.

  He’s trying to tell me something? What? What is it, Joe?

  She slowed her breathing in an effort to calm her racing pulse so she could think.

  What would Joe want her to know? Where he was, so she could find him.

  How could a wood floor and log walls help her find him? He was in a cabin. That didn’t help.

  And then she laughed and took off running toward the idling cab.

  She hurried into the backseat and smiled at Reggie, who looked up from his sudoku puzzle in surprise at her noisy entrance.

  “I’m so glad you waited! Can you take me to Hyattsville? You won’t have to wait there.” She was about to make herself an uninvited houseguest.

  She pulled out the receipt from the cafe, where Franklin had scribbled his address and the number for his landline, practically begging her not to contact him any way but in person going forward. He was reasonably convinced that the man couldn’t use his own program to monitor him, but why take the chance?

  Reggie shook his head slowly as if to let her know he thought she was some kind of fool, but he tossed the puzzle book on the passenger seat and pulled out.

  “Give me the address.”

  She read it off the scrap of paper and tried not to burst. The wood. Joe was telling her if she could identify the wood, she could find the cabin.

  Up ahead, a green light turned yellow.

  Hurry, hurry, she thought, willing Reggie to speed up and beat the light. But he slowed and then stopped as the amber glow turned red.

  She tried not to groan.

  She sat on her hands so that she wouldn’t start surfing websites from her phone in her search for clues. If the man somehow learned that she was getting close, he might move his hostages. She jiggled her leg nervously.

  The light turned, and the cab resumed its leisurely crawl up the mostly empty street.

  Hurry.

  “I’m gonna cut over to Georgia Avenue,” Reggie said.

  “Okay, that’s great,” she said, the words coming out fast.

  He tilted his head and sought her eyes in the mirror.

  “You sure you didn’t score some speed in that park, girl?”

  “Speed? No, I told you, I don’t do drugs. I solved a problem. I mean, I think I did.” She took a breath and slowed down to choose her words carefully. She didn’t want to get him mixed up in her mess as a reward for his kindness. “I’m a lawyer. I have a big case coming up, and I think I just figured something out,” she explained.

  “Ah, inspiration. It strikes where it strikes.” He said sagely and nodded, satisfied that she wasn’t high.

  A terrifying thought gripped her suddenly. What if the cab company used SystemSource to track its cabs?

  She shook it off. So, what if they did? Only Franklin would be looking for her.

  Right?

  She distracted herself from unproductive worry by watching the moon through the cab’s window. It wasn’t quite full yet, but it would be soon. January. The Full Wolf Moon.

  And a memory she’d long since forgotten came rushing back—a memory of the November night so many years ago when the Higginses came to get her from her grandfather’s ramshackle cabin.

  She’d been scared and sad, still mourning his death and anxious about leaving her home. She had answered Mrs. Higgins’s solicitous questions in a meek voice, then leaned her head against the window of the station wagon and pretended to sleep.

  But she’d peeked out from under her eyelids and had seen the moon—the Full Beaver Moon, as she knew it then—following the wood-paneled car. Her spirits had lifted. The moon, her moon, was coming with her.

  And when the car had come to a stop, she’d squeezed her eyes shut, and Mr. Higgins had gently lifted her from the backseat and carried her into the house, where he placed her in a white-canopied bed covered with a pink and purple blanket and smoothed her hair over the pillow.

  Her new parents stood over her bed looking down at her for a long moment, then crept quietly out of the room. After the door closed softly, she’d turned to look through the lace-curtained windows, and there it was. The Full Beaver Moon hanging low and ripe over a tree in what was now her backyard.

  She was smiling to herself when she realized the cab had stopped.

  “Are we here?”

  “We’re here.”

  She checked the numbers on the meter and removed double that amount from her wallet.

  “Reggie, it was a pleasure to meet you,” she said as she passed the money through the plastic window.

  He counted the bills and sputtered in protest, “I can’t—”

  But she’d already pulled the door open and was making her way up Franklin’s cracked sidewalk.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Thursday morning

  Franklin groaned. The incessant beeping of his alarm clock cut through the cotton in his brain. He flung his arm out in the general direction of his nightstand and groped around until he silenced the noise.

  He felt like crap. His mouth tasted sour and metallic. His dry eyes burned when he opened them and squinted into the daylight.

  As he shuffled stiffly toward the kitchen to start the coffee, he cast a withering look toward the living room and the cause of his current sleep-deprived misery. Aroostine Higgins was sleeping in a tangle of blankets on the couch, having declined the offer of his mothe
r’s room, which truth be told, he’d made reluctantly.

  She’d shown up at his door after midnight, just when he’d finally managed to calm down enough to sleep. She jabbered excitedly about native woods, then demanded to know if SystemSource could monitor his Internet use. Even half-asleep, he’d managed to explain that it was impossible for anyone at the company to use his own trick to spy on him without his knowing.

  Satisfied, she’d commandeered his computer and had kept him up until dawn researching the different types of hardwoods native to the Northeast. By the time the sun was starting to rise, she’d compared several galleries of historic barns and cabins to screenshots of the video of her husband and had determined the walls and floor of the log cabin where her husband and Franklin’s mother were being held captive were made of old-growth white oak.

  Franklin had vacillated between sharing her excitement and tamping down his own annoyance at this apparently academic exercise. Great, they were in a cabin that was at least two hundred years old and that had been constructed of hand-hewn white oak logs. So?

  He hadn’t had the nerve to question her, though. She’d been pumped full of adrenaline, so he’d just taken his cues from her—and had silently rejoiced when she’d finally crashed into a solid wall of exhaustion right around six thirty in the morning and collapsed in a heap on the couch. She fell asleep within seconds, and he stumbled back to his bedroom. His eyes closed as soon as his head hit his pillow.

  But his sleep had been fitful and far too short. Two hours. He didn’t even feel human.

  He banged around in the kitchen, making no effort to minimize the noise as he started coffee and poured himself a bowl of cereal.

  He checked the time and dialed the number to make his daily “I’m still too sick to come back to work” call. He’d learned that timing it for just before nine o’clock meant he could leave a message while his boss’s secretary was busy mixing pounds of nondairy creamer into the swill that passed for coffee at the office.

  He lowered his voice to an appropriate rasp and left the necessary update, making sure that everyone understood he was working from home, not simply lounging in bed.

  “I need to do that, too,” said a voice just over his shoulder.

  He jumped, nearly dropping the phone into the sink, and turned to see Aroostine rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She’d padded across the floor so quietly he hadn’t heard her.

  “Jeez. What are you—some kind of assassin? A ninja?”

  She gave him a drowsy smile.

  “No, a tracker. Did you think you’re the only one?”

  He smiled at that and felt his crankiness evaporating. After all, this woman was trying to help him. Help him get his mother back safely.

  “Coffee?” he asked, gesturing to the hissing and steaming pot.

  While Aroostine waited for Franklin’s computer to come to life, she sipped her mug of dark roast and tried not to grimace. She wasn’t a coffee drinker, but Franklin had no tea—or creamer, or sugar, or even milk. Apparently, mother and son both took their coffee black.

  The bitter taste was outweighed by her need to clear the cobwebs of sleep from her brain. She took another hesitant sip and, for a moment, she thought of another black coffee drinker she knew. The temptation to call on Sasha McCandless for help was strong, but she simply couldn’t continue to involve other people in this mess. She’d just have to handle it herself, with Franklin’s help.

  She sneaked a peek at him. With his hair sticking straight up from a night of restless sleep and clad in plaid flannel pajamas that she just knew his mother had picked out, he looked to be about twelve. Okay. Fine, she’d handle it all by herself with just a bit of help from Mitchell.

  Franklin must have felt her eyes on him.

  He turned and said, “Didn’t you say you needed to call in to your office or something?”

  “I e-mailed my assistant.”

  His eyes clouded.

  “What?”

  “What did your message say? Because, you know, I’m supposed to be reading your e-mail and telling him if there’s anything noteworthy.”

  She tried to ignore the chill that tickled her spine at the casual way he talked about invading her privacy. “It was plain vanilla. I just said I’m too sick to come in and that I’ll try to check in later.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be picking a jury tomorrow?”

  She nodded.

  “So shouldn’t you be dragging yourself into the office even if you’re sick as a dog?”

  “Yes. That’s the point. Everyone at work is probably having a fit right about now.” She sent up a silent apology to Rosie, who would bear the brunt of Sid’s outrage and would be scrambling to cover all the work herself, then she continued, “So you can tell the man that it looks like I’m cooperating. That sort of flaky behavior is consistent with someone who’s planning to throw a case, don’t you think?”

  She waited patiently until comprehension lit his face.

  “Oh, yeah, I guess it is. Great! Should I call him now?”

  “Yes. But first—is there any way you can track him—even just to within fifty miles or so of his location?”

  He shook his head and said in a mournful voice, “No. Believe me. I’ve tried. He’s using a cheapo cell phone that doesn’t hook into any of our systems. He’s untrackable.”

  Aroostine set her mouth in a firm line. “No one’s untrackable. Go ahead and make your call.”

  She turned back to the monitor, and her fingers flew over the keyboard. She’d find the forest that had been home to the white oak trees used to make the cabin’s logs. Then she’d find the stream that the beaver kept showing her, although she had no intention of sharing the existence of her animal spirit guide with Franklin. And then she’d find the cabin.

  What then?

  She’d worry about that when the time came. And it was coming fast.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Franklin could hear his voice shaking. He paused and tried to steady it, so the man wouldn’t think he was lying or holding anything back.

  The man snapped, impatient and cold, “Are you there?”

  “Yes. Sorry . . . I’m just . . .” He decided to go with a partial truth. “Well, I’m worried about my mother. And I haven’t been sleeping and . . .”

  “I do not care to hear your tale of woe,” the man said in disgust. “Get to the point about the woman.”

  “Y-yes, of course,” he stammered. “She sent an e-mail to her office. She’s not going to work today.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “She said she’s too sick, but her calendar shows a full day of meetings to prepare for jury selection tomorrow and the case next week. It seems inconceivable that she wouldn’t go to work, no matter how sick she might be.”

  He glanced nervously at Aroostine and was rewarded with a reassuring smile before she returned to whatever it was she was doing on his computer.

  “Hmmm.”

  “I think this means she’s going to do it. She’s going to throw the case.”

  “Perhaps. You have had no response to the messages?”

  Franklin exhaled and carefully recited the lines he and Aroostine had agreed on.

  “No. I can tell they’ve been viewed. But she seems to have reacted by cutting off all contact with her friends and coworkers. She hasn’t reached out to any of her coworkers, other than to send the message that she isn’t coming in, and she’s made no calls. I think she’s in hiding.”

  The man was silent for so long that sweat beaded at Franklin’s hairline.

  At last the man said, “She may be. She is not staying at her apartment.”

  Franklin’s heart pounded, and his chest constricted at the thought that the man might know.

  This is it. You’re going to die of cardiac arrest wearing plaid pajamas.

  H
e struggled for a moment and then managed a shallow breath.

  “She’s not?” he squeaked.

  Aroostine’s head swiveled in his direction at the panic in his voice.

  “No.”

  He braced himself against the counter with one hand and squeezed his eyes shut with terror. “Where is she?”

  “I do not know. I have paid some of the front lobby personnel at her condominium building to keep me informed of her movements because the building does not use key cards that you can monitor. But, unlike your system, human intelligence is flawed and unreliable. She may have returned home and gathered her things unbeknownst to me. All that I know is she is not home now. My informant rang her apartment, and she did not answer. So he let himself in on the pretext of a potential leak coming from the unit above. Her unit is empty.”

  “Oh.” Franklin searched for something to say while he imagined how Aroostine would react to the news of this latest violation. “Uh, interesting.”

  “Interesting? If you say so. Keep monitoring and let me know if she contacts anyone.”

  “Wait! What about my mother and, um, her husband? If she’s going to do what you want, can’t you let them go?”

  The man snorted. “No.”

  Franklin waited, but the man didn’t elaborate.

  “But why not?”

  An irritated sigh filled his ear.

  Then the man huffed, “Because their presence will guarantee compliance. If she has set things in motion to cooperate, that is good. But they stay here until the judge declares . . . What’s the word? A mistrial. Then I will uphold my end of the arrangement. Do not ask again, Franklin. It is becoming tiresome.”

  The words held a warning.

  “Okay, I’m sorry. May I speak to my mother?”

  “No.”

  The man ended the call, and Franklin turned to Aroostine, whose concerned eyes were still pinned on him.

  “Um, he seems cautiously optimistic that you’re going to throw the case.”