Grave Secrets_A Manhunters Novel

by Skye Jordan

  Grave Secrets

  A Manhunters Novel

  Skye Jordan

  Copyright © 2018 by Skye Jordan

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in encouraging piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  Also by Skye Jordan

  1

  Ian Heller worked the flimsy lock on the back door and slipped into the duplex in less than twenty seconds.

  Where was the challenge in that?

  He silently resettled the latch on the door and paused in a laundry room the size of a closet, anticipating the unexpected. Hell, he was hoping for it. A pet they hadn’t known about, a surprise visit from a friend… Who was to say that the sheriff himself wasn’t sitting in the living room waiting for his ex?

  But no. There would be no excitement tonight. No hand-to-hand combat. Not even a damn reason to draw his weapon. And for the hundredth time, he second-guessed his decision to give this supposedly elite, civilian special-ops team a try.

  Then again, he didn’t exactly have offers coming at him from every direction.

  “I’m in.”

  “Copy that.” Sam Slaughter was the Manhunters’ expert hacker and, tonight, Ian’s lookout. “Quickstep it, dude. I’m freezing my balls off out here.”

  “In and out,” he assured Sam. This would be so easy, Ian couldn’t even legitimately call it a job.

  Wind battered trees against the rotted siding and rattled the single-paned windows. The space was warm compared to the nasty Montana weather, but his breath still billowed in the air.

  He moved into the doorway leading to the kitchen. The room was immaculate—nothing but a toaster on the counters and an empty sink. Two wooden chairs were pushed under a tiny table. An ancient desktop computer and keyboard took up most of the tabletop. The short drapes on the windows had been gathered back in perfect mirror images of each other. On the stove’s handle, a single kitchen towel had been folded into a precise rectangle and hung directly in the center of the bar. Three pictures on the fridge—all of the kid, Jamison—were lined up in precise order. A whiff of pine and lemon lingered in the air.

  He was pretty sure if he opened the cabinets, he’d find canned goods lined up in alphabetical order.

  Ian’s sixth sense vibrated along the back of his neck. “Someone’s OCD.”

  “You must be talking about yourself,” Sam’s voice sounded in Ian’s ear. “Because I’ve never known a woman who’s OCD about anything but shoes, hair, and makeup.”

  Shoes. Ian glanced down at his boots and pulled a rag from his back pocket to wipe the soles. He flipped on his LED headlamp, pulled off his gloves, and dragged a listening device the size of a pushpin from his pocket.

  “Remember,” Sam said. “Kitchen, living room, bedrooms. Once those are in place, you can look for the ledger.”

  Ian rolled his eyes. “Dude. Give me a break. I may have been out of the game awhile, but I’m no grunt.”

  “Just sayin’,” Sam said, conciliatory.

  Hiking his ass to the kitchen counter, Ian swiveled to his back. He tilted his head, angling the light toward a crevice in the corner where the cabinets met to wedge the bug into the shadows.

  “What the…?” Sam said. “They’re back. Heller, you’ve got incoming.”

  “What happened to the grocery store?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Fastest fucking store run in history,” Sam agreed.

  “Milk, bread, and eggs.” Everly’s voice joined the group. She’d been surveilling the mother-son pair while Ian took charge of tactical assault. As if this could be called a tactical assault. “I cut in front of them in line to buy a pack of gum. I took forever to find my wallet and my money. She freakin’ offered to buy the damn thing for me. And they still made it back here in fifteen minutes.”

  Ian shut off his headlamp, rolled off the counter, and moved into the living room, headed toward the hallway. Something caught his eye before he cleared the kitchen. He stopped and scanned the table again. A small black box was hidden behind the monitor. Ian recognized the company logo, and his curiosity was piqued.

  “Her detail’s in tow,” Everly said. “One of the deputies has been following her as long as I have.”

  “Consistent with the intel,” Sam said.

  “She’s got a VPN router by her computer.” Ian cut across the living room, ducking into a hallway. Maybe he’d have some fun tonight after all.

  “That’s not consistent with intel,” Sam said. “Why the hell would a single mother and waitress in a backward Montana town need to scramble her IP addresses?”

  “A better question,” Everly said, “is how did a woman with a five-year-old get through the grocery store in ten minutes flat?”

  “She’s clearly supernatural.” This from Sam.

  “Clearly,” Ian agreed.

  The front door opened, the living room light turned on, and Ian’s heart kicked. It wasn’t like a woman and a kid posed physical risk, but blowing his cover and exposing the op—his first with the team—before it even began would be disastrous, not to mention embarrassing as hell. His self-esteem didn’t need any extra dings right now.

  “Mom,” the boy said, “can I bring Deputy Corwin cookies?”

  “It’s late, honey, and a storm’s coming.” Savannah moved around the kitchen, putting groceries away. “Time for a bath and bed.”

  “He’s got to be hungry. He’s been out there since I got home from school. He can have the Oreos from my lunch for tomorrow.”

  “Fine,” Savannah sighed. “Then straight into the bath.”

  The front door opened, closed, and silence filled the house once again.

  “Bail out the back, dude,” Sam told him.

  No way. This was just getting fun. “I only need two more minutes.”

  In the boy’s bedroom, Ian attached a listening device to the back of the mirror, then moved through the short hallway toward the mother’s room, pausing to reach for the smoke detector on the ceiling. Positioned at the opening to the living room, the device was in the perfect location to give Ian a view of almost every corner of the tiny house.

  “What in the hell are they doing?” Everly asked over the earbud, now staged outside somewhere.

  “Delivering cookies to the cop,” Ian muttered. “I can’t believe we’re surveilling the fuckin’ cookie fairy.”

  “Don’t start,” Everly warned.

  Ian pulled the cover from the smoke alarm. Only, it wasn’t a smoke alarm. “What the fuck?”

  “What?” both Everly and Sam asked at the same time.

  Ian squinted to get a better look
at what he couldn’t quite believe he was seeing. “Someone else has eyes on her.”

  “No shit,” Sam said. “I’m watching her tail eat Oreos while I turn into an ice cube. They’re heading toward you, bro. Hit the back door.”

  “Watching her from the inside,” Ian clarified as he slipped into the mother’s room. With groceries to put away and a kid to get to bed, her own room would be the last place she’d visit tonight. “There’s a CCTV unit hidden in the smoke detector. Looks like a GSM device.”

  Ian ducked into the shadows of the hallway just as mother and son came through the front door. When Savannah and Jamison returned to the kitchen, Ian slipped into the larger of the two bedrooms.

  “Perfect,” Everly said, her voice edged in sarcasm. “Whoever put it there just recorded you breaking in.”

  “Not necessarily,” Sam said. “It could be activated by movement, but it could also be a dial-in. One that doesn’t record unless the person who put it there dials in to turn it on. That would save battery life. If they aren’t watching right now, they’ll miss him. The fact that someone else has eyes on her only confirms we should too.”

  “Provably the ex, trying to get dirt for the divorce,” Ian murmured.

  “Can we play To the Moon and Back tonight?” Jamison’s bubbly voice came toward Ian, and he pressed his back against the wall as the Bishops made their way into the boy’s room.

  “It’s too cold, baby,” she told him.

  “But we’ve never done it with Deputy Corwin outside.”

  The scrape of dresser drawers came from Jamison’s room, but in Savannah’s room, the soft scent of roses and spice filled Ian’s head. Savannah’s scent. The one she left floating on the air when he’d been in the café for breakfast that morning. The one that kept him focused on her cute little body too long.

  Unlike her son’s room, which had been decorated in a baseball theme, her room was stripped down. No pictures. No head or footboard on the full-size bed. One nightstand and one dresser-mirror combo that looked as old as the house.

  “You comin’ out anytime soon,” Sam asked Ian, “or are you just going to crawl under the bed and sleep there?”

  “Don’t be a creeper,” Everly told Sam.

  The kid continued to ask a million questions without ever waiting for an answer. “Don’t deputies go home? Don’t their families miss them? Why does Dad send them here?”

  “You’ll have to ask him for a change, buddy,” she said, her voice weary. “I don’t know what to tell you anymore.”

  “Please, Mom? Can we play? I promise to be faster than ever, and I’ll take a bath and go right to bed, no bedtime story.”

  “Promises, promises,” she murmured, then sighed and caved. “Fine. I guess we should.”

  The boy whooped, and his footsteps pounded through the house as he ran into the front room.

  “What’s happening?” Sam asked.

  “Bugs in place,” Ian said even as he pulled another one from his pocket and applied it to the back of the alarm clock by Savannah’s bed. Unlike the single unit in the hallway placed by an unknown entity, these bugs would get a clear signal in every room. “Waiting for an exit.”

  When the boy returned to his room, the light went out, drenching the house in darkness again, along with a sudden silence. Ian eased to the open doorway, listening for their conversation, but he couldn’t make out the hushed words. Then creaking underfoot in the hallway sent Ian back into the shadows of the bedroom.

  “Going dark,” he told the team to let them know he couldn’t talk as he stepped into the closet. The space was empty but for three sundresses, one pair of sandals, and one pair of tennis shoes, everything lined up in an oddly precise manner. The woman would shine in basic training.

  She crossed the room and paused at the window. The moonlight illuminated a radio in her hand. “Wait for my signal.”

  “Roger that,” the boy’s voice returned.

  Anticipation tingled along Ian’s spine. What in the hell was this?

  Savannah tucked her radio beneath her chin, snapped the front of her parka, then pulled her hair into a short ponytail. She stood in front of the window on the far side of her bed, head bent as if she were deep in prayer. She was eerily still, and Ian swore a thread of desperation joined the electricity in the air.

  Finally, she pressed her free hand to the window sash and her thumb to the lock. She used the other to speak into the radio. “Pumpernickel!”

  The whisper held such urgency, such raspy seriousness, Ian had to reassess what he’d heard. But Jamison’s laugh trickled in from the other room, confirming his mother had said something completely absurd.

  “This is serious,” she murmured.

  His laughter cut off abruptly.

  Another moment. Another word. “Go!”

  Ian tensed, expecting a flurry of movement, but the kid didn’t laugh. The mother didn’t move.

  “That was good,” she praised the boy. “I thought you’d jump at that.”

  “Nope,” he returned with pride in his voice.

  “Batman.”

  A snicker came from the kid, but ended almost before it began. Followed by the mother’s now-obvious attempt to catch her son in a false start. “Now.” “Daffodil.” “Peanut Butter.”

  Ian rolled his eyes.

  “What’s taking so long?” Sam wanted to know.

  Ian ignored him.

  “Eagle.” “Run.” Savannah continued, all followed by nothing. Then she said, “To the moon and back.”

  “I love you,” the boy answered.

  Savannah pushed against the window lock and lifted the sash with one hand. She dropped the radio into her pocket with the other. Then she was out the window head-first in a tuck and roll that happened so fast, Ian almost missed it. Somewhere else in the house, a thump touched his ears—the kid opening his own window.

  Ian rushed to the opening in time to watch mother and son race off into the darkness of a thickly wooded greenbelt stretching behind the house. He stared at the footprints in the snow reflected in moonlight with his heart hammering and his mind spinning.

  What the fuck? It was three degrees outside and eight o’clock at night. The kid had school in the morning, and Savannah worked the early shift at the local café.

  “Did they just bail?” Sam sounded as shocked as Ian felt.

  “Yeah.” He exhaled and settled. “They’re playing some kind of twisted game.”

  “Are you sure she didn’t make you?” Sam asked.

  Annoyance flared. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “No offense, dude,” Sam added. “Chill.”

  “I don’t think they’re playing a twisted game,” Everly said. “I think they’re practicing their escape.”

  “If Bishop is listening in,” Ian wondered aloud, “why isn’t he monitoring both sides of the house? Why have just one guy out front?”

  “Maybe because it’s so fucking cold out here,” Sam offered, “they know she couldn’t get far without the car, and the car’s out front. If the car’s home, she’s home.”

  “And you can’t see both the front and the back from one vantage point,” Everly said. “He’s already messing with his staff by having someone dedicated to watching her. He can’t afford to have two guys watching her. Come out, Heller. We’re done here.”

  “I’ll meet you at the mining office in ten,” Ian told them.

  “Roger that,” his teammates said in unison.

  But instead of heading straight to his truck and the second of three tactical installment sites of the night including Lyle Bishop’s office at Bishop Mining and Hank Bishop’s office at the sheriff’s department, Ian followed in the Bishops’ footsteps, careful to put his feet right where Savannah had placed hers so he didn’t leave a third trail.

  He’d walked over a quarter of a mile before he heard their voices in the night. Ian leapt over the pristine snow to land behind the thick trunk of a pine tree.

  “That’s three times
in a row,” the boy told his mom as they made their way back to the house. “You’re not letting me win, are you?”

  “Never. You’re getting really fast.”

  “I’m doing the tuck and roll you taught me. It doesn’t even hurt in the snow.”

  “Right?” she said, her voice happy. “It’s fun too.”

  “So fun,” her son agreed. But his voice turned nervous when he asked, “Does Dad think the bad guys who killed Mason will hurt us too?”

  “Who told you Mason was killed by bad guys?”

  “Dad.”

  “Your dad shouldn’t say those things. Is that why you wanted to play To the Moon and Back?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Look, sweetie.” Savannah stopped and crouched, closing her gloved hands around his arms. “What happened to Mason was terrible and sad. But it doesn’t have anything to do with us. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Your dad is just…he’s just…overprotective.”

  The boy nodded, and the two started toward their house again.

  Ian waited until the chunk of the front door closing echoed in the night, and their bedroom windows closed with a snap-snap.

  He trekked through knee-deep snow on his way to the truck, where he’d parked on a side street. He turned on the heat full blast, then knocked his feet against the running board to shake off the snow clinging to his pant legs.

  Once he was thawing out in the truck, Ian replaced his team’s earbud with the one listening in on Savannah’s duplex, and pulled onto the street. The sound of running water and the boy’s laughter filled his ear but did nothing to quell the sense of unease curling in his stomach.

  This certainly wasn’t one of the high-risk, clandestine black-ops missions he’d performed for Uncle Sam, but it might not turn out to be as boring as he’d anticipated either.