by B. J Daniels
“That would certainly make things interesting, wouldn’t it?” she said as she pulled up in front of the sheriff’s department and cut the engine.
Max reached over and squeezed her arm. “I loved your make-out spot, by the way.” It had been the same pinnacle from where he’d gotten lucky with the photographs of the senator and Sarah Hamilton. “But I doubt you and I are going to make it back there.”
She glanced over at him questioningly.
He grinned. “I don’t want our first time to be in the back of a car.” With that he opened his door and got out. When he looked over the hood of the SUV in her direction, she was smiling to herself. He felt his heart go out to her and again wondered who’d hurt her. Maybe one day she’d tell him.
The sheriff was waiting for them in his office. Max closed the door behind them and took one of the chairs offered. Kat took the other.
“You said you have a photo?” Kat gripped her purse in her lap as if it was a life raft and she was lost at sea. Max wished there was some way he could make all of this easier for her. His attraction to her probably wasn’t helping. His timing couldn’t have been worse, given everything else she was going through.
The sheriff pushed a colored snapshot across the table. Kat seemed surprised. Max had to admit, he was, too. Somehow he’d expected to see “Red,” with her red hair and possibly a few assault rifles in the shot. Instead it was an attractive blonde and an older man, both dressed in white lab coats in what appeared to be a hospital or clinic.
“Is that your mother?” the sheriff asked, even though all three of them could see that clearly it was.
Kat nodded. “Who is the man?”
“Dr. Ralph Venable. I understand that your mother was his assistant.”
Kat looked up in surprise. “You mean like a...nurse?”
“Probably not. Dr. Venable was a psychiatrist.”
“This photograph doesn’t look like it was taken in the United States,” Max said.
“It was taken in Brazil.”
“Brazil?” Kat shook her head as she stared again at the photo. “So this was where my mother was all these years? Working at a clinic for a psychiatrist?”
The sheriff nodded. “They’d both been there twenty years. Until recently.”
“When my mother returned. And the man?”
“We don’t know where he is.”
Max felt the sheriff’s gaze on him as he took the photo from Kat and studied it closer.
“Do you recognize the man?” the lawman asked.
“He’s older than in the other photograph, but, yes, he was in the photo we saw of the Prophecy,” Max said. Older than the others, he was the man who had looked like a professor.
Kat looked over at him. “I thought he looked familiar,” she said, her gaze going from him to the sheriff. “This is the proof you need.”
Frank Curry sat back in his chair as he shook his head. “Without the other photograph...all we have is your mother working at a clinic in Brazil with a doctor who used to work at a clinic here in the state.”
Max was quickly stringing the pieces of information together. “This is the man who picked her up that night after her failed suicide attempt.”
The sheriff shook his head, apparently not surprised that he knew about that. “We’re still not sure who picked her up that night, but we suspect he took her to a clinic here in the state where the doctor was working. That clinic closed down just days later, and both the doctor and Sarah Hamilton disappeared. But we have no proof of that either.”
He could see that the sheriff wasn’t comfortable sharing this information with him, a reporter, but he had needed them to confirm that the man in the photo was part of the Prophecy.
“If this makes it any easier on you, I’m not planning to write anything about this until I can verify all of it. By then, I suspect, you’ll have half of the members in jail,” he told the lawman.
“I hope you’re right about the terrorists being in jail soon. Also, I did some checking on you. You have a reputation for reporting facts—not rumors.” The sheriff glanced at Kat and back to Max as if he suspected there were also feelings growing between them. Another reason Max wouldn’t be writing about any of this.
“So we don’t know where this man is or what he is to my mother?” Kat asked.
“No.” The sheriff seemed to study them for a moment. Max hoped that he’d alleviated the man’s fears about talking to them. “Dr. Venable could be responsible for your mother’s memory loss. While in Montana, he was allegedly doing research on brain wiping.”
Max let out a low whistle. This just kept getting better and better. The reporter in him began to salivate. This was going to be one hell of a story—if he ever got to write it.
“Brain wiping?” Kat asked.
The sheriff explained what he’d learned about the process. Max had heard about it and knew that it was possible, but as far as he knew, it hadn’t been used on humans yet.
“The memories can be replaced?” Kat asked.
“Yes,” the sheriff said. “But they can also be replaced with...false ones.”
“What did my mother get herself into?” she lamented. “These people...”
Max sympathized with her, but he had a feeling her mother had been a willing participant in all of it. Hell, this all could have been Sarah’s plan—if it was true that she was the real leader of the terrorist group.
The sheriff got to his feet and reached for the snapshot of Sarah and Dr. Venable. “Thank you both for coming in. I think it’s best if we keep all of this among ourselves.”
“You have to tell my father,” Kat said. “He has to know.”
Nodding, the sheriff said, “All this photograph proves is that your mother worked with a man named Dr. Ralph Venable in a Brazil clinic. If anything, I would imagine your father will be relieved to find out what she was doing those lost years.”
Kat groaned as if she, too, realized how this would play out. It appeared that nothing was now standing in the way of the senator and Sarah getting back together—except for his bid for the presidency.
“Has your father mentioned yet whether or not he plans to continue to run for president?” the sheriff asked Kat.
She shook her head. “He’d planned to announce his decision after the funeral. At least that’s what he told one of my sisters.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“HOW COULD THIS get any worse?” Kat said as they left the sheriff’s office. “This is totally bizarre. What are we going to do?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Max look at his watch. “You’re going to drop me off so I can pick up my truck. Then I am going back to my motel room to shower and change. You are going home and changing into your sexiest dress—”
“I don’t—”
“Have a sexy dress,” he finished for her with a laugh. “Let me retract that and start again. You are going to borrow a dress from one of your sisters that makes you feel sexy. How’s that?”
She swallowed.
“Then I am going to come out to the ranch and pick you up. You and I are going on our first real date.”
Kat started to argue that she was in no mood for this, but he cut her off.
“We are going out to dinner and then we are going dancing.”
“I don’t—”
“Dance.” He laughed. “You do now. My pickup.” He motioned for her to drive as he looked at his watch again. “I’ll pick you up at six. Blue, definitely blue.”
“Blue what?”
“A blue dress. Like that swimsuit you wore in California.” He grinned. “It brings out something in those gray eyes of yours. Makes them shine.”
She swallowed again. The things this man could make her feel with nothing more than a few words. “Fin
e, but I really don’t dance.”
* * *
MAX WENT BACK to his motel and got on his new laptop. Both of his laptops had been stolen, no doubt for his notes. Since he had his own type of shorthand, he doubted whoever had taken them could understand any of it.
Today, the reporter in him had his mind racing. He found the article that had alerted him to the photo of the Prophecy in the first place. The photo was grainy, out of register, which made it look out of focus, and pretty much worthless as far as offering any kind of identification. But he could still make out the older of the men on the right side of the picture.
He quickly scanned the article for the names the group went by. The Prophecy had definitely stylized themselves after the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA had rejected their given names for revolutionary names; so had the Prophecy. The SLA had used a seven-headed cobra as its symbol, while the Prophecy had used a pendulum.
He quickly emailed the story to the sheriff with a note saying,
Here is the story and photograph I found. The photo first ran in this now extinct small free paper and was later sold to a larger paper in LA where it recently disappeared. But you will note that the paper ran the revolutionary names of the members. Your Dr. Venable was called Médico, Portuguese for doctor. Had he done some internship down there before he and Sarah disappeared?
Max sat back after he finished sending the email. His fingers itched to see what he could find on Dr. Ralph Venable, but he knew that the sheriff had already done that and had even better resources than Max did. Still, he wanted to dig. He’d always loved the investigative part of his job more than even the writing.
He reminded himself that this particular story involved a woman he cared about—and he had a date. Shutting the laptop, he headed for the shower. As the water warmed up, he stripped down, thinking about earlier, him and Kat on that hillside with the valley stretched before them. He laughed to himself, surprised at the joy he felt. He’d always loved his job and gotten a lot of pleasure out of it.
Sure he’d dated, but sporadically, since he was never in one spot for very long. It had always been easy to leave those women behind. This one...
Just the thought of her required him to turn the shower to cold as he stepped in. He had to take this slowly. For Kat. For himself. He couldn’t love and leave this one. For Kat’s sake. For his own. This time was different. That alone scared him. If he was serious about her...it would mean his life would change. He wouldn’t want to be gone all the time, let alone risk his life in some country on the other side of the world. He would want to stay closer to home. Closer to her. Was he really ready for a job as a reporter closer to home?
* * *
KAT FOUND THE dress in her sister Livie’s closet. Her siblings had moved out of the condo complex their father had built for them on the ranch, but they’d left behind clothes they either didn’t want or didn’t have room to store where they were now living.
She took the dress from the closet over to the full-length mirror and held it up to mold to her body, curious what this color blue did to her gray eyes.
“Max is full of beans,” she said to the image in the mirror. Then she looked a little closer. “Well, my eyes might be a little bluer than gray.” But she wasn’t even sure of that.
Her heart began to beat a little faster as she slipped on the dress. She and her sisters had all been about the same size when it came to clothes. They’d often worn each others’ over the years growing up—which had caused trouble among them. But right now, Kat was thankful that her sisters all had great taste in clothing.
She took a breath and looked into the mirror. Her hair, usually bound in a knot at the back of her neck, was pulled up in a loose casual way she’d seen Bo do dozens of times. She’d found a pair of silver earrings she’d forgotten she had in her own unit of the complex and borrowed just a dab of her sister Ainsley’s perfume. It was citrusy and light.
Kat had felt a little silly when she’d dug through the makeup Livie had left, but now as she looked in the mirror, she felt a shock ripple through her. She looked...good. Pretty. And that alone scared her. She hadn’t dressed like this in years and she couldn’t help remembering where it had gotten her.
Shoving away that awful image, she thought of Max instead. That seemed to steady her. She could trust him. At the sound of a vehicle, she stepped away from the mirror to look out the window. Max’s old black pickup came up the road and parked out front. Kat took one more look at herself before she slipped her feet into high-heeled shoes.
You’re asking for it dressed like that.
She shuddered at the sound of the sneering male voice in her head, the words coming back to her from that long-ago night. She had the sudden urge to rush into the bathroom, wash off the makeup, get out of these clothes and curl up in a ball.
That’s what he wants you to do.
This voice, though, sounded like Max’s. Kind, loving, sensible Max.
Kat straightened as the doorbell rang. I can do this.
* * *
THE SHERIFF LOOKED again at the photo and called Buckmaster Hamilton.
“If this is about some fool thing my daughter and her reporter friend have come up with...” the senator said, already sounding upset.
“No.” Kat and Max had told him about Buckmaster’s reaction to the information they’d gathered about Sarah and the Prophecy. He wasn’t stupid enough to try to convince the senator of that—especially without something to back it up. The online story Max had sent him was definitely an eye-opener, but the photo was too grainy to be of help. Anyone could argue that the woman looked nothing like the Sarah Hamilton they all knew.
“I have some information that might be of help,” Frank said. “Do you want me to come to you—”
“I’m on my way into town to make arrangements for the service,” the senator said brusquely. “I’ll stop by your office as soon as I get there. But this better not be—”
“I think you’ll be pleased with what I’ve found out.”
Less than twenty minutes later—which meant the senator would have had to break speed laws to get there that quickly—Buckmaster walked in the door.
Frank knew better than to dillydally, given the mood the man was in. He slid the photograph across the table. Buckmaster stepped forward, picked it up and started to say something but stopped. No doubt he’d recognized his wife. In the photo, Sarah looked much like she had twenty-two years ago, making Frank think it was taken soon after she was believed dead, and she and Dr. Venable went to Brazil.
“Where did you get this?” the senator demanded.
“If you would like to sit down, I would be happy to explain.”
With clear reluctance, the big man pulled out a chair.
“There have been some interesting twists and turns when it comes to your former wife,” Frank began. “Actually, it was Russell Murdock who came up with a possible explanation for her loss of memory.”
Buckmaster made a distasteful face but didn’t interrupt.
“There was a doctor in Montana at the time of Sarah’s disappearance.” He was watching the senator’s face closely. “He was experimenting on a technique called brain wiping.”
“Brain wiping.” Buckmaster shook his head in obvious disgust.
“I know it sounds crazy, more like a science-fiction movie, but there are actually studies that the brain can be wiped of memories and then those memories replaced again. Or false memories used to fill those missing ones. The man in that photograph with Sarah was running these experiments at a clinic not far from here right before Sarah disappeared.”
“Have you all gone crazy?” The senator got to his feet, but he didn’t leave. He paced back and forth in front of Frank’s desk. “I have enough on my mind without—”
“A woman matching Sarah’s description showed up
at the clinic in the wee hours of the morning the night she apparently tried to kill herself. That woman knew the doctor. She stayed there only a few days, and then she and the doctor disappeared, the clinic closing. That was twenty-two years ago. That photo in your hands came from a town in Brazil. The doctor and Sarah have been working in a clinic down there for the past twenty years.”
Buckmaster stopped pacing. He glanced at the photo again, before slowly lowering himself into the chair again. “Why wouldn’t Sarah remember this?” he asked, looking up from the photo.
The sheriff shook his head. “I could only speculate.”
“That this doctor you’re saying she knew wiped her memory? Why would he do that? What would either of them want to hide?”
Frank said nothing. He could see the wheels spinning in the senator’s brain.
“You think they were working on this brain wiping down there?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that according to the doctor from Brazil who sent the photo, the two of them had been working there.”
“So where is this doctor?” Buckmaster demanded.
“We don’t know. What we do know is that he was involved with a group called the Prophecy.”
The senator shot to his feet again. “I spoke to Sarah about this. She was never part of this...terrorist group.”
Frank didn’t have to say anything. Buckmaster was a smart man. He could put it all together just as easily as Frank had.
“For some reason these people are trying to set her up,” the senator argued. “And if there was a chance in hell that she was somehow involved with them, then she was indoctrinated by the male members of the group and she only played a minor role. She was just a kid back then. She wouldn’t have known what she was doing.”
Frank could see that that was what Buckmaster needed to believe. “We may never know. But I think there is a reason Sarah came back. Just as there is a reason, I believe, this doctor is on his way back to the States.”
