Mountain Investigation

by Jessica Andersen

  That awareness, though, hung heavy between them.

  Finally, she broke the quiet to ask, “Do you have more pictures?”

  Several times during her hospital stay, he’d brought mug shots of men the FBI thought might be Brisbane, none of which had been a match. Other times, he’d stopped by to see if she needed anything, or to update her on the progress of the investigation. Granted, the latter snippets were undoubtedly doctored to avoid giving away anything to potential listeners, but she still appreciated knowing that her cabin had been released by the crime-scene techs, and that the intelligence community believed that al-Jihad was still out of the country. There had been no word on Lee, though, and the sense of creeping dread that stayed firmly rooted in her stomach made her positive that he was somewhere nearby, watching her.

  She shivered involuntarily when Gray handed her a computer printout bearing a dozen photographs, some candids, some mug shots, all of different men with cold, killer’s eyes. A jolt of icy fear shot through her when she finally saw the man who had played the curious role of keeping her safe from Lee, while holding her prisoner for some other purpose. She touched his photograph. “That’s Brisbane.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Gray nodded as though he’d expected the answer, and took the printout from her, but he didn’t seem pleased about the break in the case.

  “Who is he?” Mariah asked, knowing Gray would only tell her as much as he wanted the terrorists to know.

  “He was a guy we know of but don’t know much about, a ghost who called himself Felix Smith. He’s a midlevel thug we looked at in connection with the Santa Bombings, but didn’t pursue. Apparently, that was a mistake.” But she sensed that more than just the mistake was bothering him.

  “He was a ghost?” Mariah pressed. “As in, he’s not anymore?”

  Gray fixed her with a hard look. “Depends on your definition of ghost. His body turned up in a Dumpster this morning.” He paused. “Al-Jihad doesn’t take failure lightly.”

  “Oh.” A shudder started in her gut and worked its way to her extremities. “Was there…” She faltered, then fell silent.

  “There’s still no sign of your ex.” Though Gray was sitting close to her, he seemed very far away, his expression remote and businesslike.

  Mariah pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to force back an incipient headache. “Is that good news or bad?” Without waiting for him to answer, she continued, “From my perspective it’s bad news. If he was dead, I wouldn’t have to worry about him coming after me for revenge.”

  Gray’s eyes lost their distance as he zeroed in on her. “You think he’d come after you even if al-Jihad didn’t need something from you?”

  “I know he would. Lee took the ‘till death do us part’ thing literally.” She paused. “You’ve seen the letter, right?”

  Several weeks after Lee and the others had been incarcerated, she’d picked up her mail from her post office box and found a large manila envelope addressed to her in block print, along with a badly smudged return address and a Denver postmark. Inside had been another envelope, blank. Inside that had been a three-page letter in her ex-husband’s elegant script, a cutting missive that could be summarized simply as: “When I get out of here, you’re dead. Nobody leaves me.” The Feds had tracked the letter as best they could, but the lead had dead-ended quickly. Somehow, Lee had smuggled it out of the ARX Supermax, and another member of the terrorist network had made sure she got it.

  Gray’s jaw tightened. “Yeah. I’ve seen it. I wondered whether it was part of something else, though. Word is that your ex is more of a follower than an independent thinker.”

  “I didn’t know that side of him,” Mariah said slowly. “The man I married was a golden boy. He was the captain of the football team, class valedictorian, the nice boy my mother always wanted me to meet. He was handsome, charming and persistent, and it seemed to me that he always knew the right thing to say.”

  “He did,” Gray said bluntly. “Someone in al-Jihad’s network studied you and drew up a game plan.”

  “I know.” Lee had said as much to her, jeering from the witness stand. She tangled her fingers together and held on tight as she forced herself to continue, “And I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Pathetic, really.”

  If Gray had tried to soothe her, she would’ve shut down. If he’d tried to tell her she wasn’t pathetic at all when they both knew that she—or at least her actions back then—had been exactly that, she would’ve snapped at him. Instead, he sat in silence, watching her with cool gray eyes that she now suspected hid far more emotion than she’d initially given him credit for.

  She hesitated, torn. Her inner loner said that the details weren’t pertinent to the case, that there was nothing between her and Gray except the investigation. But another, less familiar part of her wanted him to know about her past, wanted him to know her. She wasn’t sure what she was looking to get back from him—absolution, perhaps? Understanding? Or maybe just a moment of feeling as though she weren’t alone in this mess. She, who almost always wanted to be alone.

  “My parents were roadies with a heavy-metal band when they met each other,” she said, still not entirely sure where the words were coming from, or whether telling him was such a good idea. “My mom was an artist—still is—and my dad was taking some time to ‘find himself’ after spending nearly a decade getting an advanced degree in structural engineering. He was burned out, she was looking for something more in life…It was love at first sight, and they married and got pregnant within the year. As soon as I was old enough to travel, they went back out onto the road, sometimes crewing for bands, sometimes working carnivals, sometimes just driving their RV from place to place, picking up work where they could and experiencing life to the fullest.” She paused. “That was what they called it. Experiencing life.”

  “What did you call it?”

  “It was what I knew. I just called it life.” But when he just sat there, looking at her as though he knew that was an evasion, she said, “Okay, maybe I saw the kids who came to the carnivals, how they hung together and knew each other so well, and maybe I wished I could have that.” This time her pause was longer, as old resentments banged up against newer guilt. “Sometimes my parents were so wrapped up in each other, there didn’t seem to be room for me. They knew I wanted to stay in one place for a while and go to a real school rather than being homeschooled, but that wasn’t in their game plan. When they finally did decide to put down roots in Bear Claw, I was applying for college.” She lifted a shoulder. “My dorm room was the first place I’d ever stayed for more than a couple of months.”

  “That must’ve been a big change,” Gray said.

  His comment reminded her of something she’d noticed about him before, back during the first two investigations. He didn’t ask questions as much as prompt with comments, and then let the silence hang between them until the other person filled the airspace. Before, the tactic had grated on her, making her feel as though he considered himself the maestro, that he had only to gesture and his suspect would tell all. Now, though, it felt different, more personal, as though he wanted to hear her life story. And yeah, he probably did. But was that because he hoped it would give him some new insight into Lee, or because he was interested in her for her own sake? Did he feel the faint hum in the air, the faint tingle of warmth that zinged from him to her and back again?

  “You don’t want to hear this,” she said, going for practical rather than coy. “It has nothing to do with the case.”

  He tipped his head slightly. “Like it or not, you’re part of the case, which makes everything about you relevant. Besides, we’re still trying to figure out what Lee and al-Jihad want from you. Any small detail could help.”

  “I can’t imagine you’ll learn much hearing about my years of college angst.”

  “You never know.” His voice and expression were impassive, giving away nothing.

  From nowhere,
sudden frustration bubbled through Mariah. Or maybe it didn’t come out of the blue, she realized after a moment of surprise. On some level the irritation had been humming beneath the surface for longer than she’d known, even before Lee had breached the defensive electronic wall around her cabin and taken her hostage. In the months leading up to that, as she’d slowly come awake from the shock of the disaster her life had become, she’d found a kernel of angry impatience growing inside her.

  Propelled by that hot irritation, she sat up and faced Gray in her hospital bed, leaning toward him in an effort to make her point, and maybe to see if she could find a crack or two in that cool façade.

  “Then what, exactly, do you want to hear?” Her voice rose beyond the sick-sounding whisper she’d been affecting as part of her hospital-bound role, but she didn’t care. She’d been lying there, waiting, for nearly two full days; surely Lee would’ve come for her by now if he were planning on taking her from the hospital. For all they knew, he’d left the country, slipping the noose once again.

  That fear, and the knowledge that she wouldn’t be safe as long as he was on the loose, sharpened her voice further as she said, “Okay, then. What part of my college angst do you want to hear about? Do you want to know how hard it was to finally be in a position to hang with a group of friends, and realize I didn’t want to, that I didn’t fit in with the uncool kids, never mind the cool ones? Or maybe how the only way I could really be a part of things was by hiding behind my camera, using it as an excuse to talk to people who forgot me the moment the frame was shot? Oh, wait. I bet you want to know that the reason I moved to New York after I graduated was because I hoped I’d fit in better with an artsy crowd. And how when I got there, when I got my dream job as the lowest of the low in a fashion photog’s shop, that was when I got to be a part of the cool crowd. That was when I got invited to the clubs, and partied until dawn without the damn camera in my hands.”

  Gray leaned in and touched one of her hands, where she’d balled it into a fist. “Mariah—”

  “I’m not done,” she snapped, barreling over him. “Because you probably want to hear about how I met Lee, not in one of those clubs, but in a coffee shop near my apartment. I was sitting at a sidewalk table reading a travel book about Paris—a girl can dream, right?—when someone reaches past me, taps the page I’m on, and a man’s voice says, ‘I’ve been there. It’s the most beautiful place on earth.’ The next thing I know, this absolutely gorgeous guy sits down opposite me and starts telling me about his trip to Paris. Only he doesn’t just tell me about himself, he asks me questions, too, and he listens as if he really cared about the answers, like he’s really into me.”

  She thumped herself on the chest with one hand, barely registering that the other had somehow become tangled with Gray’s, that he’d turned to face her so they were practically knee-to-knee, nose-to-nose.

  He drew breath to say something, but she beat him to it, knowing what he was undoubtedly going to remind her. “Of course, I know it was a setup. I didn’t back then, though. Back then, I thought it was love at first sight, just like it’d been for my parents.” She stared down at her hands, unconsciously tightening her grip on Gray’s fingers. “I may not have wanted the childhood I got, but I wanted what they had. I wanted that connection, the sort of landslide love that swept away everything else and made the rest of the world less important than what the two of them had together.” Her voice broke on tears she hadn’t even realized were threatening. “I thought I’d found it with Lee. He made me believe in him, in us, but it wasn’t real. Everything I thought and felt was a lie. Worse, I was so blind, so stupid, that I didn’t see him for what he was. You’ve got to believe me,” she said urgently, leaning in closer. “I didn’t know. I didn’t suspect. If I did, I swear I would’ve done something before those bombs went off.”

  And for the first time since three days after the Santa Bombings, when dark-suited men and women had appeared on her doorstep with a search-and-seizure warrant and had asked her to come with them, she thought there might be a chance that the person she was speaking to might finally believe her. She’d lived so long under a cloud of suspicion and self-recrimination that she’d thought she’d never find her way out. But somehow, in that moment, she saw a glimmer of hope, a small clear spot in the dark fog. At its center was a pair of cool eyes.

  Gray’s face was very close to hers, making her aware of small details she’d been oblivious to before. Fine creases ran from the corners of his mouth and eyes, suggesting that he’d once smiled far more than he seemed to now. The touches of silver at his temples made him seem older than his years; she guessed he was in his late thirties. He projected a tough, battle-ready demeanor, but in his eyes, she thought she saw another man—not the soldier or the special agent, but a younger, softer version of both.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Mariah,” he said, gripping both her hands now, as though trying to make her believe.

  For a moment she thought he was talking about whatever had happened to make him the cool, cynical character whose façade he presented to the world. Then, realizing he was talking about Lee, she blushed slightly. Inside her, a coil of uncertainty loosened, even as something else drew tighter. “I lived with him. I was married to him.” He was my first and only lover, she thought, but didn’t say that because that was the one thing she’d never shared with another human being, aside from her ex.

  Since Lee hadn’t mentioned that fact, either to sneer about it in the courtroom or gloat over it in his letter, she prayed he’d forgotten that detail as inconsequential. But knowing him—or rather knowing the man he’d turned out to be, she feared that he was saving that information for the moment when it would inflict the maximum amount of pain. That was the sort of man he was.

  She didn’t tell Gray any of that, though. Not because he was a Fed, but because he was holding her hands as though he could keep her safe through that simple contact, and because he was looking at her with a new heat in his eyes, one that sparked something deep inside her, something she thought had died the day she’d learned that Lee had been lying to her from the first moment they’d met.

  “He never loved me,” she said matter-of-factly, having come to terms with that. “And he’d never been to Paris.” It wasn’t the most important thing, but it seemed to encapsulate their entire relationship. The first words he’d ever said to her had been a well-researched lie.

  Gray’s lips twitched. “Bastard.”

  And though she knew full well that the agent’s main purpose in life was bringing down people like Lee, she liked that Gray played along with her in that moment. Incredibly, impossibly, she began to laugh—a deep, belly laugh, tinged with hysteria. Within moments, though, the laughter threatened to turn to sobs as everything started pressing in on her.

  It was all too much—the guilt she’d lived with for too long, the fear of captivity, the complications that had arisen in the wake of her escape…once again she was trapped in a life she didn’t want, one that kept her from feeling safe and at ease in her own skin.

  Face burning from the embarrassment of Gray—of anyone—seeing her on the verge of losing it, she tried to pull away from him. “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to give me a moment here.”

  He didn’t leave, though, and he didn’t let her withdraw. Instead, he held on to her hands, squeezing tight in support. “Don’t beat yourself up,” he said. “You didn’t ask for any of this.”

  Tears filming her vision, she shook her head. “But I didn’t do anything to stop it.”

  “You are now.”

  She blinked, surprised at the intensity in his eyes, and at the warm rush that surged through her at his words, a knife-edge combination of fear and unexpected heat. “I’m scared,” she said, the words coming out very small and thin, and shaming her with the weakness they revealed.

  “You’d be an idiot not to be.” He surprised her, both with the low fervency of his words and by what he did next.

  He dropped his he
ad forward so his brow rested on hers. She’d never before thought of him as a man who needed to lean, but in that moment, she felt as though they were propping each other up.

  “Gray?” she said, the single word a question that encompassed all the thoughts suddenly jammed inside her head. What’s going on? she wanted to ask, Do you feel it, too? But she didn’t have the guts, had never had the guts to do what mattered.

  “I’ll protect you,” he said, the three words punching through her in a heartfelt vow, because she instinctively knew he wasn’t just promising to protect a witness, or potential asset. He was promising to protect her.

  “I know you will,” she said, trying not to make more of this than it really was. He was tired; they both were. The situation had thrown them together, and it had broken down barriers that perhaps would’ve been better left in place. Trying to resurrect some of those barriers, she said, “Because it’s your job.”

  “And because of this,” he replied. Then he tipped his face up, and touched his lips to hers.

  Chapter Five