Carry Me Home (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  “Then,” Zoe said, taking her hand out of Cal’s, wrapping her hands together on the table, “can’t you trace that, through florists?”

  “Not that kind of flowers, unfortunately,” Jim said. “Grocery-store flowers. Cheap-ass flowers.”

  “Still,” Zoe insisted.

  “Not a cash sale three weeks ago,” Jim said. “We’ll check it out, but he wouldn’t have used his loyalty card. It’s another piece, though. We get enough pieces, we’ve got the whole puzzle.”

  “He didn’t send me flowers,” Zoe said.

  “No. He doesn’t do that until later,” Jim told her. “He stalks them first. Then he does the flowers so they’ll be there in the house, like he brought them. Like a date. He probably didn’t mean to attack you that night in the car, because that’s not how he does it, and it’s all about how he does it. It’s all about the pattern. He was doing his thing, but you ran off the road. And then he went to your house to check it out, right? That looks like the MO. Exactly.”

  “Air Force,” Cal said slowly, clearly having been thinking about something else. “Iraq. North Idaho, Spokane. Fairchild.”

  “Fairchild?” Zoe asked.

  “Fairchild Air Force Base,” Cal explained. “It’s in Spokane. Somebody who was in the Air Force until . . . when?”

  “Two years ago,” Jim said. “For the first one in Spokane. And that’s when the Iraq ones stopped, which is pretty indicative.”

  “So now we’re looking for, what?” Cal said. “Somebody who was in the Air Force in Iraq up until two years ago. Who was stationed at Fairchild after that.”

  “You’re not looking for anything,” Jim said. “We’re looking.”

  “Would he have to have been stationed at Fairchild?” Zoe asked, ignoring that. “Couldn’t he just be from around here? Because isn’t Coeur d’Alene in Idaho? And obviously, we’re in Idaho now.”

  The guys looked at each other. “Well, yeah,” Jim said. “Obviously.”

  “Nobody has a description?” Cal asked.

  “Not much of one,” Jim said. “Only the relevant piece. He stayed dressed, and he kept it in the dark. Used a flashlight, shone it in their eyes, blinded them. But they all said he was strong. They all said he flipped them hard and fast.”

  Zoe shuddered again.

  “Sorry,” Jim said.

  “No,” she said. “I need to know. But how would he be on campus here? I mean, over and over? First Amy, and now me, and it’s been weeks since it started? Doesn’t he have to be here now? At least able to come here? Can you spend a lot of time someplace else if you’re in the military?”

  “No,” Jim answered. “But if you’re ex-military, you can.”

  “Something,” Cal said slowly. “Something I noticed. This six-foot guy, Air Force, Spokane or Fairchild connection, with the black Ford F-150, who’d have been beat some with a baseball bat on Halloween. That would still have hurt a few days later, even if Amy didn’t crack any ribs. That kind of bruising doesn’t fade very fast. I ought to know. Left arm, back, right?”

  “Right,” Jim said. “What are you thinking?”

  “About a week after Amy was attacked,” Cal said, “I was in the high school gym, and Greg came in. Did some lifting. And he was uncomfortable. I thought at the time he was just putting too much on the bar to impress me, dickhead move, you know. But what if . . .”

  “Ford F-150,” Jim agreed. “That’s his rig. Physical description matches.”

  “Air Force,” Cal said.

  “Wait, what?” Zoe demanded. “You mean the cop? Your cousin?”

  “Yeah,” Cal said. “He was an MP.”

  “Security Forces, technically,” Jim put in. “He wasn’t ever at Fairchild, though. He was working up at Washington U outside of Spokane for a year before he came on back down here, because it’s where he’s from. He got hired by the university police about a year ago.”

  “But the other thing, the thing last year,” Zoe objected, “wasn’t here. It was north of here.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Jim said. “You move someplace, got an MO going, and immediately start some action in your own backyard? Way to point the arrow right at you. Nope. You’d decoy away. You’re in Spokane, you do it in North Idaho, at the college there. You move down here, you do it up in Spokane. But my guess is, eventually, it’s just too tempting. And you start needing it more. I’ll have to check, but I think that’s how it works.” He caught himself. “But this is all speculation. He’s our cousin, and he’s a cop, and this is nothing but coincidence.”

  “Whole hell of a lot of coincidence,” Cal said. “He’s got an anger problem, we both know it, and according to my mom, they’re not too sure about what’s happening at home. Looking way too coincidental to me.”

  “All right,” Jim said, shoving back from the table. “I’m way out of my league here, criminally speaking. This is one for the sheriff. And we’re in multiple jurisdictions, fellow officer . . . and I shouldn’t be talking to you at all. This has to head right on up to the sheriff.”

  “Today?” Zoe insisted.

  “Today,” he promised. “Nobody’s taking this lightly, believe me.”

  “You need me to call,” Cal said, “I’ll call.”

  “I don’t need you to call. I need you to stay right on out of it. We’re talking about one possible suspect, based on pure coincidence, out of hundreds of possibilities. And don’t get thinking you’re going to investigate by yourselves, go confronting anybody. This guy’s real dangerous. You poke him, you’re going to get bit. Or Zoe’s going to get bit. You just focus on looking out for her. And you,” he told Zoe, “you focus on being careful, and letting Cal look out for you. Nobody’s going to give you police protection, not for somebody following too close on the highway, whatever kind of pattern you might or might not fall into. Your best bet is being careful, and Cal.”

  He stood up, grabbed his hat from the table, and put it on. “You got a plan?” he asked Cal.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a plan. Same one I’ve had all along. Basically, stick with her. Me and Junior.”

  “Not a bad plan,” Jim said. “Guys like this? They don’t want to take on other guys.” He gathered his reports, tapped them together, and turned to go, then turned back. “I mean it,” he warned. “Look out for her, and that’s exactly where it stops. We’ll do the rest.”

  VOLCANIC ACTIVITY

  Two weeks later, Cal was watching for the moment when Zoe recognized him.

  She’d walked briskly into her rock lab a few minutes before two, had begun setting up for her lecture before she registered his presence at the back of the class, together with the buzz of excitement, the turned heads, the whispering. He raised his eyebrows at her, saw her intake of breath, then her shoulders straightening before she moved smoothly on with her preparations.

  He smiled a little. That was how it was going to be, was it? She was taking his visit as a challenge? That was interesting.

  He’d just wanted to see her teach. Or, let’s face it, he’d just wanted to see her. It seemed that being at her house, or having her at his, every night for the past couple of weeks wasn’t quite enough.

  For protection, of course. That was why he had to be there.

  The clock ticked over to two, and she clicked the mouse on her laptop. An image of a steaming mountain filled the screen behind her, and the class quieted.

  “Happy Monday,” she said. “You may have noticed that we have a special guest today. Hello, Cal. Glad you could join us.”

  “Glad to be here,” he said.

  “And for any of you who have found Geology 101 extra fascinating thus far,” she said, “and are thinking about your major, this would be a good opportunity to point out that Cal’s done a few things to make sure that our science and engineering classes are even better in the future. I could give you som
e more incentive, starting with the fact that physical science and engineering degrees are some of the most sought-after by employers, and among the most lucrative career paths you can take.”

  “Except for football,” a short kid near Cal threw out. Clearly the joker in the pack.

  “Cal could probably give you a breakdown on the probability of success in that career, too,” Zoe said. “If you want to have that chat. He’s an engineer himself, which means he knows a bit about probability.”

  She raised her eyebrows right back at Cal, and he grinned at her, leaned back in his chair, stretched his long legs out in front of him, and prepared to be the badass in the back row.

  “All right,” she said crisply, “let’s get to it. As I’m sure you all know from doing the reading”—she looked around, caught a few eyes—“we’re continuing our exploration of seismicity today with a look at volcanoes.” She clicked on her laptop, and a video began. The familiar dramatic eruption, lava and smoke shooting high in the air.

  “Explosions are always fun to watch,” she said. “Hollywood knows that, and so do the rest of us. But what’s actually going on here?”

  For the next thirty minutes, Cal watched as she held them. Walking, talking, clicking, moving smoothly from one subject to the next. Turning it into a story.

  “Let’s look now,” she said at last, “at a stratovolcano, the kind you’d see around here. We watched Mount St. Helens erupting at the beginning of class. What caused that to happen?” She moved to the white board, picked up a marker. “I could show you a nice slide of this,” she told them. “And you could look at the diagram again in your textbook and call it good. Because, yes, this will be on the test.” She paused for the laugh, her timing as good as any comedian’s. “But I’m not going to do that, because here’s another study tip from me, absolutely free of charge. Some of you may have heard this already, the ones who’ve been to all my scintillating lectures. But for those of you who may be hearing it for the first time . . .” Another pause, another laugh. “I’ll tell you again. You retain a whole lot more when you write it down.”

  Her glance swept the room, catching the unlucky souls who weren’t taking notes, and there was some scrambling.

  “So,” she said, “assuming that you’d like to be able to reproduce this next artistic effort on demand in, oh, about three weeks, you may want to follow along here.”

  She began to sketch the familiar cone shape. And all right, maybe he wasn’t watching as carefully as he could have been. Maybe he was distracted, as he had been the whole time, by her white blouse and knit skirt, which she was wearing with sassy black tights and little boots. Fortunately, not her cowboy boots, because then he’d have been in real trouble.

  “Here’s your stratovolcano,” she was saying as she drew. She labeled it at the top of the sketch. “I’ll draw in some features, and you all just shout it out. Go ahead and feel free.” She drew a long conduit down below the cone, a broad pool far beneath the surface. “So what do I label this?”

  “Magma chamber.” That was Amy, sitting in the second row, sounding proud.

  “Good.” Zoe wrote it in, drew a horizontal line above it. “And in what region of the earth is that magma chamber sitting? Come on now, sing out. I know you all know it.”

  “Deep crust,” Cal heard from more than one mouth.

  She went on, bringing them right along with her until she had a fully detailed sketch up there and, Cal was pretty sure, etched in everybody’s notebook and brain as well.

  “And there, boys and girls,” she said, stepping back with a satisfied smile, “is your annotated diagram of a stratovolcano. I’m erasing it,” she added, suiting the action to the words, “because I know you’ve all got it, and because we’re moving on to Hawaii now, and our shield volcanoes. So flip a page, and away we go.”

  When she finished, Cal sat and waited until the last student had left the room, then untwisted himself—damn, these desks were cramped—and sauntered up to where Zoe was packing up, still not acknowledging him.

  “So,” he said, “that a pretty good example?”

  “Of what?” she asked, looking up at last and giving him a cool smile.

  “Of your teaching technique. I might actually have retained something if anybody had lectured at me like that. And here I thought,” he sighed, “that I was doing you some big favor getting you on that committee. Joke’s on me.”

  “Oh,” she said, zipping up her laptop case again, “I suspect you retained a little bit. And I figured you might be here checking me out for the committee, making sure you hadn’t embarrassed yourself.”

  “Checking you out, maybe,” he said, “but not for the committee. Though I do have to say—color me impressed, Professor. Good to see you in your natural habitat. You got another class right now?”

  “No, I’m done for the day. With classes, that is. Got some more work to do, of course.”

  “Uh-huh.” He scratched his cheek. “In your office?”

  “Well, yes. Of course.”

  “Going to show me that?”

  “You’ve seen it.” She looked a little rattled, and he smiled again, slow and lazy, because he knew that worked on her.

  “You know,” he told her, “I kinda want to see it again. I was thinking, watching you up there, about these real bad thoughts I used to have about my French teacher in high school.” He sighed. “Flirty little skirt, flirty little voice, pretty little mouth? Oh, man. I didn’t learn too much French.”

  “And you want me to go back to my office with you and pretend to be your French teacher? Somebody you had a crush on? Somebody else?” Her innocent round eyes had narrowed at him, but her dimples were peeping out all the same, because she was fighting a smile. “My, how flattering. Why does this not sound like it’s going to be my most cherished moment?”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” he said, “I plan to do some real good cherishing. And I’m not going to be asking you to pretend to be anybody. I’m going to have my eyes wide open the whole time. I’m going to know that every inch of you is . . . you. And I’m hoping to get you familiar with every inch of me.”

  FANTASYLAND

  He was kidding. He had to be kidding. Having sex in her office was some dirty-movie cliché, not something real people actually did. Wasn’t it?

  “Then,” she said, keeping it cool, “if you’ve got all that planned, I guess we’d better go someplace where I can lock the door.”

  The smile was all the way there in his blue eyes, although his mouth stayed serious. “Now, see, Professor,” he said, “this is why I’m so crazy about you. It’s that logical brain of yours.”

  “Oh, is that it?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s one of the factors.”

  He walked sedately down two flights of stairs with her, then along the hallway, and she did her level best to calm the excitement heating her blood, the spark that had started low in her belly and moved even lower, buzzing her so hard it was almost unbearable.

  She shifted her bag, opened the office door, and he stepped through behind her, slammed the door, and punched the lock. She swallowed, but walked on over to her desk, set her bag on the floor beside it, then stood back and looked at him.

  “So,” she said, “where does this deal start?”

  He dropped into her guest chair, and she relaxed a little. Or felt disappointed a little. One or the other.

  “You know,” he said, “for somebody who says she wants a take-charge guy, you sure do like to set the tone. Is this my fantasy or yours?”

  “Hey. I just asked.”

  “Yep. You sure did. How about this? How about if you just relax? Figure you don’t have to ask, because I’m going to tell you. If you want to let go of the reins for a little while here, I’m pretty sure I can do the driving.”

  “I could do that,” she said, trying to look unconcerned and, she was pret
ty sure, failing miserably. “Since it’s your fantasy and all.”

  “Now, that’s real good news.” He looked her over. “Fantasies always have these technical difficulties, though. I think you’d better take off those cute little boots. The tights, too. They’re going to be in my way.”

  “I’ve got underwear on, too,” she said.

  He sighed. “Here you go, driving again. Don’t you worry about that. I can take care of your underwear. You just do what I said.”

  That tingle had set up full residence now, even as she wanted to laugh. She stared right back at him, tossed her hair a little, and pulled the boots off, then shimmied the tights down her legs and threw everything into the corner with her bag, like that had been her plan all along.

  “Now, that’s what I call fantasy material,” he said, standing up and coming around the desk.

  “What, me in a white blouse and a skirt?”

  “Yep,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders . . . and not kissing her. Turning her so her back was to him, then setting those hard hands on her hips, pulling her back into him, doing a little grinding. And it felt so good.

  “Standing up at that board,” he said, shoving her hair back with one hand to kiss her neck, making her shiver and shift, drawing a gasp and a moan from her. “That fine little ass of yours talking to me.”

  His other hand had a button undone on her blouse, because he was coordinated. Another one, and his hand was inside, stroking over her, his lips still moving on the side of her neck, biting her nape, moving around to catch an earlobe between his teeth. “Thought I saw some lace in here,” he murmured in her ear. “When I was trying to see through your blouse, thinking about what a bad boy like me would do to a sexy little professor once he got up behind her and felt that lace for himself.”

  His hand was inside her bra, had slipped right in there as he talked, and she was arching her back, because his fingers had captured the nipple between them, his thumb was brushing over it, and his lips were still there, tormenting her.