Military Man

by Marie Ferrarella

He realized that Emmett was rising from the table. Digging into his pocket, his cousin tossed a ten down on the table beside his cup. He slipped his wallet back into his pocket. “That should cover it.”

  The prices here were more than reasonable, even for a hotel restaurant. “You just had coffee,” Collin pointed out.

  “So?” A half smile graced his lips. “The rest can be a tip.” He glanced to the rear of the small restaurant. Their waitress was leaning back against the counter. He read her body language. “Waitress looks like she could do with a little bit of luck thrown her way.”

  Collin shook his head. “Just when I think you’re locked in your own little world…” He let his voice trail off.

  Emmett took a packet of sugar and slipped it into his pocket to use later. He liked his coffee sweet and black. Sometimes there weren’t enough packets to satisfy his craving.

  “Just because I don’t comment on them doesn’t mean I don’t notice things around me. Well, I’ve got FBI agents to badger and irritate the hell out of. Never realized what a tight-assed bunch they were.”

  “I guess you didn’t take a mirror with you while you were up in those mountains.” Collin never cracked a smile.

  Emmett spared him a dark look. “Talk to you tonight.” Not waiting for a response, he walked out of the restaurant.

  Pushing away his empty plate, Collin drained his second cup of coffee and put a twenty on top of Emmett’s ten. He didn’t have time for the waitress to write up the check. He had a few things to get to before he met with Lucy.

  The thought of the latter made his blood move just a tad faster through his veins.

  He pretended not to notice.

  It took Collin a little less than an hour to reach his ultimate destination after he’d picked Lucy up at the medical examiner’s. For the most part, the road leading from the jail where Jason had been kept to the maximum security prison was one that echoed of loneliness. Being on it made a man think of all the wrong turns his life had taken.

  He wondered if any of these thoughts had occurred to Jason, or if he’d felt that he was just a victim of a fate that dealt in cruelty. That none of what had befallen him was his fault or a result of something he’d done.

  By the time he reached the place where the van had gone off the side of the road, the winter sun was waning in the sky. Parking his vehicle, he got out.

  “You can stay in the car,” he told Lucy. “It’s warmer.”

  She looked at him and he could almost read her mind. There was no way she was just going to sit here, twiddling her thumbs. “Moving around will warm me up.”

  Lucy got out with a bounce that had long since been missing in his step.

  Shutting the door, she didn’t bother locking it. She looked down at the skid marks the transport van had left.

  “What do you think made it go off the side of the road like that?”

  Since there were no signs of a dead animal in the road and no one to tell them, Collin was left to theories that might never be proven.

  “Off the top of my head, I’d say a driver with a knife to his throat might not be the safest thing to have behind the wheel.”

  He moved around slowly, taking in the area. Here and there, there were still some patches of ice that hadn’t completely melted. They crunched with protesting groans beneath his feet as he marked off where the vehicle had gone off the road. He tried to envision what had happened here.

  The van had long since been taken away. Not so the skid marks where the tires had dug into the road as the van had gone careening off the main highway, into the ditch. The tire marks were going to be there for a long, long time.

  Lucy followed Collin for a little while in silence. Finally she asked, “What is it you’re looking for?”

  He didn’t bother to turn around. He was too busy examining the ground, the tiny shoots pushing their way up. Had they been here when the vehicle had crashed, he might have had something to go on.

  “I don’t know yet,” he told her honestly. “Something,” he murmured more to himself than to her. When he’d stopped at the morgue, he’d tried to talk her out of coming with him. But she’d been stubborn. As he’d known she would be.

  He was looking for a lead. Anything. Something more than he’d gotten from the people he’d interviewed. He’d been so desperate he’d even run down the charitable organizations that Melissa Wilkes had joined in the last year. The people who ran the charities had nothing much to offer, except that it was becoming increasingly clear that Melissa had joined the organizations for the sole purpose of getting on Ryan’s good side. Hoping to impress him.

  Hoping to steal him from his wife.

  That, Collin surmised, had brought about her demise more than anything. Jason wouldn’t have looked kindly on having her flirt with the very man he was trying to bring down.

  It had snowed shortly after the escape. The layers of ice had blocked things away from view. But the thaw had finally come. March had brought with it unusually warmer weather. It was by no means balmy, but for March, it was warm. Warm enough to melt the ice and to release whatever it might have been hiding.

  The patch of weeds looked disturbed on one side. Collin squatted to get a closer look. The patch had been bent from the heel of a shoe. The snow that had fallen had preserved it.

  “I think he might have gone this way at first,” Collin offered.

  It made sense. He’d head for the cover of trees himself to get out of sight. Into the brush. But where would Jason have stayed? It snowed within hours of the escape. Would he have tried to get back into town for shelter? Or had there been a halfway point for him, secluded in its earthiness?

  Watching the ground carefully, he found several more disturbances. Tracks hidden by the snow, but now exposed to the light.

  Lucy kept out of his way, shadowing his movements. “It’s like watching Daniel Boone at work,” she commented softly.

  He didn’t know if she meant for him to hear that. “Don’t you mean Davy Crockett?” The native of Tennessee was the more popular figure of the two.

  “No, Daniel Boone,” she repeated. “I came down with some kind of rare infection one summer when I was eleven while both my parents were stationed just outside of Rome. My father got me all these books to read. Read Daniel Boone’s life story twice.”

  He couldn’t help wondering what she was like then. That she liked to read pointed to someone who had difficulty reaching out. “Most kids would have watched TV.”

  “I read.”

  Collin was studying the ground around him intently. Looking up, Lucy shaded her eyes and surveyed the surrounding area. Her eyes narrowed and she tapped Collin on the shoulder.

  He raised his head to look at her. “What?”

  Rather than answer, she pointed in front of them. Into the heart of the forest.

  There was a cave up ahead.

  Ten

  “Damn it, he was here. How could they have missed it?” Collin fumed, shoving his fisted hands deep into his pockets.

  It was the first time she’d seen Collin get angry. It wasn’t exactly a heartwarming sight and it took Lucy aback for a moment. The Army Ranger’s rugged face looked like a thunderstorm about to wreak havoc on the innocent countryside.

  She could see him struggling to hold on to his temper. She couldn’t help wondering how much more fearsome he could be if he let himself go.

  Though she secretly didn’t welcome the venture, they had gone into the cave once they reached it. Within fifty feet of the mouth, there was evidence that someone had been here.

  Squatting, Collin picked up a stick and slowly poked around in the ashes of what had once been a small campfire. The fire had long since been put out and grown cold. Discarded cans of food, their pop-tops not completely pulled off, lay strewn around beside empty plastic bottles that had once held water.

  Standing over him, silently telling herself to breathe normally, Lucy unclenched her hands at her sides. To take her mind off her situation, she tried
to second guess the thinking of the investigators who had been in the area before them.

  “Maybe because this led into the forest and they assumed that, like any criminal, he was trying to put as much distance between himself and the police as possible, not holding up somewhere close by.”

  There was a comforter not too far from the campfire. She toed it, gingerly checking if there was anything left beneath.

  There wasn’t.

  “According to the report,” she recalled, “there were indications that he’d gone away from Red Rock, toward San Antonio. Going through the stream to lose his tracks.” It seemed like a logical assumption to her.

  Lucy looked around the inhospitable area. It was the last place she would have wanted to spend any time in the winter. She looked into the belly of the cave. It seemed to go on for at least a mile. Lucy stifled a shiver. No amount of money could have gotten her in any farther. Here, at least, there was light coming in. It looked pitch-black in there.

  A thought occurred to her. “You know,” she said suddenly, “until one of those cans or bottles are matched for prints, we’re really not sure if he was even here. Maybe we’ve wandered in on the secret stash of some homeless man, or even a hermit, like your cousin was for a while.”

  Still squatting, Collin was staring at the cans. He shook his head. “No, it was Jason.”

  The way he said it, there was no room for debate. She glanced toward the cave entrance again, as if to assure herself that it was still there, still available to run through.

  She was having trouble dragging air into her lungs. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I know the way Jason thinks. Staying around here, near Red Rock, near Ryan’s Double Crown Ranch, would be exactly what he would do.” Using a corner of the comforter, he held up one of the cans for her perusal. “Besides, this is the way he always opened cans, even when he used a can opener. He never quite finished the job. He was always too impatient to get at what was inside. It’s the way he lives his life. Impatiently.”

  It felt as if there was some kind of buzzing in her ears, winking sounds in and out. She was going to have to get out of here soon. Lucy struggled to look calm, if not actually feel calm.

  “How well do you know him?” she asked. She had cousins somewhere. Two boys and a girl from her father’s side of the family. Other than a few photographs taken at someone’s birthday party when she was five, she had nothing to remember them by. She hadn’t seen them since and wouldn’t know any of them if she tripped over them. She and her parents had moved around far too much to promote any kind of family bond.

  “Well enough when we were kids,” Collin told her. But there was more at work here than that. “I know his type.”

  Now he was speaking professionally. “Part of your profiling abilities,” she guessed.

  He gave a vague nod of his head. It went along with his unwillingness to talk about what he did or didn’t do. What paths he took and those he refrained from taking. Even so, he had to admit that he’d found himself far more talkative with Lucy than he’d been with anyone for a very long time. The last person he’d had this kind of a rapport with had been his father.

  Collin thought about August Jamison now. Maybe it was time to give him a call.

  He glanced over his shoulder in Lucy’s direction. She’d edged over a little closer to the mouth of the cave. Funny how being with this woman made him think about things like home and hearth. Things he wouldn’t normally have given a second thought to, or even a first for that matter. He’d stopped even noticing things domestic since he’d attended Paula’s wedding.

  Lucy seemed to bring out a side of him that had been in the shadows so long, he was certain it didn’t exist anymore.

  The thought surprised him. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling like a man. Wasn’t accustomed to feeling like anything at all, except an Army Ranger.

  Which was what he was, he reminded himself. And what he was doing here. Gathering intelligence to be sifted through later.

  “Stay here,” he told her in a low voice.

  Long, thin nails of panic scratched at her throat. “Where are you going?”

  He motioned toward the belly of the cave. Toward the darkness. “To make sure he isn’t still hiding in there, watching us.”

  The time she stood there, waiting for Collin to emerge, straining to hear any telltale sounds of danger, seemed endless. Her eyes strained so hard, watching the darkness, she thought they were going to pop out of her head.

  But finally he returned, slowly shaking his head. Jason wasn’t here any longer.

  Lucy began to turn on her heel, only to notice that he’d stopped by the campsite to pick something up. Trying to get her mind off the fact that the walls of the cave seemed to be narrowing, Lucy watched Collin as he took one of the empty bottles and carefully put it in a bag he pulled out of the deep pockets of his creased leather jacket.

  When he rose to his feet, she looked at him curiously. Why just one? The area was littered with bottles and cans. “Aren’t you going to take the rest of it in?”

  “No, I’m leaving everything else just the way we found it, in case he comes back,” he explained. “There’s bound to be some backwash inside the bottle. That’ll give us his DNA even if there are no prints on the bottle—which there probably are.” Taking out his cell phone, he flipped it open. He needed to get in touch with Emmett. But as he began to press the first key, he frowned.

  There was no signal.

  He needed to get out in the open again. “C’mon.” He waved her on. “Let’s go outside again.”

  “Can’t be fast enough for me,” she murmured.

  He’d noticed that she’d hesitated at the mouth of the cave just before they’d gone in. But when he’d told her that she didn’t have to go with him, that she could stay behind, she’d squared her shoulders and said something about his leading the way.

  “If there’re any mountain lions around,” she said, using the first thing that came to mind to call his attention away from her slip, “you can divert them from me.”

  It made Collin think of his conversation with Emmett, likening her to a mountain lion. Thinking about it now made it a little easier to disregard what was so plainly in front of him.

  Now that he looked, he realized that her face was pale. Even in this light. “You’re claustrophobic.” It wasn’t a question.

  She began to deny it. After all, she saw claustrophobia as a weakness and she wasn’t about weaknesses, just strengths. She’d always firmly believed that. If you were weak, they could hit you where you lived.

  But then she blew out a breath and conceded. There seemed to be no point in lying.

  “A little,” she allowed. It was all she would admit to. “I don’t break out in a cold sweat in elevators or small places, but—” she took another breath, because it was hard for her to own up to something like this “—I do feel a tightness in my chest.”

  Collin glanced at her chest and smiled to himself. The region looked pretty firm and tight from where he was standing.

  The thought surprised him. He wasn’t given to dwelling on physical attributes when they didn’t figure into a case. He’d trained himself not to notice.

  Or he thought he had.

  Somehow his training was unraveling here. “Then, let’s get out of here so that I can get a signal and you can get some decent air into your lungs.”

  Without thinking, he placed his hand against the small of her back. This time he noticed that she didn’t stiffen, didn’t pull back. He left his hand there.

  Once outside, he called Emmett with news of the discovery.

  Emmett sounded the most animated he’d heard him in a long time. “I’ll get someone to post a guard around there, in case he comes back.”

  Collin glanced back at the mouth of the cave. “I don’t think he will.” His eyes passed over Lucy. Her color looked as if it was returning. He felt a little guilty, allowing her to go in.

  “You never know
,” Emmett was saying. “Jason’s arrogant enough to think that no one’s discovered his hiding place. It can’t hurt to have someone there, just in case.”

  Which meant, Collin surmised, that he was exchanging information with his fellow agents. “Sounds like they’ve welcomed you back into the fold.”

  “Not yet, not officially,” Emmett contradicted. “Officially would put me some place other than here,” he reminded his cousin. “Thanks for calling.” The line went dead.

  He’d forgotten that for a moment, Collin thought, closing his phone again. He’d been forgetting a lot of things lately. Ever since he’d hooked up with the bright young medical student, thoughts had been less than organized in his head.

  He looked at her for a long moment, watching the way the winter sun tangled itself in her hair. He found himself wishing for things, wanting things, feeling the hollow spots inside of him become less so. “Do you have to be getting back?”

  “No.” He must have forgotten, Lucy thought. But then, why would he remember something that didn’t have anything to do with the case? “I’m off for the rest of the day.”

  His eyes indicated the empty plastic water bottle. “What do you say to a late lunch after we drop this off to be analyzed?”

  Lucy glanced at the sack he held. She wondered if he was just going through the motions because he figured that would be the best way to get her to do things for him, to help him with his case. After all, she represented his access to the forensic lab.

  All the reasoning in the world didn’t change her answer. “I say yes.”

  “Good.” He smiled down into her face, resisting a very sudden, very real urge to kiss her again. “Because I’m hungry.”

  She looked at his lips for a moment, fighting back a strong wave of desire. So was she.

  She was both relieved and saddened when he turned and started walking back to the car. With a suppressed sigh that held a myriad of emotions behind it, she quickly fell into place beside him.

  There was no point in going into the office any longer. Ryan felt too weak to carry on the charade, too weak to maintain the facade of a man whose presence was essential for all the wheels of progress to continue turning in his various industrial empires.