by Fiona Brand
Keeping his gaze glued to the rental car sign, he crossed the car park, found a phone booth and placed a call. Kurt picked up on the second ring. McElroy had just reported in: he had lost the blond woman.
“Slater’s in town. Two of his men picked me up just after I left Wendell’s place. They fired on me and ran me off the road.” He didn’t have a license plate number, but he passed on a description of the van. “Pull Wendell in, and get Rina out of the house. Now.”
A woman with a shopping trolley stared at him as he hung up the phone. One glance at his reflection in a shop window told him he needed to clean up before he stepped into the rental firm’s premises. Veering into the mall, he headed for the nearest public convenience.
His nose was bruised and swollen, and blood trailed down one side of his face and throat, staining the front of his T-shirt. Splashing himself with water, he sponged off the blood and walked through the mall to the rental car agency.
Rina closed the front door behind her, locked it and walked through to her bedroom, cold congealing in her stomach as she relived those few moments on the phone and the eerie sensation that Alex was on the end of the line.
She was certain he had enjoyed that moment of intimidation, just as he’d enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game he’d played with her over the years. Esther had died trying to stop him. In the end, so had Cesar.
Walking through to her bedroom, she collected the knapsack and her phone. Outwitting Alex might be impossible, but she had to try. For Taylor’s sake, she couldn’t afford to be stopped now.
The biggest problem was going to be getting Baby out. It was almost completely dark, but even in the dark, his light coat would glow. Still, there was no way she would leave Baby behind again. If she checked him into boarding kennels, Alex or Slater would find him.
Moving quickly, she changed clothes, pulling on black jeans and a thin, dark sweater. She retrieved the document folder that contained her personal papers from her closet, including her old birth certificate and passport. She slipped the folder into the knapsack, then walked out to the hall cupboard and took down a storage box that was filled with Baby’s things. She no longer needed the Seeing Eye dog harness, but at the time she hadn’t been able to bear throwing it away. Aside from the photo Taylor had given her, it had been her last link to Baby.
Calling Baby, she fitted the harness and the muzzle, which she used on flights. She wasn’t sure how they were going to travel. Her first destination would be the bus station. If she had missed the last bus, she would try the airport, although that was riskier and she would be more likely to be seen. Either way, she was going to need all of her blind paraphernalia. There was no other way to keep Baby with her on a bus trip.
Checking her phone one last time, she switched it off and slipped it into her pocket. JT hadn’t returned her call, but that couldn’t concern her now. He was a tough, experienced agent and he knew about Wendell. Leaving him was a wrench she hadn’t expected to have to cope with, but she couldn’t allow personal feelings to distract her. The phone call from Taylor had frightened her to the bone and cleared her mind. Alex had Taylor. Every time she thought about the moments of silence following Taylor’s choked-off statement, her blood ran cold. Taylor’s safe release had to be her first priority.
Yesterday, she would have handed the information about Taylor’s possible whereabouts and Senator Radcliff’s involvement to JT and Bayard and let them deal with it. Today, she had a different perspective. She trusted both men as individuals, but she couldn’t trust the organizations they worked for. Alex had a line into the FBI and possibly other law-enforcement agencies. The fact that he also had Radcliff, a former military adviser to the Pentagon and now a United States senator, in his pocket, was even more frightening.
If Taylor was being held in Radcliff’s house, revealing that information could place Taylor in even more jeopardy. She had thought it through, going over and over the facts, and every time she had come to the same conclusion. If she followed the logic—that she was Alex’s goal, that it was the money Esther had stolen that he wanted—then until he had her, Taylor was safe.
Once Alex realized that using Baby had failed, he would employ his backup plan and offer a deal—Taylor’s release in exchange for her. The thought of handing herself over to Alex filled her with dread, but if she had to, she would do it.
Striking out on her own was a risk, maybe a stupid one. It was possible that Taylor’s best chance at survival lay with the authorities, who were trained to deal with hostage situations. But with the FBI mole still in place and undetected, she didn’t think so. The way she saw it, as long as she was on her own, she could control the way events unfolded.
She unfastened her wristwatch, then left it on the kitchen counter. She was tempted to take it, tempted to cling to the safety the watch and JT represented, but if she kept it then JT would follow and she couldn’t afford the connection. If he knew what she was going to attempt, he would stop her.
A sharp rap at the front door almost stopped her heart as she led Baby down the hall to her bedroom, and she quickened her step. The caller was probably Kurt, although there was a remote possibility it could be JT.
Keeping Baby close, she slipped out of the French doors in her bedroom and onto the back deck. Baby’s claws clicked on the bleached hardwood, the sound distinct, although it wouldn’t be discernible to anyone standing on the front porch of the house. Seconds later, they stepped into the thick cover of a creeper that grew on the veranda and spilled over into the adjacent border of shrubs and trees. Rina urged Baby through the shadowed tangle, staying close to the fence line.
The fence was going to be a problem. There was no way she could get Baby over the six-foot-high wooden palings that bordered the rear of the yard. She was going to have to find a way under the chain link they were presently following, and walk out through the neighbor’s property. The only blessing was that the nearest dog lived four doors away, which meant she and Baby should be able to make it to the street without a major ruckus.
Keeping a firm grip on Baby’s harness, she began working her way closer to the mesh. It was overgrown by shrubs, and in places trees overhung it, but aside from the hazard of dodging low branches, Rina counted that as a positive. The trees were old and so was the fence. In places it was damaged and sagging.
Her fingers trailed across a section of bare mesh. A sharp rapping froze her in place. A soft drizzle had started, muffling sound, but the tinkle of glass breaking was clear enough. Whoever had been knocking on the door had just broken into her house.
Whispering a command for Baby to sit, she crouched down and felt around the thick layer of leaves at the base of the fence. Scraping the leaves away, she managed to get her fingers underneath the wire and lift it, but the gap was narrow. She would have to go down on her belly. Getting Baby through was going to be more difficult.
She shrugged out of the knapsack, pushed it under the fence, then snaked under the wire. It wasn’t graceful, and it wasn’t quiet, because leaves rustled and the fence made a jingling noise, but she was through.
Pulse racing, she hauled the fence as high as it would go, no longer worrying about the noise. Only seconds had passed since she’d heard the sound of breaking glass. Whoever had broken in would search the house before they would think to check the backyard. She softly commanded Baby to come and pulled on the harness, reinforcing the message that she wanted him to go under the fence. With a faint grunting sound, Baby shimmied under and surged to his feet.
Shrugging into the knapsack, Rina took a moment to listen. Apart from the distant hum of traffic, the faint sound of a television show playing in the Spurlocks’ house just yards away, and the slow drip of moisture off leaves, the night was silent.
Gripping the harness, Rina stepped out from behind a neatly shaped shrub onto bare lawn and began to walk, Baby padding silently beside her.
The lawn was as flat as a bowling green and empty of all cover, apart from a row of trees placed with mili
tary precision down the side of the house and a tidy clipped hedge that ran parallel with the trees along the boundary. Blue light flickered through a gap in the drapes of the Spurlocks’ sitting room window and the sweep of light from the kitchen lit up the neighbor’s backyard, which bordered the rear of Rina’s property.
A footfall made her freeze. Pulse thudding, she stepped into the deep shadow of a tree and held Baby in check. A flicker of movement beneath the ancient magnolia that hung over her back fence drew her eye. Someone was in the Spurlocks’ neighbor’s backyard.
Another movement registered, this time higher. Whoever it was, they were climbing the tree. The figure became briefly visible as he stepped across a thick tree limb and onto the rim of the fence and was caught in the wash of light flowing from the Spurlocks’ sitting room directly behind her. As he turned to let himself down into her backyard, Rina caught a brief flash of a face and blond hair and froze.
Not a he. She.
Diane Eady was climbing into her backyard.
The second Diane disappeared over the fence, Rina moved. A twig snapped beneath her shoe just as she caught a second flicker of movement by the magnolia. She held her breath, certain she had been both seen and heard. Long seconds ticked by while she remained rigidly still. The figure moved, swiveling as he examined the line of trees, and she realized that even though he had looked directly at her, he hadn’t registered that she was there, because the deep shadow of the tree trunk and the glaring light behind her had made her invisible. The line of the clipped hedge hid Baby from sight.
Something metallic gleamed. A gun.
The moment Alex had shot Cesar replayed itself. Her chest squeezed tight, a raw sound rasped from her throat.
A heavy droplet of rain exploded on her forehead, a second hitting her shoulder. All around she could hear the sharp rapping as the rain came down in huge droplets, spasmodic and tropically heavy. Still, the figure didn’t move. She could feel his intensity as he continued to search. The rain increased in intensity, falling like a thick gray curtain, thundering on the roof of the house behind her and blotting out the night.
Still frozen, she stared in the direction of the tree, but she had lost him in the murk. He could have moved; he could be just feet away. She wasn’t sure.
A flash of light reflecting off pale, wet skin jerked her gaze to the left. With a lithe, fluid movement, he dropped over the fence into her backyard.
Earl Slater.
A shudder worked its way down her spine. Diane and Slater, together.
Diane had been working for Alex all along.
Don’t think. Move.
Numbly, she urged Baby to walk on. She didn’t know how long Diane and Slater would be, but it could only be a matter of minutes before they discovered that she wasn’t in the house. She needed to be gone before that happened. They would likely leave the property the same way they had entered it, and she couldn’t count on the sheer luck that had kept them both invisible a second time.
She stepped from shadow into glaring light. Rain pounded on her head and soaked through her sweater and jeans as she strode beneath the wet rank of trees. She could feel Baby’s warmth against her right leg. Canned laughter erupted from the Spurlocks’ sitting room, the sound disembodied, and suddenly the abyss that separated her from that kind of normalcy registered, starker and more distinct than usual. The Spurlocks would have had their dinner and would now be comfortably ensconced in front of one of their favorite game shows. She knew Audrey worked part-time at an insurance office, and that Walt ran his own marine-engines repair business in town. She had heard the sound of a lawn mower earlier, which meant Walt must have cut the lawns when he’d gotten home from work.
Audrey and Walt were inside their house, warm and dry and secure. No one was hunting them, or was ever likely to. No one wanted to dissect the contents of their heads. No one wanted them dead.
Slater had had a gun.
Water squelched in her sneakers as she made it past the sitting room to the front yard. Cast into shadow by a thick front hedge, the pretty formal borders and bricked paths looked grim and monochromatic.
For long seconds she hunched beneath a dripping rose arbor that curved gracefully over a white picket gate and surveyed the street. The yellowish glare of the streetlamps glimmered off slick sidewalks. There were two vehicles, a truck and a sedan, parked on the opposite side of the asphalt. Steam rose in tendrils off the road, as she studied the vehicles. One should have contained Hal, but both appeared to be empty.
One of the vehicles had to belong to Slater. The fact that they were parked close together didn’t bode well. It was possible Hal wasn’t in his vehicle because he had concealed himself on one of the neighboring properties to keep a watch over her backyard. If that was the case, there was no way he wouldn’t have spotted her sneaking through the Spurlocks’ place, or Diane and Slater going over the back fence into hers.
Pushing the gate open, Rina stepped out onto the sidewalk with Baby and broke into a run.
The rain eased to a thin drizzle as the intersection loomed. To reach the bus station, they would have to cross the road. Heart pounding, lungs aching, expecting at any moment to hear Slater call out, she launched off the curb. Now that the rain had almost stopped, apart from the mist, the night was clear. She and Baby were glaringly visible.
Seconds later, she paused in the deep gloom of an overhanging tree and studied the empty street. The only movement she could detect was the rustling of tree branches as a faint breeze sprang up, and the shadowy silhouette of someone in the house directly across the intersection as they walked past a lighted window. Apart from the two vehicles parked across from the Spurlocks’ place, nothing was out of the ordinary. The street looked like it did most evenings when she had walked around the block: pretty, pleasant and utterly normal.
Tightening her grip on Baby’s harness, she backed into the shadows, turned on her heel and, once more, broke into a run.
Twenty-Seven
Lights blazed in every room of Rina’s house when JT pulled into the drive. It took him less than thirty seconds to conduct his own search and establish for himself that Rina and Baby weren’t there. There were no signs of blood or a scuffle. The fact that she had left her SUV in the garage meant that either someone had gotten to her, or she had sneaked out.
He was going with the latter theory.
He studied the wristwatch sitting on the kitchen counter. She had left in a hurry—closet doors and drawers had been left open, a box of Baby’s dog toys was abandoned in the hall—but she had taken the time to leave her watch in a place where it was instantly visible. The message was clear. She had left on her own and she didn’t want to be followed.
Kurt joined him at the counter. “There’s been some traffic out back. At least two came over the back fence. From the footprints, either two men—one large and one small—or else the small guy is a woman. I’m betting on the blonde. And, no, the shoe size wasn’t Rina’s.” He jerked his head at the neighboring property. “She and the dog went out that way. I’ve already talked to the Spurlocks, and they didn’t see or hear a thing.”
“What about Hal?”
Kurt looked grim. “We found him in the trunk of his car. The coroner’s doing the paperwork now.”
JT stared at the activity on the back lawn. With three local, linked homicides now on the books, complicating the ongoing federal case, the issue of jurisdiction was sticky. Latham, a heavy hitter from the U.S. Marshal’s office in Beaumont, was here, along with Maloney, Rina’s WitSec contact. So was Lawrence Atkins, one of Bayard’s FBI agents who just happened to be in town. He was willing to bet Ed Marlow wouldn’t be far behind, and neither would the press. Time to leave. “I need your car.”
Kurt dug in his pants pocket and handed him a set of keys. JT swapped him the keys to the rental he’d hired. No explanation was needed. JT had lost his vehicle and all of his equipment, including his laptop and his satellite phone. He needed the communications system. Kurt
, who would be stuck in Beaumont for the foreseeable future dealing with the formalities surrounding Hal’s murder and the investigation into Wendell and Sayer’s deaths, could get by with a phone until replacement equipment arrived.
Kurt walked with him to the car, leaned in and retrieved his briefcase and files. “Where are you going?” His gaze slid to a car that had just pulled in against the curb, and to Bayard’s distinctive profile. “No, wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” Being squeezed by Bayard wasn’t his favorite pastime.
JT slid behind the wheel. “I’ll be in touch.”
Kurt had already checked the flights out, and the bus and taxi companies. There had been a report of a blind woman with a Seeing Eye dog on one of the short, regular bus routes, but after that, nothing. Her name hadn’t registered on any flight manifests yet, which could mean she had rented a car.
Something had happened, something big. It was possible that she had been frightened by Sayer’s death and the implication that Wendell had led Lopez to her, but he didn’t think that in itself was enough to scare a woman who had chosen to stay in Lopez’s house, pretending to be blind so she could force herself to remember the account numbers and recover evidence that her father had been coerced.
The only reason Rina had to strike out on her own was Taylor. According to Kurt, she hadn’t received any calls on her landline, but that still left her cell phone.
Somehow, she had managed to give Kurt the slip.
