“Have you missed anyone?” he asked. “Somebody staying with you that suddenly disappeared?”
She shook her head. Somebody had disappeared years ago on Rae, but that had been his choice to leave. Nobody had murdered him, although she’d sometimes wished she had when she’d watched her mother suffer.
“So you didn’t notice anything in the backyard? Any digging?” He persisted with his questions.
She shook her head again. “Why the hell would someone bury a body in my backyard?”
“I’m not sure if they’d just buried it, or if it was just uncovered,” Forrest said. “It could have been there awhile.”
“Like the body that Maggie and Jonah found after the hurricane?” she asked.
They had just stumbled across the body—the mummified body. She shivered with revulsion. What if that was what Forrest had found in her yard? Another mummy?
“I’ll know more once the coroner arrives,” he continued.
A siren wailed as it grew closer to her house. Maybe the coroner was arriving now—along with the squad cars with the flashing lights that were pulling into her driveway, as well.
Connor cried out now, and it wasn’t a sleepy little cry but a wail almost as loud as the siren.
“What the hell is that?” Forrest asked in alarm.
And Rae bristled all over again with outrage. “That is my son,” she replied as she hurried off to the nursery.
* * *
Tension gripped the chief, and he tightened his grasp on his cell phone before sliding it back into his pocket.
Behind him, sitting on the porch of his two-story farmhouse, Hays Colton chuckled. “Forrest has always had good timing,” he said of his son. “You drive out here looking for him, and he calls you like he somehow knew.”
Chief Thompson shook his head. “That’s not why he called.” And he could have pointed out that Forrest’s timing wasn’t always perfect or young Colton wouldn’t have taken that bullet in his leg. But if his instincts weren’t as strong as they were, he might have taken that bullet in his heart or his head instead of his leg.
He had survived.
His shooter had not.
“What’s wrong?” Hays asked, his blue eyes wide with alarm. “Is he all right?”
Thompson nodded. “Yeah, he just called to give me a heads-up.”
“Did he find out the identity of that poor girl found at the pharmaceutical company?”
The chief shook his head. “I wish that was why he called. Or better yet, to tell me he caught the killer.” Because it would probably hit the news soon anyway, Archer Thompson shared, “He found another body.”
Another person for the already-overworked coroner to identify.
“I’m sorry,” Hays said. He rose from the porch swing, set his coffee cup on the railing and reached out to pat Thompson’s shoulder.
They’d known each other a long time, but Thompson didn’t need any more sympathy. He needed answers—about his sister’s murder and about these bodies that had recently turned up. He uttered a ragged sigh as he pushed himself up from the rocking chair in which he’d been sitting. He didn’t move as fast as he once had, his bones aching now with age and overuse. He didn’t stand quite as straight and tall as he once had.
Neither did Hays, though, who had spent too many of his seventy-some years in the saddle working his ranch. “My son will find out who really killed your sister,” Hays assured him.
Thompson wanted to believe the killer was Elliot Corgan—because then he would have the satisfaction of knowing the sick bastard had died in prison. But Elliot had denied killing his sister, and there was no way he could have killed that woman whose body had been discovered in the Lone Star Pharma parking lot.
There was another killer in Whisperwood.
And until he was caught, the chief had a feeling that bodies would keep turning up.
Copyright © 2019 by Harlequin Books S.A.
Keep reading for an excerpt from Special Forces: The Operator by Cindy Dees.
Special Forces: The Operator
by Cindy Dees
Chapter 1
It started as a hot tub party.
It quickly devolved into a hot tub orgy.
Rebel McQueen was supposed to provide security for a dozen members of the US women’s softball delegation in the midst of it, but she’d last seen her charges disappearing into a mass of gorgeous naked bodies that was the Norwegian men’s water polo team.
Acute regret speared into her.
Where did she go wrong with her life that she was a lousy security guard while these other young women of her approximate age and physical ability were partying with possibly the hottest guys on the planet?
The “hot tub” was actually a giant swimming pool in the Olympic Village that had been heated to spa temperatures for the duration of the games. Easily two hundred athletes were in the pool now, engaging in every manner and combination of sexual play.
She got it. They were young, athletic, far from home, and had precompetition adrenaline galore before the games opened tomorrow night. But she was responsible for those softball players, and she couldn’t spot a single one of them right now. All she could make out in the churning water were writhing limbs and the occasional flash of a pale face. The rest of it could just as easily have been a feeding frenzy of sharks.
The Medusas—the highly classified, all-female, Special Forces team she was part of—were an ultra-under-the-radar part of the American security contingent at these games.
Tonight, the American security staff was undermanned, and she’d volunteered to help out. But she’d had no idea she was in for this! The Medusas had been briefed that the Olympic Village would be a wild party scene, but nothing in her Special Forces training had prepared her for a frat party with twenty thousand wild children determined to play. Hard.
Play. Not a word that had meaning in her world. Duty. Honor. Country. Those words, immortalized by General Douglas MacArthur, were the ones she lived by.
Oh joy. Word of the orgy must be spreading, for more athletes started arriving at the pool in a steady stream, stripping naked and jumping in.
It was arguably the best-looking group of naked people Rebel had ever seen, at any rate. Idly, she played a game of “guess the sport based on body type.”
There went a lean, no-fat marathon runner.
Disproportionately massive torso and skinny legs? A rower.
Big gut, wreathed in muscle—weight lifter.
A crowd began to form around the edges of the pool. Whether they were purely spectators to the debauchery or waiting for an inch of open water to join in, she couldn’t tell. But they elbowed Rebel back from the pool with their muscular, jostling bodies.
Swearing under her breath, she let herself be propelled back. Her orders were to be inconspicuous. Instead of resisting, she occupied herself with watching the watchers. Which was why she happened to glimpse a familiar face in the crowd. A face that made her lurch. A face that emphatically should not be here.
The face of a terrorist.
Surely she’d made a mistake. She moved quickly around the pool, trying to keep an eye on the man, who looked shockingly like Mahmoud Akhtar. Mahmoud led a terror cell that kidnapped her teammate, Piper Ford, last year.
Piper’s fiancé was an undercover CIA officer who’d helped her escape from Mahmoud, and who’d captured photographs of the entire cell of Iranian operatives. Rebel had looked at an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Mahmoud posted in the Medusas’ ready room every day for the past eight months. She knew his face.
And she’d just seen it here in Sydney, Australia.
Next to Mahmoud, a second man stood up from where he’d been squatting by the edge of the pool. Yousef Kamali. Mahmoud’s second-in-command and also a glossy photo on her team’s personal Most Wanted wall.
She wove through the throng of people to the spot where Mahmoud and Yousef had been standing and turned in a slow three-sixty.
No sign of the two men.
She had to be wrong. No way could known terrorists gain access to the Olympic Village. Not unless the Iranian government had given them credentials that attached them to the Iranian Olympic team...
Nah. The Iranians wouldn’t be so brazen.
She spied two males wearing black tracksuits with green-white-red stripes down the arms and legs. Iran team uniforms. She swore under her breath.
The pair was moving away from the pool area quickly. Purposefully.
Frowning, she debated whether to leave her post and follow them. It wasn’t like the softball girls were leaving this party anytime soon. But she was responsible for their safety, which technically included apprehending terrorists.
The Iranians approached a streetlight with its pole-mounted surveillance camera and, as she looked on, both men simultaneously turned their faces to the right.
Away from the camera.
Sonofa—That was the deliberate act of someone who didn’t want to be identified. The act of a trained operative. Or a terrorist.
She took off running, but the two men were well ahead of her, and more athletes were streaming toward the pool. She dodged and weaved, doing the whole fish swimming upstream thing, desperately trying to keep the Iranians in sight. But she was only five foot four, and it was darned near impossible to see over the glamorous amazons that were most Olympic athletes.
Finally, she broke out of the worst of the crush and glimpsed her quarry passing through one of the checkpoints to leave the Olympic Village. She put on a burst of speed as they scanned their credentials and stepped onto a city street.
She flew through the checkpoint without bothering to scan herself out. She couldn’t lose the Iranians! Once they hit the giant street party outside the village, following them was going to get immeasurably harder. She had to close as much of the gap as she could before they lost themselves in the crowds. Sydney was in full celebration mode, and this part of the city had been completely shut down to allow foot traffic to fill the streets.
Rebel raced through crowds of revelers, but the Iranians picked up speed in front of her, and she stretched out into a full sprint. The men turned a corner and disappeared.
When she approached the intersection, she slowed, turning the corner fast and low. It turned out to be a relatively quiet, dark street lined with closed office buildings. And it was empty. She raced down it, searching side to side for the Iranians. Nothing. She burst out into another crowded thoroughfare.
Where did they go?
There. To her left. She gathered herself to take off running again just as the men disappeared into a building ahead.
Without warning, big, hard hands grabbed her by both arms, dragging her back into the dark street she’d just emerged from. She stumbled backward, fetching up hard against a building. Immediately, she was flattened against it by a living wall of muscle.
Chagrin roared through her. She’d gotten so focused on chasing her quarry in front of her that she’d forgotten to watch her own tail. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She knew better.
“Let go of me,” she ground out. The terrorists were getting away!
“Who are you?” a male voice rasped from over her head.
“The person who’s going to hurt you if you don’t let me go. Right. Now.”
“Little thing like you?” Humor laced her battering ram’s voice.
No help for it. She was about to be conspicuous.
* * *
Avi Bronson yelped as the fleeing suspect, a tiny, shockingly quick female, stomped painfully on the top of his left foot. He swore when she grabbed his thumb off her shoulder and gave it a vicious wrench.
“Damn, woman! You’ve practically dislocated my thumb.”
A normal man would step back from the tiny virago now throwing painful elbows at him, kneeing him dangerously close to his groin and scratching at his face. But he was a trained Special Forces soldier, and the last thing he dared do was let this woman get an arm’s length between them where she could really wind up with a fist or foot and actually damage him.
He leaned in against her, using his superior size and weight to mash her even flatter against the wall at her back, silently thanking his wool suit coat for absorbing the worst of her attack.
She went still abruptly.
“Are you done?” he asked cautiously.
“Yes.” Her tone was surly. Not even close to subdued.
“If I step back from you, will you stop attacking me?” he tried.
Too long a pause. Then, “Yes.”
Liar.
He jumped back all at once, throwing up his fists to defend himself. And just in the nick of time. She flew at him like an angry bird.
But then she surprised him by spinning away and taking off at a dead run down the street. Genuinely irritated now, he gave chase.
Crap, she was fast.
Of course, she had the advantage over him in weaving through the heavy crowd, being as small as she was. He struggled to keep sight of her as she dodged among the civilians ahead of him.
Then she did a weird thing,
She came to a dead stop in front of a giant discotheque, staring at it in what could only be utter disgust.
Avi screeched to a stop beside her. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me—”
“Oh, save it,” she muttered, yanking out a set of Olympic credentials from inside her jacket. The holographic ID card hanging from a lanyard around her neck and declaring her to be from the American delegation, certainly looked authentic.
“Nonetheless. I need you to come with me,” he repeated.
She finally turned her full attention on him, and he was taken aback by her giant blue eyes, glaring at him as indignantly as if he’d kicked her puppy. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Olympic security,” he said shortly.
“I showed you my credentials. Let’s see yours,” she challenged.
“Not here,” he muttered. A lifetime of being reviled and targeted for being Israeli had taught him to be deeply reticent about announcing his nationality in crowded, public settings. Not to mention, he was not about to air Olympic security business on a street full of half-drunk spectators.
“Why won’t you show me your credentials?” the woman demanded.
“Just come with me, will you?”
“I can’t. I need to get surveillance video from inside this club.”
“I can get you the footage faster than anyone in there can if you’ll come with me.” He said the last few words through gritted teeth. This woman was really starting to get under his skin. She was blithely ignoring him as if she didn’t give a flip for being stopped by Olympic security.
“Fine,” she declared. “There are at least four exits from this place to three different streets, and thanks to you, I have no way of knowing which direction the men I was following went. I’ve lost them.”
“Lost who?”
She blinked, as if abruptly becoming aware of being closely surrounded by dozens of Olympic guests. “Uhh, nobody I care to talk about out here in the open.”
“Hence my request that you come with me.” He emphasized the word request to make it perfectly clear that this was, in fact, not a request at all.
The woman took several quick strides away from him, back toward the Olympic Village and then had the gall to stop and look over her shoulder at him. “Are you coming or not, He-Man?”
He lurched into movement, not sure whether to be amused or fantasize about strangling her. He fell in beside her, matching his long stride to her shorter one. “Are you always this touchy?” he murmured.
“You haven’t seen anything, yet. We’re in public and I have to behave m
yself.”
“Good Lord.”
“Oh, praying won’t save you from me.”
He glanced down at her in something approaching shock and she continued, smiling sweetly all the while, “When we get back to the village, I’m going to give you a piece of my mind...and chew off a chunk of your hide while I’m at it.”
Amused. He was definitely amused. A grin crept across his features. She reminded him of a little angry sparrow—her feathers all puffed up and flapping her wings furiously at the big bad hawk. She looked ready at any second to fly at his head and peck at him.
“You’re cute when you’re mad,” he murmured as he took her by the elbow to guide her through a particularly thick cluster of drunks spilling out of a bar into the street.
Her biceps flexed under his fingers and he noted that her arm was rock hard within his grasp. She definitely worked out. But then, the Olympics drew the fittest people on Earth into one place.
Leaning in close to her and using his big body as a shield, he protected her from jostles and errant hands as they passed through a group of loudly singing young men wearing Irish national soccer team paraphernalia. One of them, carrying a brimming full pitcher of beer in each hand stumbled, and Avi spun in front of the woman, taking a hefty slosh of beer down his back for his trouble.
While the drunk mumbled a slurred apology, Avi merely rolled his eyes and ushered the woman onward. Cold, sticky wetness made his shirt cling to his back as the beer soaked through his suit.
“Thanks,” she muttered reluctantly.
“You’re welcome.”
There was a bit of a delay getting her scanned into the village since she hadn’t scanned out properly when she left, but the guard sorted it out quickly enough when Avi flashed his own senior security credentials.
“I have to make a phone call,” she announced, stopping just inside the fenced enclosure surrounding the large campus of dormitories, dining halls, workout facilities and delegation headquarters. Sighing in frustration at yet another delay, he nonetheless stopped and waited while she pulled out her cell phone.
Cowboy's Rescue (Colton 911 Book 1) Page 21
