Pride of a Hunter

by Sylvie Kurtz

  Dom wasn’t going to go away.

  When she could no longer put off the inevitable, she reached for clean sheets in the linen closet and headed for the spare room where she unfolded the futon.

  Dom stood in the doorway, leaning his big body like a roadblock across the opening, making her much too aware of him, of how easily she could let herself fall back into old patterns and seek comfort against his wide shoulder, let his smooth slow voice talk her into—what?—a relationship? She shook out the bottom sheet, snapping it. No, that was crazy. He wasn’t heading there. He wanted the same thing she did: Warren behind bars.

  The glow on Jill’s face as she’d gazed up into Warren’s eyes had stirred something inside Luci. How long had it been since she’d looked at a man with love in her eyes? Seven long years. She hadn’t realized how much she’d depended on her sister for companionship these last six years until Warren had turned Jill’s head so completely. But Dom was the wrong person to fill that emptiness. Leaning on him wouldn’t have any happier an ending than Jill’s engagement to Warren. Luci couldn’t do that to herself or to Cole.

  Think of Dom as nothing more than a Hostage Rescue Team member and this situation as nothing more than gathering intelligence for a mission.

  Luci tucked in the top sheet, making precise military corners. “How could Warren give Jill a dead woman’s ring?”

  “Recycling.”

  She shot him a dark look. “That’s not funny.”

  “Time was, you would’ve been the one to come up with the joke.”

  Luci sighed as she picked up a pillowcase. Time was, she would have. Black humor was a way to survive the horrors they’d often had to deal with. Not any more. When was the last time she’d laughed, truly laughed all the way down to her belly? Before Cole’s death. With him and Dom in her tiny apartment in Texas after a round of miniature golf that had started as a joke and ended up as a full-out competition. Cole had won, as usual, and supplied the pizza and beer for their post-game celebration.

  Fighting tears, Luci shook a pillow into the pillowcase. “I figured out where Warren found Jill.”

  “Where?”

  Luci dropped the pillow on the bed and reached for the comforter, focusing on each movement of her task instead of the blatantly male lines of Dom’s body. “She went to Florida last spring to visit a college friend. Warren must have zeroed in on her back then and spent the summer checking up on her.”

  “Could her friend be in on the scam, pointing out possible targets?”

  Luci tried to picture ditzy Andrea D’Alessandro colluding with Warren. She supposed anything was possible, especially if Andrea’s party funds were running low. That seemed unlikely when her husband could buy a small country if he wanted. “I don’t know. But she makes the Miami gossip columns often enough with her party lifestyle that she might have come up on Warren’s radar that way.”

  “I’ll check if Jill’s name made any of the papers during her visit.”

  Luci smoothed the comforter over the double bed. Dom’s feet would probably hang over the end. But he was used to that, as many nights as he’d spent on her couch. She sat on the edge of the bed, hands on her thighs and forced her mind back to task. “Did things get too hot for Warren in Florida?”

  Hands stuffed in his back pockets, Dom was studying her much too intently. “It’s always better to leave the scene of the crime. Staying in the same place, he risks running into people he’s already met. And if he’s using a different name, that makes it easier to get caught in a lie. He’d want distance.”

  Luci nodded, focusing on Warren’s movements and hoping they would lead to something they could use against him. “So he moves after every scam. Did he scam someone in Florida?”

  “I haven’t found any evidence. Yet. His pigeon might be too embarrassed to have reported the swindle. Or it may simply be his base of operations.”

  Luci curled her fingers over the round of her knees. “He loves them, then he leaves them, broke and heartbroken. He uses their pride to make his great escape. When does he change his ID? And how?”

  “He probably builds several IDs at the same time. He doesn’t stay in any one of them long enough to cause a blip. Other than the fact he’s swindling millions of dollars from divorced women desperate for love, he’s a law-abiding citizen. Not so much as a traffic ticket in any of his IDs. It costs, but you can get new real ID.”

  And to get the necessary papers to build a new identity, he’d have to know low-rent contacts. “Any chance of finding out who supplies him with those papers with those Florida Social Security numbers?”

  “Not until I catch him in the act.”

  “So another dead end.” Luci grabbed one of the decorative pillows she’d dropped on the floor and hugged it. “Still, why Jill? Even with her money and her son and her divorced status, what tipped the scale in her favor rather than some other woman? He had to have dozens to pick from. Was it because she lived so far from Florida?”

  “Could be. He has an affinity for boats. That’s the one common denominator for each of his new destinations.”

  “New Hampshire doesn’t have much shoreline,” Luci pointed out. “And we’re not anywhere near the ocean.”

  “But look at where Jill lives,” Dom said. “Near a river. And those huge windows in her living room and kitchen made me feel as if I was right on the water.”

  Luci groaned. “You’re right. And then there’s the lake house. J.J. and Jill still share that. And the speedboat.” Luci squeezed the pillow tighter against her chest. “She fits.”

  “Down to the last detail.”

  Luci scrutinized her ragged nails against the navy blue chenille of the pillow and thought of her mother’s and her sister’s perfectly manicured red ovals, of the perfectly pressed gaggle of moms at Brendan’s soccer games, of how perfectly ridiculous it was for her to expect to fit in. And for the first time in her life, she didn’t want to. Not if fitting in made her a target for some scam artist the way Jill had. “If Warren did zero in specifically on Jill, then that’s the criminal intent you need, right?”

  “If I can prove it.”

  She finally dared to look into Dom’s eyes. For an instant, the pale blue emitted tempting heat that reached down to her bones. She shook her head. Filled with new determination, she rose and tossed the decorative pillow onto the nearby rocking chair. “Then we have to find a way to prove it. I can’t let Jill marry him. And I can’t ruin her happiness without proof he intended to hurt her from the get-go.”

  She marched toward the door and came up against the roadblock of Dom’s body. He smelled like crisp night air that reminded her somehow of deep velvet and bright stars. Soap? Aftershave? It didn’t matter. She didn’t care. She wrapped one arm around her waist and pointed toward the kitchen. “I, uh, need to get my purse. I have Jill’s account numbers. You can get them to your computer guy.”

  He moved, giving her plenty of space to get around him, yet air constricted in her lungs anyway as she went by. At the kitchen counter, she fumbled with the flap of her purse. “We need to come up with a plan to get into his office and his apartment. Check his computer. Anything that would prove he knew who Jill was before he bumped into her at the country club. He can’t have memorized everything. There has to be something that’ll incriminate him.”

  Maggie’s barks ripped the night’s quiet. Luci pushed aside the curtain of the window above the sink and peered into the dark yard. She couldn’t see a thing. She headed toward the door, slipped into her barn clogs and reached for a flashlight on the windowsill.

  “Want me to check it out?” Dom asked, moving in too close again.

  “No. Maggie’s probably just tangling with a skunk or bothering the goats. That dog has no common sense.”

  But as soon as Luci opened the back door, Maggie’s barks morphed into yelps of pain. Luci hurried to the back of the barn and found the door she knew she’d closed ajar and Maggie a shaking mass of blond and brown fur with her tail tucked
between her back legs.

  “What’s wrong, Mags?” Luci flashed the light around, but saw nothing out of sorts. No fleeing bad guy. No departing vehicle. Was someone still in the barn?

  Maggie whimpered, tried to get up and fell over.

  “What happened to you?” Luci patted down the mutt, looking for broken bones and found a tender spot on her ribs. “Did Faye kick you?”

  Maggie flopped her head down, closed her eyes and panted.

  “I’ve told you to stay away from her. She doesn’t like to be herded, especially in the barn.”

  Maggie whimpered.

  “Okay, let’s get you inside.”

  Luci wrapped her arms around Maggie, but each attempt to lift her off the ground only brought a round of painful yips.

  “I’ll get her,” Dom said. He handed his own flashlight to Luci, then speaking low nonsense words to the dog, he lifted Maggie into his arms as if she were a baby. She licked at his face.

  “I’m going to take a look around the barn,” Luci said, aiming her beam at the unlatched door.

  “Wait till I get back.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  Maggie groaned.

  “I’ll be right back,” Dom said.

  Just as he and Maggie started heading back, a crash came from inside the house.

  Brendan!

  Had Maggie been a distraction? Heart beating a frantic gallop, Luci bolted inside. Out of habit she walked out of her clogs without missing a beat and darted up the stairs three by three. Flashlight aimed like a mace to pound on anyone who’d dare harm her child, she rushed into her son’s room. Something hard and cold bit into the arch of her bare foot. She kicked it aside and flipped on the overhead light switch.

  “Brendan?”

  Brendan’s dark head popped over the side of the toppled three-drawer bureau. A maze of orange Matchbox car track looped from the bureau to Brendan’s bed. “I can explain.”

  Never a good start. Luci stepped away from the row of Matchbox car lined up along the edge of the rug. Brendan was frantically trying to right the downed bureau before he got into too much trouble.

  “What happened here?” Luci asked, hand on her heart, pushing its mad beating back to normal. She bent over to help Brendan pull the bureau back in place.

  “It’s not my fault,” Brendan said. Tears squiggled down his cheeks as he picked up a piece of broken track. “It fell over.”

  “I can see that. Why did it fall over? You’re supposed to be in bed.”

  “I wanted to try a triple flip. I figured out how to do it.”

  Why didn’t that surprise her? Cole had been filled with the same kind of restless energy. “Next time wait until morning. Or ask for help.”

  He pitched the piece of broken track against the wall. “It’s broken.”

  “We’ll fix it tomorrow. Now back to bed.” Luci pushed aside the plastic track, tucked Brendan in and kissed him good-night for the second time, relieved that her fears of violence against him were unwarranted.

  When she got to the kitchen, she found Dom hanging up the phone.

  “How’s Maggie?” she asked, kneeling beside the dog’s beanbag bed. The skin above Maggie’s eyes wrinkled in pain, but she gamely tried to wag her tail at the sound of her name.

  “Broken rib, I think. I called a twenty-four hour clinic in Nashua. I’ll take her in after the police get here.”

  “The police?” Luci shook her head and petted Maggie’s long ears. “That’s not necessary. The crash was nothing. Brendan was trying to build a triple loop for his Matchbox cars and he toppled over his bureau in the process.”

  Dom’s silence hung heavily in the air, forcing her to look up. She hadn’t seen Dom’s face so tense since the day she’d told him she never wanted to see him again.

  “Someone killed your chickens,” he said.

  Her heart kicked into high gear and her fingers shook against Maggie’s coat.

  “Someone? You mean an animal?” She’d spotted a fox just the other day, hanging out at the edge of the woods that bordered her property. That’s why she made sure to bring in the chickens before dark. But even before Dom answered, adrenaline scrambled her pulse.

  “Not unless he carries a wire garrote.”

  DOM STARED at the row of chickens strung up from the rafter the way Laynie McDaniels had been hanged with her own belt in that motel closet. Was Swanson hoping the slaughter would distract Luci from worrying about her sister’s upcoming wedding? Or was it a threat?

  Jill’s assets were at stake, but now so might Luci’s life if she caused Swanson too much grief.

  Dom unhooked the last hen from her wire noose and gently lay her body in the wheelbarrow. Luci didn’t need to deal with this massacre. Brendan certainly didn’t need to witness it.

  When and how had Swanson managed the feat? The chickens were still alive when they’d gotten home and taken care of the evening chores. Why hadn’t the chickens panicked at the invasion of their coop? Even Maggie hadn’t noticed the intrusion until it was over. Not that she was much of a guard dog. She’d never barked at him, not even when he’d been a stranger to her.

  Dom had walked every inch of the yard. The only thing out of place was that the coop and barn doors were left ajar. He searched for tire tracks along the shoulder of the road in front of Luci’s farm, but the hard-packed ground had given up nothing. Dusting for prints would gain him nothing, not on this rough wood surface. He’d bet the wire cutters were Luci’s and wiped clean. Swanson was an expert at disappearing without leaving much of a trace. Especially with so much money and a jail sentence at stake. He’d send the wire cutters in for testing anyway.

  Dom wheeled the dead chickens to the edge of the woods and shoveled at the hard, granite-seeded earth. Wind howled through the trees like a child in pain, the threat of rain riding on its gusts. The cold lash of it whipped at his face and through the thin material of his shirt.

  The two drive-through cheeseburgers and the milk-shake he’d downed on his way back from the veterinary clinic with Maggie while Luci dealt with the police hadn’t done a thing to stanch the gnawing of anxiety fueling his body. Neither had the hard work of digging a grave.

  He shouldn’t have come here. He shouldn’t have involved Luci. He should have found some other way to get to Swanson. He’d thought he could handle being around Luci again. He hadn’t counted on the memories. On having her eyes silently plead with him tonight as they had after Cole’s fall. On her becoming a threat to Swanson.

  An internal investigation cleared the team of wrong-doing after Cole’s death. But Dom should have realized much sooner that the situation was unstable, that words weren’t going to help.

  “Let someone else step in, Skyralov,” the Special Operations Group leader had suggested.

  “No, I’ve got a rapport going. I just need a bit more time.” If the assault team charged, someone would get hurt—most likely the kid.

  “What’s going on? Why’d you stop talking?” Grigsby asked, agitated. “You getting ready to shoot me?”

  “I needed some water,” Dom said into the phone. “Nobody’s going to shoot anybody. We all want everyone to walk out of this alive.”

  “I need money. I need transport. Now.”

  “And I’m willing to get those for you, but I need you to give me something in return. I’ll trade you the boy for the chopper you want.”

  “Screw it. Get me money. Get me wheels. Then we’ll talk.”

  Grigsby slammed the phone.

  “Anyone got a fix on him?” Dom said into the mic.

  Luci whispered, seemingly right into his ear, “He’s still got the kid strapped to him. He’s pacing like a boar about to charge and snorting some sort of powder.”

  Dom took in a calming breath and dialed Grigsby’s number. The phone at the other end rang twenty straight times. “Come on, Joe Bob, answer.”

  All he got was more ringing.

  Then the phon
e crashed through the window, shattering his last chance to end the situation peacefully.

  Instead of saving two lives, he’d lost three. Four, if he counted how the light had gone out of Luci’s life.

  Such a waste. Cole. Luci. The chickens. All of it. And this, he thought, as he pitched another shovelful full of dirt on the growing mound at his side, was a waste, too. His mother would have a fit if she knew he was burying a dozen healthy chickens instead of harvesting their meat. But he didn’t want their frozen carcasses to remind Luci of their murder long after he’d left. He’d already saddled her with enough haunting memories.

  He lay the hens in the grave, then covered them with earth.

  She’d warned him, hadn’t she? You are not bringing trouble here. Do you hear? You are not bringing trouble to this family. You are not bringing trouble to this community. And he’d gone and done all three.

  He wished he’d never met Luci. Never met Cole. Never taken the phone that day.

  With the back of the shovel, he patted the last of the dirt onto the grave, then headed to the coop. He scrubbed every inch of the small building until someone could have eaten off the floor, then readied the nests for their next occupants.

  By the time he headed back to the house, dawn was pushing at the horizon, sweat streaked his shirt and he’d come up with no good answer to his dilemma. If he told Luci to back off, she’d push forward—especially with the wedding less than two weeks away. Having Falconer send someone else would mean taking time they didn’t have to bring another Seeker up to date, work up another cover that couldn’t be as efficient as Dom’s and give Swanson the chance to slip away yet again.

  The best way to protect Luci was to stay close.

  As he pushed through the back door of her home, the scent of bacon, eggs and blueberry muffins greeted him. Luci stood at the stove, her braid like a pendulum swinging gently across the back of her faded blue sweatshirt as she stirred the eggs. He wanted to run his hand down the rope of hair, tickle his palm with the ends. Instead, he soaped his hands at the sink and tried to wash away his need to hold her.