Stranded with the Suspect

by Cindi Myers

  “We’ll go back to the hotel for the rest of your things,” he said. “But then we need to leave.” He opened a closet and pulled out a full-length faux-mink coat. “Put this on. It’s cold out. Weather forecasters are predicting snow.”

  The Prophet had given her that coat. It screamed expense and privilege, and now it made her skin crawl to wear it.

  “Come on.” Simon held it out. “You need to stay warm.”

  She swallowed hard and nodded. He was right, and it was just a coat. Things don’t matter, the Prophet had preached. She had believed him, even when his actions contradicted the words. He wore expensive designer clothing and insisted on the best accommodations when he traveled, even when some of his followers lived in patched-together tents and trailers. How was it the contradictions hadn’t bothered her before?

  She put on the coat and walked beside Simon to the elevator. “I don’t see how you walk in those heels,” he said, looking down at her stiletto boots. “But they were the only shoes I could find to bring up here.”

  “I’m used to them,” she said. “And they’re the only shoes I brought with me. I really didn’t think I would be staying in Denver that long.”

  They stopped in front of the elevator and he hit the down button. “Where are we going now?” she asked.

  “I’m taking you back to Montrose, to a safe house.”

  She started to protest that she wanted to go home, but it wasn’t as if she could go back to the Family’s camp—if there was even a camp left. Her father was in prison and her baby’s father was dead. She had no close relatives. She had the money and resources to live on her own, but not the will—at least not right now.

  “Is the rest of the Family still in our camp?” she asked.

  “A few. Without Metwater there, most of them have gone back to their families, or to their old lives.”

  “He was what held us together,” she said.

  “Doesn’t say much for a belief system if it all depends on one man, does it?” he said.

  She glared at him. “Whatever you think of the man—whatever he is now—he did a lot of good,” she said. “I won’t stop believing that.”

  “If that makes you happy, I’m not going to stop you,” he said. “But as far as I can tell, nothing he said was original. He was just good at plagiarizing.”

  “Are you always so cynical?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t believe there’s good in the world?”

  “There’s good,” he said. “But the real saints in this world do good things instead of merely talking about them.” He took her arm. “Let’s go. I want to get on the road before the traffic gets heavy.”

  Someone had cleaned her room at the Brown Palace, removing the broken glass and bloodied sheets, polishing the furniture and freshening the flowers, even replacing the broken lamp with one that looked identical. “Pack what you’ll need for a few nights in one bag,” Simon said as he crossed the room to look out the window at the downtown scene below. “Anything else we’ll ask the front desk to send on to Montrose.”

  “I only brought one bag with me.” At his surprised look, she laughed. “I’m not a spoiled socialite anymore,” she said. “If nothing else, the Prophet taught me to travel light.”

  “There’s something else you’ve learned since being with him,” Simon said, his expression serious once more. “Something he doesn’t want you to tell the rest of the world. If we can figure out what that is, it could be the key to stopping him.”

  “If I knew, I promise I would tell you,” she said. “But until he turned against me, I never knew anything bad about him.”

  “Keep thinking,” Simon said. “You know something, and I’d like to find out what it is before he tries to kill you again.”

  She froze, one hand on the doorknob to the bedroom. “He’s on the run,” she said. “He knows you’re looking for him. He won’t risk trying to get at me again.”

  “A smart man wouldn’t do that, no. But a desperate man would. And from what I’ve seen, Daniel Metwater is a very desperate man.”

  “Are you trying to frighten me?” she asked.

  “I’m being honest with you. Would you rather I told you pretty lies?”

  His eyes met hers, and the steadiness of his gaze made her feel less shaky. “No,” she said. “I’ve been lied to enough in my life.” Maybe an honest man—even one who didn’t spare her feelings—was worth sticking with, at least for a while.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME they left the hotel, low clouds had blanketed the area, blotting out the sun. The air had the cold, heavy feeling of imminent snow. At least Andi wouldn’t have to worry about keeping warm in that coat of hers. Simon pulled his sheepskin-lined jacket out of the back of his cruiser, along with leather gloves, ready for whatever the weather brought.

  Andi wasn’t a chatterbox, that was for sure, which was fine by Simon. He had a reputation as not much of a talker himself. He preferred action to words, most of the time anyway. He glanced over at his passenger as they waited at a red light, trying to gauge her mood. Not nervous or afraid. He would have said she was calm, even.

  So far, he had been pretty impressed with her, something he hadn’t expected. She looked delicate and weak, but when push came to shove, she had nerves of steel. She had been threatened, cut, examined by strangers and betrayed by her lover, yet she hadn’t wilted or whined or complained. She was struggling with her emotions—he hadn’t missed the moments of troubled silence or brief tears—but she was keeping it together.

  The light changed and he turned right onto a side street, drove two blocks, then made another right. “What are you doing?” Andi asked.

  He made another right. “I’m driving,” he said.

  “That’s the second time we’ve passed that car wash,” she said, nodding to the Sudzy Ride sign.

  “I’m making sure we aren’t being followed. Nice to know you’re paying attention.”

  “I’m not as dumb as I look.”

  “I never thought you were dumb.” Naive, misled and too trusting, but not dumb.

  “Then you don’t believe the stereotype?”

  He headed up the entrance ramp to Interstate 70. “And what is the stereotype?”

  “That blondes are dumb. That beautiful women aren’t serious or smart. That rich women only care about shopping.” She waved her hand. “I’m familiar with all the assumptions.”

  “Did you try to prove them wrong?” he asked.

  “I studied botany at Brown,” she said. “My father told everyone I was learning to grow roses and arrange flowers. He thought it was more suitable than telling people I was interested in science.”

  “What century was he living in again?”

  “Oh, he was positively Victorian. But he wasn’t alone. Plenty of rich men want wives who look good, do good and keep their mouths shut. He couldn’t imagine why I wasn’t excited about the prospect.”

  “Is your mother that type?” he asked.

  “She wasn’t. But she married my father before he had money. And she died when I was fifteen.”

  “I lost mine when I was sixteen,” he said. This confession—the intimacy of it—surprised him. He never talked about his family.

  “Mine died of cancer,” she said. “What happened to yours?”

  “She was murdered.”

  He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Andi looked stricken. “How horrible!”

  He cleared his throat, as much to buy time to measure his words as to rein in his emotions. “She was a nurse, volunteering at a center for pregnant teens. One of the girls’ boyfriends broke into the place, high on drugs. He killed his girlfriend, and then he killed my mom.” He still remembered the grayness of the days after that—the darkness of every room, and the hollowness of every conversation, as if the blac
k void left by her absence was taking over the world.

  “She sounds like a very good person,” Andi said.

  “She was.”

  “And your father?” she asked. “What was he like?”

  “He was a cop.”

  “Like you.”

  “Not like me. He was a city cop. A street cop. He made a difference in people’s lives every day.” Simon couldn’t say that about his own work. His dad had relationships with the people on his beat. Simon’s interactions with both suspects and victims were usually brief.

  “Is he still working?”

  “He was killed in the line of duty.” Set up to take a fall by corrupt bosses he had stood up against, but no sense going into that. An investigation had revealed the truth, and he had been awarded a medal, posthumously. Simon had the medal in a drawer somewhere at home. He couldn’t bear to throw it away, but he didn’t keep it where he would see it often—a reminder of how the system had failed his father, coming through only when it was too late.

  “At least he’s someone you can be proud of,” Andi said. “Not like my father.’

  “Have you had any contact with your father since he went to prison?” Simon asked. Pete Matheson had pleaded guilty to killing Special Agent Frank Asher and was currently serving time in a federal prison near Denver.

  “No.” Her voice was clipped, and cold enough to send a chill through Simon.

  “Has he tried to get in touch with you?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t care.”

  But the tears that roughened her words told Simon she did care. He reached out and took her hand. “If you ever do want to see him, I can help arrange that,” he said. “And if you don’t, that’s okay too.”

  She pulled away from him and wrapped her arm across her belly. “I don’t know what I want,” she said softly. “Just for all of this to be over. I want to be somewhere quiet, where I can focus on my baby and not think about anything else.”

  “I’m working on that,” he said. “Just hang on a little longer.”

  She pulled the coat more tightly around her and didn’t say anything for a few miles. When sleet began to hit the windows, she turned toward him once more. “I guess winter has finally decided to show up,” she said.

  The tension in Simon’s chest eased at the words. She didn’t sound so upset anymore. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she had decided to sulk in her misery for a while, but she was stronger than that, and he appreciated it more than he could say. Funny—he wasn’t someone who especially liked talking to people, but he was finding that he enjoyed his conversations with her. “It would have been pretty miserable, camped in the woods all winter,” he said. “We can get a lot of snow in that country.”

  “The Prophet talked about heading south for the winter,” she said. “Maybe Mexico.” She shifted toward him. “Maybe that’s where he’s gone now. He said he had friends down there.” She frowned. “Well, not exactly friends. He said he had ‘connections.’”

  “I’ll mention it to my commander next time I talk to him,” Simon said. “He’ll check it out. Is there any place else he mentioned—another house he owned or friends he might turn to for help?”

  She shook her head. “None of us talked about our lives before we came to the Family,” she said. She had tried a few times to bring up the past, but Daniel had always deflected her attempts to unburden herself, and he had revealed very little of his own history—nothing, she realized now, that hadn’t already been written in news stories about him. “The whole point was to start over, with a clean slate. To focus on the present and the future, not the past.”

  “Kind of makes me wonder what he had in his past that he didn’t want to talk about,” Simon said.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t have things in your past, things you did or said, that it hurts to remember,” she spoke softly. “Choices you made that you wish you could take back.”

  “Of course I do. Everyone does. But I try to learn from them, not pretend they never happened.”

  “Not everyone can do that.”

  “So all that time you spent with him, and he never talked about his past?” Simon asked.

  “Not really.”

  “What about his family?”

  “He said his father was a cold man who was only interested in work and money. Greed drove all his decisions and he judged everyone by how much they owned.”

  “Sounds like he brought his son up to follow in his footsteps,” Simon said. “Between his family’s wealth and what he was acquiring from his followers, he’s put together a considerable fortune.” A fortune he couldn’t access, since authorities had frozen his accounts.

  “Yes, he liked money, but it was never his main focus,” she said. “I’m sure of that. If it had been, he would have lived in a mansion, instead of a motor home. With his looks and charisma, he could have been one of those TV evangelists.”

  “So why didn’t he do that?” Simon asked. “Why hide out with a small group of followers in the wilderness?”

  “Because he believed that was the way to spiritual purity.” She said the words without a hint of sarcasm or irony.

  “Or maybe he wanted to keep a low profile because he was afraid of the wrong kind of attention,” Simon said. “From what I recall, he was a little paranoid about the Russian mafia.”

  “Because they killed his brother,” Andi said. “David’s death affected him deeply.”

  “David Metwater was suspected of double-crossing his killers,” Simon said. “He gambled, did drugs and stole from the family business. He was living the kind of life that pretty much guaranteed he would come to a bad end.”

  “He was Daniel’s twin,” Andi said. “His identical twin. It didn’t matter that he was living a terrible life. Daniel said they were two halves of a whole. David’s death left a void that could never be filled.”

  “It’s a good story,” Simon said. “But something tells me there’s more to it than that. First, he goes after Michelle Munson—Starfall—because he finds out she’s got a scrapbook full of articles about him and his brother. She wants a necklace that belonged to the sister she thought David Metwater murdered. Daniel Metwater would rather kidnap her baby, and try to kill her and a cop, rather than hand over that locket or let us get a good look at that scrapbook. And now he’s gone after you.”

  Andi put a hand to her chest. “When he came to me last night, he said we were meant to be together.”

  Simon tightened his grip on the steering wheel. It shouldn’t matter, but hearing her sound so lovesick over a man like Metwater caused him physical pain. “Do you believe that?” he asked.

  “No.” She pulled the coat more tightly around her, though he had turned the heater up to high. “He’s not the kind of man who could ever be devoted to one person. I knew that from the first. I told myself it was because he had so many followers to care for, and higher things to focus on.”

  “Do you still believe that?”

  The look on her face was pure misery. “No. I think he’s just another man who thinks the world owes him everything.”

  Simon winced. He was no expert on women, but he figured now was a good time to stop talking. He focused instead on the traffic creeping out of town, west toward the mountains. The sleet had turned to snow, and was beginning to stick to the browned grass along the roadside.

  He exited the freeway onto a county road. The weather would have I-70 traffic slowed to a crawl, so this rural route would probably be faster. “I remember traveling this way once with my mother when I was about twelve,” Andi said, apparently having decided that, even though he was a man, he was worth talking to.

  “Where were you headed?” Simon asked.

  “My uncle has a cabin in South Park.” She smiled. “The real South Park—the one the show was named after.”

  “Just a mother-daughter getaway
?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “At the time I didn’t realize it, but looking back, I think she and my father had had an argument of some kind and she wanted to get away for a few days, so she took me to stay at the cabin. It was all a novelty to me—a woodstove for heating and cooking, a hand pump for water and a little log outhouse. We hiked and fished and roasted marshmallows over a campfire.” She smiled. “Living with the Family reminded me of those times.”

  “When was the last time you were there?” Simon asked.

  Her smile faded. “About six months before my mother died. My uncle still has it, but he only uses it for a few weeks during hunting season. Maybe I’ll go back one day.” She rubbed her belly. “I’d like to show it to my son or daughter.”

  The baby. Something else for him to worry about. The doctors had said she could deliver any time now. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “I need to use the bathroom.”

  He spotted a sign for a gas station up ahead and signaled to pull in. The snow was heavier now, fat white flakes clumping on the windshield and clinging to the branches of the evergreens that lined the road.

  “Take your time,” Simon said as Andi climbed out of the cruiser. “I’m going to fill up while we’re here.”

  After he filled the tank, he pulled into a parking spot near the door and went inside. He bought coffee, then lingered by the hot plate. When Andi came out of the restroom, he’d ask her if she wanted anything.

  “It’s nasty out there,” the man behind the counter said. Simon judged him to be in his fifties, his hair in a long silver braid down his back, fastened with multiple rubber bands.

  “Mmm.” Simon turned back toward the restrooms, not interested in small talk.

  “They’re saying it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” the clerk said.

  Simon suppressed a sigh. Now if he didn’t talk to the guy, he would call even more attention to himself. He would be that rude guy who was too snotty to make conversation. “That’s pretty much what they always say, isn’t it?” he said.

  The man laughed. “You’re right about that. Where you headed?”