by LENA DIAZ,
“Where is he, Jody?”
She motioned with her chin. “He jumped out, ran toward the water.”
Adam yanked his knife out of his boot and leaned across the opening. He sliced the rope on the roll bar, freeing her. “Can you drive?”
“The tire—”
“Don’t make any sudden turns or stops and we should be able to ride on the rim for a bit on this soft ground. We have to get out of here, now, before Damien finds the cache of guns I took away from his men, or the one who took off looking for me returns. He would have heard the gunshots and could be back any second.”
She was shaking her hands, working her fingers. “I’ll try. My hands feel like a thousand needles are stabbing them.” She stepped over the middle console and plopped down behind the wheel. “What about you? How will you get into the—”
He rolled over the side of the buggy and fell into the back seat. “Go! Head that way.” He motioned toward where they’d come from earlier in the day, back toward the Sugarland Trail.
“Your leg. Are you okay? How did you—”
Boom!
The crack of another rifle sounded from the direction of the water.
“Go, go, go!” Adam yelled even as he returned fire.
The buggy took off, tilting dangerously to the right.
“Back off the gas, ease into it!” Adam fired several more rounds, laying cover fire as Jody brought the buggy under control, then took off more slowly.
The buggy straightened out, the ride so bumpy and lopsided that Adam fell back. He scrambled across the seat on his knees, cursing when his makeshift splint caught on a seat belt and pulled his hurt leg. Fire shot up to his thigh, but he couldn’t give in to the pain now. He gritted his teeth and brought up his rifle, exchanging shot after shot with the thugs by the other buggy until it fell out of sight behind a rise.
He collapsed, clutching his useless leg.
Jody looked at him in the mirror. “Should I pull over?”
“No! Keep going. I slashed all four tires in the other vehicle and tossed the keys in the water. That should give us a good chance. But it’s still a dune buggy. They can ride it with flat tires on this ground just like we’re doing. All it takes is one guy who knows how to hot-wire it and they’ll be after us in no time.”
“Then...what can we do? This buggy can’t get back up the mountain where we came down. I don’t remember a road.”
“There’s a road—several. Access roads we rangers use, more like wide footpaths than roads, but they’ll do the job. I assume Damien and his men came down one of them to get to us as fast they did. We’ll have to keep ahead of them. That’s our best chance right now.”
A dull roar sounded in the distance. The other buggy, back over the rise they’d just come down.
Jody’s tortured gaze met his again in the mirror. “Is there a plan B?”
This was his plan B. Plan A had pretty much ended when he’d had to shoot out the buggy tire to get Damien to stop. He’d hoped to use that buggy for his and Jody’s escape. Without a flat tire, they could be going twice as fast as they were now, and escape would have been easy.
He forced a smile even though his leg was throbbing so hard he could barely think straight. And it was bleeding again. And he was pretty sure he was close to passing out. Again. “I’ll think of something.”
A bright spotlight popped on ahead of them.
Jody slammed the brakes.
Adam grabbed the roll bar and swung himself into the seat beside her, dropping onto his knees and aiming his rifle straight ahead over the top of the windshield.
They came to a shuddering stop, turned sideways, with Adam’s side the one facing the lights.
“Drop your weapon!” a voice called out over a loudspeaker.
Adam hesitated.
The spotlight swept off to the side, still lighting up the buggy but not in his eyes anymore. He got his first clear glimpse at what they were facing. A group of at least fifteen men and women formed a semicircle about a hundred feet away. They were all aiming rifles at them.
“Drop it!” the voice ordered again.
Adam pitched his rifle out and held his hands up in the air.
Jody stared at him in shock. “What are you doing?”
He was about to tell her when the loudspeaker buzzed again. “Step out of the vehicle, hands up.”
“Go ahead,” he told her. “These are—”
Chh-chh. Four men materialized from out of the darkness on either side of them. One had just pumped his shotgun.
“Put the guns away,” Adam told them, sounding furious as he leaned over Jody as if to shield her. “I’m Ranger Adam McKenzie.”
“Lower your weapons!” Another man jogged into view, shaking his head as he reached the buggy. “What have you gotten yourself into this time, Adam?”
Jody’s eyes were wide, her face pale as she looked back and forth between them, her hands in the air.
Adam rolled his eyes at him, but he couldn’t help but grin as he gently pressed Jody’s arms down. “Jody Ingram, meet National Park Service Investigative Officer, Special Agent Duncan McKenzie. My brother.”
Chapter Fourteen
Adam looked over his brother’s head, past the foot of the hospital bed to where Jody was curled into a completely uncomfortable-looking chair by the window, passed out from exhaustion.
“Earth to Adam,” Duncan said. “She’s fine. The doctor checked her out last night, and other than some bumps and bruises, she’s okay. You can quit checking on her every thirty seconds.”
Adam shoved his brother’s arm off the bed railing. “And you can stop exaggerating. I’ve only checked on her a few times since you came in.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” He didn’t look convinced as he waved a hand toward Adam’s left leg, heavily bandaged and propped up on some pillows. “I’m surprised they didn’t cut that thing off while I was dealing with your mountain buddies all morning.” He winced with sympathy. “It looked awful yesterday. Had to hurt like a son of a gun. What’s the prognosis?”
He started to glance at Jody again but caught himself.
Duncan grinned, as if he could read his mind. Maybe he could. The two of them were the closest in age of all of his brothers. They were only ten months apart—Irish twins, as the saying went. Most strangers had difficulty telling them apart. Every time he had to tell someone in front of his mom that, no, they weren’t twins, they were ten months apart, she’d blush bright red. His dad would grin with pride, as if his virility had been confirmed. He didn’t mind at all being the stereotype behind the slang Irish twins saying that some found offensive. He just pointed to his other two sons and smiled. Or, most of the time to his other one son, since the fourth son was rarely ever home, doing everything he could to keep his title as the reigning black sheep of the family.
“The doctor threw all kinds of medical jargon at me. The best I can tell, I pretty much ripped the main muscles apart when I pulled that piece of wood out. Creating a makeshift splint out of tree branches and my shirt and chasing down the bad guys destroyed the rest. If I’m lucky and the antibiotics work like they’re supposed to, I might get full use of the leg with a year or so of physical therapy.”
Duncan winced again. “And if you’re not lucky?”
Adam’s hands tightened on the blanket covering him. “They lop it off.” He shrugged. “Jody’s alive. I’m alive. That’s a miracle considering what we were up against. If I end up losing a leg out of it, I consider myself lucky.”
“You have a warped view of good luck,” Jody’s soft, feminine voice called out from her window seat. “And there was no luck involved. You almost killed yourself saving both of us. If the National Park Service hands out medals, you deserve a drawer full of them.”
She uncurled her legs and headed toward the bed. She held her hand across Adam to the
other side, offering it to his brother. “Thank you for rescuing us, Duncan. But knowing your brother, he’d have found a way to finish the job and bring us both home, even without your help. He’s pretty amazing.”
Duncan shook her hand. “I’m sure you’re right, Miss Ingram. Adam would have found a way. He’s a pretty resourceful guy and I’m proud to have him as a fellow officer, and a brother.”
Adam rolled his eyes.
Duncan dropped down into his chair as Jody took the one on the other side of the bed. He picked up an electronic tablet from the bedside table and tapped the screen, bringing it to life. “I’m actually on duty, in spite of the obscenely late hour of seven on a Sunday evening—well past my normal dinnertime. I need to take Adam’s statement now that he’s finally out of surgery and no longer under the influence of anesthesia. My team’s heading up the investigation in conjunction with the local police.”
“So sorry to have inconvenienced you by having a long surgery,” Adam said, rolling his eyes.
Duncan grinned.
“Have they found Tracy? Or Sam?” Jody asked.
“Not yet, ma’am. But I promise you we have every available resource searching for them. We’ve also got a team looking for that Damien fellow and his right-hand guy, Ned. The rest of them we captured and put into lockup, waiting to be processed. We know their names because of their fingerprints. They’re all in the system. We just have to figure out last names for Damien and Ned and make the connections, figure out how and why they ended up together. We’re on this. Don’t you worry.”
She nodded her thanks and rubbed her hands up and down her arms, as if chilled.
Adam started to pull his blanket off to give to her.
She put her hand on his, stopping him. “Don’t you dare. I’ll go ask the nurse for an extra one. Be right back.”
As soon as the door to the hospital room closed, Adam rolled his head on his pillow to look at his brother. “Waiting to be processed? No one has interrogated the thugs you captured?”
“Every single one lawyered up. We didn’t get squat from any of them.”
“Any idea what their connection is to each other?”
“Career criminals, and not the garden-variety street thugs, either. They all have long records with everything from grand theft auto to breaking and entering. One of them was charged with murder but beat the rap. No question he did it—the prosecutor made some stupid mistakes and he got off on a technicality. But finding links between them has proven difficult. If anything, the lack of links is what’s so glaring and concerning. They’ve all done some time, either in jail or prison, but never at the same places, not at the same time, at least. Two of them aren’t even from Tennessee. And the states they’re from aren’t the same, either. So, again, no links, other than them being lowlifes who will do anything for a buck.”
Adam drew the obvious conclusions. “Damien’s the leader, so he probably hired all the guys working for him. Instead of bringing on guys he did time with or knew in some way, he purposely went out of his way to hire strangers. He didn’t want to risk anything coming back to point to him.”
Duncan nodded. “That’s my take, too. Which makes me think that either Damien has some kind of connection to whatever is behind the abductions, or someone who hired him does. And that someone is going to great lengths to distance themselves from whatever happens. Even if everything hits the fan, they want to come out lily-white.”
“You think someone hired Damien? That he’s not the one behind this?” Adam asked.
“Did he strike you as smart enough to mastermind all of this?”
“Hard to say. Didn’t you find his fingerprints on the buggy he drove? He has to be in the system. Those were prison tattoos on his arms.”
Duncan’s mouth flattened. “Unfortunately, the steering wheel and the rest of the interior of the buggies isn’t conducive to giving us viable sets of prints. They’re textured, don’t provide anything useful in the fingerprint department.”
“What about the outside of the buggies, the painted surfaces? Can’t you get prints off those?”
“Oh, we’ve got plenty of prints from the outside. So far, every one matches up to the guys we’ve already got locked up. Not one of them leads to this Damien guy. Also, the buggies were stolen. So tracing registration is a dead end.”
“Figures.” Adam blew out a breath in frustration. “The lack of prints doesn’t make sense. He wasn’t wearing gloves. And I didn’t see him wipe down anything. He sure didn’t have time to later, when he took off running.”
“If he took precautions to only touch the textured plastic door handle on the outside, he wouldn’t have left prints. A guy who went to the care he did in order to hire guys who weren’t connected to him in any way could have been careful enough to think about fingerprints before touching anything.”
Adam stretched his leg, wincing when a sharp pain radiated up his calf. “You have to have a theory about all of this. A group of thugs kidnaps all three employees of a PI firm and threatens one of them if she doesn’t show them where some supposed pictures are. Makes sense it’s all related to one of Campbell’s cases, don’t you think?”
Duncan nodded. “The possibility has crossed my mind. This Damien fellow was worried about surveillance photos. The client who hired Sam would have wanted the photos taken. And there wouldn’t be any reason for Sam to hide the photos from the guy paying his bills.”
“So whoever was in the photos found out that the client hired a private investigator and wants any pictures he took. The question is how did the person in the photos find out. You think Sam got sloppy? That someone saw him taking pictures?”
“Seems like the simplest scenario, and it matches what Miss Ingram said on the chopper on the way to the hospital. Whoever is being followed by Sam sees him and hires Damien to kill Sam and hire a group of guys to toss Campbell’s home and office. Only they’re still searching the office when Tracy Larson goes to work, and she catches them in the act.”
Adam nodded, following the scenario. “There’s a struggle, maybe they kill her—either accidentally or on purpose—and then they realize the pictures they’re looking for are nowhere to be found. Now they’re getting desperate. Was there anything in Campbell’s office to let them know that Jody worked there, too? And that she was the only remaining employee?”
“Absolutely. Campbell was meticulous. His payroll records were right in his filing cabinet. Damien knew there were three of them. Without Sam or Tracy around to interrogate, Miss Ingram was the last link to making sure those pictures never find their way into anyone’s hands. That’s why they went after her.” He shrugged. “Makes sense as a hypothetical. But I have to keep an open mind and follow the evidence. We may be on a completely wrong track. If Miss Ingram can remember more details about what Damien and the others may have said in front of her when you weren’t with her, that could give us the clues we need to make all the puzzle pieces fit,” Duncan said.
“I assume you’re talking to all of Campbell’s clients?”
“Of course. We sent the files from the office to our team of investigators. They’re following up with everyone who hired him in the past month. If we don’t get any leads out of that, we’ll go back further. Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.”
“What about finding Sam Campbell and Tracy Larson?” When his brother hesitated, Adam narrowed his eyes. “You found them, didn’t you? That’s what you really came in here to tell me. But since Jody was here you couldn’t.”
“I came in here to check on my brother and take a more detailed statement now that you’re coherent and off drugs. But, yes, you’re right. We found something. Or, rather, someone. A body. The autopsy isn’t finished yet. They’ll need DNA results or dental records to confirm the identity.”
“Male or female?”
“Male.”
“Sam Campbell.”
> Duncan nodded. “Most likely but it hasn’t been confirmed. Physical description and approximate age matches the body, and there aren’t any other open missing-persons cases that could fit. He was dumped in a ditch not far from his office, beside a rural road. Critters and decomp took their toll. Thus the need to wait for dental records or DNA results before making it official.”
“Understood. What about her friend Tracy Larson?”
“Based on the quick statement you gave me while the search-and-rescue team hauled you two out in the chopper, I can’t imagine that she’s still alive. But without a body, we’re still treating it as a search and rescue, not a recovery. Not yet.”
“No leads?”
“None. Her car was parked at the office, so it seems likely that’s where she was taken. No witnesses so far, though. We’ve canvassed her apartment complex, too, in case this was planned in advance and someone suspicious was hanging out watching her place in the week before she disappeared. Gatlinburg PD is doing a knock and talk, going door to door to follow up with anyone who wasn’t home when they did their initial canvass. But the last reported sighting of Miss Larson so far is Friday afternoon, when Miss Ingram left the office.”
“I prefer Jody to Miss Ingram.”
They both looked toward the door. Jody was just inside, her face pale, her freckles standing out in stark relief.
“How long have you been listening?” Adam asked.
Two bright spots of color darkened her cheeks as she clutched a beige blanket in her arms. “I wasn’t purposely trying to eavesdrop. I was about to step inside when I heard you mention Tracy. I didn’t want to interrupt, or make you stop, because everyone has been so tight-lipped. It’s frustrating. No one seems to want to tell me anything.”
She stepped to the plastic chair on Adam’s right and sat down, bringing the blanket up to her chin.
Adam exchanged a relieved looked with his brother. If Jody had only started listening at the mention of Tracy, then she hadn’t heard that a body had been found and might be Sam. He wanted to keep it that way until the coroner confirmed the identity. “Duncan, can you—”
