by Meryl Sawyer
Ryan ambled along, envying the daredevils, tackling the waves without boards. The surf pummeled the jetty at the entrance to the harbor with such force that spray shot into the air and could be seen on the mainland. All but the most talented bodysurfers were hurled against the shore like a piece of driftwood or hauled under and towed out to sea.
Not that he was much of a surfer but Ryan would like to give those awesome waves a try. When you were successfully riding one, they called it “the green room” because your mind went into a zone where nothing mattered but you and the wave. It was a natural high unlike anything else.
Aw hell, even if he was allowed to surf, the green room wouldn’t change a damn thing. Chill, he reminded himself. He’d come to the beach to relax, to forget.
He turned his back on the Wedge and ambled along the shore. Overhead a swarm of gulls circled, riding a thermal, cawing, scolding each other. One spotted a fish and dove like an arrow into the waves. Two seconds later it emerged triumphant.
Ryan smiled in spite of himself. There was something about the ocean. It represented the natural order of things—a world bigger than man. The sea could soothe a troubled soul the way nothing else could. He inhaled the briny scent of the ocean and let it fill his lungs. He stared down at the sand pockmarked by crabs’ air holes.
He exhaled slowly and walked forward, his beach towel slung over his bare shoulder to hide the scar. He didn’t care what people thought, but he didn’t want to answer questions. When you got right down to it, he didn’t want to talk to anyone.
“For crissakes, get a grip,” he muttered to himself.
Garlands of seaweed were being nudged onto the shore by waves that rolled across the sand, tumbling like dice. He kicked idly at a free-floating piece of seaweed. It felt slick as an eel when he flung it back into the water with his toes.
Something in the distance caught his eye. A chestnut-colored dog had just emerged from the waves, a tennis ball in his mouth. The dog raced toward a teenage girl who was clapping her hands.
Buddy, he thought. His breath solidified in his lungs. He’d found his lost dog. Make that stolen dog.
Ryan halted in his tracks. Sand dragged by the retreating waves swirled around his feet. He must be losing it—big-time. Buddy—even if he’d lived beyond normal life expectancy—was long gone.
Dead. Dead for many years.
Buddy had been his dog when he was sixteen and living in Northern California. Part golden retriever, part Labrador, Buddy had been Ryan’s best friend in the year following his mother’s death and a move to a new town. He’d trained the dog all by himself, using a library book as a guide. Buddy faithfully waited on the front porch every day for Ryan to come home from football practice.
Then one day, Ryan returned and Buddy had vanished. A neighbor reported seeing a strange car in their driveway. Ryan knew Buddy wouldn’t have gotten into a car with a stranger. Buddy had been distrustful of anyone but Ryan and his father. Unless Ryan or his father was around, the dog growled at strangers. They figured the dog must have been abused before they adopted him from Cloverdale Rescue.
Ryan put up posters, searched everywhere, checked pounds in the surrounding area, and used his allowance to put an ad in the paper. Nothing. Only the report of the strange car in their driveway.
He’d gone to bed each night, trying not to let his father know he was crying. Sixteen-year-old football players don’t cry. He couldn’t hold back the tears as he prayed that whoever had Buddy wasn’t mistreating him. He was getting good kibble and lots of fresh water. Runs. Sessions with a ball.
No matter who had Buddy, the dog would never be theirs. Ryan had taught him to trust, then taught him a slew of tricks. Buddy only belonged to Ryan. No one else.
Then there were the nights when Ryan imagined Buddy in a cage too small for his large body. Could be a pound or worse, a lab where they were experimenting on dogs. Ryan could see Buddy’s black nose between the bars, his eyes glazed with fear, the way they’d been the day Ryan rescued Buddy. His dog was silently asking: Why did you do this to me?
The thought of Buddy somewhere alone and forsaken haunted Ryan. He kept hearing the dog: Why have you deserted me?
The lingering memory of Buddy had been part of the reason Ryan had gone into the FBI. What would it be like not to know what had befallen a loved one? Thousands of people vanished each year without a trace.
The academy had been a challenge, but he’d enjoyed the training process, the winnowing out of those who couldn’t cut it, the air of camaraderie. In a way, it felt as if he were playing football again.
Back then, he’d enjoyed being part of a team. Just when had he turned into such a loner? He supposed facing death day in and day out did that to a person. When death finally arrived and stole the one you loved, you didn’t much feel like reaching out, being part of a team.
Reality about FBI work hadn’t set in until Ryan’s first assignment at a field post in Minneapolis. It was boring beyond anything he could possibly have imagined. He’d watched too much television in his formative years, Ryan decided. There wasn’t much action in the field offices.
After two years, Ryan applied for advanced training in the computer sciences unit and was accepted because he’d been a math major at Duke. The training concentrated on white-collar crimes and identity theft. It wasn’t what he’d envisioned when he’d joined, but at least he was solving crimes, not pushing paper in some field office.
A bonus had been his assignment to the capital of white-collar crime, Los Angeles. Not only was there plenty of activity, it meant he could be closer to his father, who had suffered a stroke and was living in a facility in Newport Beach, south of L.A.
“Hi,” called the young girl with the dog as he approached. Nearby her friends were lounging on beach towels, wearing bikinis no bigger than eye patches. “Isn’t Dodger great?”
“He’s special, all right.”
The dog bounded up to Ryan and offered him the dripping wet tennis ball. Ryan took it and threw it into the ocean with his good arm. The dog was off hell-for-leather after the ball. He splashed through the breaking waves with the same happy abandon that Buddy used to have. Dodger swooped under the water with amazing agility and came up with the ball. He trotted back to the girl.
Ryan marched on; he already had a spot picked out where he intended to stretch out and try to sleep. As he walked away from the girls, he heard one of them call him a studmuffin.
Get outta here, he thought. He was old enough to be her father. He was tall—almost six and a half feet tall—but he no longer had the muscular build of the running back he’d been in college. He was slim now, too slim.
He spread his beach towel on the sand and slathered sunblock on his body as best he could with his left hand. He had a limited range of motion with his right arm but it was quickly improving. Meanwhile, he was getting to be quite adept at using his left hand. He lay down on his beach towel and closed his eyes.
Beep-beep. Beep-beep. The chirping from some distant spot awakened him. Wow. He had been sleeping. A first. He automatically reached for the cell phone in the side pocket of his swim trucks with his right hand. Pain shot up his arm and settled in his bum shoulder. He grabbed for the phone with his left hand and saw Caller ID showed Conrad Hollister. Had something happened to his father?
“Are you all right, Dad?”
“I’m fine. I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
“I’m on my way.” Ryan disconnected and stood up, shaking the sand from his towel with his left hand. He saw that he must have been asleep for some time. It was nearly noon. Dozens of people were now on the beach and umbrellas had sprouted from the sand like mushrooms. The girl with the great dog was gone.
“WEIRD,” RYAN HEARD himself say, but his voice seemed to belong to someone else. “Car bombs are unusual.”
His father hadn’t developed a medical problem. He had summoned Ryan to hear this story. Ryan had a sneaking suspicion—hell, more than a suspicion—wh
ere this was going. He should just haul ass now, but he needed to let his father down gently. Conrad Hollister wasn’t what he used to be. Confined to a wheelchair, his world now revolved around Twelve Acres. And Meg Amboy.
After Ryan’s mother’s death, Conrad had never remarried, although he’d had numerous girlfriends and plenty of chances. He seemed more attached to Meg than he had to any of them, which was unusual since they couldn’t possibly be having sex at their age. Could they? Don’t go there.
“Hayley was like a daughter to me,” Meg said, the threat of tears in her voice.
“I’m sorry.” Ryan searched for the right words. “It’s such a tragedy.”
“I told Meg that you could help us,” his father said.
There you go. Ryan would have bet anything that this was the reason he was here. “I’m sure the police are all over this. Since it happened so close to an airport, the Joint Terrorism Task Force must be investigating, too.”
His father’s lips clamped together in resentment and tears shimmered in Meg’s eyes. The air around them was fraught with pain and desperation. Ryan could see that they had no idea of the magnitude of this investigation. He wouldn’t add a damn thing.
“The Joint Terrorism Task Force includes the FBI, local fire and police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as well as Homeland Security. That’s tremendous manpower focused on this crime. They’ll solve the case.”
“They’re not you.” Determination was etched on every time-worn line on his father’s face. “This isn’t personal to them.”
Something inside Ryan clicked, a painful echo of the larger than life man his father had once been. Back then, Conrad Hollister would never have begged anyone for help. A host of conflicting emotions warred inside Ryan. It wouldn’t be long, he realized, before he lost the only other person he loved.
“You know I’m not an investigator. I’m a computer jock.” He said this more to Meg than his father. Meg knew what he did; they’d discussed it the first time he’d met her. But she looked so stricken, as if she’d keel over any second, that he felt he had to explain.
“I don’t trust them,” Meg said in a surprisingly firm voice. “They were here to interview me. They don’t have a clue. The car bomb has thrown them. The police think there’s some foreign connection. I tried to explain Hayley designs clothes. She doesn’t have foreign connections, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“Can’t you just look through Hayley’s things?” his father pleaded. “See if the police missed something.”
The tone of his father’s voice triggered a raw ache in Ryan. He’d miss his father as much as—if not more than—he missed Jessica. “The police won’t let me waltz into her place—”
“My place,” Meg corrected him. “I own the loft. The detectives who interviewed me said they would be through with it this afternoon. I asked because I need to find one of Hayley’s dresses for the funeral.”
Ryan struggled to hold in a gasp. After a bomb, what could be left? He couldn’t imagine a coffin with nothing in it but a dress.
Meg rose and walked with surprising agility across her suite, returning to where they were sitting with a photograph in a sterling silver frame.
“This is my Hayley.” Meg’s voice cracked. “She’s all I have.”
Kicking himself for getting into this, Ryan gazed at the girl in the photo as Meg handed it to him. It was a candid headshot obviously taken at the beach. Tousled brown hair shimmering with coppery highlights. Clear hazel eyes blazing with happiness.
Pretty. Healthy. Sexy. The typical California girl.
Except for the arresting smile that hit Ryan like a sucker punch to his gut. She had a mysterious glint in her eyes that made him wonder just what she was thinking. Something told him that there was nothing “typical” about Hayley.
He studied the photograph more closely. Those full pouty lips. Did they taste as good as they looked? And that skin the color of honey. Would it be silky smooth to the touch? His pulse kicked up a notch.
Annoyed at the direction his thoughts had taken, Ryan realized he felt some sort of connection with this woman, which was totally unexpected. Since Jessica’s death, not one brain wave had focused on sex for over a year. Why now?
“All right,” he said, feeling like a cat who’d just horked up a hairball. “I’ll check her place. I’ll also make a few phone calls and see what I can find out.”
This was like dancing on eggs. He didn’t want to give them false hope that he could personally solve this. “It may be hard to tell much at her place. I’m sure the task force has removed a lot of evidence.”
“Thank you, son,” his father said in a low-pitched voice that couldn’t hide his emotion.
“Bless you,” Meg added. “Bless you.”
Doing this small favor that meant so much to his father wasn’t a big deal, he assured himself. Still, he had the disturbing feeling that he shouldn’t be doing this. His sixth sense kicked in, telling him that Hayley Fordham was nothing but trouble.
CHAPTER THREE
“WHATDAYA THINK?” Ed Phillips asked Ryan.
“Too soon to tell, but so far I’m not finding much.”
Ryan had arrived at Hayley Fordham’s loft to discover the authorities were still there. He wasn’t surprised. He’d thought releasing the crime scene as early as Meg indicated was unlikely. His bad luck had not run out when he’d agreed to help Meg. The first person he saw when he walked up was Phillips.
The special agent worked with Ryan in the L.A. office. Phillips was a senior criminal intelligence analyst while Ryan was in cyber crimes, but they knew each other from previous cases. Phillips had been sent to represent the FBI on the Joint Terrorism Task Force that Ryan had predicted would investigate this case. A car bombing so close to an airport was a huge red flag for a terrorist act.
Phillips had immediately enlisted Ryan to check Hayley Fordham’s computer and introduced him to the local detectives investigating the murder. He also spoke to the ATF guys, who were still called ATFers even though their official title was now Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“This is the computer guru who cracked the Rosier case,” Phillips announced to the team gathered in the makeshift command post set up in the ground-floor garage of Hayley Fordham’s loft. This introduction wowed the group. The Rosier case had been a fraud scam that made headlines early last year. The information that hung Carleton Rosier had been encrypted and buried on his corporation’s computers. Ryan had figured out how the con artist had created two sets of books on his computers.
“What have they got?” Ryan asked as he kept punching keys and concentrating on Hayley’s twenty-one inch screen. Phillips was standing behind him, watching. This was annoying but Ryan didn’t say anything because he needed to find out as much as he could about Hayley.
“Nothin’ unless ATF finds out something.”
ATF bomb experts spent so much time training that even though the FBI had their own team, they took a backseat to ATF. They would be looking for bomb-making equipment, although Ryan thought it was unlikely that Hayley made the bomb that killed her. Yet stranger things had happened. The bomb could have been intended for someone else and she’d accidentally detonated it.
“Nothing like this case on VICAP,” Ryan said, referring to the Violent Crimes Apprehension Program that maintained a massive database on crimes at their headquarters in Quantico.
Phillips shook his head. “Whoo-ee, this is one for the books. We get two, maybe three car bombings a year, most of them along the border. Mexican cartels have a buncha’ crazy muthafuckers who rig bombs.”
Phillips had grown up in Alabama and his roots could be heard when he talked and in the expressions he used, which was unusual at the Bureau. They encouraged the neutral cadence of newscasters. Accent aside, Phillips was one of the sharpest guys Ryan had encountered at the FBI.
“Could Hayley Fordham have been involved with drugs? Should I be looking for something like that on her
computer?”
Phillips shrugged. “I doubt it, but shee-it. Who knows?”
“Are we sure that it was Hayley who was killed?”
“Ninety-nine percent sure. She used her credit card just minutes before her dadgummed car blew sky high. The license plate flew off or we wouldn’t have been able to ID the car. No body parts. She was vaporized.”
Ryan imagined the dress that Meg was coming to pick out tomorrow. Evidently, the poor woman had no idea her niece’s body was dust. “What about the security cameras? What do they show?”
“The camera at the entrance nearest the car was on the fritz but the ones in the restaurant clearly show the woman Trent Fordham identified as his half-sister, Hayley. She had drinks with an unidentified female friend, then got in her car and yow-zer. That’s all she wrote.”
“What does the friend say?”
Phillips quirked one dark eyebrow. “The brother didn’t recognize the woman and the locals haven’t tracked her down yet.” He sounded as if he didn’t have much confidence in the police.
Ryan stared at the computer screen as he tapped a few keys. His mind was on the intriguing face in the photograph. Hayley was something else, and according to her aunt, talented and smart. Who would want her dead?
They were on the loft’s third floor, which Hayley used as an office/studio. The small desk with her computer was a fire hazard of notes and sketches. There was a work table with some fabric laid out. Two empty easels faced the twelve-foot floor-to-ceiling windows that provided natural light during the day. Racks of oil tubes and brushes were on the wall next to pegs for oilcloth to cover artwork and paint-splattered smocks. Several completed oils were stacked against the far wall.
Ryan again thought about what Meg had told him about her niece. Hayley was the clothing designer for Surf’s Up, the family company. Except for the fabric on the table, this place looked more like an artist’s studio. But hey, what did he know?
