Her Christmas Protector

by Geri Krotow

  “No, impossible. All of us have the highest level of clearance not only by government standards but by our standards. There is someone at the SVPD who knows about us, of course. Theoretically it’s possible that he leaked it...or that someone overheard him talking to me. But I doubt it.”

  “How do you know it’s not him?”

  Claudia answered with one decisive shake of her head.

  “It’s not him. Our contact at SVPD is a virtual vault when it comes to operational security.”

  “You’re that sure, huh?” Zora had a hard time believing anyone could be trusted completely. She’d held clearances and guarded national secrets for her entire career. Even the best of agents made mistakes, left files in the wrong place, spoke about something they shouldn’t have in an unsecured area.

  “Let’s focus on the region around the farmhouse.” Claudia pulled a tablet out of her designer leather tote and tapped polished fingernails on the surface. A satellite image of Zora’s property appeared, taken in the spring, judging from the heavy foliage on the oak trees that peppered her yard.

  “The timing doesn’t match, Claudia. Even with driving back to the station and getting into my car, it would take me only five or seven minutes longer than if I’d driven straight from the high school. Which we’re presuming the shooter did, if it’s the same guy?”

  Claudia sat, her chin resting on her hand as she leaned over the tablet from the corner of the ottoman.

  “It’s far-reaching but indeed possible. If he was driving a four-wheel-drive vehicle, he could have made it via these three farm roads.” Claudia used her cursor to mark the route. “He would have had to hide his car in the woods here or here.” She circled the copse of trees nearest to Zora’s house, and one a mile or so away.

  “Bryce tried to pursue him and had the area blocked off within minutes of me going down. I find it hard to believe that no one saw anything at all while the shooter escaped. Don’t you find it odd, too?”

  “I do. Unless the shooter lives around here.”

  Zora sat up straight and immediately regretted it as a sharp stab of pain bit through her rib cage.

  “Easy, Zora.”

  “I’ll relax once we have the bastard. I know all of my surrounding neighbors. None of them look like the man I saw at the football game.”

  “Like you, he could have been wearing some kind of disguise.”

  “Has anyone done a profile on the residents?” Zora had a sinking feeling in her stomach. It was sickening to think one of the neighbors that she trusted to get her mail or watch Buttercup could be a killer.

  Claudia swiped her tablet a few times until a spreadsheet of the Trail Hikers’ findings on her neighbors appeared.

  “That’s fast work.”

  “It’s what we get paid for.” Claudia handed the tablet to Zora and leaned back. “Robert Blumenthal, the Trail Hiker you met during your initial read-in, did the work.”

  “It’s impeccable.” She’d expect no less from the agent who had, in two days, briefed her into the Trail Hikers and taught her their history, mission and capabilities. On top of that Rob had certified that she was proficient in a variety of weapons as well as hand-to-hand combat.

  The Trail Hikers had to be dependable. It was part of what made Zora agree to sign on for a five-year stint. The other part had been that she knew she was going to miss the navy in terms of being operationally relevant. As much as she loved counseling and the people she helped, nothing compared to helping local and national LEA take down the bad guys in the most expeditious manner possible.

  “Looks as if my neighbors are all trustworthy, thank God.”

  “Which leaves the shooter on the loose.”

  * * *

  “Sit down with your father and eat your borscht, Zora.” Anna motioned at the spot near her father, Adam. Zora’s Ukrainian immigrant parents had given her a love for authentic Ukrainian cuisine as well a new name when they adopted her. They were as American as anyone but when it came to food, no one made a meaner borscht than Anna.

  “I can’t thank you enough for setting up the tree for me, you two. I don’t know when I’d have gotten it off the back porch.” They’d cut down two trees last weekend and Zora had brought the smaller noble fir to her home, leaving it on the back porch to settle in a bucket of water.

  Adam and Anna had set it up while she napped, and they had all decorated it together. It lit up the front room, its glow visible from the table where they ate.

  “Your mother tells me you’re involved with more of your detective work, Zora.” Adam’s gravelly voice was in stark contrast to his fit form. Seen from behind, he looked thirty years younger than his true age.

  “It’s not my work, Dad, it’s with a private agency. They were looking for someone with my background for some local work.” She’d given them minimal information on her work with the Trail Hikers and they hadn’t pressed it, accepting that it was similar to the type of work she’d done in the navy. She hadn’t been able to talk about that, either.

  “Counseling’s not enough?” Anna slid into the chair opposite Zora, next to Adam.

  “Yes, it’s more than enough. But it’s good for me to still give back in some way.”

  “You owe nothing to no one.” Adam spooned the hot red broth and appeared calm but Zora knew better. Under his steady exterior was a bear that, once disturbed, could be formidable. And when it came to his only child, Adam was overprotective and immovable.

  “Dad, it’s not as if anyone is forcing me to do this. I want to. And I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  “We’re talking about it because we love you, Zora.” Anna spoke quietly from her seat, her bright blue eyes reflecting her concern.

  And the same stubborn attitude as her husband.

  “I know, Mom, and I appreciate that. I wouldn’t be here without either of you.”

  “You’d be here, lubovichka, just with another family. We’re blessed that we got the pick of the litter.” Adam laughed at the family inside joke. They’d done all they could to draw Zora from the hardened shell she’d arrived with when the social worker had dropped her off in Silver Valley. Zora didn’t remember those days clearly, only that she’d taken months to learn to cry again, to allow her heart to open and pour forth incredible sorrow and grief over what she’d experienced in the True Believers cult. The trauma and emotional abuse she’d been subject to with the cooperation of her biological mother...

  She shuddered.

  “What? What did I say, Zora?” Adam’s bushy silver brows meshed into one.

  “Nothing, Dad. I’m just thinking of how grateful I am that you both took me in.”

  “We didn’t take you in like you were some bum off the streets. We adopted you.” Anna’s voice wrapped around Zora’s heart like a hand-knit alpaca throw.

  “We would have taken her in if she were a bum, too. Enough of this.” Adam pointed a salad fork at Zora. “You need to relax. You did your navy time, and you don’t have to do anything that’s so dangerous anymore.”

  Working for the Trail Hikers was far more dangerous on a day-to-day basis than her navy job had been, but she wasn’t going to volunteer that to her parents. They’d been through enough, worried plenty about her over the years. Not to mention their own struggles before and after they immigrated to America.

  “Dad, I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do. And my counseling is starting to take off.”

  “Until your client was murdered.” Anna spoke as simply as if she’d said it was getting chilly outside. Zora loved the practicality of her parents, who had escaped the former Soviet Union as soon as the Berlin Wall’s collapse had allowed them to. They, too, had seen a lot in their lifetimes when they were still so young. Learning to speak English without much of an accent was the least of their accomplishments.

  Zora didn’t believe in coincidence, and the fact that Adam and Anna had become her adoptive parents remained a miracle in her estimation.

  “Have the
y found this Female Preacher Killer, Zora?” Adam buttered a piece of the bread Anna had baked.

  “No, not that I know of.” Her parents didn’t know she was working the very same case.

  “We’re worried, Zora, that maybe who shot you is somehow connected to what you left behind in New York all those years ago.”

  “New York is a crazy place!” Anna chimed in.

  “It’s a very large state, Mom. And the city is only part of it. I never lived anywhere near the city.” She turned back to her dad. “No one from that cult knows where I went. My name, my entire identity, was changed. You know that, Dad. How could they find me? Besides, so many of them are gone, either dead or in prison.”

  “Some of their prison sentences are up.” Anna voiced the concern she’d mentioned yesterday in front of Bryce.

  “I know—you pointed that out yesterday in front of an SVPD detective who knows nothing about it, Mom.”

  “Don’t give me that stern tone, Zora. I’m your mother. And Bryce is like my own son. I certainly fed him as much as you while you were growing up.”

  “He’s a detective now and he doesn’t know anything about my past. He doesn’t need to.”

  “How was I supposed to know you never told him?”

  “Mom, I was in the Witness Security Program. None of us were supposed to talk about what we’d been through, ever. You know that. You never mentioned it to his mother, did you?”

  “No, of course not. Your soup’s getting cold, honey.” In typical Anna fashion, her mother deflected Zora’s ire and sidestepped her own culpability.

  “I noticed a police car at the end of your drive when I came in.” Adam carefully buttered a second slice of the pumpernickel bread, the creamy spread in direct contrast with the rich dark brown grain.

  Anna reached out quicker than a viper and slapped Adam’s hand. “Your cholesterol!”

  Adam grunted.

  “They’re giving me a little extra security, just in case that random shooter thinks of coming back. But he won’t. It was a chance in a million.”

  Adam grunted again and Anna crossed herself three times in Orthodox Russian fashion. She’d remained faithful to her beliefs throughout the communist era and occasionally visited an Eastern Orthodox church two hours away in Washington, DC, but they attended a local Roman Catholic church normally, where Zora had gone with them.

  “It’s not that dire, Mom. You can relax already.”

  “I’ll relax when I’m dead.”

  “Mom, you know I hate it when you say that.”

  Anna shrugged. “It’s true, right?”

  “Enough dark talk. When are you going back to work, Zora?” Adam stood up from the table and started to make tea for all of them.

  “I’ll start seeing clients again next week. I thought I’d go out on my own tomorrow.” She’d already cleared her client schedule for a week, as Mark had directed her at the hospital.

  “Are you sure?” Anna had been at Zora’s side for the past several days, not wanting Zora to lift or strain herself in any way.

  “Yes, Mom. You should go home, too. I’m doing fine. I showered on my own today.”

  “You did.”

  “And I have Butternut.” She also had several types of weapons available to protect herself from any intruder. Another fact her parents never needed to know about.

  Butternut’s tail thumped on the kitchen floor as she sat in her usual dinner spot, far enough away from the dining table so that she wouldn’t get reprimanded for begging, but close enough to dive in if any crumbs fell from the table.

  “She’s a good girl, aren’t you, baby?” Anna stood up and placed her soup bowl, still half-full of broth and bits of beef, on the floor in front of the shepherd.

  “Mom, I told you to please not feed her people food.” Zora’s tone sounded lame even to her. As if she was going to get up and stop Butternut from enjoying the yummy snack—not.

  They all watched Butternut devour the treat with her incredibly long, almost clownish tongue.

  “That dog has the life!” Adam chuckled as he brought the mugs of steaming tea to the table. “When we were kids, dogs were lucky to live a few years. This dog will outlive us all.”

  “It’s not the USSR, Dad.” Zora still liked teasing her parents, even though she was immensely proud of them for the pioneering spirits they possessed. Not a day went by that she didn’t send up a prayer of gratitude that they’d made it to the States and had been available to nurture her when she’d needed it the most.

  She felt a wave of nostalgia and she wanted to blame her healing body, or the coziness of being together with her parents over a bowl of borscht, or setting up the Christmas tree.

  But she knew none of that was the reason for her sense of loss. It was the realization of how the time since she’d left Silver Valley could have been spent.

  With Bryce.

  * * *

  “This isn’t as straightforward as I’d like it to be.” Superintendent Todd stood behind his desk with his hands on his hips, a look of frustration stamped on his face.

  “Sir, I went over all of the people in the immediate vicinity of Ms. Krasny’s house and they’ve all come out clean.”

  “Which leads me to believe that whoever shot her could have been our man. It may have been the man she saw at the football field.”

  “I still don’t know how we let him slip away.” Bryce’s gut twisted in knots and he regretted the near miss at the football game. If Zora’s observations were accurate, and he had no reason to think they weren’t, they’d come very close to nabbing the killer at the game.

  “There’s something you need to be aware of, Bryce.” At Superintendent Todd’s somber tone, Bryce felt the hairs on the nape of his neck stand up. Colt Todd was the furthest possible thing from a trauma-drama type. Never an alarmist, he approached operations methodically. This was perhaps his strongest character trait and the one that had gotten him hired as Silver Valley’s police superintendent.

  “Sir?”

  “As you’ve probably figured out, we occasionally have part-time agents of a sort who help us out with particularly difficult cases, or cases that involve federal jurisdiction.”

  “Like Zora Krasny.” Posing as a minister.

  “Right.” Superintendent Todd looked as though he was hesitant about what he had to say. Bryce had never seen Todd appear anything but confident.

  “You’ve caught their attention, Bryce.”

  “Whose attention, sir?”

  “The agency I’m talking about. Hell, they’re not even an agency. It’s a contract group, for want of a better term. You need to meet with their CEO later today.”

  Bryce felt an automatic resistance to having these sorts of decisions made for him and tried to hide the anger in his voice.

  “I have a job, sir. It’s here at SVPD.”

  “And that won’t change. But I can’t be the only one to interface with them—if something were to happen to me, or if they needed to pull in a local officer, you’re the best candidate for the job. Just go meet them and decide after that, okay?” Superintendent Todd pulled out his wallet and drew out a business card.

  “Go to this address. There’s an intercom at the door. They’ll buzz you in, same as our security here.”

  “And if I’m not interested?”

  “Tell them.” Superintendent Todd had his “you’re dismissed” expression in place and Bryce knew better than to refuse. Todd was one of the most fair-minded men he knew—he had to have good reason to send Bryce to this mystery organization.

  Besides, Bryce didn’t mind finding out about the organization Zora really worked for.

  * * *

  Zora had been eager to get out of the farmhouse and away from her mother’s scrutiny, but twenty minutes into her field trip to Walmart she was winded, sweaty and annoyed.

  Her irritation was at herself for allowing a lone shooter to get close enough to hit her, and on her own property to boot. As much as her past wit
h the True Believers was over, she more than anyone should have known to put a decent security system around and in her home when she purchased it two years ago.

  There were members of the True Believers who’d probably give their eyeteeth to find her after all these years and make her life miserable, if not snuff it out completely.

  Familiar anger left her hands shaking as she walked up and down the holiday aisles, reaching out to touch an ornament here and there. She’d been twelve, damn it, and the abuse had started years before that. Being primed to become a “true disciple” of Leonard Wise, the sick bastard who’d convinced over a thousand people that he alone knew the meaning of life and had direct contact with God. He’d preached that all of his descendants would inherit his God-given abilities, too. Hence the need for so many of his own offspring.

  By as many young women—“god mothers” as he’d referred to them—as possible.

  She’d been one of the lucky ones. She’d gotten out at age twelve, before he’d had a chance to touch her. Her biological mother had told her over and over how lucky she was that “the Master” had chosen Zora as one of his mothers for the True Believers’ children. Her mother had never wanted to believe that meant Zora would be molested by the man. Truth was, he molested all the girls once they reached seventeen. They’d be impregnated by him and a few select male disciples as mothers to his future minions. This way he skirted the law on the legal age of consent.

  If not for the newspapers she’d read in the grocery store they’d visited on random Saturdays, she’d never have realized that the world wasn’t meant to be such a scary place. That real families who loved and nurtured their children did exist. That Leonard Wise was a criminal.

  “Can I help you find something, ma’am?” A young clerk smiled at her and Zora willed her grimace to relax. Since taking her counseling courses she’d figured out she still suffered from PTSD, a remnant of a childhood under constant duress.

  “No, thank you, I’m just browsing.”

  “Let me know if I can help you.”

  “Will do.”

  The young man walked away and relief that it had only been a store clerk, not one of the True Believers, made her shoulders relax, as if they’d been carrying a huge burden.