The Third Secret

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Leaving his truck at the side of the road, with only the crunch of Huey’s boot steps and heavy breathing for company, he gave himself over to the mercy of a system he didn’t trust and allowed the chief of police to lead him to the back of his unmarked car.

  4

  Erin watched the man. That was her job. To watch him. He knew she was there. Knew she was watching. She couldn’t turn him in. Couldn’t tell anyone what he’d done. He knew that. And laughed.

  He wanted Erin to know what he was about to do.

  She moved closer. The man’s face changed. Now she was looking at an old man. With darker skin and different eyes.

  His eyes were brown. She liked his eyes. He glanced at her and met her gaze. He shook his head, lifted his eyebrows, as though telling her to watch, and then raised his hand and whipped the back of it across the woman’s cheek.

  Erin couldn’t stop him.

  Then the face changed again. Became female, and young. With soulful blue eyes. Erin liked her eyes. The girl had money in her hand. She’d just been paid to do something and Erin had to watch. It was going to be bad. Really bad and—

  Shooting up in bed Erin froze, waiting—for what, she didn’t know. Confused by swirling thought, she couldn’t escape the fragments of visions in her mind.

  Was that what she did? What she’d become? Was she a voyeur to the bad and ugly? Someone who let bad people do bad things? Who watched it all—after the fact—and helped them get away with what they’d done?

  Dripping with sweat, she shivered, scared to death.

  She heard it again. The sound that had woken her. Her cell phone. On her nightstand. Right next to the clock with the big red numbers.

  One-fourteen.

  Boots, the five-year-old tabby cat Noah had given her for her birthday just weeks before he died, raised his head, looked up at her, as if to say “Aren’t you going to get that?”

  As if the ringing of the phone, the disturbance of his sleep, was her fault.

  And she supposed it was. Boots didn’t get a lot of calls.

  On the next ring, Erin grabbed the phone, pressing the call button, while lingering images continued to float in and out of her consciousness. “Hello?”

  Dreams. They were just dreams.

  “Ms. Morgan?” She recognized the voice. It meant something. But what? From where?

  Was he a client? Someone she’d set free? In trouble again?

  A middle-of-the-night phone call wouldn’t be a courtesy call. A thank-you.

  “Yes.”

  “My name’s Rick Thomas. We’ve never met. I need your help.”

  Erin clicked on the light, only vaguely aware of Boots’s squinting, protesting eyes. “Where are you?”

  “Sheriff’s station. I’ve just been booked.”

  She’d been there the morning before. And that afternoon, too. And then she placed the voice.

  “You’re the man who found Charles Cook.”

  “That’s right.” He didn’t ask how she knew.

  “And now you’re in jail.”

  “They think I killed him.”

  That was quick. And convenient.

  “How’d you get my name?” Not that it mattered. But she liked to know.

  “Huey Johnson.” Sounded odd, not hearing him referred to as Sheriff Johnson. He was always Sheriff. Whether in uniform, at church or at the grocery store. He was the sheriff. Had been for decades.

  “I’ll call him about bail. You got money to post?”

  “I can get it.”

  In that case, “My fee is two hundred dollars an hour.”

  “Are you that good?”

  She had her AV rating. “Yes.”

  “Then get me out of here.”

  Erin tried to take offense at the man’s high-handedness. Except that he didn’t sound bossy or egotistical. He just sounded tired.

  A man who didn’t waste time on social games and niceties.

  “One more question, Mr. Thomas.”

  She waited for a response that didn’t come, then asked, “Did you do it?”

  “No.”

  For now, and because the sheriff had told him to call her, she believed him.

  And went to work.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Rick was just dozing off in the smallest cell he’d ever occupied when Deputy John Wright, a young man from a neighboring city whom Rick had never seen before that night, was unlocking his door.

  He stood. “What time is it?” They’d taken his watch.

  “One forty-five.”

  Less than an hour since his one phone call? Erin Morgan was worth her two hundred an hour.

  He hadn’t met the woman, but picked her out immediately when he came around the corner from the now-empty cell block, consisting of six cells, and into the office area of the Ludwig County Sheriff’s Department.

  She was the only female in the room. The only other person besides the young man accompanying Rick and an older man who’d been working dispatch when Rick was brought in.

  “Mr. Thomas?”

  The woman was younger than he’d expected. And gorgeous. Two strikes against her. Rick didn’t put any stock in looks—other than to recognize that they came in handy as a distraction—and at two hundred bucks an hour, he’d counted on the kind of experience that comes with age.

  Still, she was all he had at the moment. And she’d managed to get him out of there. He nodded as they approached each other. Took the envelope of belongings she handed him. Noticed the small, soft hands with long slim fingers and evenly cropped nails.

  “Do I need to sign anything?”

  Ms. Morgan shook her head—a head bouncing with short, golden-brown hair.

  “Let’s go in here.” Her voice, as soft and feminine-sounding as she looked, didn’t ask. It instructed. She led him to a small door off the main office.

  Once inside, she indicated which of the four chairs he should take at the round table in the middle of the room.

  Because she’d just sprung him, because he might need her, he complied.

  Dressed in brown slacks, a beige top and lighter brown sweater, with pumps that had enough of a heel to be dressy but not enough to be showy, she took the seat to his left. She opened the file she’d been carrying, detaching the pen hooked to the top of it.

  “It says here you’re thirty-seven.”

  “That’s right.”

  She rattled off his birth date and social. Rick nodded. The same for his address. It was all common knowledge.

  “I’ve never seen you around before.”

  “I’ve only been here a year.”

  “A year’s quite a while in a town this size.”

  “I spend most of my free time in Ludington.”

  Still bent over her pages, she glanced up at him. “You know someone there?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t elaborate. Steve had nothing to do with this. She scored big with Rick when she didn’t push.

  Though the speculative look she sent him seemed to add an unspoken, For now.

  “What are the charges?” He cut to the chase. Needed to find out everything she knew—information she’d have more access to than he would.

  Erin Morgan might think she was there to defend him. In Rick’s mind, she was there as a conduit between himself and whoever might be against him. She had the means to get inside information.

  “There aren’t any charges.”

  “Come again?”

  “They can put you at the scene of the crime. And there’s some pretty strong circumstantial evidence. Enough to bring you in for questioning. Not enough to detain you. As soon as I pointed that out, Sheriff Johnson had to let you go.”

  “So I’m free.”

  “For now.”

  “Right.”

  “They’re going to arrest you again as soon as they have the evidence to make charges stick.”

  “There isn’t going to be any.”

  “Sheriff Johnson thinks there is. He said
they found some things at your place. They’re just waiting on forensics.”

  “They searched my place?”

  “They had a warrant for this afternoon.”

  “I wasn’t home. The door was locked.”

  “I guess it isn’t anymore.”

  So he had a door to fix before he could get some shut-eye.

  “What does he think he found?”

  Rick wasn’t worried. There was nothing in his home in Temple that would identify anything about him or tie him to anything more dangerous than the local grocery-store dairy aisle.

  And even if they searched the truck, he’d be safe. His locked storage was camouflaged as a second gas tank.

  “They found the blade that killed Charles Cook in a register duct in your bedroom. They’re just waiting on a match.”

  Rick’s blood ran cold.

  5

  He was being framed.

  A man had been killed when only Rick would have been around to find him. And the murder weapon had been planted in Rick’s home.

  He didn’t panic. He didn’t worry or give in to the cold knot of fear that occasionally took up residence in his gut. He just went from tired and irritated to focused.

  During his fifteen-year career as a special agent, he’d been in far more dangerous situations.

  “Who searched my place?” he asked the woman who managed to look fresh and perky at two in the morning.

  Other than four years in the army, his work for the government had been covert. He’d been protecting national security. He’d used an alias. There should be no traceable record.

  Who knew he was here in Temple?

  Or was it Tom Watkins, his alias, they were after? And if so, who knew that Tom was Rick? That Rick Thomas was Tom Watkins?

  Who planted a murder weapon in his home?

  His new attorney was frowning. “The sheriff’s department searched it at three o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Who specifically?”

  “Sheriff Johnson was there. I don’t know who else.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “Yes.” Her voice held questions that she didn’t ask. He was making her suspicious.

  Time to tone it down. He needed her. Needed an ear in the legal establishment. Just in case someone within local law enforcement had been hired to track him down.

  And he needed a cover. Someone he could feed with information to pass on if necessary.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “At the moment I believe you. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. You’re cooperating fully. And the murder weapon was too conveniently placed for my liking. But if I’m going to do my job, I do need some help from you, Mr. Thomas.”

  “Of course.” He tempered the aggression storming through him. “Ask me whatever you want.”

  He withstood her intense perusal with ease. He had a job to do now. And would call forth whatever persona he needed to get the job done. That was how it worked.

  How it had always worked.

  Didn’t matter that he’d thought he was done with all that. Didn’t matter what he wanted. What mattered was keeping himself safe. For Steve.

  He wasn’t above using this pretty attorney, or anyone else, to reach that end.

  Erin Morgan studied the pages she’d brought in with her, moving through them quickly. Leaving the impression that it wasn’t the first time she’d read them.

  That was good. She was of no use to him if she wasn’t sharp.

  “It says here that you joined the army immediately after high school.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You served four years.”

  “Yes.”

  “At twenty-two you sought and were awarded an honorable discharge.”

  “Correct.” That’s it, Ms. Morgan, tell me everything that’s officially available on Rick Thomas.

  Rick knew what information was supposed to be available. Knew what was supposed to be in his government record. Now he had to find out if something had been changed without his knowledge.

  She glanced up. “What did you do after that?”

  For a split second Rick thought of Brady. Or, more pertinently, of his comrade’s death the year before. Brady Cardington, alias Jack Dunner. He should have investigated.

  The first and only time he hadn’t listened to his instincts.

  Was he paying the price now?

  Taking a calculated risk, betting that his cover was still intact, he said, “I was a contracted construction worker in the Middle East.” It explained long periods undercover. And large amounts of money. And could be verified on his tax records.

  He really had worked construction in the Middle East, should anyone want to check.

  Most of that time, he hadn’t been there—or at least not on construction sites. He’d worked as a member of a covert operations team for the United States government. His undercover persona, Tom Watkins, had specialized in illegal ammunitions running, doing jobs that could’ve landed him in prison any number of times.

  Jobs the government would deny being aware of if he was ever caught.

  “You worked in the Middle East for fifteen years.”

  “Fourteen. Yes.”

  “Do you have references?”

  “Two,” he said. “Jack Dunner.” By rote Rick rattled off information that should lead her to a voice that would confirm his identity. A guaranteed benefit that had come with signing his life away to protect his country—and to make enough money to pay for Steve’s care.

  And then added the second name, Kit Matthews, the other man on their team of three agents overseen by Rick’s army sergeant. Another alias. Tom, Jack and Kit. Three men who’d never really existed, but who’d risked their lives on a daily basis to help keep the country safe. The phone number he gave for Kit would lead to another voice confirmation of Rick Thomas’s work in the Middle East.

  A voice. He’d never met the person connected to that voice. Didn’t even know if it was male or female, although he suspected it was some assistant hired by the Department of Defense.

  And that person, who was probably well paid for answering anonymous phone calls, had no idea who or what he was. Just one more thing that had been “arranged” to cover for the members of the team.

  Ms. Morgan nodded. “I’ll give them both a call first thing in the morning. Now, what about personal references? People who’ll vouch for you? Speak to your character?”

  “Shelby Horne.” An older woman who ran the boarding house in Maine that Rick had called home for most of the past fifteen years. He hadn’t been there often, but enough to create an excellent character witness.

  A carefully planned circumstance.

  Tom Watkins had had a landlady, too. A room in a boarding house. Different women. Different states. But identical characteristics. Identical plans.

  Brady and Saul and their aliases had had the same.

  Rick gave the attorney Shelby’s number.

  “Anyone else? Family, perhaps?”

  “No.” He shook his head. Portraying a sadness he mostly didn’t feel. “I never knew my mother. I had a brother who is also deceased. And Dad died in a truck accident fifteen years ago.”

  He’d hit a tree roaring away from Rick.

  “The same time you got out of the army.”

  “Just about.” He’d already agreed to his future—had already agreed to be a member of the dangerous covert ops team being run by his sergeant. Because of his exemplary military record, Sarge had been promoted to lead the team and had carefully chosen the three men who would work with him.

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It says here that you’ve never been married. What about a girlfriend?” She flipped through a couple of pages, as though she’d find some woman lurking there. She didn’t look over at Rick.

  “No one significant. I couldn’t ask a woman to be faithful to me and then leave her with no way to reach me for months at a time.” He couldn’t put anoth
er human being in danger. Associating with Rick—and by default with Tom—meant being exposed to danger.

  If a job went bad, if Tom’s cover was ever blown, if someone wanted to hold him hostage or blackmail him, a family member or loved one would’ve been the first weapon they’d use.

  “What about friends? Army buddies?”

  “There was one, but he died last year.”

  “What was his name?” No reason she had to know that. The man was dead, so he could hardly serve as a character reference.

  “Brady Cardington.” The real man behind Jack Dunner’s alias. Dunner had been a well-known figure in the illegal drug business. When Brady was killed, there’d been a separate funeral for Jack.

  “Where did you know Brady from?”

  “Boot camp,” he told her. They’d been the only two recruits who’d completed an unscheduled fitness challenge their first afternoon in. One that had been administered by a jackass.

  Rick hadn’t seen Brady after those grueling six weeks, until, four years later, Sarge had asked if he knew anyone he’d trust with his life.

  He’d given the man Brady’s name. Brady had found himself with a lucrative new career protecting his country in ways he’d never imagined.

  And had ended up dead at thirty-six.

  “This should help,” Ms. Morgan said, looking over the short list she’d just made.

  “Help?”

  “Several things about you raised Sheriff Johnson’s suspicions, which was one of the reasons he arrested you before he had enough evidence to hold you,” the attorney confided.

  And Rick was getting exactly what he was paying for. Inside information.

  “What does the sheriff find suspicious?”

  “You show up in town a year ago, a nearly middle-aged man with no family, no apparent ties to anyone or anything—and you’ve formed no close attachments since you’ve been here. Your previous career is unusual, to say the least. You have a substantial amount of money, although no one would guess that from how you live, and other than your social, there’s no way to trace you.”

  That was it? He took an easier breath. Whatever the breach, apparently it was small.