Time to Run

by Marliss Melton

  “Les Wright and Timothy Olsen can’t be located,” admitted the SOT leader, Captain Lewis, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms. “The leader of the group goes by the name Will. Detective Cannard’s found no mention of his last name in the evidence that we’ve gathered.”

  Hannah looked up from her laptop. “He’s the former Army Ranger?” she inquired.

  “That’s the rumor,” the captain corroborated.

  “I’ll have my analysts access the American Veteran’s database,” Hannah offered. “If there’s a Will living in Broken Arrow and receiving pension benefits, then he’s probably your man.”

  Captain Lewis flicked a glance at Cannard. “Good idea,” he answered.

  “And as for Les Wright and Tim Olsen, I’ve requested tax information from the IRS on both of them,” Hannah added. “It never hurts to look at employment history.”

  “Excellent. We’re talking about a group of at least ten members, none of whom can be located for questioning right now. All we have is a reference to a truckload of ANFO and the promise of a demonstration on Columbus Day. We need to bring some of the members in. I have our uniformed division out scouring the city for them.”

  “Let’s talk about potential targets,” Hannah suggested, keeping Chase from having to open his mouth.

  Detective Cannard leaned forward to put in his two cents. “Well, I’ve reviewed all the evidence at our disposal; I’ve even had a couple of officers here look at it, but we can’t find mention of the target anywhere. Given the racial bias of this group, it could be a federal building, as in the Oklahoma City bombing. It might also be an ethnic neighborhood or a school, or even a local company that’s given jobs to minorities and laid off too many white workers. Who knows?”

  A reflective silence stole over the table.

  “The members of the group know,” said Hannah, garnering everyone’s attention. She gave them a cool smile. “You put up flyers all over town with Les and Timothy’s pictures on it, and offer a reward. Does anyone know what Will looks like?”

  Dean Cannard’s gaze slid expectantly in Chase’s direction. Hannah followed his gaze with a curious look.

  “We may have to subpoena Ms. Jensen to give us a description,” Dean said on an apologetic note.

  Chase couldn’t give him the excuse that Serenity was gone, not when she was on her way back, even as they spoke.

  “Who’s Ms. Jensen?” Hannah asked, with a frown.

  “Friend of mine,” said Chase, earning a long, curious stare from her. Now that Sara had identification corroborating her new name, he supposed it wouldn’t hurt if she gave a statement. “She’s been out of town. I’ll bring her in tomorrow.”

  Hannah put a thoughtful finger to her lips.

  “See if you can get a composite sketch from her,” Captain Lewis instructed Cannard, who gave a nod.

  Chase was conscious of Hannah’s burning regard throughout the rest of the meeting.

  At last, the group disbanded, and she and Chase headed into the sun-baked parking lot, headed for the red Mustang. She’d insisted on driving, not because of her unlimited mileage but because she loved flying along the hilly back roads at way over the speed limit.

  “Okay, Chase,” she said, tossing her briefcase into the backseat, “spill the beans.”

  He waited until their car doors were shut and she was backing them out of the parking space. “You remember Sara Garret, the lawyer’s wife at Jaguar’s court-martial?”

  She shot him a funny look. “Yeah, she and her kid disappeared a few weeks back.”

  Chase kept quiet, waiting for her to figure it out.

  “Oh, no,” she exclaimed with predictable horror. “Oh, my God, Chase!”

  “Don’t lecture me,” he warned her. “You don’t know what her life was like, what he did to her kid.”

  His words rendered her silent for a long, long while. That didn’t slow her speed, however. The Mustang screamed down the country road, turning the pastureland on either side into a green blur. Chase lost his stomach on a couple of hills as the car caught air.

  “Chase,” Hannah finally said, with a rare quaver in her voice, “that case was labeled an abduction. An Amber Alert was issued nationwide. Do you know what that means?”

  He’d intentionally not given it much thought.

  “It means,” she continued with intensity, “that the FBI has jurisdiction over the case, which means that I have every right to arrest you right now.”

  “It wasn’t an abduction,” Chase insisted. He didn’t suffer a moment’s doubt that Hannah would arrest him.

  “That doesn’t mean that Garret won’t press charges.” She shook her head, shooting him a few more looks, each one more incredulous than the last. Unexpectedly, a smile seized the edges of her mouth, turning her frown into a grin.

  “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

  “I never thought I’d see it,” Hannah declared.

  He had an inkling of where she was going with this.

  “You’re in love!” she cried, with a shout of laughter.

  Chase’s heart seemed to freeze over at the suggestion. He glowered at her, causing her broad grin to fade. “Don’t say shit like that,” he warned her. If she were any woman other than Hannah, he wouldn’t talk that way. But Hannah, to him, was one of the guys, as good a friend as Luther was.

  Her smile disappeared. “Come on, Westy, lighten up,” she countered. “Everyone falls in love at some point in their life.”

  “Not me,” he insisted, hardening himself further. “I don’t want you sayin’ it again, especially not around Sara. She knows what I do. She doesn’t need to be misled by some cock-’n’-bull notion that I’ll be there for her. Besides, what would she even see in a redneck like me?”

  “Are you kidding?” Hannah retorted, giving him a candid once-over. “You have to realize what a catch you are.”

  “I’m not a catch,” he said, incredulously. “I’m a sniper. Everyone knows that snipers are psycho, especially the ones that’ve spent as much time in the field as I have.”

  “So maybe it’s time to quit,” she suggested gently.

  “I just reenlisted,” he articulated on a growl. “I can’t fucking quit.”

  There wasn’t a hint of humor left in Hannah’s pitying look. “Just remember what you told me back when I was falling in love with Luther,” she advised him.

  He hated it when his advice was thrown back at him. “What?”

  “Some things can’t be planned ahead of time. You take them as they come,” she tossed out, imitating his drawl.

  And of course, she remembered that word for word. With a grumble of annoyance, Chase set his jaw, refusing to talk the rest of the way home.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sara quelled the impulse to jump out of the truck and run up to Chase the way Kendal did.

  “We’re gonna get a puppy!” he shouted, circling Chase like Indians circling a wagon train.

  “I said to ask him, not tell him!” Sara chastised, reaching into the back of the truck. It was all she could do to behave like her heart wasn’t leaping at the sight of him and her spirits weren’t soaring.

  “What’s all this?” he asked, his gaze sliding to the boxes in the truck bed. He didn’t greet her with the enthusiasm she’d privately hoped for.

  “My mother took us shopping,” Sara explained. “I tried to talk her out of spending money, but she said she’d gone forever without a daughter or grandson to spoil. She even bought Kenny a television.”

  “I’ll get that.” Chase took the unwieldy box out of her hands. As their fingers brushed, pleasure licked over her; but if he felt it, too, he hid it well.

  Feeling strangely hurt, Sara grabbed a smaller box that was filled with some of her new fall wardrobe. She followed Chase into the house, taking comfort from the home she’d worked so hard to clean. It’d had been so heartwarming to see the ranch again, not as a temporary resting point but as a place to put roots down.

 
; “I thought maybe your FBI friend would be here,” she said, moving past Chase to the bedroom that would now be hers.

  “She’s stayin’ at a motel in town.”

  Sara paused halfway down the hall and hefted the box higher. It occurred to her belatedly that Chase might have preferred to be left alone with Hannah. The agent was married to Chase’s best friend, but that would account for his lack of warmth right now.

  Disturbed by the thought, she deposited the box on the bedroom floor and went back to the truck for more. Kendal was carrying his TV into the house. “Be careful with that,” she told him.

  Going in and out several more times, she passed Chase again and again, never managing to time it right so they would be together. Their gazes met briefly. Each time he was the first to look away.

  Finally, she blocked his path. “Are you sure you want me here, Chase?” she asked, her emotions in a wild flux. This wasn’t how she’d pictured their reunion.

  He gave her a long look, one that remained oddly detached. “’Course I want you here,” he told her. “I just got a lot on my mind right now, tryin’ to stop the skinheads before I have to head back East.”

  She nodded, her heartbeat faltering at the reminder of his impending departure. “When do you have to leave?” she asked him.

  “Pretty much right after Columbus Day.”

  She nodded, digesting the information as unemotionally as possible. Chase wasn’t the man for her. If only her head could persuade her heart of that.

  “I need you to come downtown with me tomorrow and give a statement to the police. We need that physical description of Will.”

  “I can do that,” she agreed, grateful for the new ID that she carried everywhere she went. Thanks to Chase, she also had a college transcript from Dartmouth College. “But I need to register Kendal for school first.”

  Kendal had fake transcripts from a school in Vermont and a copy of his shot records.

  “No problem,” Chase said, summoning a smile for her that wasn’t entirely reassuring.

  She let him step around her, taking the box he held into the house. To comfort herself, she regarded the sunflowers in the field, most of which had gone to seed. The nights had gotten cooler, and soon the sycamore trees, the first to turn, would flush scarlet.

  Taking a long, deep breath, she savored the scent of prairie grass and dry air. I’m going to be happy here, she told herself. With or without Chase.

  Kendal wanted Chase to walk him to the head of the driveway in order to meet his bus on his first day of school.

  “Better ask your mother,” Chase said, thinking that this was probably the only time he could actually put Kendal on the bus, since Monday was Columbus Day, a school holiday, and he’d be leaving for Virginia on Tuesday.

  Sara, who’d fussed over Kendal’s new school clothes and packed his lunch box, looked momentarily nonplussed. “Well, of course, honey, if it’s okay with Chase.”

  Chase, who was planning to mow the rest of the field this morning, got up from the breakfast table. “Sure it is,” he said, eager to get out of the house. If he stayed in here alone with Sara, he was bound to betray his agitation. She was getting way under his skin.

  At quarter to eight, he and Kendal stepped off the front porch to encounter an autumnal chill, the kind that stimulated the brain and made you actually want to go to school.

  The sun set the tops of the trees on fire, warming Chase’s face as they forded the driveway. He abandoned thoughts of Sara long enough to glance down at his bright-faced companion. “Not scared or anything, are you?”

  While registering Kendal yesterday, Sara had expressed her relief that Country Lane Elementary School was the same size as Kendal’s previous school.

  “’Bout school?” he scoffed. “Nah, school’s easy.”

  “You think?” Chase had dreaded school.

  They stepped beneath the trees, where the thinning leaves overhead filtered through sunlight. “There’s lots of things worse than school,” Kendal added philosophically.

  “Like what?”

  “Like my father finding us.”

  Chase’s stride almost faltered. “He won’t find you here,” he said, sending him a reassuring look.

  But Kendal was watching his feet glide through light and shadow. “I wish you’d stay,” he said quietly.

  The words pegged Chase right in the chest. “We talked about this already,” he said roughly.

  Kendal swung his backpack off one shoulder and fumbled with a zipper, his steps slowing. “I made you somethin’ to take with you,” he announced. Taking a palm-sized object out of his bag, he handed it to Chase.

  It took Chase a second to recognize where it’d come from. What used to be a sizable hunk of cedar had been whittled down to a miniature box turtle.

  He stopped to inspect it, turning it over with amazement. The high, rounded shell bore hexagonal markings, each painstakingly delineated. Ken had even remembered to carve out three toes on the rear legs. “Wow,” Chase said, touched by the gift.

  “You said they were your favorite.”

  And he remembered that? “You sure you want to give it to me? Why don’t you give it to your mama?”

  “It’s for you,” said the boy, with gravity.

  Okay. “Thanks,” he said again, cradling it gingerly.

  “Turtles carry their homes on their backs,” Kendal added, meaningfully. “When you look at it, I want you to think about your home.”

  Jesus. “I will,” Chase said, his voice thick. “Better walk fast,” he added, glancing at his watch.

  They arrived at the head of the driveway just as the bus came into view. As it pulled away, Chase watched Kendal’s face grow indistinct in the rear window. His chest felt full and tight.

  If he’d known three months ago that life was going to take this strange little detour, he wouldn’t have reenlisted. Even back then, he’d hesitated before signing his name, wondering what he could do with his life that didn’t entail living out of a duffel bag. The answer was nothing.

  That was then. Right now he could think of plenty of things he’d rather do than jump out of a helicopter into some godforsaken country in order to thin the population. And every one of those things was right here on this ranch, where Sara and Kendal were.

  Dean Cannard had just walked into his office when Chase McCaffrey and Serenity Jensen showed up at his door. As with the last time he’d laid eyes on Serenity, she enchanted him. There was something familiar about her, probably because she looked like Meg Ryan. He went for blondes in general, especially slim, pretty blondes with intelligent eyes and a manner of speaking that betrayed a high level of education.

  “Well, hey there,” he greeted them, waving them in. “Sorry ’bout the cramped quarters. Have a seat.”

  As they lowered themselves into the mismatched ladderback chairs, he reached for the phone. “Let me call Al, my lead crime scene investigator. He acts as our in-house artist.”

  Al promptly joined them with a sketch pad and pencil in hand. “Some departments go with computerized composites, but I still think that the hand-drawn ones are more accurate,” he explained.

  As Serenity described the leader of the FOR Americans, one feature at a time, Dean was content to study her. He liked the gentle way she spoke, with no hint of any kind of dialect. It’d been days since the skinheads had held her for ransom, but she remembered every detail of Will’s face, from the sparse hair on the top of his head to the sickle-shaped scar on his square chin. She was observant, like he was.

  He wondered if he’d ever have the chance to woo her. That depended, of course, on exactly what her relationship with Chase was.

  There wasn’t any doubt that they seemed connected, even when they avoided eye contact, never touched. But they had nothing in common that Dean could see. Sara was obviously upper-class. Chase was still a good-ol’-boy, rough-and-ready and also extremely dangerous, given his military training.

  “Where are you from, Miss Jensen?”
Dean asked, prompted by his curiosity. He was conscious of Chase’s blue gaze rising from the sketch-in-progress to skewer him.

  “Er, Vermont,” she answered, “near the New Hampshire border.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re from New England,” he pointed out.

  “I’ve moved around a lot,” she explained.

  She wasn’t letting him know much, was she?

  “You going to settle down here now?” he pressed.

  Chase was definitely glaring at him.

  “Yes,” she said brightly. “I fell in love with Chase’s ranch.” She immediately blushed in the wake of her words, which sounded an awful lot like, I fell in love with Chase.

  “Then you changed your mind about Texas,” he guessed, enjoying himself. There was nothing like a mystery to intrigue him.

  “I guess I did,” she admitted. “Will’s eyebrows were bushier than that,” she said to Al, who angled the tip of his pencil to fill them out.

  Dean waited until the drawing neared completion. He’d never seen the suspect before. If he had, he probably would’ve recognized him, as he rarely forgot a face. “So, when’re you headed back East, Chase?” he inquired.

  The Navy SEAL took his time answering. “I have a week of leave time left,” he said with a steady stare.

  “Takes, what, three days to drive that route?”

  “A little less.”

  Dean caught back a chuckle. The man’s jealousy was palpable. Too bad he was going to be so far away from Serenity for months at a time. From what Dean could tell about the woman, living on an isolated ranch wouldn’t be easy for her. She’d need a man to lean on.

  He’d give her two months to pine for her Navy SEAL. And then he’d ask her out to dinner.

  “Okay, so what have we got?” Captain Lewis asked the group gathered around the conference table on Saturday morning. Hannah, curiously, was late. Chase had tried to call her cell phone but it was busy.

  “Detective Cannard?”

  Dean Cannard whipped out the composite sketch that Sara had helped put together yesterday. “This is the leader of the group,” he announced, giving everyone around the table a good look. “Every officer in the uniformed division has a copy, and they’re scouring the city for ’im, but we still have no last name, don’t know who he is.”