Cold Wicked Lies: A gripping romantic thriller that will have you hooked (Cold Justice - Crossfire Book 3)

by Toni Anderson

  Tom shook his head. “He either found it poking around or he followed you one Wednesday morning.” His father threw him an all-knowing look.

  Shame and foolishness swept over TJ. “How long have you known?”

  Tom’s shoulder twitched. “A few months. Why didn’t you tell me about her?”

  TJ drew in a huge lungful of air. “I didn’t think you’d allow it.”

  Tom’s features twisted. “You think I don’t understand the nature of love?”

  TJ’s lips wobbled. He knew how devotedly his father had loved his mother and how deeply his father loved him. “Meeting her gave me something happy to look forward to after Mama died.”

  Tom nodded, acknowledging his own grief. “I’m sorry your girl died, TJ. I’m sorry they both died.”

  TJ’s throat felt raw. He wanted to tell him about Kayla. He wanted him to know the truth, but first he needed to know something… “Do you think I did it? Killed her?”

  Tom looked up at him then. Brown eyes fixed on his blue, hypnotic in their focus. “I never for one moment thought you’d deliberately hurt anyone.”

  It wasn’t a complete exoneration, but a wave of relief crashed over TJ anyway. He hadn’t realized how much he needed someone to believe him, but especially his father.

  “I don’t understand. Why don’t you want me talking to the Feds?”

  “Because whatever you say to them won’t matter in the end. Not anymore. They want someone to blame for killing the girl and starting this whole mess, although the wildlife officer shot at you first. They’ll want your DNA.”

  Protecting his DNA had always been of paramount importance in Tom’s view. He believed once you were in the system you were in there forever. He’d told TJ never to give a blood or hair or cell sample. And to call their lawyer if he was ever arrested for anything and to keep his mouth shut. TJ had never understood the big deal, but then he’d always lived under his father’s overprotective rule. Maybe that was part of Kayla’s appeal. She was something that belonged solely to him and not his family.

  The kettle boiled. His father poured scalding water into two mugs with a tea bag in each. He added a spoonful of sugar to both cups and stirred the brew, the spoon making a rhythmic clinking sound that emphasized his anger and resolve. He fished out the tea bags and tossed them in the garbage. Handed one to TJ and took a sip of his own.

  “I spoke to them.” Tom blew on the hot liquid.

  “Who? The Feds?” TJ couldn’t believe it. “What did they say?”

  “They claim they don’t want anyone hurt. Wanted to talk to you to get your side of the story.”

  “I could do that—”

  “I already told you, I don’t want you talking to them. They’ll end up twisting things around.”

  TJ didn’t understand. “We can’t live underground forever…”

  “We could have.” Tom gave a bitter smile. “If it was only the two of us.”

  TJ shuddered. He didn’t want to live underground forever.

  Tom’s expression darkened. “I will love your mother until my last breath, but her soft heart means I can’t protect you here anymore.” Tom huffed out an exasperated gasp. “And ever since her brother arrived, people have been grouching and bitching about getting their fair share. Fair share of what? My home? My food? My money?” Tom’s eyes narrowed to slits.

  “But if we don’t talk to the Feds what other options do we have? There’s no other way out of here.”

  Tom’s eyes grew sharp then. Assessing. “I’ve only ever had your best interests at heart, son. You know that, right?”

  TJ nodded. His father loved him. He knew that.

  “Do you trust me? I mean really trust me?”

  “Yes, of course. But I don’t want to die.”

  “I’m not going to let that happen.” Tom put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Do as I say. Stay inside our quarters. Gather me a pack together the same as you had. Put all the money and documents out of the safe inside it too. As much gold as we can carry between us. We can come back for whatever is buried in the woods in a few years when this all blows over. Store the packs out of sight in case Malcolm comes crawling around here.” He pulled the roll of cash out of his back pocket and handed it to TJ. “I’ll come get you when it’s time.”

  TJ shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  Tom clasped his upper arm and held his gaze. “You don’t have to. Be ready to leave. It might not be today or tomorrow, but the day will come, and we need to be ready to move fast. Okay, son?”

  TJ nodded. But it wasn’t okay. None of this was okay.

  * * *

  “Who’s this guy?” McKenzie pointed to the video still of one of the two men running down the corridor toward Tom Harrison seconds before he blew the tunnel.

  They were going through the nitty gritty of all the new information they’d uncovered. Charlotte sipped on fresh coffee the ranch owners had provided and wished she could crawl into a hole.

  “We’re trying to match photographs with names. Believe it or not, they’re not big on Instagram selfies.” Truman winced. “Sorry, boss, that didn’t come out how I intended it to. I haven’t slept in a while.”

  McKenzie spared the young agent a hard glance. “What do you have?”

  “A bunch of names many of which seem to be nicknames like Bud and Chuck. They tend to use cash when they go into town. No credit cards or checks although we know some of them collect welfare.”

  “Most of the phones we traced inside the compound were burners,” McKenzie added. “The numbers they called provided us with a lot of additional information that agents are following at various field offices around the country.”

  “Any connection to the guys who attacked us yesterday?” Charlotte asked.

  Agent Makimi looked up from typing on her laptop. “Not that we’ve been able to ascertain. The man who attacked you wasn’t talking, but the younger one peed his pants when I told him he was looking at three counts of twenty-five-years-to-life for attempted murder and conspiracy to murder Federal Agents.”

  Yesterday seemed like a million mistakes ago.

  “What did he tell you?” asked Novak, sending Charlotte a concerned look.

  “Someone on one of the White Supremacy chatrooms suggested they all head to Washington State en masse and get a head start on the revolution the tin pots want.”

  “Those ‘tin pots’ almost brought down HQ in the spring,” McKenzie reminded them all with a glower.

  “I was there. I remember.” Makimi pulled a face. “These two drove over from Oregon. Hiked in from a logging road to the west. Claimed to not even see any deputies up there.”

  Charlotte scowled. “I take it all the chatroom users are being tracked?”

  The woman nodded and tucked her ink-black hair behind her ear. “We’re mapping their communication network. We plan to make coordinated arrests where appropriate and bring others in to interview if we don’t have enough evidence of actual crimes being committed. Remind them no one is above the law.”

  “Some of them may already be on their way here,” Novak said.

  “That’s why we have SWAT and State Police assisting. There’s always a danger.” McKenzie grimaced. “The longer the standoff goes on, the greater the potential for harm.”

  Charlotte frowned. She was disappointed the two men weren’t connected to Harrison in some way. They could have used them to instigate a phone call. The fact she’d been attacked because of some rightwing bozos wanting to burn the Constitution pissed her off. At least she’d helped put them in their place without anyone getting hurt.

  “Do we know how the women who left Eagle Mountain yesterday came to live there in the first place?” she asked Truman.

  “One says her husband is a cousin of Tom Harrison’s late wife, Martha. The second woman is her sister-in-law. Her husband died in a car wreck a few years back.”

  “So they’re all loosely related?” Charlotte was trying to get past the utter fail
ure her plan to interview Harrison’s old CO and air it on the news had been. It was still being shown to the compound because removing it would tip the FBI’s hand completely, but it was being interspersed with other additional innocuous items as they arose on the cable news networks. Right now, McKenzie wasn’t taking any more risks with predicting the behavior of the man running the show. Tom Harrison had revealed himself to be completely volatile like a stick of old dynamite.

  “Yup. All related to the late wife, so far as I can tell.” Truman nodded.

  “Can we fill out the family trees? We know she had relatives down in Utah, correct?” Charlotte asked.

  “That’s a good idea,” said Novak. “See if we can find a relative who can talk some sense to them.”

  She shot him a look. Was he trying to make her feel better because of the disaster she’d created earlier? She was grateful no one had died, but the situation had escalated fast. She’d overheard McKenzie briefing the director again, which couldn’t have been fun. She knew he was under a tremendous amount of pressure.

  She glanced at Novak and caught his gaze. He looked away. They hadn’t even had the chance to discuss what had happened in the bedroom that morning, which was probably for the best. She wasn’t sure her people skills had equipped her for that conversation, especially when she didn’t know if he was actually attracted to her or not.

  And she also didn’t know why she was seeing him differently now. He wasn’t her type. Her type was standing a few feet away trying not to yawn with tiredness. Charlotte gave Truman a sympathetic smile.

  McKenzie hadn’t said anything about Harrison blowing the tunnel, but she felt the weight of his censure every time his gaze landed on her.

  “Run the images of the men we saw on the video through face-recognition software ASAP.” McKenzie instructed the tech guy.

  “Already running them, boss. But the quality isn’t great so it might take a while.”

  “What about the vehicles inside the gates?” Charlotte suggested.

  “Shit. I forgot about getting the license plate information. I suspect we can grab it off the footage from the drone flight yesterday.” Novak stood, and Romano opened up another laptop to start scouring the footage.

  “Get on it.” McKenzie sounded annoyed.

  They’d decided to leave the drone in place in the darkened corridor until the early hours of the morning when the least number of people would be around. Even underground, people followed the diurnal rhythm of the sun.

  Charlotte opted to confront the elephant in the room. “I’m sorry my idea about interviewing Harrison’s CO backfired. It was a bad call. I take full responsibility.”

  McKenzie frowned.

  “It wasn’t your fault, SSA Blood.” Novak shifted his stare from her to their boss. “We all agreed it was the best course of action. Even BAU approved.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “We didn’t have enough background information from after he left the Army. Eighteen years is a big gap.”

  “Don’t blame yourself.” Novak gave her a wry smile. “Anyway, you said it would make him pick up the phone, and it sure as hell did that.”

  McKenzie crossed his arms over his chest. “Aw, look at you two getting along so well. Next thing we know you’ll be getting married.”

  Charlotte glared at the Incident Commander, but Novak took it a step further, sounding furious. “You don’t get to make that joke, boss. You forced us into each other’s pockets for this op, and we made it work. You were right to do it. Now our relationship is based on mutual respect, which was what you wanted. Don’t turn around and twist it to make us look bad for following your orders.”

  Charlotte’s eyes bugged.

  Silence rang around the barn, and no one dared move, let alone speak.

  McKenzie raised both hands. “You’re right. I’m being a dick because I’m pissed the plan didn’t have the desired results. It wasn’t SSA Blood’s fault Harrison went so far off the deep end.” He rubbed his brow. “His reaction doesn’t make sense.”

  “We pressed a button we didn’t know existed.” A black swan. An unknown unknown. The problem was, they still didn’t know what it was. “We need to figure out what we’re missing, and I bet it’s buried somewhere in the past eighteen years.”

  McKenzie swore and then closed his eyes. “You’re right. We’re going to re-interview everyone who ever worked with or met Tom Harrison or his wife or son. That’s every storekeeper in town. All the churchgoers where he occasionally worshipped. It’s his relatives, his wife’s relatives, it’s the environmentalists who might have interacted, his Army buddies—see if he kept in touch with any of them. If these people aren’t local, let’s get leads out to FBI field offices around the country. If people have been questioned once, question them again, this time about what makes Tom Harrison and any of the people inside that building tick. I’m going to call the lab and light a fire under their asses, so we have some solid pieces of evidence to work with.”

  “Did we get the Medical Examiner’s report yet?” Charlotte asked.

  “Yeah, but they’re still waiting on toxicology results. They’re running DNA through CODIS and missing persons and any other databases they can access.”

  “Did the ME say if Brenna had been assaulted?” Charlotte asked.

  “There were scratches on her torso that suggest she might have been involved in some sort of struggle but no obvious sign of sexual violence.”

  That wasn’t a hard no, but as an FBI agent, Charlotte had learned to take the best she could from a case. There were things she’d seen on the job that still gave her flashbacks. It was why she’d moved off the streets into negotiation, although she still came up against violent altercations. If she wanted to avoid them altogether, she’d have to live in a sensory deprivation unit.

  “Should one of us go interview Bob Jones?” she asked. The FWO was one of the three people known to be on the mountain that morning. He was a key witness.

  McKenzie opened his mouth to say something and then stopped. He stared at her for a long moment. “My first instinct was to say no, you don’t have time,” he laughed harshly, “but I have the sneaky suspicion time is something we’re gonna have lots of, because that man is not going to be picking up the phone anytime soon. Yes. Both of you go talk to Bob Jones.”

  Novak gritted his teeth and clenched his fist in silent annoyance.

  “I hear he’s doing so well they moved him to a general ward,” McKenzie added.

  Sunlight picked up dust motes in the air. It still hadn’t snowed, but every day felt as if it were on the brink. “The rest of us are going to stay here and dig into Tom Harrison’s life. We’re missing something, and I intend to figure out what.”

  “Hey, Novak,” Charlotte muttered under her breath as everyone returned to their tasks. “We pass the airstrip on the way to the hospital.” She watched his entire body uncurl and unclench as the information registered. That’s where the FBI was building the reconstruction of the compound.

  He shot her a glance. “You don’t say.” Then he smiled at her, slow and hot, even though she was sure that, only yesterday, it would have been a perfectly ordinary smile. “Let’s go then.”

  Chapter Twenty

  It was an estimated seventy-minute drive to Colville. Novak did it in forty.

  It helped to have blue lights flashing the whole way. Which, in turn, meant he avoided having a conversation he didn’t want to have.

  Charlotte huffed her disapproval at his driving and maintained a death grip on the handle above the door the whole way. Up until now, they hadn’t been alone even for a second since he’d left the bedroom in darkness that morning, and he hadn’t thought about the potential embarrassment until he’d climbed behind the wheel. Hence the lights and sirens.

  Concentrating on driving also made it impossible to dwell on the way his body had betrayed him that morning. Not that it was a problem. It would not happen again. Despite what she might think, he was an elite warrior and
controlling his mental and physical reactions was part of that gig. He trained daily with live ammo, so he didn’t flinch at the sound of a gunshot. He simply didn’t have a huge amount of experience working with a woman he found attractive or having to mask that reaction while in a bedroom wearing nothing but boxers. Maybe he needed to put in the time, acclimate to her presence, and his reaction would go away—although he didn’t want it to go away indefinitely. God forbid.

  The fact they only had one night left together was both a curse and a blessing. But he could endure it as long as she could.

  He pulled into a space rather than parking on the curb because Charlotte gave him “the look.”

  He jumped out of the vehicle and waited for her to join him. “What ward is Jones in?”

  “Let’s go find out.” She strode away.

  She’d changed into a trim black pant suit for this interview. He still wore his jeans but had teamed them with a dress shirt and a sport’s jacket to conceal his shoulder holster. Turning up in tactical gear set people’s nerves on edge…or so Charlotte had informed him.

  She was probably right. Not the best way to blend.

  He dragged his eyes away from a very fine rear view and pinned them to the back of Charlotte’s head. Time to think about anything except the fact he was lusting after a woman he could barely tolerate two days ago.

  McKenzie’s plan had worked a little too well for Novak’s liking.

  Frantically, he searched for a distraction from his wanton thoughts. The smell of gun oil. The feel of the rope burning between his gloved palms as he threw himself out of a helicopter. The rub of new boots on long runs. Angeletti taunting his ass. His snipers…

  They’d settled into a rhythm, and he felt a whole lot better about their safety with an unmanned drone for air support and SWAT teams backing them up. Wasn’t foolproof and certainly didn’t show de-escalation in their response, but the press was being kept out of area and, so far, none of their new efforts had made it into the public’s awareness. And he was quite happy to identify as many of these domestic terrorists as possible as long as they didn’t present a direct threat to his men.