by Diane Capri
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger here.” Owen held both hands up, palms out.
Trevor glared.
Owen leaned back in his chair, out of Trevor’s reach. “Look, it could go either way. Maybe Lange is dead. Or maybe he was the killer and he’s on the run. But one choice or the other seems likely, doesn’t it? Locals say cops haven’t identified the bodies yet. One of the dead could be Lange. On the other hand, this place is fairly close to the airstrip where the man calling himself Hourihane was picked up by the local guy in the Mercedes. Neither the Mercedes nor the driver seem to be around anymore.”
“The timing fits.” Trevor held his temper. He nodded slowly and took a closer look at the Houston photographs of Hourihane. The guy could have been Lange. Or not.
He thought about the situation for a long few minutes. Owen and Oscar waited for orders.
It didn’t make sense that the killer would have started the fire. Why would he do that? Made no sense at all.
A single assassin would have left quietly after completing the kills. A fire that size had the potential to draw too much attention to the scene, making a clean getaway less likely.
Not only that, but the killer couldn’t possibly have known that the fire would go unnoticed and the bodies undiscovered for maybe two years.
Trevor shook his head. No. Deliberately starting a fire like that to conceal a crime, or even several crimes, was too clumsy for Lange. He’d been careful getting to the location. He could easily have slipped away unnoticed afterward.
Other facts Trevor had uncovered suggested Lange had planned to be gone for a week at the most. In addition to the potential trouble beginning to brew in Belgium, they had a lot going on in South Africa, and Lange knew that. And he hadn’t taken any of his assets with him. He wouldn’t have disappeared taking nothing but Trevor’s million dollars. Not when he was entitled to so much more.
Trevor figured Lange took the money because he knew it was untraceable. Which meant he’d planned to use it for something that couldn’t blow back on them.
But Owen and Oscar had gone as far as they could with this thing. They were paid muscle. Low level. Which was exactly why he’d chosen them. No way were they good enough to find Lange. Trevor knew that now. Which was a good thing, because it made them both dispensable.
A plan was beginning to take shape in his head. He shrugged casually, as if his anger had dissipated. He slipped the photographs into his pocket.
“Okay. Wait here at least thirty minutes. Meet me tomorrow morning. I’ll send you directions. Make sure you’re not followed,” Trevor instructed.
“Where are we going?” Owen asked.
Trevor said, “To find my money and find out whether Lange died in this fire. Or if he didn’t, where the hell he is.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Friday, February 25
3:30 p.m.
Near Syracuse, New York
Most of the hitchhiker’s bulk came from the heavy winter gear she wore. But she was tall and sturdy enough to take care of herself, Jake guessed.
She held her hands close to the heat blowing into the cabin from the vents in the dashboard. When her hands warmed, she put her palms on her cheeks.
“Wow, it’s turned super cold out there all of a sudden,” she said. “I was thinking I’d be sleeping in an igloo tonight before you came along. Thanks for picking me up.”
Jake shrugged. “No problem. Where’d you come from?”
“Pittsfield. East of Albany. Headed home to Buffalo. The weather was better when I started out.” Her gaze fell on the green stainless steel vacuum bottle his dad had given him for their first hunting trip. “Got any coffee in there?”
He glanced at the bottle. He’d filled it up the last time he bought gas a while back. “Yeah, sure. Help yourself. No cream or sugar, though.”
“Perfect. Hot and black. Just the way I like it,” she replied with a grin while she screwed off the top and poured the aromatic brew into the cup. Her hands were big enough to handle the heavy thermos easily.
Jake kept his eyes on the road. The wind buffeted the Jeep and pushed it sideways on the snow-slicked pavement. He struggled to keep the vehicle between the ditches. Darkness was coming fast and the last thing he wanted was to spend the night stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, USA.
“I’m Julia Mucha,” she said, still holding the coffee and sniffing it appreciatively.
“Jake Reacher,” he replied.
“Where are you headed, Jake?”
“California. Looks like I might be stuck in Syracuse for the night, though.”
She nodded. “Worse things have happened. They get a lot of snow here. Not as much as Buffalo, but pretty damn close. Around here, Rochester gets the most. We were always pretty proud of that. Proud it wasn’t Buffalo, you know?”
Jake glanced at her. “You like baseball?”
She shook her head. “Not a sports fan.”
He nodded, “Seen any good movies lately?”
“Nope. Too busy at school.”
Jake didn’t reply. So much for good conversation.
Maybe she’d read his mind or something because she said, “I’ll be graduating in May. What about you?”
“Finished college last month. I needed to speed things up because my dad was sick.” It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d normally have told a complete stranger, but he didn’t want to be stuck talking about fashion or something for the next two hours.
“Where’d you go?”
“Dartmouth. My dad went there and it was close to home.”
“Big bucks for tuition, though,” she said, as if having the money to pay for school was a luxury she didn’t have.
“Don’t I know it.” He shrugged. “I had some savings. Got a bunch of small scholarships from local organizations. Took some loans and summer jobs for the rest. So it worked out. You?”
“Culinary school outside of Albany that you’ve never heard of. I want to be a chef. Own my own restaurant one day,” she replied, jutting her chin forward as if she dared him to argue. When he didn’t, she said, “That’s why I’m hitching. Missed the one and only flight I could afford. And I need to get home.”
“What’s the rush?”
“My best friend’s wedding. I’m doing the cooking. Can’t possibly miss it, you know?”
Jake nodded. “Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem.”
“Even if I’m stuck in Syracuse for the night, I can get home in the morning. If I’d waited until tomorrow to fly, the earliest I could get there was too late for all the work I’ve got ahead of me.” She tipped the cup and drained the last of the coffee. “Mind if I refill this?”
“Help yourself.”
Snow was falling at the rate of about an inch an hour now, he guessed. Fast enough to cover the roads soon, and these backroads didn’t get plowed right away. He needed to get moving.
He glanced at the odometer. Another hour or so to Syracuse, given the weather conditions. He’d briefly considered pressing on to Buffalo for Julia’s sake, but driving that much farther tonight was about as appealing as listening to her talk about food he couldn’t eat while his stomach growled louder than a hungry predator.
“Can we change the subject before I feel compelled to gobble the upholstery or something?” Jake teased, like he wasn’t starving when he really was. Those sandwiches his mother made were long gone and the chances of finding a diner or a drive-through out here were slim to none.
“Sure.” Julia smiled as she poured the last of the coffee from the thermos. “I’m sorry about your dad being sick. How’s he doing?”
“He passed. Two weeks ago.” Jake cleared his throat. He’d wanted a change of subject and now he was stuck with the one he’d chosen.
She lowered her gaze. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” Jake replied. He didn’t want this to devolve into a real downer so he covered the topic quickly. “Cancer. He’d lost the will to fight a few months back. We knew it was comin
g.”
“Oh,” she said awkwardly, without looking up. She probably hadn’t had much experience expressing condolences or accepting them, either.
Jake had more than enough experience for the both of them. The way to get through the awkward phase was to talk about something else. “That’s kind of why I’m here, actually. At the funeral, Old Man Reacher gave me a letter Dad wrote a few weeks before he died.”
“Who is Old Man Reacher?”
“Friend of the family. That’s what everybody calls him. He’s at least ninety, I guess.”
“That’s pretty old, all right. What did the letter say?” She was probably thinking it was some sort of handwritten will or something. In a way, Jake supposed it was.
“Basically, it said Dad knew I wasn’t really his son, but he’d always be my father no matter what.” Now that he’d started talking, he seemed unable to stop. Probably because he’d never see her again after he dropped her off in Syracuse. There was safety in spilling his guts to a total stranger, somehow. Like talking around a campfire in the dark. He’d done plenty of that when he was in Junior R.O.T.C.
Julia gasped. “Not really his son? You mean, like you were adopted or something?”
“He was pretty frail by the time he wrote the letter, so it was short. Only a few lines, really.” An oncoming pair of headlights swerved into Jake’s lane up ahead. He hit the horn and the headlights swerved back where they belonged.
Once the danger was past, Jake said, “I asked Old Man Reacher what the letter meant. He said he didn’t know. But Mom overheard the conversation. She was already a wreck, so I didn’t have the heart to ask her about it then and there.”
“Did you ask her later?”
“Yeah,” Jake nodded. “She told me the whole story. She’d been dating my dad and they were pretty serious. But they’d had a fight and broke up. She went to visit a friend for the weekend and she met my bio dad. On the rebound, I guess. The guy moved on and so did she. A few weeks after she and Dad got back together, she found out she was pregnant.”
Julia shook her head, holding onto the coffee with both hands and looking down into the dark liquid like it might be magic or something. She said quietly, “She didn’t know which one was the father?”
“She must have had her suspicions. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that I didn’t look at all like Dad, even back then. And I didn’t have Dad’s temperament, either. He was easygoing. Lighthearted. A real homebody, you know? He liked gardening and bird-watching. Stuff like that.”
“And you don’t?”
“Not at all.”
Julia nodded, sipping the coffee. “So when did your mom find out about your real dad?”
“Her curiosity got the best of her by the time I was ten. She sent DNA samples off to one of those free services. Sure enough, David Reacher was not my dad,” Jake finished up with a flourish.
“Did she tell the other guy?” Julia asked, as if Jake’s life was some sort of movie-of-the-week or something.
The longer he talked about this, the less he liked it. The details started to sound too much like a soap opera. He stated the facts simply, trying to steer the conversation in a different direction. “It was too late. My bio dad had already died by then.”
Julia’s breath sucked in and caught and Jake thought he might have to do CPR, it took her so long to start breathing again.
“Did she tell you anything about him?”
“She told me everything she knew. She’d started talking to him at the party and found out his last name was the same as her ex,” Jake replied.
“His name was Reacher?”
“You sound surprised. It’s not that uncommon a name in New Hampshire where I come from. Meeting him was one of those small world things, I guess,” Jake shrugged. “You know, ‘oh, my ex-boyfriend’s last name is Reacher. David Reacher. Are you related?’ yada yada yada.”
“Yeah, that stuff happens. I meet people who attended my high school in Buffalo all the time. People I’ve never heard of,” Julia smiled and he thought she might have exhausted the subject. She hadn’t. “Were they? Related I mean? David Reacher and the guy your mom met at the party?”
“He said no at the time. She told him she was from Laconia and he said his father was born there but left when he was seventeen to join the Marines. He’d never been to Laconia, but he’d always meant to check it out.” Jake shrugged again. She wasn’t going to let this go, he knew that now. “But I figured maybe they shared relatives in the distant past or something. Anyway, once she found out the DNA results when I was ten, she knew he was my bio dad, so she looked him up. He’d been in the Army back when they met, so it was fairly easy to trace him.”
“She told him about you and he never came around or anything?” Julia’s gaze was full of sympathy now for the poor little abandoned boy. Jake didn’t like that, either. Last thing he needed was anybody feeling sorry for him.
“Not exactly. By that time, he’d already died. He was killed in the line of duty, they said.” Jake had turned the windshield wipers on full speed and flipped all the heat up to the defrosters, but the snow was falling too fast to keep his view cleared.
He slowed the Jeep further and slipped into four-wheel drive. Syracuse wasn’t that much farther, but he’d begun to think they might not reach it tonight. Which meant he’d have to work out what to do with Julia. He couldn’t just dump her somewhere on the side of the road. Not in this weather, anyway.
CHAPTER SIX
Friday, February 25
6:30 p.m.
Siesta Beach, California
Patty Sundstrom pretended not to worry about her boyfriend. She’d already closed out the cash register of their windsurfing shop and prepared the bank deposit. She’d brought all the equipment inside. Now she was wandering around, straightening here, arranging there, simply to kill time until he returned.
She and Shorty Fleck had been together more than five years now. They’d been through a lot. They’d left his potato farm and her sawmill job in the cold, white north, to follow their dreams of sun and sand and surf. A decision they were both satisfied with, even after all that had happened.
They’d driven as far as they could from Saint Leonard, a small faraway town in New Brunswick, Canada, in Shorty’s beat-up old Honda. Until the Honda died. After they acquired another car, they went to New York first and then all the way to California.
Patty never looked back.
Even though the money was tighter than she’d like, she never second-guessed their decision to set up shop near San Diego in California instead of Sarasota, Florida.
She never thought about that horrible time in Laconia, either. It was over and they’d both survived. That was all that mattered to her.
But she knew Shorty thought about Laconia. A lot. He had visible scars and invisible ones, too. Laconia haunted him. He still had nightmares. She knew because after they’d settled into bed in the rooms above the shop, from time to time he’d wake her up with his whimpers and screams.
Sometimes she couldn’t get him back to sleep for an hour or more.
He always said he didn’t remember the nightmares, but she knew that was a lie. His skin would be drenched with sweat and it took him a good long time to fall asleep again. If he didn’t remember the horror, then he’d have gone right back to sleep, now wouldn’t he?
The only thing that seemed to calm Shorty these days was windsurfing on the ocean. He was quite good at it now, although it had taken him a while to learn. After his injuries healed well enough and his doctors signed off, he threw himself into the sport with a child’s enthusiasm that lightened her heart.
Patty didn’t object to his long hours with the wind and the surf and the cold nights. Even as she understood he was chasing exhaustion to avoid the nightmares. But he kept at the windsurfing anyway.
She smiled. Shorty’s dogged determination was one of the things that had made him a good potato farmer. It was one of the things she loved most about him. Besides, Sh
orty needed the windsurfing practice. He couldn’t teach classes until he was proficient enough himself.
She already knew how to windsurf before they set up the shop. Patty’s grandfather taught her. He was born in Minnesota and had slipped north to beat the draft during the Vietnam war. But like many Minnesotans, he had vacationed in Florida where he’d learned to windsurf.
She taught Shorty everything she knew. She was the one who gave lessons to the tourists, too. She kept the books for the shop. She did the banking. She did just about everything, actually.
Turned out Shorty was not as good a businessman as he had been a potato farmer. Not that Patty cared about his business skills. She hadn’t fallen in love with him because he was destined to be a master of the universe. He had qualities that were more important to her, like loyalty and steadfastness. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have thrown in with him and left Canada for good.
Shorty loved her, too, of course. They’d been close enough before Laconia. But after all the stuff they’d been through up there, they’d grown even closer. They planned to get married, as soon as they could get a few days off for a honeymoon. The way things were going, she figured the wedding was at least a year away.
Where was he? Patty glanced at the clock again. Sunset was an hour ago. The sun’s afterglow was almost gone. Soon it would be pitch black out there on the Pacific. Black and cold. Really cold. San Diego was a lot warmer than back home in Canada, but February was still winter time, even here. When the sun went down, cold came in fast. He didn’t need to be out there this late.
“Damn you, Shorty,” she whispered, although she wasn’t really angry. Concerned was all. Very concerned. “You told me you’d be back before dark. Where the hell are you?”
