Captured Lies (12 page)

“Want a bottle of water or
lemonade?”

“Lemonade please.”

She tossed him the bottle over
the top of the car which he snatched out of the air.

“You have bags under your eyes.
Since I’ve already had a good nap, it’s your turn.” He looked at her pointedly.
“Unless that look is vogue right now?” Arching his eyebrow, he didn’t wait for
her to respond. “Seriously, if we’re going to figure out what is going on we
need to work together. I have information you need and I believe you have some
I need.”

Breathing out slowly and without
another word, she climbed into the back seat and lay down, curling on her side.
Several minutes later he climbed into the front, downing his juice.

“Where we headed?” He pulled back
onto the road and headed north.

“Jasper. For now.”

He didn’t ask why, he just drove.
Reaching into the seat beside him, he ripped open a bag of chips and grinned
over his shoulder at her. “My kind of woman.”

She tried to stop it but the
warmth of those words went well beyond the joke he had meant. She tried not to
let that simple statement make her sit up with pride but it did. Her mother had
never doled out any praise and it seemed any little bit made her want to strut
like a peacock. Then something that had never happened to her before, happened,
she drifted off to sleep. Immediately.

CHAPTER
TWENTY

Da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum. Charge.

Scrambling, Guy yanked his cell
phone out of its case, which was strapped to his belt. He hit the talk button
as soon as he realized who it was.

“I’ve got something interesting.”

He peeked over his shoulder to
see if the noise had disturbed his passenger. Bailey’s hair had fallen across
her cheek, hiding her face. Her chest rose and fell like someone in a deep
sleep. “What time is it there?” Guy looked out into the black night. Every now
and then he’d pass a vehicle. Looking in the rear-view mirror something he did
constantly he saw a set of headlights but they were way behind them. He was
sure they weren’t anything to worry about but he’d been keeping watch.

“Too early for the sun.”

“Did you get any sleep yet?”

“When there isn’t some work to
do, I will. How about you?”

He’d often wished he’d had
Graham’s stamina. The guy could stay up for twenty-four hours, sleep a couple
and then off he’d go again. It exhausted him just thinking about it.

“You’ve got company?”

Guy smiled. “In a matter of
speaking. So yes, I’ll be talking quietly.”

“All right here goes. Mrs. Donna
Saunders came into existence August of 1983—”

“She was born in 1952.”

“Hold on my dear friend, I’m not
finished. Mrs. Donna Saunders came into existence in August of 1983.There is no
information regarding a Miss, Ms or Mrs. Donna Saunders prior to that time.”

Guy rubbed his forehead. “That
happening so close to when baby Cassidy was stolen can’t be a coincidence.”

“I don’t think it is either. I
have lots of information but can’t find a thread to tie it all together yet.
I’ll keep working on it.”

“Thanks Graham. This case is
turning out to have more surprises than either of us could have ever
predicted.” He proceeded to fill him in on what had happened so far.

“Holy Toledo. Are you sure you
don’t want to go to the police with this?”

Glancing over his shoulder at his
passenger, he knew that he might pay for his decision. “No. But I do need you
to run a license plate. I’m sure the car is rented but not legally. Of course I
can always hope.”

“By the way, your Grandmother,
the next coming of God, called and wanted to know where the report was that you
promised her. Where is it Guy? She scares me.”

He chuckled knowing that Graham
loved to make her think that. He also knew she was a big marshmallow on the
inside.

“I haven’t really had the time or
place to do such. So here’s what I need you to write in it and send it off. Fax
it to her private machine.” He filled him in on what to put and not to put in
the details to her.

“Got you boss. Hyuuh. Hyuuuuh.
Hyuuuuh.”

He clicked off the phone, on
Graham’s sad rendition of Goofy’s laugh but couldn’t help chuckling at his
friend’s odd sense of humour. Yawning like it was never going to stop; he
followed the road that led him to Jasper. It would be another hour or two
before the sun was up but the sky was already quite light and made seeing much
easier. The mountains in all their majestic beauty were just becoming visible.
He couldn’t help but look around in awe as he drove into the town limits. Not
having a clue about Jasper, he drove around until he found an obscure, off the
beaten path motel. He went in and booked a room. Bailey wouldn’t be pleased but
then she was still sleeping and he needed a few hours. Besides, he had no clue
as to where exactly they were going. Somewhere near Jasper was all the
information he’d been given.

Unlocking and pushing the door
inwards, he stepped back as an old, musty smell jolted him. He went back to the
car to get his travel mate. After a moment of trying to figure out how to best
get a sleeping Bailey out of the car, without waking her, he decided there
wasn’t really any graceful way. Worst that would happen, he thought, was that
she’d wake up and give him hell. Thinking that was as bad as it would get, he
wasn’t prepared for what happened.

Her hand came up and drove him in
the chin, her right foot drove down, clipping his knee. Next thing he knew he
was on the ground writhing in pain and she was standing over him, ready to kick
the crap out of him.

“Stop!” He rolled out of her
reach. Her stance didn’t change much but the crazed look in her eyes
dissipated. She was breathing hard. Her chest heaving as though she’d run the
whole way there. He slowly got to his feet, his hand automatically going to the
lump he could feel growing on the side of his face. His jaw still moved easily
enough but not without pain. Standing up, he realized his knee didn’t feel all
that great either.

“I should have woken you. My
mistake. I thought we could both use some proper sleep so I booked us here.” He
waved behind him. “Since we’re parked on the back side, out of the main stream
of Jasper, I figured we’d be okay.”

“We’re in Jasper?” The intensity
in her stare seemed out of place.

“Yeah.”

“I slept for three or four
hours?”

He shrugged and nodded, trying to
let her know it wasn’t a big deal.

Bailey stared hard at him for a
minute before turning her back to him. Reaching in the car, she grabbed her
purse and marched past him into the dingy room.

Thinking that some real food
might do them both some good and give Bailey time alone, he headed off down the
road to the fast food place they’d passed. Fifteen minutes later he pulled into
the motel parking lot. Rather than get out he sat there just staring absently
out the window. He couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling in his gut. Reversing, he
drove down a few side streets and back alleys, almost losing her car in the mud
puddles and finally parked a few blocks away. He grabbed the food and walked
back to the room barely able to refrain from eating.

He knocked and then waited a few
seconds for a response. “Bailey?” When there was no answer he inserted his key
and cautiously entered. She lay flat across one of the beds, her left hand
dangled off the side, her shoe-clad feet off the other and her hair covering
her face. The fact that she didn’t move and the deep even breathing, told him
she was sound asleep. He tiptoed to the small, round table in the corner and
started to munch on his breakfast. He opened the curtain slightly so he could
see anyone approaching.

“Don’t eat all that.”

He’d never been skittish or jumpy
in his life. In fact, he’d always been told he had nerves of steel; no one was
ever able to walk up and scare him, at least not until now. After jerking
around and knocking over his chair with a loud crash, he glared at the woman
who had so calmly moved from the far bed to drape across the one close to him.

“Dammit. You’re going to kill
me.”

Bailey shrugged and reached for
his food. He ripped it out of her hands. “Yours is in the bag.”

“Grumpy, aren’t we. Maybe you
need some sleep.” She kicked off her shoes and socks, grabbed her food and
climbed onto the bed.

Growling at her, he sat down and
finished his while trying to ignore her sitting barefooted, cross-legged,
eating like she hadn’t had a meal in weeks.

“Oh man. This is the greasiest,
tastiest stuff I’ve ever eaten.”

“You might want to slow down or
you’ll have a gut ache.”

She wiped her mouth with a
napkin. “You sound like my mother. Only, my mother would never let me eat this
kind of stuff.” She proceeded to polish off the egg, sausage and tomato
sandwich.

“Oooohhhhh.” Bailey flopped
backwards. “I ate too much.”

Guy laughed. Bailey glared at him
but couldn’t contain her smile.

“So we’re in Jasper. Where to
from here?” It was like he’d flipped a switch again. Her face lost all
animation and became very somber before turning away.

“I’m going to have a shower. Get
some sleep.” At the bathroom door she turned. “What time is it?”

“8:00 a.m.”

Without a word, she grabbed her
purse and closed the door behind her.

He needed to figure out what was
going on but he knew that he needed sleep more. Something he wasn’t sure would
come easily. He stared at the closed bathroom. She was confusing, aggravating
and seemed to make him far more alive than any woman he’d ever met. The thought
scared the hell out of him. He wasn’t known for lasting very long in any
relationship. That jerked him out of his crazy thinking. They were running for
their lives and he was analyzing whether or not she’d date him. Calling himself
all kinds of names, he got back to making sure they were secure, although he
doubted that the man had been able to follow them. He locked the front door,
placed a chair in front of it and moved the table in front of the window before
stripping down to his shorts and crawling into bed. Within minutes he nodded
off.

****

Hit and run. And a shooting.
Man killed in residential neighborhood. Well known to police as Payme...

Lund’s hands crumpled the paper
with such a force he shook like he was having a seizure.

“Are you all right, dear?”

Not bothering to respond to his
wife, who’d come home much earlier than he’d hoped from her sister’s, he got up
from the table and headed up the stairs to his office. He locked the door
behind him before making his way to his desk. He flopped into his leather chair.
Sweat beaded on his forehead and ran down across his cheeks. His heart thumped
wildly in his chest, as he clenched his hands into fists.
They’ll never be
able to connect him to me.

Reaching inside his shirt, he
pulled out a key that, when not hanging around his neck, was locked in the safe
in his bathroom his wife didn’t know about. He leaned down and inserted the key
into the second drawer of his desk, unlocking it. The soft clicking sound
usually gave him a little thrill, a sense of being in control. After all, he
did have information on people, who, if they even thought of trying to bring
him down, would go down as well. Today though, that feeling didn’t come.
Carefully pulling open the drawer he removed the few books that were there for
looks only and touched the back corner of the false bottom. It popped up. He
leaned forward to check that the only copy of all that he’d done, all that he
knew, was safely in its hiding place.

It wasn’t there.

A pain shot through his chest
lightning quick but with the force of a Mac truck. His hand, still resting on
the key, jerked back hard, flinging the key across the room. He clutched at his
rib cage, opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water, as he tried
to catch his breath. Tremors shook his body as he slumped forward, slamming the
drawer closed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After climbing out of what Bailey knew was longer than her
usual allotted five minute shower, a habit from days on the run, she dried
herself off. The clothes from the day before were dry but felt grungy against
her skin as she pulled them on. Finger brushing her teeth, she then detangled
her hair as best she could. She let her mind wander, trying to figure out what
she needed to do.

She had no idea if the guy from
the night before was still after them. Why he was chasing them. Or what he
wanted. What she did know was that she had to go back through time, through a
sketchy history from the memory of a little kid, who would rather the past just
went away, disappeared. Since that wasn’t going to happen she had to go back
through a maze of places, hopefully find some people who remembered her and her
mom and then be able to tell her something that would make sense. The thought
of going back through time, made her shiver. Goosebumps covered her arm. The
face, not unlike that of the joker on the latest Batman movie which had plagued
her childhood and many of her adult dreams, popped into her mind.

Refusing to allow that nightmare
to take hold she opened the bathroom door. A loud sucking sound as though air
and a bit of water was being suck through a small straw, met her. Then there
was a gentle whooshing sound. Tiptoeing across to the far bed, she stood and
stared at her partner. He lay on his back, his head turned to the side. She was
amazed with the amount of noise he was making, that the curtains weren’t fluttering
due to his snoring. His bangs fell over his face. It wasn’t until she felt the
heat of his skin on her fingers that she realized she was about to touch him
and yanked her hand back.

She sat down heavily on the other
bed, confused by her concern and her reaction to him. The last thing she wanted
to do was to go 'there’, to analyze what was going on with her emotions.
To avoid it, she picked up the remote and turned on the TV while lowering the
volume. She flipped through stations until she found the News. The reporter was
talking about a serious car crash that had happened in Calgary’s south side.
Another large company was about to declare bankruptcy and there had been a hit
and run.

About to flip the channel, she
stopped when they showed the street that the killing had occurred on. She
pressed her hand to her mouth as she recognized that it was the same place
she’d been last night and it was around the time she’d been there.

“Payme, well known to police…”

Bailey stared hard at the picture
of the man they put up. He had a long, lean face, brown eyes hook nose and bad
acne. She recognized him instantly as being the visitor in her Mom’s house. Who
the hell was he? What did he want with her? Who killed him?

Her mind started to race with
lots of questions. The one that stood out and kept repeating itself was, '
What
did you do, Mom
?’

The one thing she knew for sure
was that her mom was at the bottom of this. As she thought about it the
information that Guy had been trying to give her, almost from the moment he’d
met her, would no longer be ignored.

You’re not who you think you
are.

Bailey hadn’t wanted to listen to
nor to allow that thought to enter her mind because she knew as soon as she did
she’d have to admit that for whatever reason, she knew it to be true. Just
letting it loose in her head confirmed something she knew in her gut. Why she
had that sense she didn’t know but she knew with certainty that it was a fact.
She didn’t know exactly what it meant but she did have a strong sense that
whatever her life had been for the last 29 years, it wasn’t what it should have
been.

All the frantic moves, the
constant picking up and starting over, the living in places not fit for four-legged
creatures - although there’d been plenty of those kind of roomies - eating
whatever could be begged, borrowed or stolen, the late night disappearance
acts, the constant need to hide, all came flooding back. Along with that came
the horror that not only had she been alone all her life, now she didn’t even
have an identity. That hit her like an avalanche that started as a loud roar and
then soon buried her under its weight.

Clutching her chest, she curled
on her side, pulling her knees in as tight as she could. She lay there for a
while trying to stop the images that were flying at her on high speed. At five,
there was the mouse that ran across her mattress on the floor and her screaming
like she’d never be able to stop. At three, staring out the back window of the
cab as they drove away. At ten, running away to go live under a bridge, which
only lasted a few hours but felt like days. All sorts of faces, distorted into
scary Halloween masks.

Enough!

She jumped to her feet, slid on
her runners, grabbed her coat, yanked open the door and raced outside. Not
stopping to think, she ran. After all, it was what she knew how to do. She’d
been taught well. It did cross her mind at some point that people were probably
thinking who is this weird person. Not really caring or giving a lot to that
thought, she continued to pound the pavement. Her heart thumped in her chest,
her pulse throbbed in her neck. Her mouth hung open gulping in what air she
could. It wasn’t until her muscles tightened and knotted up, screaming in protest
that she finally stopped. Bent over, heaving with exhaustion, she didn’t
straighten up for a good five minutes. Her head pounded, her legs weak and her
lungs protested the excessive exercise. The one good thing about it was that
she had something else to focus on. Something other than what her life was.
What it could have been. Standing up slowly, she rubbed her hands up and down
her thighs, easing the aching muscles. Her fingers moved over the small but
distinct lump in her pocket. Reality came slamming back. She straightened.
Fighting, that’s what she knew how to do.

She hadn’t really had a destination
in mind when she’d set out. Nor had she really paid attention, not even to
those places she’d passed two or three times. But looking across the street she
couldn’t believe her luck – an internet café. She’d heard of them but had never
gone into one. She gave little thought to the fact that she was jay walking and
zipped through the steady stream of vehicles headed both ways. Walking through
the door, she stopped as the aroma of coffees, teas, spices, herbs and stuff
she didn’t know, assailed her senses.

Nirvana came to mind. Reeling
from the overdose of smells and salivating on command, she walked up to the old
fashioned counter with the tall baker window beside it. She refused to look at
the delectable selection of sweets, something she’d tried to refrain from
eating most of her life. Instead, she smiled at the middle aged woman.

“Hi. I was wondering…” Bailey’s
eyes opened wide as she patted down her pants pockets and realized she didn’t
have any money on her. Her purse was back at the room. “Do you have a computer
and access to the internet that I could use?”

“Yes. Depending on the amount of
time you want to be on there, determines how much it will cost. And in about
ten minutes it will be busy for about an hour, then around 11:00 until 1:00ish
and late afternoon through the evening.”

“Do I book or just show up?”

“It’s first come first served.”

“So I can get on it now?”

The woman shook her head and
waved in the direction of a few people at the tables. “Sorry, that’s the line
up.”

“Fine. Thanks.” Spinning on her
foot she turned and walked out the door, only to be met by a pair of very
intense blue eyes.

“If you came to buy coffee, you
forgot it.” His tone indicated that he wouldn’t believe any excuse she gave
him.

Ignoring that and the twinge of
guilt she felt, she replied, “Actually I did want a coffee but as luck would
have it I forgot my money.”

He eyed her critically for a
moment before shoving his hand in his pocket and pulling out $20. “Black coffee
and two glazed donuts.”

“Looking for an early heart
attack?” Before he could reply, she stomped back into the café. Five minutes
later she was back, balancing two coffees and a bag of treats.

She handed him the coffee but
turned away when he reach for the bag. He arched an eyebrow at her. She gave
him a real smart-aleck smile. “Uh-uh-uh. I get to choose first and you’ll just
have to wait until we get back to the room.”

As though knowing she was talking
to it, his stomach growled. They looked at each other and started laughing. It
was enough to allow them to walk companionably but silently, each lost in his
or her own thoughts, back to the motel room. She felt almost a sense of calm, of
just being. It was something new for her. Then Guy started looking over his
shoulder every few seconds. She should be concerned as well but she just
couldn’t muster the energy. She had enough to ponder. He could keep up his head
spinning act.