Cody Walker's Woman (25 page)

“I know. But I don’t have to like it. Makes me glad I’m a small town sheriff now. Most of the time, anyway. There’s something to be said for breaking up bar fights and arresting drunk drivers.”

“Ah, the good old days,” Cody said, agreeing with him.

“You ever miss it?” Callahan asked him. “You ever wish—” He stopped abruptly, as if he suddenly remembered the real reason Cody had left Black Rock.

All at once Cody realized Keira and McKinnon could hear their conversation. They had been quiet this whole time, but that didn’t mean they weren’t listening. “Yeah,” he said honestly. “I miss it sometimes. Denver’s different from Black Rock—nothing against Denver, but living in a small town, where you know everyone and everyone knows you, has its advantages. But there’s also a certain satisfaction working for the agency that I never got from being the sheriff here. It’s a trade-off.”

The sun was almost up when Callahan reached the center of town and circled slowly, weaving in and out of the town’s few side streets. When they passed the sheriff’s office, Cody was hit by a sense of nostalgia. He’d spent a lot of years as Black Rock’s sheriff. But then he glanced at the passenger side mirror. “They’re still back there,” he told Callahan quietly.

McKinnon spoke up. “They just want us to know they’re around. And that they’re not going away.” Then he chuckled. “It’ll be fun leading them on a wild-goose chase,” he told Cody, “while you and Keira accomplish our mission.”

* * *

Cody and Keira waited in the truck behind the house after Callahan and McKinnon had left. “Give me five minutes before you pull out,” Callahan had told them. “But don’t wait any longer than that. You don’t want to give them a chance to call up another team to tail the two of you, just in case they notice you’re not with us.”

Cody glanced at the clock on the dashboard, then put the truck into gear and slowly drove down the winding driveway toward the highway. Both he and Keira had their eyes peeled, but no vehicle appeared behind them or in front of them. Ten minutes later Cody turned into the driveway of Betsy Duggan’s house and drove all the way around the back so the truck couldn’t be seen from the road. “Stay here,” he told Keira, hopping out of the truck and making his way cautiously around the side of the house, peering out.

Nothing. No cars, no people, nothing. He waited a couple of minutes, but still nothing, so he headed back to the truck. Keira was waiting beside it, shielded behind the passenger door. Her hand was tucked inside her jacket, and Cody knew she’d been ready to draw her weapon if necessary. He signaled to her that he was going to try the key on the back door. She followed him, but backwards, eyes on the alert for any sign of the FBI or anyone else.

Cody slid the key into the back door’s lock and turned. “Bingo!” he whispered. He smiled triumphantly at Keira, and the returning smile on her face said, “I knew it!”

They slipped inside, Cody taking the lead. Keira stopped to lock the door behind them, and they made their way through the kitchen into the living room. Cody had no intention of turning on the lights—that would be a dead giveaway to anyone who knew Betsy was out of town—but after a minute their eyes adjusted, and they were able to see clearly in early morning gloom.

The living room furniture was old-fashioned but neat and tidy, with only a fine layer of dust showing that the owner had been absent for some weeks. In one corner of the room stood a large desk Cody remembered had belonged to Roland’s father. Roland had rarely used it, but it still had pride of place in the room. And on the desk stood a computer and monitor.

That’s it,” Keira said, walking quickly toward the corner.

“How can you be sure?”

Her gaze encompassed the computer. “This isn’t something you can buy just anywhere,” she said. “It’s top of the line.” She bent over and glanced behind the computer setup. “It’s plugged in, but there’s no DSL or anything connecting it to an ISP,” she added, referring to an internet service provider. “No one would have this computer without internet access. It’s
got
to be Tressler’s.”

She sat down at the keyboard, turned the computer on, and was immediately confronted by the need for a user password. As Cody watched, she typed
C-e-n-t-a-u-r,
but that didn’t work. Then she tried
C-e-n-t-e-r,
but no luck there, either. She tried again, this time all lowercase, but again nothing. She made a face of frustration. “One of them
has
to be the password. Remember what Callahan said about Tressler’s last word? But even if one of them
is
the password, it could be any combination of caps and lowercase,” she told him. “Damn! I could sit here all day, but without a starting point...”

Something niggled at the back of Cody’s brain. Something Keira had just said; something about a starting point. “Wait,” he said, closing his eyes to concentrate, and Keira fell silent. Starting point. Starting point...

With Tressler dead we don’t even have a starting point....
He’d said that to Callahan. Now his mind was doing free association. Starting point. Tressler.
Veni, vidi, vici...

He could hear Keira saying,
The reference to Julius Caesar could mean anything—the Ides of March, Marc Antony, the Roman Legions, crossing the Rubicon. Even the month of July or William Shakespeare.... Did he say anything else?

Then as if Callahan were standing right next to him, he could hear the deep voice saying,
One other word at the very end, but I couldn’t really understand him.... It sounded something like
center
or
centaur,
but I can’t swear to it.

Roman Legions. Center.
“That’s it!” Excitement building, he leaned down over Keira’s shoulders and typed
C-e-n-t-u-r-i-o-n.
Pennington’s code name for him.

“And we’re
in!
” Keira exulted as the screen opened into a standard computer desktop. She looked up at Cody, admiration glowing in her face. She turned back to the computer screen, running the mouse pointer over the icons scattered across the desktop. Cody recognized links to the names of many of the most popular online video games, but Keira kept going. Then the mouse pointer stopped abruptly at a link near the bottom right of the screen.

Veni, Vidi, Vici.

“It’s an online video game,” Cody whispered, stunned.

“I know,” Keira said, but so low he had to strain to hear her. “It came to me in my dream last night.”

He frowned. “But you never said that this morning....”

Keira kept her head down, staring at the computer screen. “I might have been wrong,” she said in an undertone. “I didn’t want...” She drew a sharp breath. “Actually, when I was researching a link between the Praetor Corporation and that phrase two weeks ago, I came across a few references to an online video game by that name,” she confessed, as if she’d failed him somehow. “I just didn’t make the connection until last night.”

Cody reached down and turned her face so she had to look at him. “Don’t,” he said. “We’re a team. Don’t hold back when you have an idea just because you might be wrong. Hell, I’m wrong half the time myself,” he said, exaggerating to make his point.

She hesitated, then said, “You’re right. I should have trusted that you and Callahan wouldn’t hold it against me if my theory proved wrong.”

Cody realized Keira hadn’t included McKinnon in that statement, and another surge of jealousy rose in him. Apparently she trusted her partner more than she trusted him...and that bothered him. A lot.
A hell of a lot more than just a lot,
he acknowledged, trying to squelch his unreasonable jealousy of McKinnon. In some ways Keira still didn’t trust him, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it...not here...not now.

Chapter 19

T
hey drove in silence to Callahan’s house with Tressler’s computer stowed in the back of the truck, the tonneau cover safely concealing it from curious eyes. Cody wondered what Keira was thinking but couldn’t bring himself to ask—he was still coming to terms with the wound she’d dealt him without realizing it. Keira’s lack of unquestioning belief sliced into Cody’s psyche in a way he hadn’t thought possible. “Trust me,” he’d told her that first night, and she’d answered, “I will.”

She trusted him with her body. Every step of the way in their one night together she had demonstrated her implicit faith that he would cherish the gift of her body in a way she had done with no other man.

She trusted him with her heart. That incandescent moment when she had cradled his face with her hands and whispered, “I love you, Cody,” would warm him until the day he died.

But she didn’t trust him the way he yearned for her to do—with every fiber of her being. McKinnon was more important to her than Cody was where her work was concerned. And her work was her life.
Trust me in that, too,
he wanted to plead, but he knew faith and reliance couldn’t be won that way—not with words. They had to be given freely; they had to come from the soul. And in her soul she didn’t trust him completely...not yet.

Just before the driveway leading to Callahan’s house, Cody noticed another car parked down a little way on the side of the road. It wasn’t the same one that had followed the four of them earlier, but it was too far away for him to make out the license plate or see if there was anyone in the car.

“No sense wondering,” he told Keira as he kept driving past the driveway. He pulled over on the other side of the road and rolled down his window. After a few seconds the window of the other car also rolled down, and Cody recognized FBI Agent Jeff Holmes in the driver’s seat.

“Good morning,” Cody said with a grin only partially concealed. “You’re up early.”

He could see the tightening jaw on the other man’s face. “So are you,” Holmes replied eventually. “So is Callahan.”

“Yeah. Things to do, you know.” He debated with himself for a minute, then said provocatively, “If you wanted to know what we were up to, you could have asked.”
Not that we would have told you,
he added silently,
but...

“Right, Walker.”

Cody rolled up his window, chuckled to himself, and executed a U-turn.

For the first time Keira spoke. “Whatever happened to interagency cooperation?”

He glanced at her. “Right. And I suppose you’re going to tell him about the agency’s secret data link into the FBI’s computers in Washington?”

She laughed softly at the dryly teasing note in his voice. “Well, no, I wasn’t going to go that far. But I wouldn’t deliberately provoke rivalry, either. We
are
on the same side, after all. And he has his job to do, just as we have ours.”

“I know.” A tinge of contrition crept into his voice. “But they resent the hell out of us. And they don’t trust us, not where the job is concerned. They never have.” He took a deep breath. “Just like you don’t trust me.”

She cast him a look of shock. “I trust you,” she whispered.

“Not completely,” he told her. “In some ways you do, but...”

She didn’t answer, and Cody knew she was thinking...really thinking about what he’d said, trying to decide if it was true. That was one of the wonderful things about her—she didn’t automatically leap to her own defense. And she could admit her own failings. Not everyone could do that.

Cody pulled the truck up in back of Callahan’s house, turned off the ignition, and waited. And waited. He watched her profile, saw the delicate color come into her cheeks as she realized he was watching her. She glanced away, staring out the window at the back porch, but he knew she wasn’t really seeing it any more than he was.

After a couple of minutes, Keira turned, and her eyes met his. “What do you want from me?” she asked in a low tone.

“Everything.” Her eyes widened, and her face took on a startled expression. He smiled faintly, then reached over and brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. “Heart, mind, body and soul. I’m thirty-seven, Keira,” he confessed. “I’ve waited too long to settle for anything less. I can’t...I
won’t.
”

“Do you know what you’re asking?”

He was gambling everything on one roll of the dice. “I want you—you know that. But I want all of you. I want to go to sleep at night with you in my arms, and I want to wake up the same way. But that’s not enough. Not for me...not for us. I also need to know that you trust me...in every way there is. Not just with your body. Not just with your heart.”

“You’re asking the impossible.”

“I know.” His voice was husky. “But it’s all or nothing.”

“I can’t...it’s not that easy...I...”

Cody unbuckled his seat belt and took the keys out of the ignition. “I’m not asking you to decide right this second,” he said. “But I thought you should know how I feel.” He opened the truck door and changed the subject. “Come on, let’s get that computer inside and hook it up to the internet, see what else we can find out.”

She caught his arm, and he turned back. “Wait, Cody. I...”

His heart melted at the confusion on her face. He knew he’d sprung this on her with little or no warning, and maybe it wasn’t fair. Some people might say they barely knew each other, and maybe Keira was thinking that, too. But he knew everything important there was to know about her. And he hoped...prayed, really, that she would realize she already knew everything important there was to know about him, too.

He leaned toward her, hesitating just a little, then brushed his lips against hers in a kiss unlike any other he’d ever given her. He fought back the possessive passion that surged through his body unexpectedly at the touch of her lips. The alpha male side of him—the side he’d only recently acknowledged after all these years—wanted to deepen the kiss, to swamp her senses, to sway her with sensual promises. But instinctively he knew that wasn’t what she needed right now. She needed to know she was safe with him. In every way. And only when she knew it was safe to trust him would she do so.

Trust. It was such a little word, but it meant everything.