Cop by Her Side (The Mysteries of Angel Butte) (21 page)

He’d gotten his hands on a list of employees, although there was always the possibility there were more being paid under the table.

Like Lissa,
Jane thought, wincing.

She was trying
not
to think about her sister. For one thing, she couldn’t afford to be paralyzed by guilt. She knew eventually she’d have to come to terms with her own responsibility for Lissa’s elastic morals, but not now.
Once Bree was safe.

Clay gave her other names to research. Stillwell Trucking had a sizable security department, which might be legitimate, of course, but might not, too.

Drew called midafternoon to tell her he was at home. “I can’t talk to Lissa right now,” he said, in a voice that seemed flattened by exhaustion and the fury of emotions burned down to ashes.

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “I feel the same.”

Clay had turned from his computer and was watching her. “Drew,” she mouthed to him, and he nodded.

She told Drew she was doing some research for Clay.

“You coming back to the house tonight?” Drew asked.

She hesitated. “Do you need me?”

“I don’t know if I’m ready to talk yet, but your company would be welcome. I’ve picked Alexis up, too.”

That speared her with another form of guilt. She hadn’t thought of her youngest niece today at all.

Seeing something on her face, Clay scribbled on a piece of paper and pushed it across to her.

Have dinner with me tonight. Stay?

Oh, God. She wanted to.

“Jane?” Drew prompted.

“I won’t make it for dinner,” she said, having yet another attack of guilt. Drew was her friend. If he’d ever needed her, it was now.

He ditched me. He chose Lissa.

Yes, but...

“I can’t promise,” she said finally. “Don’t worry if I don’t make it.”

There was a silence. Then, “It’s Renner, isn’t it?”

Okay, damn it, she would not feel guilty about this. “Yes,” she said.

“I’ll see you when I see you, then.” And he was gone.

She set down her phone.

“Yes what?” Clay asked.

“He wanted to know if I was having dinner with you.”

“What business is it of his?”

“I am living with him at the moment. More or less,” she added hastily. “With him and Alexis.” She was immediately annoyed with herself for feeling she had to justify anything she did to Clay
or
Drew.

She turned back to the computer.

“I thought we’d check out a few of these properties,” Clay said. “We can grab dinner while we’re out or go back to my place.”

“All right. Do you have anything promising?”

“Hard to say when I don’t know which employees might be involved.”

“They could be renting someplace,” she said in sudden frustration. “Using a barn, like Matt Raynor’s kidnappers did. There must be vacant properties around.”

The hard look Clay had had on his face while he listened to her phone conversation was gone, replaced with sympathy and shared frustration. “I thought we’d start with a drive out Bear Creek way. I can’t imagine they’d hold Brianna in the cabin where your sister was supposed to meet up with Stillwell, but we have to look.”

She’d been thinking about that. “They’re unlikely to have planned in advance for anything like this. I mean, Lissa was supposed to be alone. Unless they intended to grab her—” She shook her head. “But why would they?”

“That’s why I’m concentrating on owned properties,” Clay agreed. “You don’t drive up and down country roads looking for a vacant house when you’ve got a kid stowed in the trunk of your car and you’ve got to be having a major panic attack. If there was a plan B, I doubt this was it.”

That made sense. At the same time, she couldn’t imagine anyone who would be a logical suspect being willing to hold a kidnap victim at a property with his name on it.

But what were the alternatives?

Clay spent some time assigning officers to check out addresses on his list. Jane eavesdropped on his instructions—they were to drive personal vehicles only, and to go home if necessary to change out of uniforms. If they found anything of interest, they were to call him immediately rather than make a move.

Once his cluster of detectives and deputies broke apart to fan out across two counties, Clay and she were able to leave. He drove, stopping at her apartment so she could change to jeans and boots and get her Ruger from her small gun safe.

In between Clay taking calls, the two of them got a look at a dozen possible properties, some surreptitiously, some—like the time-share condominium—directly. One by one, they checked them off the list.

The vacant cabin on Bear Creek was even more run-down than Lissa had described it. Uninhabitable, in Jane’s opinion. She and Clay had left his Jeep at the county park and made their way along the creek, then through the woods, until they reached the clearing where it stood.

“Cover me,” he said finally, despite the sagging roof that made it unlikely anyone would try to hold a captive inside. Nodding, Jane gripped her weapon while he moved swiftly across the open ground to flatten himself on the back wall of the ramshackle cabin. Watching him, she was struck again by the grace and athletic ease of his stride. If she’d gone instead, she’d probably have stepped on half a dozen dry branches that would have cracked loudly, but Clay managed to move silently. Like the soldier he’d been, she remembered, accustomed to ghosting through enemy territory.

When she realized suddenly that he’d edged up to a window, glanced in and was shaking his head at her as he walked openly back in her direction, Jane was embarrassed to realize how wholly she’d let herself be distracted.

She holstered her weapon and raised her eyebrows when he got near, hoping her cheeks hadn’t flushed.

“One room,” he reported. “Floor’s rotting.”

“I wonder how they knew it was a good place to meet,” Jane said thoughtfully.

His brows drew together. “Good question. I didn’t recognize the property owner’s name, but I’ll dig deeper.”

The sun was setting when, hungry and discouraged, they bought a pizza and took it back to Clay’s cabin in the woods. While he got out plates and drinks, she escaped to his bathroom to clean up. She’d acquired a long scratch across her upper arm from a careless encounter with a branch that wasn’t as flexible as she’d thought it would be. She gently washed it and used antiseptic she found in his medicine cabinet to bathe it, wincing at the sting. Then she took her hair out of the ponytail, brushed it with her fingers and put it back. Not a whole lot of improvement, she was afraid, inspecting herself in the mirror, but there was only so much she could do.

Clay’s gaze went straight to the scratch. “Got you good,” he observed.

She made a face at him as she sat down at the table and reached for a soda. “It’s not fair. You’re way bigger than I am, and no vegetation got in
your
way.”

He grinned. “I had some serious training, you know. I told you I was an army ranger, didn’t I?”

She nodded. She’d found the idea he had been special forces disturbing on a lot of levels.

“I grew up hiking, fishing, hunting, too,” he added. “Even did some mountain climbing.”

“Do you still hunt?” she asked, not sure she approved. Hypocritical though that was, when she was reaching for a slice of pizza with Canadian bacon on it.

And, oh, wow, it tasted good.

“No, that was Dad’s thing. I prefer to buy my meat at the supermarket.” Clay’s mouth quirked. “I must have gotten that from my mother. I could see the dread in her eyes when we showed up with a dead deer in the bed of the pickup truck. I don’t know if she was thinking about Bambi, or merely trying to figure out what she’d do with all those strange cuts of meat, but she wasn’t enthusiastic. I don’t think Dad ever noticed,” he added reflectively.

“My father was not an outdoorsman,” Jane said, wiping her fingers on a napkin. “I got excited when I biked to the park in town.”

Clay nudged the pizza toward her. “That’s actually as nice a stand of old-growth trees as you’ll find anywhere.”

“I thought it was spooky when I was a kid.”

He polished off a slice of pizza. “Isn’t that where Captain McAllister’s wife was abducted when she was a teenager?”

“Yes. Did you hear about the bones that turned up last fall when a crew took down some of the trees infested with beetles?”

“Yeah. Hey.” He looked interested. “Was it your investigation that early on?”

As they ate, she told him about it—finding a backpack with a pitiful store of belongings that turned out to be all a boy had owned in the world. A picture of himself with his mother, the Purple Heart his father had earned in Vietnam before dying over there. The poor kid had been killed the same night Maddie Dubeau had been attacked and disappeared so completely, it was as if she’d vanished from the face of the earth.

Like Bree,
Jane thought with a shiver.

With his sharp gaze, Clay noticed. “You okay?”

“I was thinking of the parallel with Bree.”

“Not the same,” he said, in the gentle voice that broke down her defenses. “Maddie—she’s Nell now, isn’t she?—came upon a genuine psychopath.”

“My boss,” she reminded him. Lieutenant Brewer had headed Investigative Services for the ABPD until the investigation she and Colin McAllister conducted closed in on him. Colin had shot the man he’d considered friend and mentor while she had braced herself and gripped Colin by the belt to keep him from falling out of the open door of the helicopter as he lined up the shot.

Clay’s face darkened. “It’s the worst when our own goes bad.”

She couldn’t argue. Finding out this past year how many cops, both city and county, had been on the payroll of drug traffickers had sent a shock wave through the local law enforcement community.

Clay pushed his plate away with an abrupt, almost angry movement. “Damn. I wish we didn’t have to let up tonight.”

Jane’s meal suddenly felt indigestible. “Where do we go next?” she said.

“We keep looking. Other employees. Relatives. Friends.”

“Because friends or relatives are eager to lend their ski cabin to hold a kidnapped child.”

He looked sardonic. “Some people’s friends might not be.”

He couldn’t very well say
your
friends or relatives might not be. Because they now knew what her closest relative was capable of doing.

“But these mostly look like such ordinary people,” she argued, determined to prove her original point. “I mean, take Glenn Arnett. His daughter is at one of the top liberal arts colleges in the nation. He’s a CPA. When I went online, I found a newspaper article about his wife chairing a fund-raiser for the senior center. Do you really think she knows how her husband is paying that college tuition?”

“Probably not,” Clay admitted. “You’re right. You have to wonder if people like Stillwell and his pet accountant even think of themselves as criminals. Maybe to them it’s just business.”

“Shouldn’t we have someone following Stillwell and Arnett?” she asked abruptly.

“We’re monitoring the comings and goings at the trucking company right now, including theirs.” He sounded cautious. “Outside that... My guess is they’re both keeping a healthy distance from a kidnapped child.”

“Maybe.” She’d been thinking, though. “Drug running is one thing, murder and kidnapping another.”

His eyebrows rose. “They do tend to go hand in hand.”

“That’s true, but we don’t have any reason to think Stillwell has ever had to commit either crime before.”

“Granted,” Clay said after a moment.

“So he’s not likely to keep a strongman on the payroll.”

His mouth twitched, as though he was amused by her description. “If our suspicions are right, he’s in an ugly business. My bet is that he’s had to do some intimidating or worse by now. A trucker who wants a raise or else, say. There might well be someone on the payroll who has arranged accidents for him.”

“But this is different,” she argued. “Closer to home. And a little girl.” Was it really him she was trying to convince? Or herself.

“I’ll give you that,” he said. “I’ve met some major scumbags who wouldn’t consider killing a cute seven-year-old kid.”

“So what if it’s only the two of them who knew about Lissa’s blackmail? How many people would they
want
to know that they’d screwed up and let some bookkeeper see information that jeopardized the whole enterprise? If they’re transporting illegal drugs, they’re working with some rough people who expect discretion and competence. Stillwell and Arnett could have been desperate enough to decide to kill Lissa themselves. Keep the whole thing quiet. Maybe they intended it to look like an accident. When that didn’t work out...well, plan B went into effect, but they’re still trying to handle it on their own.”

She half expected Clay to instantly discount her theory, but instead she could see him clicking through the possibilities, weighing them against what he knew about the two men.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “I can see it. All right. You know there’s some risk they’ll spot a tail.” He paused, watching her.

He was right—they’d been going to great lengths to avoid doing anything that would panic either Stillwell or Arnett. Even so...they
couldn’t
let Bree go. If they hadn’t already realized that kidnapping a kid had been really dumb, they were going to have an epiphany any minute. Being caught with Bree in their hands was the worst thing that could happen to them right now.

She gave a mental gulp but nodded.

Clay gave a small nod, warmth and sympathy in his eyes. “I’ll put someone on them tomorrow. You and I can take over when they cut out of work.”

She smiled at him. “Good.”

“In the meantime,” he stood and came around the table to pull her to her feet, “I’d like to kiss you.” His voice had become husky.

“I can’t stay,” she said hastily. “Drew really does need someone he can talk to.” Seeing Clay’s frown, she laid a finger over her lips. “But I think I can spare another hour.”

He groaned and rested his forehead against hers. “I guess I can settle for that.”