Material Witness (20 page)

But before they could head back to
the secluded woods, Jake had one more errand that demanded his attention.

They stood in a phone booth located
in the store's parking lot, Jake dialed the telephone number. Cassie stood just
outside the booth's broken door, keeping it open. A ten-dollar watch with a second
hand he'd just purchased at the store dangled from Cassie’s fingers as she
waited for the call to connect. The caller picked up after the first ring.

“Gordon.”

As soon as Jake heard Kevin's voice,
he nodded to Cassie. Her eyes flew to the second hand on the watch, keeping the
time as he spoke.

“Kevin, it's me.”

“Dammit, Jake, where the hell have
you been? Russo's crawling all over and up my ass, flaming about you and
Cassie.”

“Cassie's with me. We're staying
hidden for a while.”

“Gotta tell you, buddy, I'm damned
glad to hear your voice. The FBI has been very hush hush about what went down
at that safe house. I don't know how you escaped that explosion, but…” He let
his voice trail, paused before continuing. “I'm obligated to tell you that
Captain Russo and Agent Tate have ordered you to bring Cassie back.
Immediately.”

“Are they standing over your shoulder
or are they relying on a tap?”

Kevin sighed. “It was a given you'd
call me first. And you know if Charley was standing over my shoulder she'd be
holding the phone by now.”

“I figured as much.”

“She's been spitting fire. And as
pretty as the woman is, it ain't a pretty sight. Ever since you took off from
the safe house—”

“Like we had a choice! Bellows locked
us in, Kev. No matter what Charley is telling you about what went down. It’s an
inside job. Someone in the FBI wanted us dead.”

“What? Tate said it was a gas leak.”

“It was. But that’s all I can say
right now. I’m going to bring Cassie back in, but only after Angel Fagnelio is
behind bars and has been debriefed.”

A heavy breath carried over the phone
line, distorting the connection. “Is she really worth all this, Jake? You're
killing your career doing it this way. You do know that, don't you?”

“Internal Affairs can strike me from
their Christmas list. Get your end set up and I’ll come in.”

“Not a problem, just tell me how I
can contact you.”

“I’ll call you.”

“Jake, right now you're a suspect.
There's been talk of you being in with Fagnelio from the start.”

“
Fuck
.
I walked right into this one. Charley all
but stuck an apple in my mouth and put me on a spit as the scapegoat. Did you
tell them about Debra Cantelli?”

“For all the good it did. Just tell
me where you are, Jake,” Kevin said. “I’ve got your back. You know that. You
can't clear yourself if you're on the run.”

“When you have Fagnelio. Then we'll
come in. Not until then.”

The sound of items crashing carried
through the phone line. Jake could just picture Kevin pushing something across
his desk in frustration. “Jake—”

Cassie reached through the phone
booth door and cut the call.

“Time’s up,” she said. “Did he tell
you anything?”

“They don’t have Angel Fagnelio.
There’s nothing more I need to know.”

Jake stood in the booth with his hand
clutching the phone for a moment before either of them made a move.

“What if he lies? What if you call
him next time and he tells you that Angel Fagnelio is behind bars and it isn't
true?”

“I hate people who lie. And Kevin
knows it. He wouldn’t do that to me.”

“Jake, you're not talking about
your
friend
, Kevin,” she said, her quick laugh dry. “He's a police officer who
has the FBI breathing down his back. He may not have a choice.”

 “Let’s get out of here,” Jake said,
stepping out of the phone booth and walking with Cassie back to the Jeep. It
had begun to snow again while he'd made the phone call. Snow now clung to the
back of Cassie’s ridiculously large coat.

Deep down Jake refused to believe
Kevin would betray the friendship they'd spent years nurturing. They'd been in
tight spots together before. Some fueled by undercover work gone bad. Some
dealing with dirty police politics in the precinct. In those years, they'd
developed a connection, a sixth sense about each other. They knew by body
movement and tone of voice when the other was holding back.

And they both despised liars.
They had reason. And that reason
began with Charlotte Tate.

Tate
. Yeah, she was probably spitting
fire right now. When the safe house blew sky high, Tate would have insisted on
taking Cassie to God only knows where. She would have pulled Jake off the case
immediately. From what Kevin just told him, he was being made the fall guy. Of
course, he’d expected as much. The only way to make the truth go away was to
blame him or kill him. Killing him hadn’t worked twice. The only thing left was
blame.

It all seemed too clean to him now,
too convenient for the guilty party to frame him. There'd been no fuss at all
with Cassie's simple request to have him be her bodyguard at the safe house.

Until Angel Fagnelio's conviction,
the FBI and the federal prosecutors would want to make damned sure their star
witness was safe. He wouldn't know where she'd gone or what had happened to her
until the trial was over. He shouldn’t care…but he did.

The thought of Cassie getting lost
deep into a red-taped system, losing her identity, her family and everyone else
she loved for months—maybe years—made his heart ache. He didn't want her to get
lost. Not from him. Not when someone from the very agency who'd be protecting
her so clearly wanted her not to testify against Angel Fagnelio. Even if it
meant death.

Not when he couldn't figure out what
this
thing
was building between them.

He shook off the thought. Cassie
would
eventually testify. There would come a day when they'd have to return to face
Angel Fagnelio. The FBI would hide her away.
Away from him.

A wave of nausea flooded his stomach
and he pushed past the distressing thought. This case was so much more than
just Angel Fagnelio. He had to find out who leaked Cassie’s name to the press
and who rigged the safe house to blow up.

“Do you think Kevin can help us?”
Cassie asked, cutting into his thoughts.

He nodded, the conviction of it
making him feel good for the first time in days. The one person he absolutely
could trust was Kevin.

* * *

There was a good chance the fire had
gone out in the ancient potbelly stove while they’d been gone. Jake drove the
Jeep out to the back of the cabin where it was normally parked. The smoke that
had been pluming out of the pipe chimney when they left was now only an
occasional puff when the wind slammed against the cabin. The snow had picked up
considerably on the drive. It wouldn’t take long for the small rooms inside to
turn into an icebox.

Ignoring the hunger pangs his stomach
was screaming, he parked the Jeep next to a pile of split wood. He could easily
get the stove going while Cassie started lunch.

Cassie shoved her door open and
climbed out of the Jeep, pulling the collar of her coat together. Immediately
upon closing her door, she opened the back door and lifted one of the four bags
of groceries out of the back seat.

“I’m going to take in an armful of
wood for the stove before I come out and get the rest of this stuff. It looks
like the fire in the woodstove might have gone out.”

“I can handle these while you get
some wood,” Cassie said. As she walked toward the cabin, she reached into her
pocket with the hand that wasn’t holding the grocery bag and dug around for the
key.

Jake looked at the sky and tried to
remember when he’d even noticed that it had begun to snow. When he’d called
Kevin, he finally remembered. Since then, the snow had gotten heavier. It was
just as well they’d gone out when they had.

His gaze darted from the house to the
tree line on the far side of the property where another line of split cordwood
was stacked neatly in a long row. Half of the row was covered by a sky-blue
tarp. His eyes walked along the smooth satin of the untouched snow in the open
area of the small field to the set of tiny prints, most likely made by a lone
deer, to another set of deep marks in the snow. Up in these hills there had to
be a lot of wildlife lurking about just beyond the tree line.

Jake reached down and plucked a few
pieces of wood from the top of the pile that were already wet with snow and
tossed them aside in favor of some drier wood underneath.

That’s when he saw them. The deep
marks next to the smaller ones in the snow, just beyond the longer woodpile by
the tree line, looked innocent enough. But something told him those marks
didn’t come from a four-legged animal.

Jake couldn’t remember if Cassie had
gotten any wood this morning while he was working on the Jeep, but quickly
decided it didn’t matter whether she had or not. They hadn’t been gone all that
long this morning, but it was snowing hard enough that the tracks he now saw
leading to the house were too fresh to be from this morning.

Dropping the pile of wood he’d just
picked up, he shoved his feet through the deeper snow toward the opposite side
of the house, which was not visible from the driveway.

His heart slammed against his chest.
The small bedroom window was shattered and slightly open as if someone had
tried to close it, but didn’t push down far enough. The bleached white curtain
ruffled back and forth with each gust of wind. The opening wasn’t all that big,
but it was certainly big enough for someone of medium built to crawl through.

His adrenaline kicked in like a boot
to the stomach. He went for the gun that was usually snug in his holster, but
neither was there. It was automatic, something he’d done hundreds of times.
There was a comfort in knowing his gun was secure against his ribs when he
walked into imminent danger. But he'd lost the gun after the explosion at the
safe house. Damn!

Cassie was in there. And he had
nothing to protect her with.

With full force, Jake bolted to the
woodpile and grabbed the small ax before heading toward the cabin, his feet
moving with a will of their own. His pulse pounded in his ear as he tried to
listen for sounds. A struggle. Voices. Anything. Dear God, if the perpetrator
had used a silencer, he wouldn’t have heard a thing.

Jake hugged the outer wall of the
cabin, gripping the ax with both hands. There was no sound inside as he stood
just outside the door. No rustle of groceries being pulled out of the bag. No
footsteps on the smooth, knotty pine floors, or clanking of pots or pans on the
stove.

“Cassie?” he called out, hoping and
praying that the intruder was some local hell-bent on stealing goods from an
unused rental property. Maybe they were long gone by now.

When no response came, fear gutted
Jake, making his breaths come out in shallow bursts. He closed his eyes for a
second and tried not to think of Cassie lying dead on the floor in a pool of
blood, but the image wouldn’t fade from his brain.

With his left hand, he eased the
cabin door open and walked into the darkness.

* * *

Pain pounded against Cassie’s temple
as she tried not to think about the gun pressed against her skull right above
her left ear. She hadn’t seen him come up behind her. She was too busy
unloading packages from the bag she’d carried in from the Jeep. The scent of
the intruder registered seconds before the feel of his hands against her mouth.

She’d been too terrified to scream
even if he hadn’t covered her mouth to muffle any warning sound she might make.
His fingers bruised her cheeks and the barrel of the gun she’d yet to see
dented her tender skin.

The raw scent of his sweat wasn’t
concealed by the heavy aftershave assaulting her nose, choking her. He reeked
of the same fear Cassie felt deep in her bones. His body, hot and rigid,
pressed against her back, making her skin crawl where there was forced contact.

She couldn’t move. He crushed her
hard against the counter, her stomach and pelvic bone pressed solidly against
the edge.

“Stay quiet,” her captor said against
her ear, his threatening voice a harsh whisper.

Cassie flinched at his hot breath and
closed her eyes against a wave of nausea that bubbled up her throat. He hadn’t
said the somewhat comforting words “and I won’t hurt you” after demanding her
silence. That surely made his intentions unmistakable. He wasn’t there to hurt
her. He was there to kill her.

Her chest rose and fell with each
breath as she fought to focus and think of what to do. Somehow she needed to
warn Jake that he was walking blindly into the tiger’s pen. She’d gotten him
into this by insisting he be her bodyguard. He didn’t deserve to die. She
wouldn’t let him die. Especially not for her.

Still pressing his body against hers,
pinning her in the corner of the small counter space, the stranger slowly
released the hand gripping her mouth and whispered, “Not one word or I’ll make
sure this is slow and agonizing.”