Ransom River (49 page)

T
he road ran straight across the hardpan, an asphalt cord that unspooled toward the mountains on the horizon. The desert was cool in the sunrise, the sky a deep and flawless blue. Rory kept her speed steady and her eyes on the vanishing point. She didn’t look in the mirror. She knew what was behind her.

Addie was singing in the backseat.

The little girl kicked her bare feet and sang along with a kids’ album on the stereo. Dino songs. T. rex: deadly but dead. That’s why kids loved dinosaurs. They couldn’t hurt you.

Addie was less withdrawn today than she had been for the past three weeks, since the confrontation with Boone and Riss. Physically, she was fine. And Rory had been taking her to an infant-parent therapist, to help her start dealing with the trauma she’d lived through. She no longer clung silently to Rory’s side. She was singing. Nonsense words, but enthusiastically. Her eyes were bright.

Rory’s bruises had faded to yellow stains. Her right side was a crocodile skin of scabs, but the pain was mostly gone.

Other aches lingered. Petra remained shaken, though she was drawing hope from her third graders. Rory had hated to tell her good-bye. A friend you can trust with your life is a rare, fine thing. After Petra escaped the river that day, she’d bolted down the road in Seth’s truck—and found him beyond the storm drain, injured and struggling up the bank. They backtracked
but couldn’t find Rory. Desperate to get Addie, Seth dropped Petra at a safe location and tore over to Amber’s house, where he walked into the fray.

The bowl of the desert brightened, chalk white with the sunrise. Rory put on her sunglasses. In the back of the car, Chiba stirred to watch yucca trees and red bluffs roll past.

The U.S. Attorney had taken over the investigation of the courthouse attack. Detective Xavier had been arrested. Grigor Mirkovic was under indictment for solicitation to murder. Rory had been cleared of all suspicion. She’d been interviewed extensively and would be called as a witness in any trial. But she didn’t have to sit tight. The feds knew how to find her.

And she had been given temporary guardianship of Addie. Amber had readily agreed that Rory should take the little girl—for a few weeks, a few months, maybe longer—until Riss surfaced. Rory knew that Riss had the capacity to stay subterranean for long periods. She’d be back, and when she appeared Rory wanted Addie to be far away.

She put down the window. The Mojave hadn’t heated up yet, and the air felt brisk. In the far distance, range after range of stark mountains marched to the horizon, purple, brown, sharp, sawing the sky. The Sierras edged into view ahead. She was on the back road to far gone.

And she had cash in her pocket. More cash than she’d ever had. Enough.

Before leaving town, she had phoned the FBI and told them the location of the buried money. She kept her parents out of it. She told the Bureau that one day when she was nine, she and her cousins had gone with Lee Mackenzie to the national forest in an old van. Her uncle, she explained, told the kids it was a fishing trip. Now she understood he’d used them for cover. Left them lakeside for hours, and came back dirty and exhausted.

The Bureau couldn’t disprove her story. They couldn’t hold her accountable for what she’d seen as a youngster. They followed her directions and found the money.

They paid her the reward.

She put part of it in a trust fund for Addie. She paid her bills and kept
enough money to stay on the road for months if she needed to. She donated ten thousand dollars to the school where she’d taught in the Peace Corps.

The rest she gave to Asylum Action. The charity was going to be able to run for at least two years. It would have time to get back on more stable financial footing. The refugees they’d been helping would not, after all, be left in limbo.

The mountains seemed to hover above the horizon, beckoning. She was seeking safety. She was holding tight to a little girl who needed love and care, and who she would ensure never grew up in Ransom River.

She checked her watch. The two-lane blacktop rolled nonstop until the view ran out. But in the distance, at the side of the road, glass sparkled. A minute later she pulled into an old gas station and diner.

Dust swirled around the Subaru when she stopped. It blew against the wall of the diner and against a faded mural of the space age, stars and the moon and a streaking Saturn V rocket.

The black pickup was waiting. Seth climbed out.

He was moving better, breathing better. His shoulders were still canted. If his cocksure grin existed any more, it was hidden. He was unwilling to reveal himself, even now, even to her.

She parked and turned to Addie. “Be right back, roo.” She got out.

“Good timing,” Seth said.

“You know I’m fast.”

In the dry brush of the wind, the question was plain on his face:
Forgive me?

Not yet. Not all the way. She was fast, but not that fast. She would absolve him for withholding the truth about his role as a federal cop. Eventually. Soon, even. Because she knew him. She knew who he was, and that she should have seen it. She’d known him all his life.

She handed him the flash drive that Neil Elmendorf had put in her car.

Seth turned it over. “What’s this?”

“Bootleg CCTV movie. It’s the Brad Mirkovic killing.”

“How—”

“Lucy Elmendorf’s husband gave it to me. Don’t know how he got it. But he had it enhanced. It raises reasonable doubt.”

He looked openly surprised. “You want to elaborate?”

“Brad Mirkovic was armed,” she said.

His surprise turned to skepticism.

“With an illegal handgun that belonged to Lucy Elmendorf,” she said. “Lucy dropped it when she tackled Brad. Brad grabbed it. Without computer enhancement it’s almost impossible to see, because it was nighttime. But it’s there. Lucy didn’t want to admit she was carrying the piece. She thought she was home free via self-defense, so she lied.”

“Why would she lie?”

“The gun, I’m guessing, was purchased through a channel that leads back to Grigor Mirkovic’s arms dealership.”

He curled his fist around the flash drive. “Purchased through Boone, you mean.”

Boone’s links to Grigor Mirkovic, they now knew, extended beyond the courthouse attack. Boone not only ran drugs through Ransom River Auto Salvage, but was a conduit for Mirkovic’s illegal weapons business. Nobody had looked twice at smashed vehicles on the back of his wrecker, or considered that those vehicles might be loaded with contraband.

And through his ties to Mirkovic, Boone had met Dobro, the gun dealer Seth had pursued. Boone told Dobro that he recognized Seth—that his cousin dated him. Dobro took it from there. He contacted Mindy Xavier and got confirmation that Seth was an undercover officer.

Neither of them said the rest. Boone had supplied the vehicle that smashed into Seth’s truck two years earlier, injuring Rory.

That was a piece of the puzzle they’d slotted into place and tried to let go of. Boone was dead. They couldn’t get much more payback than that.

Rory said, “Lucy Elmendorf can mull her decision to buy that weapon when she lays flowers on Jared Smith’s grave.”

The wind gusted. Seth nodded and looked up the road. He had sent the
authorities to protect Elmendorf and Smith, but they weren’t fast enough. Mirkovic got to Smith before the cops did.

Seth put the flash drive in his shirt pocket. The wind brushed sand across the road. They shaded their eyes and avoided any talk of other betrayals. They didn’t mention their families.

Lucky Colder couldn’t remember much about the days before the Geronimo Armored car robbery. But it was clear that he must have let sensitive information slip to Xavier during a drinking binge. And she had played him, both before the robbery and before the courthouse attack. After the heist he spent two decades saturated with guilt, fearful that a drunken blunder had allowed the robbers to attack the Geronimo Armored car. To make up for it, he devoted himself to the cold-case file. He told Xavier there was an unknown palm print on the getaway van. And Xavier had run it, discovered it belonged to Rory, and contacted Boone and Riss.

Now Lucky was broken, and fumbling to regain his honor. Rory hoped Seth would find a way to help him do that.

“Last chance,” Seth said. “You sure you don’t want new IDs for you and Addie?”

“I’m sure of nothing. Except that I need to learn how to feed a growing girl. But no, thanks.”

Silence scraped between them. A big rig rolled past on the highway, headed north for Reno or Montana. The sun cast shadows across Seth’s face.

“I thought you were dead,” she said.

“I thought you were dead,” he said.

Rory’s phone buzzed. She didn’t answer immediately. It was a repeated text message, one that came every day about this time. It buzzed again.

“Yet we’re both alive. So what about us?” she said.

“You’re running.”

“But not away. And not alone.”

The wind lifted her hair from her neck. She held out her hand.

He took it. And his smile didn’t look like a dare, but like light pouring out. He pulled her in and held her. She hung on, tight.

When her phone buzzed yet again, she took it from her pocket. No caller ID. Despite the fact that she’d changed her phone number once already, the texts kept coming, from seemingly random cell phone numbers. The words were same as before.

I’ll find you.

She deleted it. She thought:
No you won’t, Riss.

Seth said, “How far you think you’ll get today?”

“Maybe Lone Pine.”

“I’ll follow.”

She smiled. “That’ll be a first.”

She got in the car and pulled out. She looked, one time, in the rearview mirror. Seth’s truck was a hundred yards back. She put her hand out the window, held it up to the wind, and felt the morning air flow through her fingers. In the mirror she saw him do the same.

Welcome home.

As always, I want to thank my wonderful agents, Deborah Schneider and Sheila Crowley, for their support and expertise. I also want to thank everyone at Dutton, especially Brian Tart, Ben Sevier, Jessica Horvath, and Jamie McDonald, along with Kara Welsh, Claire Zion, and Jhanteigh Kupihea at NAL. I’m lucky to work with such great teams. My gratitude also goes to my first readers: Mary Albanese, Adrienne Dines, Kelly Gerrard, Susan Graunke, Tammye Huf, and David Wolfe. My friends Ann Aubrey Hanson and Nancy Freund Fraser deserve special mention for holding my feet to the fire and forcing me to think, hard, about the story I was about to write. And, as ever, to my husband, Paul Shreve: I couldn’t do it without you.

Meg Gardiner is the author of four Jo Beckett thrillers, as well as five novels in the Evan Delaney series, including the Edgar award–winning
China Lake
. Originally from Santa Barbara, California, she now lives in London.