Dark Sky (17 page)

But Nate Winter had been there for the meeting. He knew about the mission.

“Sorry I missed your wedding,” Ethan said. He didn't exactly know why, but he'd been invited. “I hear it was perfect.”

A tall, dark-haired, rangy man, Nate was a no-nonsense law-enforcement officer. The fact that his wife was like a daughter to the president of the United States wasn't something Winter would view as an advantage—it just came with falling in love with Sarah Dunnemore.

Even at dusk, Winter's eyes were a piercing blue. “I take it you're not here for a social visit, Major.”

“You remember you drove me to the White House the first week in September, before your wedding?” Ethan didn't wait for Nate to respond. He laid out the facts. “We met with the president and Mia O'Farrell. You didn't stay for the entire meeting, but I think you know the basics of what I was asked to do.”

Winter wasn't the type to lay out what he knew. “Go on.”

“We got our guy. He's safe. The rest of it's a mess. I'll assume you've talked to Mike Rivera or Joe Collins and know about Juliet Longstreet's ex-con.”

Nate didn't say a word.

Ethan looked out at the water, remembered his frustration in the weeks before Sarah Dunnemore, sipping sweet-tea punch on the porch of her Tennessee family home, had learned that her twin brother and another marshal—Nate—had been shot. By the time Juliet arrived on the Cumberland River, all hell had broken loose. But it seemed like five years ago, instead of just five months. “Tatro's in jail, my guy's free,” Ethan said. “But this thing isn't over. There's more to it—”

“And that's your business?”

He looked at Winter, his unchanging expression, his steady self-control. “Was it your business to come down here in May? You weren't supposed to investigate the shooting. You were one of the victims.”

Nate sighed, some of his rigidness easing. “Fair point. Go on. What do you want me to do?”

“Mia O'Farrell's on her last nerve.”

“I don't deal with her.”

“You were there with her and the president, Nate. You can see he trusts her.”

“Shouldn't he?”

“You just might want to let him know that she's hanging by a thread.”

Nate had no visible reaction. “Why don't you tell him yourself?”

Ethan shrugged, smiled. “Poe doesn't show up at my house for fried-apricot pie.”

Again, Nate didn't indulge in so much as a twitch of a smile. No jokes about his wife's friendship with John Wesley Poe. Or her fried pies.

“What does Juliet know about your meeting with O'Farrell?”

“Not as much as she wants to. She's about as big a hard-ass as you are, Winter. The no-stone-left-unturned type.”

Nate didn't disagree, but he said, “O'Farrell's on her way to New York. She's meeting with Rivera and Collins in the morning. There's no need to keep them in the dark as much as she has been.”

“You set up the meeting?”

He shrugged, not answering. “Brooker—you might want to be careful.”

“With Tatro, Mia, Collins, Rivera or Juliet?”

A near smile. “All of the above. You must know by now you're not the type to be satisfied sitting on the sidelines. You want to fill in the blanks, find the answers. It's the way you're wired, Major.” The hard blue gaze stayed on him. “It's why you ended up digging in the dirt here in Night's Landing.”

Literally and figuratively, Ethan thought. He gestured toward the beautiful Dunnemore lawn. “The stuff I planted looks pretty good, don't you think?”

But Nate didn't let up. “Why is Dr. O'Farrell on her last nerve?”

“If I knew, I wouldn't need to be here, now would I?”

“You have an idea. Or you wouldn't have come all this way.”

“When I was in Afghanistan, I helped put some psycho vigilante mercenaries out of business. It didn't make the papers, but it was a pretty big deal. Most of them got away. A few didn't, but they were low-level players.” Ethan didn't like taking the kind of leap he was taking now, but he wasn't a law-enforcement officer—he was just a guy trying to figure things out. “I think some vigilante psycho could be manipulating O'Farrell.”

“Does she realize it?”

“Now she does, at least to a degree.”

“Same guys as in Afghanistan?”

Ethan paused. “Maybe.”

“The president and I—” Nate hesitated, then went on, his tone more amiable, his manner more approachable. “We get along okay, but it's Sarah he has the bond with—he's one of her closest friends. She adores him, and Poe adores her.”

“This one's not her fight.”

A darkness came into Nate's eyes, and he was obviously remembering the caves and the snakes and the dead bodies from his first visit to Night's Landing that spring.

“I'll see to it Poe gets your message about O'Farrell,” Nate said abruptly, then shifted immediately into southern-host mode—Sarah's influence, no doubt. Nate was another northern New Englander. “Do you have time to join us for dinner? Sarah made a congealed salad this afternoon that seems to involve coconut and fruit cocktail.”

“I didn't think anyone ate congealed salads anymore.”

“She says they bring back memories of her grandmother.”

Ethan grinned. “It's a shame I've got a plane to catch.”

“Do I want to know where you're headed?” Nate asked quietly.

“North.”

Ethan only gave one word, but Nate obviously didn't need more. “Juliet's got a good career ahead of her, Brooker.”

Ethan took the comment for what it was—a warning not to screw up her life.

He left Winter on the dock and headed across the lawn, the grass he'd tended warm and soft under his feet. Sarah had come onto the porch. She smiled and waved to him. She was a beautiful woman with honey-colored hair and a strength people often didn't realize she had.

With Juliet, people noticed her strength first.

Ethan waved back and gave her a cheeky smile that made her laugh. He'd damn near screwed up Sarah's life when he'd pretended to be a good ol' boy from Texas. Now he hoped it wasn't too late for him to avoid screwing up Juliet's life.

 

Mia pushed open the door to her hotel room and wheeled her suitcase into the small room, leaving it in the middle of the floor while she checked out her view. It wasn't much of one. Her hotel was located on Central Park South, but she'd balked at paying for a room with a park view. Hers looked out on office buildings. She looked down at the street ten floors below and saw a man in a dark business suit running, flagging a cab.

The FBI agent, Joe Collins, and the chief deputy, Mike Rivera, had offered to fly to Washington to meet with her. Nate Winter must have given them her name. He'd been at the meeting when she and the president had asked Ethan Brooker to volunteer for the rescue mission. Nate hadn't stayed for all the details.

She couldn't give the FBI or the marshals Ham Carhill's name or any details of the information he'd provided her, but there was a lot she
could
tell them. About Tatro and his henchmen. The timing of the rescue mission. How Tatro wasn't there when Ethan and his team arrived at the camp. She'd cleared everything with her superiors. And she'd talked to the president. Now that Ham was safe and they'd acted on his information—and Ham was done, no longer a viable candidate for covert work—she saw no reason whatsoever she couldn't cooperate with the FBI investigation.

Neither did President Poe, when she'd told him what she intended to do.

But she didn't tell him all of it. About the anonymous calls, the tips—her mounting concern that her caller had manipulated her.

Turning from the window, Mia called room service and ordered the soup of the day—wild mushroom—and a glass of red wine. She'd relax tonight. She'd put up her feet, order a movie and let her subconscious do its work, and maybe, by morning, she'd have a better idea of who her caller was and what he wanted and how to stop him. Because this guy was still pulling strings. He wasn't done.

H
am watched a rerun of
Law & Order
while he thumbed through a free Vermont guidebook in his room in a fleabag motel off I-89. All the decent hotels, motels and country inns were booked solid. Leaf-peeping season. He'd seen plenty of leaves on his drive north from New York. Supposedly “peak” foliage wasn't until next weekend. He couldn't tell.

The guidebook listed fairs, arts-and-crafts shows, hay rides, scenic hikes. He wasn't interested, but he hoped pretending he was, going through the motions, would help keep him from going crazy.

Lennie Briscoe made one of his pithy wisecracks, and Ham switched to CNN. At least his motel had cable. But nothing was going on, and he lay back on his flat pillow and crossed his feet, running through his mind again what he'd say to Juliet Longstreet. Talk about threading a needle in a sandstorm in the dark. Except, in this case, one wrong move and someone could die. Himself, even. Never mind pissing off the national-security types. He'd come close enough to dying this fall to know he wasn't in the mood for it.

But what was he supposed to do, leave everything to Ethan? Hope for the best?

He glanced at the old bedside clock-radio. Midnight. He supposed he could wake Mia O'Farrell and ask her advice about what to do. Get another opinion. But he didn't trust her entirely. And who was he kidding, anyway? It was too late for advice—too late for permission. He'd already made up his mind what to do.

Bobby Tatro thought Deputy Longstreet had his ransom payment.

The emeralds.

That scenario was the only one that made sense. The only explanation for breaking into her apartment. Tatro must have figured that Ham had given them to Brooker—payment, maybe, for freeing him—and Brooker had given them to Longstreet. To silence her about what she knew? Keep her from asking questions? Ham didn't have that part of Tatro's twisted thinking figured out yet. But he was pretty sure he was on target about the rest of it.

And Deputy Longstreet deserved to know.

She was in Vermont. Ham had stopped at her building to talk to her. The security guard told him she wasn't around, refused to tell him where she was. When Ham guessed Vermont, the guard still kept mum, but his expression told Ham what he wanted to know. He rented a car and headed north to Vermont, getting lost twice before he found Longstreet Landscaping. He saw Juliet Longstreet patting a fat dog next to a trailer of pumpkins, but with a state police cruiser in the driveway and people all over the place, he decided to wait until tomorrow to pry her loose.

Ham tried to relax.

Tatro's in jail.

The bastard couldn't hurt him or anyone else, not anymore.

Ham could feel the emeralds under his pillow. They were cut and polished—beauties. They weren't raw crystals freshly dug out of the Andes. Emeralds were portable—a favorite with smugglers—and good ones were valuable. He estimated the worth of the emeralds he'd spirited away from his captors in the vicinity of a half-million dollars.

Beryllium and chromium…two elements that, together, produced an emerald. Yet they were brought together only under rare geological conditions. The Colombian Andes were a geological rarity. And Muzo, Coscuez, Chivor were Colombian mines known all over the world for their unique, high-quality emeralds.

The emerald was the birthstone for May, the gem of Taurus and Gemini. It was associated with kindness and goodness, and rumored to ward off panic attacks.

And there were those who still believed that emeralds could provide their wearer with the ability to see the future.

Ham wished the emeralds under his pillow could empower him just to see what tomorrow would bring. But perhaps because they were tarnished by violence and deceit, their mystical attributes were unavailable, at least to him. He couldn't put pieces together, make connections that he normally could, connections that had made him valuable to Mia O'Farrell and, in a way, had led him to Vermont.

In any case, Ham had no illusions. He was at the mercy of forces outside of his control, and no one could help him now. Not even Ethan Brooker.

 

Wendy sat in the window seat in her dark bedroom, wrapped up in a fleece blanket, and tried to work on a college essay. The question she was supposed to answer was straightforward—
Why do you want to be a doctor?
—and yet she couldn't think of a single reason why. She pictured herself sitting in a college chemistry class, studying nonstop, dealing with the competition and stress of being a premed student.

And the work itself. She liked the idea of helping people, but she didn't think she could look at blood and pus or even runny noses every day. She thought about the doctor who'd had to examine Juan after he was murdered. She didn't want to have to be around death and suffering all the time.

Wendy put the essay aside and glanced at her poem, which was awful. She tore it up and threw the pieces on the floor. How could she ever have thought it was any good?

With her knees tucked under her chin, she stared outside. It was a clear night, with just a sliver of a moon and stars everywhere. She spotted a flock of wild turkeys down by the barn, led by the fattest tom she'd ever seen. What were they doing traipsing around so late? She quickly put on her slippers and ran downstairs, her blanket wrapped over her shoulders. She made as little noise as possible so as not to wake her grandparents, who worried about her too much as it was—even before New York.

Ducking out the side porch, Wendy immediately realized it was colder outside than she'd expected. She tightened her blanket around her and walked out back, triggering the motion-detector light. But the turkeys were gone now, the night quiet and still. She walked a little ways up the lane behind the barn. She was in pajama pants and an oversize T-shirt, but she didn't have on any socks, and the blanket wasn't really warm enough—she should at least have grabbed a coat.

Her poem really was stupid, she thought, shivering in the night air. She wasn't being overly hard on herself. She didn't regret tearing it to shreds.

And her apple crisp. What a disaster. No matter what anyone else said, it was disgusting. The oats were hard. The apples had turned to mush. Her dad said it was good, but Wendy had noticed he ate his helping with a lot of vanilla ice cream. It wasn't the recipe—it was her. She'd done something wrong. Her mind hadn't been on making apple crisp.

She'd kept seeing Juan—Vincente Perez—smiling at her, trying to make the indignity of having her bag searched easier for her to take. She'd had no idea he was lying about who he was.

And that awful Bobby Tatro. The things he'd said to her while she was hiding in Juliet's bedroom. She kept hearing him, seeing herself, as if she were perched atop her aunt's curtains and was looking down at what was happening to her—watching herself pushing the bureau in front of the door, imagining her expression as she'd tried to block the evil, horrible words from entering her mind. He talked about what he'd do to her. What he'd do to her aunt. He'd
liked
the idea that Wendy was in the bedroom, frightened, at his mercy.

She stopped in the middle of the lane. She thought she'd heard something. The turkeys? She tightened the fleece around her and decided she should head back. The motion-detector light had gone off again, and she was out of its range, anyway. It was just too dark to go any farther. She'd start a new poem when she got back to her room. Writing helped quiet the memories of NewYork.

“Wendy?”

She nearly screamed, but Matt Kelleher immediately caught her hand and said, “No, no, it's just me. I thought you saw me.”

“Where—”

“I was up at the cabin, out working on my camper.”

Her heart raced, but she patted her chest, trying to get herself to calm down. “Did you see the wild turkeys?” she asked him.

“They just walked across the end of the driveway up at the cabin. Kind of late for them, isn't it? But they're fun to watch. Just don't want to get in the middle of a turkey fight.” His shaved head stood out against the blackness of the woods behind him. “Thought I heard someone out here.”

“I couldn't sleep,” Wendy mumbled, not explaining further.

“Yeah. I can understand that.”

“My aunt's here. Juliet. Did you meet her?”

“Briefly.”

Wendy sniffled. “She had to talk to me about—about what happened. I know everyone's worried about me.” She wiped her eyes with her fingertips but wasn't crying. “But I'm okay. Really.”

“It's hard, I know, having everyone hovering over you, watching you for every little thing you do,” Matt said gently. “Makes you feel claustrophobic, doesn't it?”

“That's it. Exactly. I know they mean well.”

“I remember, when my wife was dying—” He paused, caught up in his emotions, then went on thoughtfully, “People did their best, I guess, but sometimes I just needed to be alone. To be honest, there were times I didn't even want to be around her. That made me feel guilty, but that's just the way it was. I didn't want to be alone all the time by any means—but it was like people, circumstances, wouldn't let me be normal.”

Wendy nodded, amazed at his understanding. “My dad and my grandmother keep looking at me like I'm going to suddenly fall into a million pieces or go crazy or something.”

Matt laughed a little. “Yeah. I know that look.”

She smiled. “Thank you for telling me about your experience. I feel—” She hesitated, uncertain whether her train of thought would offend him. “I think it'd help me deal with what happened if I could—” She stopped herself. “Never mind.”

“If you could what, Wendy?”

“I've had a hard time saying goodbye to my dog. Teddy. And here, when I know you've lost your wife—”

“Your dog was a part of your life for a long time.”

“Since I was a baby. I went back for his ashes at my aunt's apartment. That's why—that's why I was there when that guy—” She blinked back tears, wishing she hadn't brought up New York. “It's not Teddy's fault. He didn't do anything. He's not even—I mean, I know he's dead. It's
my
fault I went back. It's
my
fault I can't give him up.”

“I don't mean to butt into your business, Wendy, but maybe now's the time to scatter Teddy's ashes. He must have been a great dog, but—I don't know. At some point, we all need closure after the death of someone we love.”

The tears spilled down her cheeks, but she wasn't embarrassed for Matt to see her cry. He seemed to understand her feelings, not take them as a sign of weakness, or typical teenage angst. “I'm not like the Longstreets.”

He cuffed her gently on the shoulder. “Kiddo, you're more like them than you think you are. Probably more than they think you are, too.”

His words made her feel better. She wondered if he'd meant them to. “I've been thinking about scattering Teddy's ashes in the lake. He loved the water.”

“He was a golden retriever, right? I've never met one that didn't love water—”

“Once, he jumped into the lake when the ice was still melting. It was
so
cold. I thought he'd die! But he loved it! When he came out, he had icicles hanging off his fur.”

Matt laughed. “Dumb dog.”

Wendy found herself laughing, too, and when she headed back to the house, she had a glimmer of an idea for a new poem. It would be about Teddy. She wouldn't name him—that'd be corny—but, still, he'd be the inspiration for what she hoped would be her best poem, ever.

And first thing in the morning, she thought, she'd scatter Teddy's ashes in the lake.

 

Juliet awoke with a start and lay very still in the pitch dark.

Where the hell am I?

Her eyes adjusted, and she made out the interior of her small tent. She had left the flaps up, just the mosquito lining separating her from the elements. She could make out the faint shine of moonlight on the lake.

Vermont. My five acres on the lake.

A raccoon or a wild turkey must have wandered past her tent—or the cold had jerked her awake. Somehow she'd managed to squirm halfway out of her sleeping bag, not that it was worth a damn. She'd had the bag since college, but at least it was hers. Most of her camping gear had been handed down from her brothers.

The night temperature had dropped to the low thirties.

A barred owl sounded in the nature preserve across the lake.

There. That's what woke me up.
Suddenly she heard the crunch of twigs just outside her tent and sat up, reaching for her Glock.

“Don't shoot, Marshal.”

She groaned, immediately recognizing the west Texas drawl. “Damn, Brooker. Scare the hell out of me, why don't you?”

“You don't scare that easy.” He unzipped the mosquito lining and crawled in, blotting out what minimal light there was from the stars and quarter moon. “All nice and cozy in here, I see.”

“What time is it? You were in Texas this morning—”

“I flew into Manchester and rented a car, found my way up here. I figured I'd get the lay of the land and go find a motel room, but some guy who looks like you—”

“All my brothers look like me.”

“This one had just pulled up in a town cop car.”

“Ah. Paul.”

“We had a nice chat. He was checking on the family before heading home. I think you make them nervous when you're around.”

“I make them nervous when I'm not around. They'd be happier if I'd stayed home to sell mums and pumpkins and design pretty gardens. It was what I thought I'd do.” She didn't know why she was telling him this—or anything. “I'd have liked it.”

“Ah. The path not taken. I was supposed to be a rancher.” He sat at her feet, his head hitting the tent roof. “Your brother told me you pitched your tent out here.”