Night's Landing (27 page)

She glanced up at the overcast sky. It was more of a misting rain than a real downpour. She sighed and jumped off the curb, heading across the street toward Riverside Drive and her regular route along the Hudson. She went at a light jog, warming up her muscles, letting her body get in sync with the idea that, yes, it was a running day, not a rest day. Once she reached Riverside, she’d stop and stretch a couple minutes before her three-mile run.

“Gotta keep up with the big boys,” she said half-aloud.

Rob was a triathlete; Nate was a mountainman. They both could run forever and kick ass with the best of them. They worked at it and so did she. Running, weights, boxing, tai chi, yoga, karate. She wasn’t an expert at any of them, but she figured they all helped.

A black car pulled off the curb and just missed running over her toes.

Irritated, Juliet resisted smacking its passenger window.

It came to an abrupt stop, the back door opening. Instinctively she jumped back—but she was too late. A dark-haired man shot out of the door, shoved a gun in her solar plexus and, using his free hand, jerked her into the back seat. She went sprawling over the smooth black leather and almost hit her head on the opposite door.

“Good,” the man said, settling in next to her. “You didn’t scream. You’d be dead now if you had.”

“I had that feeling.” Juliet sat up, her knee already swelling from where she’d banged it getting thrown into the car. It looked like one of the thousands of black Lincoln Town Cars the rich and the super-busy almost-rich hired to drive them around the city. “What do you want?”

“Information.”

The man had a slight, indefinable accent and sharp features. Juliet examined her knee. No blood. “What kind of information?”

“The Rob Dunnemore investigation.”

“Come on. I’m a lowly deputy marshal. Nobody tells me anything.”

He slapped her across the face. Hard. She had to stiffen her neck muscles to keep him from knocking her damn head off.

Her lip swelled almost immediately, and she tasted blood.

She didn’t say a word.

The man was going to get his information from her. Then he was going to kill her. The scenario was crystal clear to her.

“The other marshal,” he said. “Winter. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

He popped her another one on the mouth. “You will tell me what I want to know.”

His accent took some of the menace out of his words—she decided they’d have scared the hell out of her in his native language. But Juliet recognized her reaction for what it was. Bravado.

Let your fear work for you.

Who’d told her that? Her instructors at the academy? Her father?

The car had pulled into the morning rush-hour traffic. The driver was blond, older than the guy beside her in back. There was no one in the front passenger seat. Neither man wore a mask or a disguise. More bad news, since they obviously weren’t worried about her providing the police with their description.

Her door was unlocked.

This fact registered almost automatically—she wasn’t sure she’d even looked at the locks. It was as if she knew.
This is your escape. This is what you have to do
.

American car. These guys were foreign. Maybe they didn’t know how to lock up?

Just then the guy next to her realized his mistake. “The locks! Idiot!”

But Juliet was already making her move. In one swift, well-practiced maneuver, she pushed open the door of the moving car and hurled herself out.

She heard the guy in the back seat swear in another language. French? Italian? Not Spanish. She sort of knew Spanish.

She slammed onto the pavement and used her karate and tai chi skills to control her full-body roll even as she felt the pain tear through her.

Brakes screeched all around her.

She scrambled to her feet. A yellow cab came to a hard, crooked stop so close to her that she had to fall onto its hood to keep from ending up under it. Another car rear-ended it, and it was all she could do not to slide off the hood.

“You stupid, fucking bitch,” a man yelled out the window of another car.

She didn’t exactly blame him.

“Call the police,” Juliet told the cab driver, who was staring at her through the windshield, frozen behind the wheel. “Nine-one-one.
Now
. Tell them a federal officer’s been hurt. A U.S. marshal.”

The driver nodded, his hands shaking. “You shot?”

“No. Hurt.”

God, she couldn’t breathe.

Had she cracked a rib?

She felt a searing pain in her upper right thigh and glanced down as she eased off the hood of the cab.

Blood. Road rash.
Nasty
road rash.

A half-dozen other cars and cabs stopped. A young man identified himself as an E.R. nurse and asked if she needed help.

“Yes.” Juliet could feel him and another guy helping her off the hood. “Yes, I think I do. I’m a federal agent. The car I was in. Did you get its plate number?”

“No, ma’am. Please, try not to talk. Let’s have a look—”

“I’m okay. I need a car. I need to go after those assholes—”

“Ma’am. Please.”

They got her to the curb. She heard sirens. She saw a police officer.
I’m fine…I’m fine
. She didn’t know what she said aloud and what she only thought, but they all got the idea that she wasn’t going to let herself get strapped onto a gurney and stuck in any damn ambulance.

While she was still arguing, Joe Collins pulled up in his black G-man car. It was the first time he hadn’t looked amiable. “Get in the fucking ambulance,” he told her. “I’ll see you at the E.R.”

“You don’t give me orders—”

“I’m quoting your chief deputy. He’d said you’d be like this.”

He rolled up his window and drove off.

Juliet looked at the stunned E.R. nurse who’d helped her in the first moments after she’d leaped out of the car. “So. Okay. I guess I’ll get in the ambulance. But I’ll walk. No stretcher.”

Sarah knocked on the side of the screen door to Ethan’s cottage. When there was no answer, she debated a half second, then stepped inside, knowing she was violating the basic trust between them. He wouldn’t sneak around in the house when her family wasn’t home. But she’d slept fitfully, dreaming of water moccasins, haunted by Rob’s warnings and Ethan’s own words that she was too trusting.

And she’d slept alone. Her own doing. When they’d arrived back at the house after visiting Conroy, her mind was racing, her body quivering from nerves and fatigue. Nate had touched her shoulder gently, even kindly, and suggested she take a hot bath and fall into bed.

They’d gone too fast. They both knew it.

As she moved into the kitchen area, she fought back a memory of Granny Dunnemore greeting her at the cottage, leaning on her cane, by then a tiny, old woman who’d wanted nothing more in her last years than her own independence. More than a decade after her death, the place still reminded Sarah of her father’s mother. Ethan kept it tidy and clean, but it had an unlived-in quality that she couldn’t pinpoint. It was if Ethan had only lit here temporarily, superficially, and never intended to dig roots.

His coffee mug was in the sink. Instant coffee. Somehow it seemed to fit.

She had no idea where he was. She’d noticed in her first days home that, like her, he was an early riser. He could be working on the fence or out in the fields, tinkering in the shed—the finicky riding lawn mower was often in need of repair.

She checked the small bedroom. The place was furnished, with all the necessary utensils and linens, but it looked as if Ethan hadn’t added anything of his own. She pulled open the bedroom closet and found only his work clothes and one pair of dress pants that looked unworn. That fit with his image of the West Texas good ol‘ boy.

She did believe he was from Texas. His accent hadn’t sounded fake to her. The rest—she wasn’t sure. During her troubled night, she’d replayed their conversation at the fence in her head, remembering how cogent and well-spoken he’d been. How he’d warned her not to trust him so easily.

Maybe she shouldn’t.

She sat on the small sofa in the living room and opened the trunk that served as a coffee table, then almost let it drop shut on her hand.

Ammunition. Boxes of different caliber bullets. There were four boxes for a .38-caliber weapon, six for a 9 mm.

“Ethan…holy…” Granny’s presence kept Sarah’s language in check.

Under the boxes was a small photo album, the old-fashioned kind that set the pictures in little black triangles instead of between pieces of plastic. She lifted it out and opened to a picture of Ethan standing on a beach with a slender, dark-haired woman in a bathing suit.

Sarah flipped through the pictures slowly, all of them shots of the couple on the beach—a tropical beach. Florida, the Caribbean. Ethan looked younger, happy, strong and superfit—nothing like the polite, slow-talking gardener in overalls she’d come to know.

He looked more like a man who could slam Conroy Fontaine into a refrigerator and scare the hell out of him.

Conroy had called early. He was coming over for prune cake before lunch.

She glanced at the boxes of ammo. Presumably Ethan had guns to go with the bullets. Where? Did she even want to find them?

Time to get the marshal.

She’d slipped out while Nate was in the shower. She hadn’t pictured herself searching Ethan’s cottage, never mind finding boxes of bullets and a photo album that didn’t exactly show him in West Texas.

Taking a calming breath, Sarah noticed a crumpled computer printout on the end table next to the chair in front of the window overlooking the river. She rose and picked it up, then sat back on the couch and smoothed out the paper with her hands—a man’s face. Like a mug shot.

“Oh, my God.”

It was the silver-haired man who’d chatted with her mother at the Rijksmuseum.

Without a doubt.

There was no name under the photo, no caption, no indication of the Web site from which the photo had been lifted.

The front door opened, and Ethan shut it behind him as he walked into the small room. “I see you’re not above snooping,” he said casually.

Sarah didn’t bother trying to conceal what she was up to. She waved the picture of the silver-haired man at him. “Where—”

“I found that picture in Conroy Fontaine’s cabin. I have no idea who it is.”

“Why did you take it?”

“It interested him. Therefore, it interested me.”

She noticed Ethan wasn’t speaking as slowly, as deferentially—he hadn’t yet referred to her as Miss Sarah or called her ma’am. He still had the Texas accent, but this different tone fit better with the man in the beach pictures in the photo album. But it was the tone of a harder, more suspicious man.

Whether this was a new act or the real Ethan Brooker, the sweet-natured temperament and overreaching good ol‘ boy act were gone.

Sarah debated grabbing one of the ammunition boxes in case he tried anything, but what would she do? Throw a couple of bullets at him? She walked over and shut the trunk. “And I see you’re not above lying. The woman in the pictures—who is she?”

He took another step closer to her. “My wife.”

There was something in his eyes. He glanced away.

Sarah’s heart twisted. “Ethan?”

“She was killed last fall.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“She always wanted me to try my hand at songwriting.” He leaned back against the small dining table, where Granny used to sit and watch the cardinals in the pecan tree and the boats on the river. “Charlene thought I could do anything. I should have told you, but it’s not easy for me to talk about her. I wanted a fresh start. I didn’t want to answer a lot of questions.”

“The bullets?”

“Your parents told me they don’t like having guns on the premises. I had a nine-millimeter I liked. Legal, of course. I sold it, but I didn’t think to sell the ammo.”

“There are bullets for a thirty-eight, as well.”

“I got rid of that gun a while ago.”

Sarah decided not to ask to frisk him.

“With all that’s been going on around here,” he went on, “I wouldn’t mind having a weapon right now. Your brother getting shot, the feds showing up, reporters snooping around—it’s a lot. Legit reporters are one thing, but that Conroy Fontaine’s a weasel. You know he is.”

“Well, he’s a charming weasel.” Sarah didn’t know what to say—she wasn’t the one who’d hired Ethan. “My parents like giving people a second chance. Excons and recovering alcoholics and drug addicts who’re trying to pick up the pieces of their lives—some have worked out better than others. A bereaved husband is different.”

“Not so different.” His eyes seemed to bore right through her. “You’re in danger, aren’t you? Something happened to bring Deputy Winter down here besides falling for your pretty gray eyes. The feds yesterday. They went through your house. What’s going on?”

She didn’t answer.

“I live here, Dr. Dunnemore. I have a right to know.”

Dr. Dunnemore. No more Miss Sarah. “Did you go and pound Conroy last evening because you were concerned about me? Or did you have your own reasons?”

He ignored her. “I was in the army for a pretty good stretch. I can tell when someone’s hanging by their fingernails. That’s you, Sarah.”

Now it was Sarah. “Fair enough. I found a threatening anonymous note in my mail. It’s why the FBI and the marshals were here sweeping for bugs and taps. But you know that already, don’t you? You’ve been keeping pretty good tabs on what’s been going on around here.”

“That’s my job. Think the snake in the house was part of it?”

“Part of what?”

“This campaign to scare the hell out of you.”

“Me? There’s no evidence that I’m the focus.”

“You look at it the way you want to.” Ethan’s tone took on an extra edge. “Makes no difference to me.”

She stared again at the picture of the silver-haired man. She’d thought nothing of him or the man who’d approached her until she’d gone to Central Park, until she’d come across the threatening letter. “You’re sure you don’t know who this man is?”