Pursuit (4 page)

When had those become the good old days?

He couldn’t see the silver thing anymore: It was too dark. But he remembered where it was. Reaching in among the prickly branches, he touched it almost at once, felt the cold bumpiness of the surface, and instantly suspected what it had to be: the First Lady’s elegant evening bag. He had last seen the sparkling bauble clutched in her right hand as the elevator doors had closed on her. Leaving her, as he’d thought, safe and sound for the night.

Pulling it out, looking down at it, experiencing the weight of it in his hand, he suddenly felt the urge to puke. It drove home with brutal finality the hard truth that the impossible had happened: Annette Cooper was dead.

He glanced back down at the accident scene. Pictures were now being taken of the blackened car from every angle and what looked like survey equipment was being set up to, if his memory of accident investigation techniques served him correctly, measure the distance the car had traveled from the road above before coming to rest on its roof. Several members of the forensic unit were down on all fours to, presumably, take a look at the inside of the car. He opened his mouth to yell at investigators, announcing his find.

Then he looked down at the small, crystal-studded rectangle and shut his mouth again.

After only a split second of indecision, he flipped open the clasp and reached inside. Along with the various assorted cosmetics and small brush she customarily carried, there were a number of credit cards held together by a rubber band and a good-sized roll of cash. As surprising as those items were—the First Lady never paid for anything herself and, therefore, as far as he was aware, never carried credit cards or money—they were not his target. Just as he had been sure it would be, the brown plastic bottle of tablet-style artificial sweetener the First Lady supposedly favored and took with her everywhere was tucked down at the bottom, nestled against the smooth satin lining. Only, as he had learned to his dismay, the pills inside the bottle weren’t aspartame. They were painkillers—Vicodin, Percocet, you name it, including, most recently and disastrously, OxyContin, to which Mrs. Cooper was—had been—hopelessly addicted.

Mark’s hand closed over the bottle, which he removed and stuffed in his jacket pocket. The pills inside rattled insistently.

She was dead, but he meant to do what he still could to honor that vow. No way was he letting that bottle fall into the wrong hands.

“Yo, up here!” he yelled, and as a couple of FBI heads craned his way, he waved at them. Then, realizing that the bright lights blazing in their faces coupled with the darkness of where he stood prevented them from seeing him, he turned to go back down the slope, the purse now ready to be turned over to the investigation.

He’d taken no more than a step when the sound came out of the darkness to his left. It was the merest breath of a whimper. But it caught his attention, stopping him in his tracks. He looked sharply in its direction.

Something lay curled on the ground just beyond the bush where he’d found the purse. He could just make out the dark shape of . . . what?

Frowning, moving cautiously toward it, Mark at last realized what it was and caught his breath.

It was a body. A girl’s small, slender body, lying crumpled and broken among the swaying evergreens.

L
ie still. Help’s coming.”

Those words penetrated the darkness Jess was lost in. It was a horrible darkness, riven with screams and pain and an explosion of hot, leaping flames. Warm, strong fingers touched her neck, her cheek, and she swam even closer to full consciousness.

“I need some help over here! There’s an injured woman!”

The shout, uttered in the same deep, drawling male voice that had told her to lie still, sent terror stabbing through her.

“Shh,”
she breathed, because that was the best she could do. He was crouched beside her, bending over her, she realized, and realized too in that moment when she saw stars swirling through the ink-black sky beyond the dark shape of his head that her eyes were now open.

The reality of his large body looming so close caused her heart to leap. Her stomach cramped with fear. She sucked in air.

The pungent smell of something burning filled her nostrils. It stung her throat, curled down into her lungs.

“Hey! We need help!”

“Be quiet,” she whispered, clutching desperately at his trouser leg. She tried to make the caution urgent, sharper and louder, but it came out sounding more like a sigh. A deep, pain-wracked sigh. With reason: She hurt. All over.

“It’s gonna be okay. There’s an ambulance here.”

The man stood up. Her grip on his trouser leg tightened. He’d made no move to hurt her—he couldn’t be one of the demonish wraiths from her dream. Could he? Her instincts said no. He felt safe, somehow. Like she could trust him. Her hand made a tight fist around the cloth near where it broke over his shoe. Conviction coalesced inside her: Whatever happened, he mustn’t leave her here in the dark alone.

“We had a wreck.” The words hurt her throat as they emerged. She remembered it now, the tires screeching, the car skidding then leaving the road. . . .

Slow-motion flip-flops, end over end . . .

She started to shake.

“Damn it, move your asses! Get a medical crew over here
now
!”

That wasn’t a shout, it was a roar. Loud enough to shatter the night. Loud enough to pull her head out of the terrible vision she seemed to be watching from a distance. Loud enough to make her cringe. Loud enough to penetrate the sounds—the deep, rhythmic thumping overhead, the jumble of voices, the clang of metal, the hum of motors, of which she was just becoming fully aware. Loud enough to be heard. Thanks to him, they would know where she was now without any possibility of concealment.

Her pulse pounded. Panic shot through her veins.

She was, she realized, curled on her side on damp, cold ground. Her cheek rested on something that both cushioned and prickled—dead grass? Something large and sharp that she guessed had to be a rock jabbed into her hip. Her head felt like it was lower than her legs because she lay twisted like a discarded doll on a hillside. She had only to push herself up and . . .

Gathering all her force, she tried to get to her feet, to scramble away, to run until the darkness swallowed her up and hid her and she was safe once more. Pain shot everywhere, zigzagging along her nerve endings like white-hot lightning bolts, making her want to scream at the intensity of it—only she couldn’t. It hurt too much.

The realization stunned her.

Only her head moved, and her arms, with a great deal of effort. Getting them beneath her, she found she could push her torso a few inches from the ground—and that was all. She was trapped, immobilized in her own body. As she fell back, terror turned her insides icy. Her thoughts went fuzzy. All she knew for sure was that she was in pain, quickly intensifying pain. Her ribs, her legs, her head—they all hurt. She couldn’t get away. And she was afraid.

Certainty laced the thought. The crash had been bad. Flying out into darkness, into nothingness, the car rolling over and over, end over end . . . and screams, multiple screams. Soul-shattering screams. She was screaming, too. She could still hear the screaming in her head.

That’s what she tried to ask him when he crouched beside her again. Either she was making no sense or he didn’t hear. She clung to his trouser leg. The material was smooth and cool and sturdy. A lifeline.

“Help’s coming. Try not to move.”

He must have felt her grip on him, or maybe he sensed her desperation through the darkness, because he patted her hand in clumsy comfort.
If he wanted to hurt you, he’s had plenty of time to do it by now.
Instead she felt protected.
Thank God.
Letting go of his trousers, she clutched his hand instead.

“Don’t leave me,” she begged, her voice a hoarse, dry rasp in her throat. “They . . . they . . .”

But her mind fogged up again, and all of a sudden she couldn’t remember who “they” were. Wasn’t even sure she had ever known in the first place.

“What?” He leaned closer, clearly having heard her voice but not understanding what she was trying to say. “Who are you? Were you in the First Lady’s car?”

The First Lady. Annette Cooper
.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh . . .

She could hear a flurry of movement not too far away: the crunch of dried grass, the shuffle of footsteps, a fragment of conversation. People approaching.

Jess caught her breath. Terror grabbed her heart and squeezed.

“Please . . .” she begged.

“Over here,” he called, releasing her hand with a quick compression of her fingers and standing up. Jess guessed that the forest of swaying bushes surrounding her probably blocked her—both of them—from the view of whoever was approaching.

Until now.

Desperation sent her heart pounding against her rib cage like it was trying to beat its way to freedom.

“Gotcha,” a man called back.

Her rescuer crouched beside her again. Jess caught his hand.

“The paramedics are almost here,” he said before she totally panicked.

Of course. Paramedics were coming. He wouldn’t be yelling like that at anyone else.

But her thundering heart wouldn’t be calmed.

More footsteps, drawing closer and closer. Rustling branches. Crunching grass. As a spotlight found her in the darkness she couldn’t help it: She cringed. Half-blinded, she felt like a small animal in a trap, helpless to save herself. All of a sudden she was ruthlessly exposed, visible to everyone, vulnerable. Her pulse pounded. Her heart raced. Her hand tightened on her rescuer’s fingers. He glanced down at her. She saw the dark gleam of his eyes shift so that they were once again focused on her. Though the spotlight was on
her,
the glaring white beam pin-ioned
her
, the shadows enshrouding him receded slightly so that he was more visible, too. Her vision was all blurry—her contacts, she must have lost them—and he was still mostly in darkness, but she was able to absorb the broad strokes. He was a big guy, wide chest, broad shoulders, thick neck, short, thick, fair hair. White dress shirt, no tie. Black suit coat . . .

Recognition flew through her consciousness with the swift, fierce speed of an arrow. She gasped—gasping hurt—and dropped his hand.

“So, what’ve we got here?” It was a new voice, another man, and, contrary to the terror she’d felt a moment before at the idea of being discovered by anyone else, Jess welcomed it now. Welcomed him. There was safety in numbers—right?

“She’s conscious. She must have been in the car.”

He moved back, out of her line of vision, as paramedics bustled around.

“Hi, there, what’s your name?” Another man crouched beside her. Fingers found her pulse.

“Jessica.” She closed her eyes against the light. “Jessica Ford.”

“We’re going to take good care of you.”

“Get a cervical collar on her,” someone else said.

Then she stopped listening, stopped thinking, stopped doing anything, really, except feeling, or trying not to feel, the pain that came in waves. Her attitude was fatalistic: Whatever happened happened, and there was nothing she could do to change any of it now. There were two men, both EMTs, she thought, both seeming dedicated to making sure she would survive. The man who had found her stayed back, mostly just out of her sight, although she caught the occasional glimpse of him with her peripheral vision as the EMTs stabilized her, then loaded her onto the stretcher and carried her up the hill.

“Keep her away from the press.” The drawl in his voice was unmistakable. He had found her, and stayed with her. He was with them still, walking near the stretcher. She was afraid of him now.
One of them.
That was the thought that kept darting through her mind. But she couldn’t quite justify the fear.

He hadn’t hurt her. And he didn’t feel like a threat.

But still she was afraid.

Waking up in the ambulance as they were threading an IV into her vein, Jess realized that she must have lost consciousness sometime during the latter part of the ascent.

Not that it mattered. Now that she was out in the open, now that
they
knew where she was, now that she was hurt and helpless and trapped in her own body, there was nothing she could do to help herself even a little bit. Except maybe . . .

“Call my boss.” With what she feared were her last few seconds of clarity before sedation claimed her, she summoned every bit of strength and determination left to her and spoke to the paramedic securing the needle to her arm with tape. At first her voice was a mere thread of sound. She strained to make it louder. The paramedic heard, because he met her gaze with a questioning look. “John Davenport. And my mother. The numbers are in my phone. . . .” Which had been in her jacket pocket. She remembered feeling the solid shape of it bumping against her thigh as they put her on the stretcher, but she wasn’t wearing the garment now and—there it was, her jacket, in pieces on a shelf; they must have cut it off her. . . . “Which is in my jacket pocket. Over there.”