The Hiding Place (26 page)

If she’d not been panting so hard, Veronica would have held her breath in anticipation. Two ladders over the fence, the lofty doorway to new beginnings. That is, after she checked on Laird and Jennifer. She had to know one thing, and, however long it took her to drive to Seattle, she wasn’t turning back.

“Rita?” she whispered. Then louder. “Rita!”

“Yes. Here. Me and Carlos, we here.”

Hiking up her robe and nightgown with one hand, Veronica grabbed the highest rung of the ladder she could reach and started to climb.

In the hall outside her bedroom, Tara wanted to scream, but, leaning against the wall with Nick, she whispered to him, “I feel like a complete fool. That night we took a supposedly hysterical, grieving woman in, I’ll bet she planted bugs in my office, then had to break in to get them out.”

“I shouldn’t have let her stay, but I felt sorry for her.”

“Don’t blame yourself. She would have gotten in somehow—maybe like she did today.”

“Damn her for almost killing Beamer. And who’s to say she didn’t kill Rick for some reason?”

“I know. How convenient he typed a suicide note on her laptop. I’ll bet she got all the bugs ripped out of my office, but let’s search anyway.”

Not saying another word, Tara looked under her desk and behind her file cabinets while Nick got down on floor level and looked under her chair and in the closet. He reached up and ran his fingertips along the top of the molding on the doors and windows.

“I think the coast is clear,” Tara said in a normal voice.

“At least in here. If you find one of those bugs, I’ll buy you a diamond ring.”

That off-the-wall remark stopped her for a moment, but she grabbed a flashlight out of a desk drawer and searched on. He might have meant the comment as a joke, but it was strange he seemed to have that on his mind.

“And if I don’t find a bug, no diamond ring?” she asked, hardly believing they were talking like this. If she thought a listening device was still in here, she’d stage a little play where they gave out all kinds of disinformation to whoever was listening. Maybe that’s what he was doing, because he was sure confusing her.

“Diamond ring or not,” he said, “I’m still thinking the four of us make a good team.”

The four of us, she thought. Ah, yes, Beamer, too.

Her light caught something far back under the knee space of her desk. “What do I get if I only find the tape one of the bugs was anchored with?” she asked, and pulled off the small piece of black duct tape. Eager to show it to him, she bumped her head when she came back up.

He reached to take it, but it snagged their fingertips together.

“You get my solemn vow I won’t go east until we find out who’s behind all this, and I don’t just mean Marcie. If you’re still listening, Jordan or Laird Lohan,” Nick declared with bravado as if he were speaking into an invisible microphone, “you’re soon going to be toast.”

She wanted to laugh at that. Laugh in defiance, laugh in joy that Nick now believed her about the Lohans, laugh that he would stay to help her and wanted her in his life even after—after whatever befell. She wasn’t stopping until she solved her own Finders Keepers case.

“I’ve got to check my PCs for spyware,” she said, “the sophisticated kind that’s downloaded directly and doesn’t come in online, because my anti-spyware programs would have sniffed that out. I’ll bet all she had to do that night was pop a CD or disk in and out.”

“I’d be shocked if Marcie is the brains behind more than installing that. You know that precious, pricey Wi-Fi laptop of hers? It was probably given to her so the data coming out of your computers went directly to hers and then she reported to her employer.”

“Maybe she was reading what the bugs picked up that way, too—or just by hanging out above the house with some sort of audio receiving equipment. You mentioned the army using that, and I know people’s cell phone calls can be picked up by a receiver in the vicinity. I’m thinking we owe Dietmar Getz a couple of new tires or something, though he’s still a jerk.”

She was excited now, on a roll, as if they were really getting answers. And that could mean finding out what had happened to her little Sarah.

“You know,” she went on, giving her main PC commands to search her hard drive, “computer spyware has shown up in several cases I’ve had. One ex-husband installed something called Lover Spy on his former wife’s PC. Yes—yes, Nick, here it is!” she cried, leaning closer to her screen.

“What?” he asked, bending over next to her. “How can you tell?”

“See this encryption message? It’s reporting a specialized spyware called a key logger, which records a victim’s keystrokes and sends images of the computer’s screen to whoever installed it. Maybe she didn’t have time to uninstall this today, or just thought I wouldn’t catch on—which I almost didn’t. I feel like I’ve been conned by the Lohans all over again! This stuff tells everything. Nick, they now know I’ve researched sedative drugs to keep a patient in a coma and that I tried to track the specialist they hired for me at the clinic, the one I’ll just bet they sent, all expenses paid, to Europe.”

“At least, if they wanted to get rid of you, they could have by now.”

“How about that boulder that just missed me at Red Rocks?”

“I’m still hoping that was an accident. But maybe they have some strange loyalty toward you, since you were once a Lohan.”

“It could be. After all, they figure that Laird’s leaving me is already a fate worse than death. I just don’t know. I used to love puzzles, solving things, tracking people, but I’m just so lost in all this!”

“Can you remove that crap from the computer?”

She tried to get hold of herself again. Thank God she had Nick to keep pushing her on, keeping her on course. She forced her fears down again. “I’ve advised others not to until they contact a lawyer or law enforcement. I’ll check to see if it’s on my older PC and, if not, just use that. We may even be able to use this to throw them off, because it’s evidently still functioning. Since the ladder was left outside, maybe our arrival caught Marcie, or whomever they sent, before they could remove this.”

“Or it was helping them track your moves so well they decided to chance leaving it. After all, they tried to cover the real reason for the break-in with the money and drug motives. But won’t your keystrokes show them you’ve found it now?”

“I don’t think so—only that I might have checked my hard drive. It’s worth a chance. Besides, spyware and a seemingly random, anonymous B and E is hardly enough to confront the Lohans with. If we could only find Marcie and make her talk!”

She got her main computer back to its screen saver and turned to her other. Its hard drive looked untampered.

“Nick,” she whispered, and motioned him to follow her down the hall to Claire’s empty, dark bedroom. She pulled him into it, then into the closet among the short, hanging clothes where the two of them sat on a shelf among stuffed animals. Desperate just to hide out, Tara slid the closet door closed.

“What in hell are you doing?” he asked.

“I don’t care what we found and figured out tonight, I’m still paranoid. Who knows where Marcie put bugs that night we were being so nice to her, but going by what Claire recalls, I don’t think she was in here.”

“Definitely not in the closet,” he muttered, sounding suddenly amused. “And here I was hoping you just wanted to be sure Claire didn’t watch us make out and have some sort of dream about it later.”

She felt herself blush. How ridiculous at her age and in the dark. No man had ever affected her like this one, not even Laird. Yes, Nick impacted her roller-coaster emotions and hormones, but her ties to him went deeper. Nothing was the ultimate escape but being in his arms.

Thank heavens, it was pitch-black in here, because the heat started at her throat and climbed clear up to her ear tips while her skin tingled. She had meant to ask him in private what it would mean to his job offer to delay going east, but he reached for her and nuzzled her throat, then trailed wet kisses down it.

Trying to sound normal when her heart was beating as if there were a set of drums in there, she whispered in his ear, “Nick MacMahon, I’ve fallen hard for you, but I’ve got to go after Jordan, Laird and Jen, using any ammo I can. And I’ll understand if you’re not along for that part of the battle. You know what I mean, I think…don’t you?”

Whenever this man touched her, she lost her train of thought. What had she just said?

“I’m in it all the way, in all the way,” he murmured as the tip of his tongue plundered the hollow of her throat while his hand slid up the inside of her thigh.

Right now, that vow was better than a diamond ring, she thought, better than the standard promise of
I do.
She relaxed under his kiss, slanting her mouth sideways to get closer to him. Stuffed animals gently thudded off the shelf as they sprawled out together. They heard the padding footfalls of their real animal, pawing at the closet door.

“It’s Beamer,” she murmured, though that was obvious.

“Hell of a tracker dog, even when someone doesn’t want to be found.”

Nick slid the closet door open. Beamer stepped in and flopped among the displaced array of stuffed animals, putting his head down on a big yellow tiger. A wan silver glow from an outside floodlight gilded his golden coat.

“He won’t tell what he sees,” Nick murmured, running his hand along her bottom to lift her hips into his lap. “You can trust Beamer and you can trust me for the utmost discretion.”

Amidst the chaos of all the losses in her life, she smiled deep within as his mouth covered hers again.

T
he next morning, using her spyware-free PC, Tara tried to trace Marcie Goulder. Dead ends all the way. Was that even her real name? she wondered.

The house was quiet. That had pleased her once, but now she longed for the sound of Claire’s voice, Nick’s heavy tread and Beamer’s barking at elk and deer. Nick had refused to let Claire take the bus this Friday, but had left to drive her to school himself, with Beamer riding shotgun. After he’d dropped Claire off, he’d gone to check Marcie’s apartment again, but had called to say she hadn’t shown up. He’d said he’d be back soon, but he was going to get a piece of glass to replace the broken window.

Tara sighed, remembering how wonderful it had been to be with Nick last night. With him she felt so safe and yet so tense, as if she could explode. Once she’d settled everything with the Lohans, she couldn’t wait to have days with Nick where they weren’t afraid of or angry at what could happen next. Only one week with Nick, and she was ready to give him her body and her life—but she couldn’t completely, not yet.

She shook her head at her wandering thoughts and tried an online search site to locate anyone named Goulder in this immediate area. Could Marcie be a nickname for Marcia?

Outside, something bright caught her eye. She looked out and up toward the tree line. Nothing amiss, but what had caused that flash?

It darted by again, piercing her eyes so she blinked. A reflection from the trees. She gasped. A square piece of glass? Was Nick back and had carried the new window glass up there?

Under an aspen, something moved. A booted foot, not Nick’s.

“Damn!” Tara yelled, and stood so fast she hit her chair with the backs of her legs and it rolled away, bumping a filing cabinet. “She’s out there again with her laptop!”

She grabbed her cell phone, dialing Nick’s number as she ran through the house. The gall of that woman to come back here like this!

“Pick up, Nick, now!” she muttered as she jammed shoes on her feet and ran to the side door. Her gut instinct was to chase the woman, grab her and that laptop, but what if she bolted into the trees? Without Beamer, she’d never find her in the thick forest if she took off running. But maybe she was heading toward the hunter’s cabin and Big Rock.

Nick’s voice on the phone. “Tara?”

“Marcie’s outside again!” she cried without preamble, as she dipped her head to look out the great room window. She wished the kitchen window wasn’t boarded up, because that was probably the best angle. “She was near the scent pool with her laptop, but I don’t see her now.”

“Call the cops, and I’ll be there as quick as I can. Stay put.”

“She’s moving away. She’ll get away. I’m going after her.”

“No! It may be a trap. Stay put and call—”

She hung up. Turning off its ring, she jammed the cell phone in her pocket, though she knew there were dead spots where it didn’t work in the mountains. She grabbed her jacket and went out the front door. No use charging out the back and spooking her. Mommy’s ghost, indeed! She had a lot to settle with that woman, and she wasn’t getting away. Man, she could use Beamer, but trekking mountain paths right now might open up the poor Lab’s cut foot pads. And Nick had said the dog was getting too old for long, hard tracking.

Tara took time to lock the door. She had the Evergreen police on her speed dial, so she knew she could summon them if that really was Marcie. She’d only seen her jeans, boots and laptop, but it had to be her. Tara figured she’d head for the old hunter’s cabin and she was sure where she must have left her car. She’d stop her somehow and get the answers they needed to link Marcie to Jordan or Laird.

Tara’s heart thudded as she quickly climbed to the tree line, passing the scent pool. All around her, the aspens shook their golden leaves; it looked as if they were trembling.

Tara looked for tracks. Yes, Nick would be proud. Clean boot sole prints. And what, he might ask, can you tell about this person?

“That she’s a lying Lohan lackey,” Tara muttered as she stretched her strides, trying to keep an eye on the footprints and the path ahead. Dead tracking, Nick had called this. She should have brought some sort of weapon, a knife from the kitchen or one of Nick’s father’s hammers, but it was too late now.

She caught a glimpse of the woman up ahead. Yes! Marcie for certain, with that spiky blond hair. Carrying her laptop and something else. What if she was armed?

Once Tara never would have taken such a risk. Laird wouldn’t have allowed it, and it wasn’t in her nature. Until now. Now almost any danger was worth it if she could just get some answers. Follow the evidence trail, follow the money trail—follow…