Triple Exposure (5 page)

So now the lights had vanished, leaving loneliness and panic rising like a flood tide in their wake.

The Spirit Guides must be restored—and quickly.

Even if that meant carnage at the airfield, where a brazen killer was preparing to take wing.

Friday, February 15
 

Startled by the ringing telephone, Rachel jerked out of a sound sleep to both darkness and confusion. By the second ring, she remembered she was in the tiny rental casita, her temporary home. Just two days before, her dad had gotten her this cell phone, and so far as she knew, he was the only person who had the new number.

Something’s wrong with Grandma
…Rachel fumbled until she found the phone where she had left it on the night-stand, beside the glowing red numbers that read 4:18. With her thoughts focused on her family, she didn’t even glance at the caller ID window before she answered.

“Dad? Is something—”

“I know where you are, killer.
Murderess.
” The woman’s voice formed a fragile skin of hatred over an icy lake of malice.

Not again, not here, too.
Rachel’s eyes stung with frustration. The woman sounded different this time, raspier and more unbalanced than she had when the calls had started, back during the trial in Philadelphia. Was this even the same person? It must be, for Rachel’s most persistent—and frustratingly anonymous—tormentor had a knack for getting private numbers. Still, how had she found this one so damned quickly?

“You are one sick bitch,” Rachel snapped, her fury outrunning her better judgment. Responding to this nut case only encouraged her. “Get some help and get a life.”

“I have one, but you won’t soon. Because I’m coming for you,
Raaaachel.
You can’t run far enough or fast enough. I’ll always know where you hide—”

Rachel’s trembling fingers found and pushed the power button. From hard experience, she’d learned this was the only way to stop the harrassment. If she simply hung up, Psycho Bitch would merely hit redial and start back up where she’d left off. Invariably, the woman blocked her number, and the phone company’s attempts to trace her hadn’t helped, since she was using—and frequently changing—disposable, prepaid cell phones.

As Rachel burrowed deep beneath her covers, her pulse pounded and her ears strained for the slightest sound. And not just any sound, but those that ruled her nightmares: the turning of the closet doorknob, the quiet footsteps of an intruder who had stripped off all his clothing and hidden there in darkness until he’d thought she was asleep. The casita might be chilly, but she felt sweat trickling from her temples. Despite the fact that she had checked and rechecked both the closet and the door’s locks earlier, she could almost swear she heard the quick scrape of someone’s breathing—
Kyle’s breathing
—and see the featureless, black
silhouette looming above her that last instant before she reached the gun.

Flinging back the blankets, Rachel rubbed her prickling arms and clicked on the bedside lamp. As light flooded the two-room cottage, she peered at the closet door she had left open—and sighed to see that it was empty of all but her clothing and her fears. Even so, it infuriated her, that one whacko hounding her from Pennsylvania had so much power over her that she had had to look.

Like mother, like son,
Rachel couldn’t help suspecting. For the longest time, she had blamed a few unbalanced fans of Kyle’s mother, a popular news anchor and Philadelphia morning talk show host, for taking it upon themselves to avenge the famously personable blonde’s all-too-public grief. Most of the callers had admitted that much, but this woman, this incredibly persistent head case…could the Psycho Bitch be Mrs. Underwood herself?

Heaven only knew the woman had been rocked off her foundation. Rachel had sympathized with the tearful breakdown that had been played and replayed on the news, had even tried to reach out to tell the woman how sorry she was for her loss. But Kyle’s mother had flipped out on her, then gone public with accusations that Rachel had seduced her “baby” and shot him down when he tried to end their sleazy, secret sex. The grand jurors had been sympathetic—enough to hand down the indictment that Rachel’s lawyer had been certain wouldn’t happen.

But whoever her tormentor was, Rachel wasn’t about to let the woman push her back into the habit of self-medicating. After Rachel had been charged, her attorney insisted she meet with a clinical psychologist who worked with victims of violent crime. Not only had Dr. Damien Thomas later testified on her behalf, he’d helped her wean herself off the sleeping pills she had used to get through each long night after the shooting. It had been hard, harrowing work with the pressure of the trial looming, but she hadn’t fought to save her life from her attacker only to end up as an addict…or a suicide.

Reclaiming your life’s the best revenge.
Dr. Thomas had been right about that, Rachel reminded herself, even though he was wrong—dead wrong—about the evening she’d forgotten.

From outside, she heard gentle hooting, the soft call of a nearby owl to her mate. It was a sound she remembered from her childhood, something as familiar to her as the drone of an airplane or the sweep of winter winds down from the mountains. But not even the owl’s serenade could lull her back to sleep now. A little after five, she gave up and crawled from the bed, then used the coffeemaker to heat water from the bathroom. While her tea brewed, she pulled on sweats with fuzzy slippers and switched on the radio. She needed friendly chatter but had to settle for the country tunes that had already been relics in the days her mother had enjoyed them. Still, it was something else familiar, something more to pull her back to the years before she’d first heard the name Underwood.

Soon, Rachel was sitting at the room’s small writing table with a mug of hot tea and reaching for the prints she’d created using her laptop and a high-end printer. Though she hadn’t finished tweaking values or yet printed onto acid-free archival paper, the proofs convinced her she’d been right about the shots of Zeke Pike at his work.

Especially about the one shot she was holding, where soft light gilded sweat-beaded biceps and highlighted a strong man’s absolute absorption in his work. He was at once humility and pride and the embodiment of power, captured at a moment she felt privileged to have witnessed.

Yet there was something more as well, an undercurrent of sexuality that made her ask herself—would probably make any living woman ask—what it would be like to be the object of such total focus. Rachel wrapped her hands around her mug and shivered, at once deeply attracted and repulsed by the idea.

She had already been the object of one man’s total focus—a focus that had sharpened into sick obsession. She’d had
enough of male attention to last her for two lifetimes. Her reaction, she decided, had nothing to do with Zeke Pike, and everything to do with the most perfect photograph she’d ever taken.

The trouble was that no one else would see it. Because once Zeke Pike saw the proofs, he’d never sign the release that she needed to use a photo with his likeness. The image was so personal, so revealing of the man behind the misanthrope, she felt certain he’d demand that she destroy it.

And that would be a crime, every bit as much a crime as if she took a blowtorch to the gorgeous table he’d created. Both were art, and art counted for something more than the stubbornness of one of its components.

So what are you going to do about it, Rachel?

She worried at the edges of the question for a long while, until the earthenware mug grew cool between her hands. Finally, she put her tea down and pulled one print from her stack.

By the time she parked beside The Roost a half hour later, the small airport had already sprung to life. A mechanic tinkered with the innards of a small plane, and a uniformed pilot was giving one of the Learjets a preflight check. A curl of fragrant smoke rose from the café, a sign that Patsy had started serving breakfast.

Rachel climbed out and zipped her jacket, then paused and decided her meal could wait until she dealt with the contents of the envelope she was holding. As she made her way back toward the gold van, she raised a hand in greeting to her father and his two assistants, who were pulling a fifties-era German sailplane—a restoration project—from its hangar. Both Lili Vega, a tiny twenty-something whose shoulder-length, dark hair bore a fresh streak of magenta, and the more experienced Bobby Bauer waved back, but Rachel’s father stopped what he was doing, jumped on a golf cart used to tow the gliders, and made a beeline for her, irritation written on his ruddy face.

Uh-oh.
Her father didn’t get mad very often, but when he
did, he was no subtler about it than any other of his emotions.

“What’s the matter with that phone of yours, Rusty?” he asked before the cart stopped. “I tried you three or four times this morning, and it kept going straight to voice mail. Or didn’t you want to be bothered talking to me?”

She pulled it from her purse and feigned surprise. “Sorry, Dad. I—uh—I guess I must’ve accidentally switched it off when I meant to hang up last night. I’m still figuring out which button does what on this new phone.”

She regretted the lie but decided there was no need to worry him by explaining the real reason for her actions. With the young day bright and blue around her, Rachel felt light years away from her tormentor. “What’d you need?”

His expression eased, assuring her he’d accepted her explanation at face value. “I wanted to let you know this afternoon looks perfect for us to take up a sailplane. Weather’s great, and Lili tells me the schedule is wide open.”

Since Rachel had been home, she’d noticed that her father relied more and more on his assistants—especially Lili—to take care of the scheduling and nearly all the office work. Apparently, he’d finally learned the art of delegating those tasks he least enjoyed.

“I thought you told me earlier it would be too busy for us to fly today.”

Little by little, he was dragging her back in the direction of the family business. Every evening, they had been reviewing flight rules at his kitchen table, where her dad rattled off regulation after regulation from memory. And yesterday, he’d insisted on flying her to El Paso for her physical. Though she wanted to be a help around the airfield—heaven only knew she owed him that much—she still felt ambivalent, even a little queasy, about returning to the skies.

He shook his head. “That group coming in from Reno canceled, and Lili says she’ll take care of any tourists who show up.”

“So Bobby’s available to fly the tow plane?” When she
was still a girl, he’d started hanging around the airfield, taking flying lessons. People had talked, since only a few years before, a fatal drunk driving wreck had cost him his own wife’s love and his career as a Border Patrol agent, to say nothing of the guilt he carried over the death of a young father in the accident. More than a few thought Walter Copeland insanely soft-hearted to give such a man a second chance. But over the years, Bobby had repaid Rachel’s father’s faith by becoming a top-notch aviator and a respected mechanic, not to mention a close friend.

Since he’d always had a soft spot for her, was in fact the only other person she allowed to call her Rusty, maybe she could talk him into having something else to do today….

As quickly as the thought popped into Rachel’s mind, she dismissed it as unworthy. But was it any more dishonest than what she planned to do this morning?

“This afternoon will be fine,” she promised her father. “I have a couple of errands to run now, photography-related errands.”

It was important to remind him she had work of her own. Not a whole lot at the moment, but she was praying that the photo of Zeke Pike was going to change that. She was hoping that with the publicity related to the showing, she could once more become capable of financially standing on her own feet, maybe starting to repay some of the money her dad and Patsy had put out. Though neither one had said a word about it, Rachel needed to pay them back, not only for her family but for herself.

Her conscience nudged her once more. As important as her goals were, did she really mean to achieve them by deception?

“Your stepmother will have something to say about it if you don’t let her feed you.” With a shrug of his sky-blue coveralls, her father flashed a grin. “And since I’ll be the one who’ll have to hear her grousing, I’d count it as a personal favor if you’d—”

“All right, already. I’ll stop to say hello and grab a muffin,”
Rachel told him. Afterward, she had to run back to the casita and add one photograph,
the
photo, to the stack of proofs she meant to take to Zeke. Because as much as she wanted his permission to display it, she wasn’t going to jump-start her new life with what amounted to a lie.

“Damned pain-in-the-butt conscience,” she muttered under her breath as her father drove the cart back toward his work.

Zeke was leaning forward, cleaning one of Cholla’s big hooves, when he heard the crunch of approaching tires on the gravel. Rachel Copeland’s tires, he suspected, for who else would come by so early in the morning?

“What’s she want now?” he grumbled, bothered by the unexpected—and plain stupid—pinch of pleasure at the thought that she’d come back.