Eagle's Last Stand (16 page)

Rick turned away from her to lean against the brick fireplace and stare out the window.

She came over to him and placed her arm around his waist.

He turned and held on to her. “It wasn’t until I saw myself reflected in that man’s eyes that I realized what I’d become. I’d wanted to kill him and had been looking for justification. I pulled back, intending to let him go, but he grabbed his fallen knife and took the swipe that gave me this scar. Then he moved in for the kill. In the end, I survived, he didn’t.”

“You did what you had to do,” she said. “You gave him a chance. Your humanity came through.”

“And it nearly cost me my life. As I walked to my car, half-blinded by the blood, his bodyguard stepped out of hiding and shot me three times. A few seconds later, a local cop took him down.

“Later, in the hospital between surgeries, I had plenty of time to think about what I wanted to do next. I decided to come home and reconnect with myself. Figuring once I was back on my turf, I’d be able to find a new purpose for myself, a reason to get up in the morning.”

“And the mystery behind your father’s disappearance has given you that?”

“No,
you
did,” he said. Tilting her chin up, he kissed her slowly and tenderly.

When Rick released her, a small tremor ran up her spine. “You’ve gone through hell, Rick, but you’re a man of honor and compassion. You’re everything I thought you were—and more.”

He kissed her hard then, forcing her lips to part for him as he drank her in.

* * *

F
IRE
COURSED
THROUGH
HER
.
She’d met men over the years who’d attracted her, but she’d never felt this overwhelming need to give her love without demands or conditions. Maybe real love didn’t need a reason, just the freedom to exist.

Though Rick hadn’t said he loved her, it didn’t seem to matter now. She pushed his jacket back and opened his shirt, wanting to feel his muscled chest. As she looked up at him, she saw the dark fire in his eyes. He was holding back, keeping a tight rein on himself. His jaw was clenched, and as she left a moist trail down his chest, he sucked in his breath.

There were two scars on his chest, both up high, by his collarbone. Below, over his heart, was a Navajo word:
Chaha’oh.
She ran her fingertips over it. “What’s it mean?”

“Shadow. That’s what many claimed I was like when I hunted man or beast.”

She kissed his scars one by one and felt him shudder. When she moved to unbuckle his belt, he placed his hand over hers. “It’s not too late to change your mind, but it will be in another second or two.”

“Rick, I’m not afraid of you. Open your heart to me. Let me show you that love doesn’t have to hurt.”

She undid his belt and caressed him.

“Slow down,” he whispered, pulling her hands up and placing them on his chest. He slipped off her jacket, then tugged at her sweater and pants until she stood naked by the fire. Lifting her into his arms, he lowered her onto the sheepskin rug.

In the flickering firelight, a world of light and shadows, they came together. Heat became a living force. The roughness of his touch drove her wild. This was love—and their destiny.

She knew Rick struggled to maintain control for as long as he could. Yet the fire coursing through him seemed to increase with each second. With a groan, he surrendered and completed what was meant to be.

Even after their breathing evened, Kim held on to him, refusing to let him move away. “For now, you’re mine and I’m yours. Don’t go.”

“I’m here.”

Chapter Seventeen

Time passed and the air in the room began to grow cold.

“The fire’s almost out,” Rick said, moving away from Kim’s arms and getting dressed. “Too bad it’s not summer. I would have loved seeing you walk around naked.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” she said, her gaze taking him in slowly.

He laughed. “Scarred and worn, but not too bad?”

“I’ve got no complaints,” she said, reaching for her clothes.

He gave her a hand up. “We’ll warm up sooner if we get to work. Let’s find the books and take them out to the SUV. I’m not leaving them here. This place doesn’t have the electronic protection the ranch does,” he said. “More importantly, we don’t know who else knows of this place besides family.”

“Did your brother tell you where he put the books?”

“No, just that they’re in a metal trunk. I don’t see them here, and they weren’t in with the generator, so I’m sure they’re in the bedroom,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the door.

“I can’t remember ever being this cold,” she said, wrapping the sides of her jacket tightly around herself.

“I do, but it was a long time ago,” he admitted. “Once I get the fire going again, it’ll heat up fast. Don’t worry, I can build a fire in the stove, as well. Daniel’s a wuss about cold, so he sold the old potbellied stove and added this beauty.” He pointed toward the steel stove with its two big doors, the right one with a glass window. “No gas, no electricity, just firewood in the left side.”

“Daniel doesn’t seem like a wuss to me,” she said, laughing.

“Well, he is. Just don’t tell him I said so. He’s the one who paid for the upgrades.”

A short while later they’d pulled two large boxes from a big trunk in the bedroom. They were clearly labeled Books and marked with the date they’d been packed. “That’s Gene. He’s organized about everything,” Rick said.

They carried the boxes into the main room and placed them on the heavy pine table. “I want to sort through these before we load them into the SUV. I’m not taking back any passengers, like mice, to my brother’s house.”

“Yeah, I saw the chewed corner,” Kim said. “He must have kept the boxes outside the trunk at one time.”

Rick opened the flaps of the first box and reached for a fat, clearly water-damaged paperback that had long lost its cover. “I remember this one. It’s signed by one of the Navajo Code Talkers, a man Hosteen Silver greatly admired. Kyle was reading it one summer and accidentally dropped it into the horse tank. I helped Hosteen Silver dry it out, but it looked ruined to me. Since he’d read it a million times, I assumed he’d chucked it,” he said, leafing through the loose, brittle pages until he found something of interest. “There’s a torn page from another book stuck in here at the halfway point. It’s from a book about Richard Sorge, from what I can tell.”

“Who’s Richard Sorge?” Kim said.

“Don’t know. Once we have internet access, we can do a search. If the code I found in the notebook is based on a book about, or by, Sorge, maybe we’re on to something.”

She helped him return the books to the box before they opened the other one. “You want to go directly to Daniel’s place instead of to the ranch house? Paul and Daniel seem to know more about codes than Kyle.”

“Yeah, let’s go to Daniel’s. I have a feeling we’re close to answering some important questions.”

He doused the fire and they locked up the cabin, loading the boxes into the SUV.

Rick took it slow as they went down the narrow road, which was basically a bumpy trail cut into the hillside by vehicle use, not road equipment. After a quarter of a mile, needing to slow before crossing a dip in the road, he touched the brake.

“The brakes feel spongy,” he said in a taut voice, his hands clenching the wheel. “Not good.”

The SUV bounced hard as they crossed the shallow trench. Kim grabbed the armrest and adjusted her seat belt.

“We’ve lost our brakes,” Rick said. He pulled the handbrake and it grabbed, slowing them a little. “Hold on,” he said, turning the wheel slightly to the right and trying to skid to a stop as he reapplied the handbrake.

The SUV rocked to the left and the right rear tire rose off the ground. When he swerved left, the wheel touched down again. Even though they bounced heavily, the road was steep and they picked up speed once more.

He glanced over at her. Kim had pressed her back against the seat, her eyes wide with fear as she hung on to the armrest.

Ahead was the steepest part of the trail, a sharp curve and a fifty foot drop to the left. At the speed they were going, Rick knew he wouldn’t be able to hold the turn. They’d fly right over the edge.

For a second he thought a forced roll would be safer—they were buckled in and the air bags would help. Then he remembered the brush ahead. There was still a chance...

“Hang on, this is going to get rough,” he yelled, veering off the road to the right and ramming into a scrub oak thicket about three feet high. The soft impact knocked him into the steering wheel, enough to cost him a breath, but not enough to trigger the air bag.

Rick hung on to the wheel, whipping it back and forth, fishtailing as they rammed their way through the thicket, racing up slope. There was a loud, jarring thump somewhere underneath them and Kim bounced into the air, bumping her head on the roof.

Their speed dropped and the rear wheels grabbed on to something. As the SUV slid to a stop, dust enveloped them in a cloud.

Rick reached down and turned off the ignition. The engine rattled for a few seconds. The front end vibrated. Then suddenly it was dead quiet.

After a second Rick’s ears stopped ringing and he looked over at Kim.

She smiled weakly. “Are we there yet?”

“Take it as a win. This may be as far as we can go, but at least we’re in one piece.” He looked around carefully before glancing back at her. “Stay in the vehicle for now. I’m going to take a look underneath to see if I can figure out what happened.”

“No, I’m going with you. I can hold the flashlight while you check the brakes. I can also keep an eye out for anyone who might be lurking about. This may not have been an accident,” she said, climbing out her side.

Rick crawled beneath the SUV and studied the damage. “From the smell of brake fluid and the crimp in the line, which is now dangling loose, you’re right. This was done on purpose.” When he came back out and stood, his jaw was set. “I let my guard down, Kim, and brought this on. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand. How is this—” She stopped abruptly. “You mean because we made love?”

“I was on the job. I should know better than to get so distracted.”

“First, you don’t know exactly when the person sabotaged that brake line except that it was after we arrived. We may have been searching for the books at the time, or maybe it was done right after we arrived and you were busy building a fire,” she protested.

“More importantly,” she added softly, “I wouldn’t trade a second of what happened between us.” She held his gaze. “It drew us closer, and if you allow it, it’ll make us even stronger.”

He smiled. “You look like an angel, but you’ve got a core of steel, Kim.”

“Most women do,” she answered.

He studied the area around him, taking everything in slowly and thoroughly. “Escape and evasion. I’m trained for this. Let’s get moving, in case whoever did this stuck around to watch. There’s a tool bag in the back. Let’s empty it out and put the books inside. I’ll carry it while you take the binoculars in the glove compartment. They’re infrared.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a half-hour hike to the main road. Once we’re there I’ll be able to get a cell phone signal. I’ll call Daniel and let my brothers know what happened. Preston will be able to get the tribal police moving on this. There’s no second set of tracks on the road, so the guy must have approached on foot. His vehicle is probably parked in the vicinity.”

Rather than stick to the trail, they moved directly downhill, sticking to cover whenever possible to avoid being spotted. Rick scarcely made a sound even through the rough terrain, but Kim knew she was probably alerting wild animals for miles.

“Do you think the person’s still out there? They haven’t done anything directly, like shoot at us,” she noted. “Not yet anyway,” she added, looking over her shoulder.

“My gut tells me our enemy is around here somewhere. There’s no way for him to have predicted how effective tampering with the brakes would be. Once he sees we’ve walked away unhurt, he’ll probably try something else.”

* * *

D
ANIEL
PICKED
THEM
UP
at the highway and before long they were inside
Daniel’s office in the computer room, all holding freshly brewed hot coffee. Preston had just arrived and Paul was already behind the computer.

“Let me look up Richard Sorge for you. Then we can go from there,” Paul said, typing in the name.

He then looked up at them. “He ran a Soviet spy ring in Japan before and during World War II. They used OTPs—one time pads—that required both sender and recipient to have the identical page to decipher the message. Although it was more secure than what the code talkers used, it was also a lot more time-consuming to decode,” he said. “Do you still have the photos of the code you found in the notebook Hosteen Silver left for you?”

“Yes, I do.” Rick handed Paul his cell phone and Paul transferred the images to the central screen.

“They’re sequences of numbers separated by commas,” Daniel said. “But it isn’t a simple grade-school code, where the number one equals
a,
two equals
b
and so forth. We’ve already checked some of those patterns.”

“A common substitute for those OTPs is one that requires both sender and receiver to have identical editions of the same book—a popular novel, reference book, even a dictionary. If we can find the book our father used to create the code, we can figure out the message,” Paul concluded.

Rick studied the well-worn paperback in his hands. Although they’d looked for a book about Sorge, it hadn’t been in either box. “I think he mentioned Sorge to tell us he was using a variation of the old-style OTP code,” Rick said. “Let’s check the books, starting with his favorite, and see what we get.”

“Go from the premise that the first number corresponds to the page, the second is the line number, the third is the word and the fourth is the letter in the word,” Paul said.

Rick checked the old paperback and followed the sequence. “First letter is an
s.
” A few minutes later Rick looked up and smiled. “First word is
she.
Second is
fed.
Third word is
it.
”

“That can’t be a coincidence,” Kim said, looking from brother to brother. “
She fed it
is not random. And the only woman who’s a suspect in all this is Angelina Curley.”

Rick nodded and continued matching numbers with letters, writing them down. “The next word is
to
. Last word...” He paused. “There’s water damage on this page, but I think the last word is
me
.”

“She fed it to me.”
Kim looked around the room. “What did Angelina feed your father?”

“This was in a notebook with information about the Plant People, so I think Hosteen Silver was trying to tell us he was poisoned,” Rick said.

“He hid that notebook in a place only you would find,” Kim said. “I think it’s safe to assume he was concerned his enemy, probably Angelina, would sweep the ranch house to make sure no evidence of what she’d done was left behind.”

“What I don’t get is why he didn’t call you, Preston, or the tribal police, and identify Angelina,” Daniel interjected. “Or just name his killer outright.”

“Maybe he wasn’t one hundred percent sure, and didn’t want to make what was essentially a death-bed statement, naming the wrong killer,” Kim suggested.

“He may also have known help wouldn’t arrive in time, or that nothing could be done, so he used his remaining energy to do what he felt was honorable—die as far away from his home as possible,” Paul said.

“Or maybe he thought he might be able to reach Angelina in time and she’d have the plants necessary for an antidote,” Daniel said. “But, as Kim suggested, that doesn’t necessarily make her guilty. She might have simply shared his love for the Plant People.”

“But Angelina doesn’t live anywhere near Copper Canyon,” Kim pointed out.

“This all happened before she married,” Paul responded. “Let’s see where she lived before then. Hang on.” Paul typed something into his computer and a minute later looked up. “According to MVD records, Angelina lived just three miles from Copper Canyon. It’s possible that since his truck wouldn’t start, our foster father set out on foot to her house but never made it.”

“Great theory, but without a body, we still have zero,” Preston conceded. “We can’t prove how he died or even that he
is
dead.”

“There’s something that still doesn’t make sense to me,” Kim said. “Why would Angelina try to kill Rick after all this time? Even if she did kill Hosteen Silver, she’d already gotten away with murder. No body, no witnesses, no real evidence except the coded message—and that doesn’t identify her, not really.”

There was a long silence as everyone considered the possibilities.

“She may have been afraid that once Rick was back, he’d somehow be able to tie the poisoning to her,” Preston said. “Rick was the only one of us who could think like Hosteen Silver. That’s scarcely a secret.”

“Makes sense, but finding the body is totally up to us now,” Daniel said. “We need to hike away from the ranch house to the location of Angelina’s former home. We should take the most likely direct routes, and search along those trails. If he didn’t make it to her place, his body has to be around there somewhere.”

Paul used his computer to locate an aerial view of the area, and showed the others what was on the monitor.

“The shortest route passes through a section with no homes or signs of habitation. Just nature and wild animals,” Preston observed, not needing to explain the gruesome possibilities. “His body may be long gone by now.”