Right from the beginning, she’d had misgivings about her choice. Wondered whether joining the Secret Service hadn’t merely been a knee-jerk response to looming grad school graduation. Secret Service recruiters had, after all, arrived on campus precisely at her first great ‘what am I going to do with my life?’ moment. It all sounded so romantic. Not only that, but her mother hated it. Thought it was an unseemly occupation for a girl with any Ivy League education. The daily double. What could be better?
Audrey Williams felt herself trembling with anger as she tried to come to grips with herself and all that had happened in the past couple of days. How she’d killed a man and felt nothing other than relief that it wasn’t her body lying on the dirty grass and then spent the subsequent day and a half justifying her lack of drama to a series of well-meaning company shrinks. God only knew what conclusions they’d drawn. And now this. One slip of the tongue and she was on her way to Boise.
“What if I don’t want to be reassigned?” she asked.
Rosen blinked in surprise. “Refusing reassignment is not an option,” he said flatly. “May I remind you that your current status…”
As the tension began to skyrocket, Bobby Duggan jumped in. “Let’s not be hasty here,” he said. “We….” He leaned against a corner of Daniel Rosen’s desk. His tone took on a conspiratorial air. “Quite frankly, Special Agent Williams, we would prefer not to lose you,” Bobby lied in a low, kindly uncle voice. “Director Rosen and I have discussed your situation at some length and as far as we’re concerned, you deserve an opportunity to redeem yourself.”
Audrey frowned. She had a terrific urge to argue, to take issue with the notion of ‘redemption’ but managed to curtail it. “Sir?”
“We need to get you out of sight and mind for a period of time. Long enough for State to cool down and move on to something more pressing,” Rosen said.
Before she could muster a response, Bobby said, “We’ve discussed a couple of options for you.”
“I’ll bet you have,” was what she was thinking. “Yes, sir,” was what she said.
“We wondered if perhaps you wouldn’t like to reconsider accepting your appointment to the Behavioral Analysis Unit over in Quantico,” Bobby Duggan suggested with a smile. “You are, as far as we know, the only person ever to decline their invitation to join. The Bureau assures us their offer still holds.”
She shook her head. She’d been all over this before. Spent weeks mulling the matter over and over in her mind and another week justifying her decision to her immediate superiors whose ire at her choice had been apparent.
“I couldn’t do that all the time,” she said. “I enjoyed my time in the training program and I’m still fascinated by profiling, but I couldn’t spend my life dealing with the kinds of things they see on a daily basis. I just couldn’t do it. It would eat me up.”
They indicated that they understood without actually saying so. Watching the series of practiced gestures, Audrey was amazed at how difficult it was to read men such as this. It was as if they had no substance.
“You said options,” Audrey prodded.
“We have another matter which I believe could benefit from your assistance. Something that would remove you from the LA limelight for a period of time.”
“Such as?”
“We have a retired agent and his family who are presently missing from the USMS witness protection program,” Duggan said.
Audrey frowned. “Wouldn’t the USMS handle that?” she asked.
“Not in this case,” Rosen said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“The personnel belong to us.”
“Who would I be working with?” she wanted to know.
“A Senior Special Agent.”
“What department?”
“Diplomatic Security,” Ops Director Duggan said.
“What does he have to do with the missing family?” she asked.
“He and the missing father used to be partners.”
“Back in the day?”
His eyes crinkled like the kindly uncle. “Yes,” he said. “Back in the day.”
“And I’d be assigned in what capacity?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question,” Duggan said.
“I’d be his partner? I’m too old to fetch coffee.”
He smiled knowingly. “Certainly.”
She ran the possibilities through her circuits.
“Any other options?” she asked after a moment.
“Chicken Fried Steak,” Rosen said from behind the pile of paperwork.
The tension once again was rising. Audrey sensed she’d asked one too many questions and was about to have to putt or get off the green. Resigning from the service was final and would surely leave a bad taste in her mouth. Audrey had never failed at anything and didn’t plan on allowing this to be the first. If she was going to resign it was going to be on her own terms.
“Well?” Duggan pushed.
“I’ll look for the family,” she said.
Rosen suddenly got to his feet. “You will report to Deputy Director Duggan on a daily basis. We’ll assign you a secure channel through which to do so. I’ll have the appropriate files delivered to your apartment.”
Duggan put a paternal hand on her shoulder and steered her toward the door. “After you’ve briefed yourself, call 3312 and Marlene will be able to tell you how to contact your new partner
.
”
He squeezed her shoulder. “This could go a long way toward mending your standing within the organization,” he whispered. “I sincerely hope you’ll take advantage of the opportunity.”
“Yes, sir,” she said as the door closed.
Gilbert handed the adobe brick to his wife. “Hang onto that for a sec,” he said.
She watched as Gilbert lifted the weathered piece of plywood from the top of the chimney, slipped it under his left arm and descended the short home-made ladder, one careful rung at a time. Back on the roof, he leaned the plywood against the chimney, took the brick from her hands and set it down.
“You don’t keep the chimney covered, the creatures move in,” he said.
He slipped a hand around her waist and leaned against her. The Kaibab Plateau spread out before them like a prickly green blanket, undulating over a series of irregular mesas and buttes for as far as the eye could follow. Too high for pine or spruce, relegated to fir and the occasional aspen grove, this part of the Kaibab National Forest looked precisely the way it had to the putrid collection of drunks and drifters, miners and misfits who had, in the name of Manifest Destiny, liberated this part of the state from the Southern Paiutes a century and a half ago.
Gilbert pointed at a glint in the distance. “That’s Jacob Lake,” he said with a shrug. “More like a pond, but around here any water is notable water.”
Her gaze remained distant. He wasn’t surprised. He knew her well enough to suspect that, even in these dire circumstances, the sting of learning her husband had secrets would serve to pick at the scab of the old wound. The one they didn’t talk about.
The pain of having their life-dreams side-tracked by a force beyond their control. Something her husband wasn’t, by law, allowed to discuss with her. The pain of leaving her home, her family, everything she had known until that moment for no better reason than it was necessary. Things would never be the same. How could they be?
And now this. Again.
Gilbert attempted to breech the gap with a travelogue. “This is the only private piece of property in the whole Kaibab National Forest,” he said. “Somebody way back in my mom’s family homesteaded the place.”
She separated herself from his hand and walked toward the edge of the roof. For the briefest of moments, he thought she might be going to throw herself to the ground. Mercifully, the awkwardness of the moment was broken by the reappearance of the kids, who came stomping out the front door of the cabin, down over the porch and out to the yawning rear of the SUV.
“Did you see a TV?” Becky asked her brother.
“No TV,” Michael said.
“No waaaay,” Becky said, as if confronting the reality of time travel. She stopped and looked around. “What are we gonna do?”
“Come on.” Michael held one end of the plastic storage bin in both hands. The other end rested on the tailgate.
“Come on,” he said again.
They’d packed enough food for a week, ensuring they wouldn’t be seen in the Jacob Lake Store or anywhere else. He’d seen to it that all the cell phones were back home in the safe. The SUV didn’t have any kind of GPS technology. He’d never bothered to put the cabin in his own name but could prove he had a right to be there. Clean as current technology would permit, he imagined.
Becky jerked the container from the tailgate and took off toward the house at a pace faster than her younger brother could muster. Needing two hands on the handle, Michael trotted doggedly along, carrying and then dragging, until finally disappearing under the porch and out of view.
Gilbert, for reasons he couldn’t explain, immediately began talking. “My Uncle Hugo left it to me. He didn’t have any kids of his own which made me his nearest male relative, which he had to do, because leaving it to somebody in the family is the only option. It can’t be sold. If we don’t own it, it reverts to the forest service.”
From five paces away, from behind, he heard her sigh. A somber moment passed before she turned and walked across the roof, threw her arms around him and leaned against his chest. She heaved a deep sigh. “I’m not mad at you,” she said. “I’m just mad. Mad that our lives are being interrupted again. Mad that I can’t talk to my family on the phone. Mad…” Fearing the list could go on for hours, she stopped herself. “I’m just mad,” she said finally.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault. All you were doing was being a good cop. Doing what you got paid to do. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Just the same,” he said.
She looked into his eyes. “It is what it is, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
The kids made another pass at the car, this time loading up with camping gear. When they once again faded from hearing, Gilbert took a half a step back. “This afternoon the kids and I are going to set up a perimeter.” He anticipated her objection to including the kids in anything threatening. “Don’t worry,” he soothed. “I’m going to make a game of it. Wildlife pictures…you know, that kind of thing.” He bobbed his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx. Emelda smiled.
“Tonight, after the kids hit the sack, I’m going to drive over to Saint George, Utah. Make some calls. Send a few messages that can’t be traced back to here.” He eyed her closely. “You think you can hold down the fort?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“This needs to be over. We need to get on with our lives.”
She nodded her understanding and patted his chest twice. She’d never seen her husband this unsure of himself and found the experience rather disquieting.
“What say we make some lunch?” she said.
Before Gilbert could agree, the sound of a slamming door brought their attention to the hard packed ground in front of the cabin. Becky appeared in the front yard.
“We’re up here,” Emelda sang.
Becky ran a hand through her hair and squinted up at the roof.
Emelda waved.
“I’m going for a walk,” Becky announced.
“Lunch is on the way,” Emelda said brightly.
Becky glowered. “I’ll catch something when I get back,” she said starting up the well worn path leading to the top of the mesa. As she stalked off, the chains and zippers on her skater pants tinkled as she moved.
Emelda started to coax her back, but Gilbert stopped her.
“Wait till she sees how steep it is,” Gilbert said under his breath.
Seven minutes later, Becky had slowed to a crawl. The steep grade and the thin air were taking their toll. She had her jacket tied around her waist; her chest burned; she’d broken into a full sweat. Under normal circumstances, this type of exertion would not have been her bailiwick, today, however, she was motivated.
Down at the cabin, the screen read NO SERVICE. But, as she’d hoped, things got better the higher she climbed. She had a bar here, halfway up, and, she figured, two maybe three by the time she got on top of this stinking hill.
By the time she reached the top and sat with her legs hanging over the sheer edge of the cliff face, she was too gassed to talk. She sat and looked out over the rugged country for a while, before pulling her right knee toward her chest, folding the monstrous cuff up to reveal yet another zippered pocket sewn on the inside of the trousers, from which she liberated her cell phone as well. “Asssssssssssss if.”
As if she didn’t know the combination to that crappy little safe in their bedroom closet. She’d known that since she was she was eight and had spent forty-five minutes watching her dumb and dumber mother fumble her way through getting it open. It never ceased to amaze her how stupid parents assumed their children to be.
Two bars! She wanted to scream in delight but thought better of it. Instead, she pushed a button and speed dialed. “Where were you at school?” came Melanie’s voice at the other end.
“You won’t believe this crap,” Becky said.
The relentless north wind had scoured the ground nearly clean of snow. As the Tarrant County patrol car rolled up to the barrier, shards of ice and stone popped beneath the tires like small arms fire. On the right, the foothills seemed close enough to touch. Off to the left, the ground fell steeply toward the valley floor. The digital reading on the dashboard read minus four degrees Fahrenheit. A gust of wind rocked the Sheriff’s Ford Expedition on its heavy-duty springs.
County Sheriff John Letzo looked the part. Early fifties, tall and lean as leather weathered by the wind. He eased the SUV to a stop just short of the red police barrier. On the other side of the saw-horse, a matching police SUV huddled tight against the hill with its engine running.
They’d protected the crime scene with a blue plastic tarp, anchored at the rear to a pair of pine trees, the shelter was held down along the front and sides by a collection of boulders, all very stone-age functional.
“Everything else is exactly the way we found it, as per instructions.” The sheriff’s tone made it clear he didn’t much like being told how to handle a crime scene.