Hunted (6 page)

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T
HIS
TIME
THEY
did not have the advantage of being able to watch from up high, a good distance away. To see anything, they had to get close.

At the scene, somebody had set up three battery-operated lights. They lit up the area fairly well although the heavy snow made it difficult to see fine detail. They didn’t need that ability to see some guy dressed in a yellow rain slicker half climb, half slide down a ladder. He had a purse and a backpack slung over his shoulder.

“Car is empty,” the man said.

There was a general mutter of disbelief and dismay. It would be a difficult search in the heavy woods in fresh snow.

They watched as he carried both the purse and the backpack over to a parked SUV. He reached into the purse, pulling out her billfold.

“Guess the mystery is solved,” Chandler whispered.

It was only a matter of time before Baker McCann knew that his little girl was missing. And Ethan knew that by daybreak, there’d be an army of volunteers in these woods, attempting to find Chandler.

The smart thing would be for her to turn herself in now. It would save a whole lot of worry for Baker and Mack. And save the volunteers a whole lot of trouble searching the woods unnecessarily.

“It’s not too late,” he said, voicing his thoughts.

“I think it might be. It was too late the minute I started looking at the records of who had viewed those screens.”

“You’re sure you can’t tell your father about your suspicions?”

“My dad waited twenty years to remarry. He told me that he never wanted to until he met Claudia. Now I’m going to accuse her of treason? I can’t do that without proof.”

“But if it’s true...”

“I know I have to do the right thing. And I will. I just hope I’m brave enough,” she added, her voice full of doubt.

“You’re brave,” he said. “Hell, you climbed out of a car that was suspended eighty feet above ground.”

“Maybe I should join the circus,” she muttered.

Now wasn’t the time or place to try to convince her. “So now what?” he asked.

“I’m going back to Denver, to Linder Automation. I’ve thought of a couple more ways that I can check the computer activity associated with that particular technology.”

“Earlier you asked about internet access. Why go all the way back to Denver when you could drive thirty miles, get an internet connection and remote in?”

“I’m fairly confident that my username has been disabled. I won’t be able to remote in. But I actually have another username. When we do upgrades, we have to run scripts to test the new software. When I’m testing, I have a different username. It makes it easy for me to audit what I’ve tested. I don’t think they will have thought to disable my test username. But because of our intense need for data security, I never set my test username up with remote capabilities.”

“How will you get into the building?” he asked. “I suspect you all have swipe cards to enter certain areas. If your computer access has been disabled, don’t you think it’s true that your entry access is also gone?”

“I’m sure you’re right. I’ll just have to figure something out when I get there.”

She was walking into danger and he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to convince her otherwise. “Maybe wait a few days? When Mack hears that you’re missing, nothing will keep him away.”

“I can’t. Every minute that I delay is another minute that my father is worried sick about me. Plus, the longer I wait, the more likely that somebody will cover up their tracks and I won’t be able to get to the information that I need. I have to move quickly. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you take me as far as Glenwood Springs? I know that’s west when I need to go east, but there I should be able to rent a car at least.”

“You’re going to drive back to Denver? The roads are getting bad.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, dismissing his concern.

Mountain passes blew shut all the time. It would be dangerous. “You can’t rent a car,” he said. “You’ll have to show your driver’s license, your credit card.”

She sighed and he understood. She wasn’t frustrated with him, just with her situation. “I’m kind of bad at this, aren’t I?” She paused. “Okay, this is even more to ask. Would you be willing to use your credit card to rent the car for me? I promise that I’ll pay you back.”

“No.”

He could almost feel the disappointment roll off her. “I understand. I do. This is a mess. You’re smart to stay out of it. There must be a bus that goes from Glenwood Springs to Denver. I’ll take that.”

“You don’t need a damn bus. I’ll take you.”

“No.” Her refusal came fast. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You didn’t ask. I offered.”

She was silent for a long minute. There was just enough light that he could see her put the binoculars up to her eyes once again. She watched the scene for several long minutes. When her head jerked, he got nervous.

“What?” he asked.

She handed him the binoculars. An SUV had pulled up and a young woman wearing a big coat and knee-high boots was standing next to the vehicle. She was pointing to a young man who was carrying a camera and a tripod.

“Local news,” he said. “It would have taken them a while to get here. Probably the biggest story they’ve had since the summer fires.”

“This is getting worse by the minute,” she said. “I have to get to Denver. Right away. Before the story becomes any bigger.”

“Okay. Maybe we’ll beat the worst of it.”

Or maybe they were about to walk right into the worst of it.

Chapter Six

The snow intensified as they headed toward Denver and the wind started really blowing. Even though they were on an interstate, there had been very little traffic and for the past twenty minutes, they hadn’t seen another car.

“It should start getting light soon,” Chandler said. Not that light would necessarily help the situation. But she felt the need to say something. There had been no conversation for some time, probably because they were both exhausted.

Except for the short rest they’d gotten before the cabin exploded, they’d been up all night. At least she was warm and dry. Before walking back to the truck, she’d put on the dry socks Ethan had carried. Of course, they were wet by the time she’d climbed into the cab of the truck. Ethan had given her another pair of dry socks and aimed the heater vent at her wet jeans. Once they were on their way, she’d pawed through the box of supplies and made them both peanut butter sandwiches. They’d drunk orange juice straight from the bottle because they didn’t have any cups.

She’d been grateful for the food, but after her hunger had been somewhat satisfied, it made it even harder to stay awake and several times she’d caught herself closing her eyes and drifting off for just a minute. She’d woken with a start, grateful that Ethan was able to stay alert.

He had to be just as tired, if not more. He’d had the additional stress of keeping the truck on the snow-covered road.

She felt horrible that she’d dragged him into this situation. He could still be warm in his bed, asleep.

No. Instead, he was battling with many inches of snow and a sharp wind that was creating drifts that the truck was having trouble plowing through. Several times, the back end had started sliding and she knew that it was only Ethan’s superior reflexes that were keeping them on the road.

“This is worse than I expected. It’s coming down so fast.”

“Yeah. If I had to guess, I’d say a couple inches an hour. We’ll be okay,” he said, assuring her.

She wasn’t so sure. The only consolation was that anyone following them was battling with the same snow and likely wasn’t handling it as well as Ethan.

They drove for a couple more miles when in the distance Chandler saw flashing lights. At first she thought it might be police or fire trucks, but as they got closer, she saw it was a big snowplow.

How was there going to be enough room on the road for both of them? She held her breath as Ethan inched his big truck over. She expected the plow to keep going but it slowed and the driver waved at them to stop. He leaned out of the cab of the plow.

Ethan rolled down his window. “Hey,” he said.

The driver wore overalls and had a stocking cap pulled low on his head. He was at least sixty. “Road is closed fifteen miles up ahead,” he yelled. He was still difficult to hear over the wailing wind.

Chandler leaned forward in her seat. “Closed? Totally?”

“Yes, ma’am. We might have been okay if not for the wind picking up. Denver and everything two hundred miles west is socked in. I’m on my way home. They’re pulling the plows off the road.”

She had to get to Denver. “How long before the road is open again?” she asked.

“Depends on when it stops snowing,” the man said. “Last I heard, this is supposed to keep up for most of today.” He wiped his gloved hand across his mouth where ice crystals were quickly forming on his gray mustache. “Next side road to the left takes you into Wheatland. That’s where I’m headed. You might want to follow me. Bessie here will blast through anything that’s blocking the road.” He patted the side of the noisy beast lovingly. “Not much there but at least you’ll be off the road. Dot’s is open 24/7 and you can probably hunker down there and ride out the storm.” He raised his hand and waved. “Good luck,” he yelled. He pulled his head back inside the cab of the snowplow and raised the window.

Ethan rolled up his window and looked at her. “What do you think?”

She couldn’t think. She was too tired. Too worried. “What do you think Dot’s is?”

Ethan shrugged. “If we’re lucky, a nice little restaurant with great food and a wine list. If we’re not, a gas-station-convenience-store combination with hot dogs that have been rolling around in some machine for eight hours. In either case, I’m assuming there’s heat. And quite frankly, that’s probably our biggest need right now.”

“We’ve got blankets,” she said.

“And they will help but we’ll still need to use the heater if we are stalled on this road for any length of time. I’ve got less than half a tank of gas left. We’ll eat through that quickly.”

The smart thing to do was to follow the snowplow. But that meant going backward. Losing time. And she had this horrible feeling that time was not her friend.

But she’d be risking her life if she insisted they stay on the road during a blizzard. Risking Ethan’s life. “Let’s follow the snowplow.”

Turning around on the snow-covered highway took just a moment and they easily caught up with the snowplow. The orange beast cleared a path for them, all the way up to the front door of Dot’s Diner. It was a stand-alone building with a metal frame and a row of windows across the front.

The lights were on and Chandler could see people inside. “I’m guessing no wine list.”

Ethan nodded. “Probably a meat loaf special.”

“Will Molly be okay out here if we go inside?” she asked.

“For a few minutes.” He reached under his seat and pulled out a leash for the dog. “I’ll let her out for a minute to do her thing.”

Chandler waited while the dog inspected several piles of snow before deciding which one to yellow. She peered out her window. The snow was beautiful, really. If it wasn’t so frustrating.

Ethan opened the door and Molly jumped inside and promptly got snow on Chandler. She used the towel to wipe the worst of it. “Lie down,” she said. “Be a good girl and I’ll bring you a cheeseburger.”

Molly was either agreeable or hungry for meat because she did a couple circles on the seat and then plopped down.

Chandler opened her door and trudged through the deep snow into the building. Inside, there was a worn linoleum floor, ugly green booths, an empty pie case, a Spanish-speaking radio station blaring in the kitchen and a small television in the corner that was on mute but had storm updates running across the bottom of the screen.

There was also the smell of coffee and something cinnamon.

And it was blessedly warm.

They took a seat in one of the ugly booths. There were four other diners. Two older men sitting side by side at the short counter. They both wore brown overalls and work boots. There was a pile of dark coats on the empty stool next to them. There was also a young couple, probably both early twenties, who sat in the booth farthest from the door, holding hands across the table. They had already eaten because their dirty plates were pushed to the side.

There was no sign of any employees until a woman, stick-thin, wearing white uniform pants and a white smock, came through the swinging door that separated the dining room from the kitchen. She had a cell phone up to her ear.

“You could call your dad,” Ethan said quietly.

Chandler shook her head.

The woman in white put the phone down, looked in their direction and held up a pot of coffee. When they both nodded, she grabbed two empty coffee cups. As she approached the table, Chandler could hear the click of her shoes on the tile floor. Her gray hair was not quite as short as Ethan’s but darn close. When she got near the table, Chandler could see her name tag. Roxy.

Chandler wasn’t sure what a Roxy should look like but it wasn’t this stern-faced, almost military-type presence.

“Storm blow you in?” Roxy asked.

Chandler nodded.

Roxy poured coffee with a comfortable familiarity, holding the pot high above the cups. “Where you headed to?”

Chandler opened her mouth to speak but Ethan cut her off. “Nebraska. My wife and I drove all night. We need to pick up our kids from my mom’s.”

Wife? Kids? Nebraska?

What the heck? It dawned on her that what she’d said earlier remained true. She was bad at this. Fortunately, Ethan was better. He’d concocted a story without blinking an eye.

“Snowplow stopped us and told us the road was closed,” Ethan continued on.

The woman nodded. “Happens a couple times a year. It’s blowing worse than usual. You want some breakfast?”

Chandler nodded and expected the woman to hand them menus. But she simply stood there.

Even though they’d had the peanut butter sandwiches, Chandler was still hungry. “I’ll...uh...take some pancakes,” she said. “And some bacon, too.”

Ethan took a sip of his coffee. “I’ll have the same but can you add two eggs over easy and a side of hash browns?”

The woman turned and went behind the counter and through the swinging door. Chandler took a drink of her own coffee. It was delicious. She appreciated that Ethan had dropped the idea of calling her dad. She wasn’t ready to do that.

“Hope the kids have been good for Grandma,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “It was the first thing that came to mind.”

“It’s fine. Better than fine. Really smart. If somebody is tracking us and happens to stop here, Roxy’s not going to connect me to some too-inquisitive-for-her-own-good computer analyst.”

“Exactly.”

They sipped their coffee for several minutes. “Do you want children, Ethan?”

He set his coffee cup down hard and one of the men at the counter turned to look at them. Ethan gave him a little wave and the man turned back around.

“I haven’t given it much thought,” he said.

“You’d be a good dad.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know about that. My own dad died when I was ten.”

She’d have been two. She might have heard somewhere along the line that Ethan’s real dad had died but she’d never really given it any thought that they’d both lost a parent when they were very young. Maybe that was the basis of the connection that she’d always felt with Ethan.

She’d met Ethan’s stepdad a couple times when he’d picked Ethan’s mom up after she finished cleaning their house. The man had scared her for some reason. He always had an angry look on his face. “What about your stepdad?”

A look came into Ethan’s eyes that she couldn’t decipher. But she saw him push away his coffee, as if he’d lost the taste for it.

“What ever happened to him? I know your mom is dead, Ethan. I’m sorry about that. Dad and Mack went to the funeral, but I was out of the country at the time on vacation. I guess I never heard what happened to your stepdad.”

“Two years after my mother died, he drank too much one night and ran his car into a lake. He drowned.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I wasn’t. It was too bad he managed to avoid the lake as long as he did.” Ethan sat perfectly still for a long moment, then shook his head, as if in disgust. “Makes me sound like a coldhearted bastard, doesn’t it?”

She knew that wasn’t true. Ethan Moore was a good guy. The past several hours had proved that. Plus, as a young girl, she remembered her father talking about how Ethan watched out for his mother. He used to carry her heavy cleaning supplies and in the winters, when it got dark earlier, he always took the route home from school that would allow him to walk her home.

“He must have been a really bad man,” she said. Without thinking, she reached out and touched his hand.

His skin was warm, warmer than hers, and she felt the heat travel up her arm. With the tips of her fingers, she rubbed the fleshy part between his index finger and thumb.

He didn’t move. She wasn’t sure he was even breathing.

“Ethan,” she said, her voice hesitant.

He pulled his hands back, breaking the connection. Then he picked up his coffee cup and drained it.

She put her hands in her lap. They were shaking and she sure as heck didn’t want him to see that.

“Look,” he said, “let’s just get something to eat and then we’ll try to find a place where we can buy some gas. Maybe get a couple hours of shut-eye.”

He looked tired. Heck, he had to be tired. He’d been awake all night, battling treacherous roads.

“Once the road is opened up, we’ll take off,” Ethan added.

“What if it takes all day?” Chandler asked, hating that she sounded petulant.

“I know it’s hard to be patient but you heard the snowplow driver. He said the storm has pretty much shut down Denver and everything west of it for two hundred miles. Maybe nobody makes it in to work today at your place?”

It was possible, but it ate at her that she was so close but could virtually do nothing to finish the trip. “Damn snow,” she muttered. “Damn mountains.”

That made Ethan smile and she felt the mood lighten. She was happy about that. She hadn’t meant to stir up ugly memories or make him uncomfortable with her touch.

“I don’t see how they’re going to be able to get my car out of the trees,” she said, determined to keep to safe topics.

“You’re probably right. They already know it’s empty, so that won’t be their first priority. They may initiate a search-and-rescue operation but the heavy snow will hamper that effort.”

“The car that hit me, that knocked me over the side of the mountain, is still out there.”

Ethan nodded, looking serious. “And we have to assume that they know that your body wasn’t recovered. We have to assume that if they were responsible for the explosion at your cabin, that they also know by now that there were no bodies found inside. We have to assume that they won’t stop looking.”

“But will they think that I’m headed back to Denver? Maybe I’m running the other direction?”

“Maybe. But you have family and friends in Denver. Two touch points that people need when times are tough.”

“Claudia Linder McCann is not a touch point.”

“But is she a traitor to her country?”

“I wish I knew,” Chandler said. “I just wish I knew.”

They didn’t speak again until Roxy returned with their food. The pancakes were big and nicely browned and the bacon was crisp, just how she liked it. She took a few bites. “We could have been stranded in a much worse place,” she said.

Ethan nodded. “Yeah, this is good. I guess I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”