“That’s what everyone says,” Sarah remarked as they pulled into the motel parking lot.
* * *
A
S
N
ATE
UNLOCKED
the door, his cell phone rang. In a way, he hated to answer it. It was late, both he and Sarah were exhausted, and there just wasn’t anyone he wanted to talk to except the person or persons behind what was going on, and he doubted they would phone to explain themselves.
“Go ahead and take that call,” Sarah said, dropping her handbag on the bedside table and heading to the bathroom.
He dropped into the chair by the small desk and saw on the screen that it was Gallant. “What are you doing still up?” he asked in lieu of a greeting.
“Acting like your darn answering machine. First Diana Donovan called, supposedly to hear what we’d found out about her ex-husband’s murder, but I got the feeling she really wanted to find out where Sarah was.”
“Okay,” Nate said. “And speaking of Sarah, what kind of vehicle does Netters drive? And how about his son? And the mayor, too. And Morris Denton.”
“Let’s see. Netters drives a dark green four-door truck. George Bliss has a white car and a dark truck. Jason drives his dad’s old—wait for it—truck. I don’t know about Denton, but he was in my office with you when Sarah was run off the road.” He paused a second. “Besides, why would any of them run your truck off the road?”
“I don’t know,” Nate admitted.
“There’s something else,” the sheriff continued. “Jessica Foster has been trying to get ahold of you. She finally called my office, and they called me, and I called her and promised I’d pass along a message. She wants to talk to you right away, no matter what time it is.”
“Do you know what this is about?” Nate asked.
“I’ll let her explain,” Gallant said and smothered a yawn. Nate thanked him and clicked off his phone, then clicked it back on and called the Foster house.
Jessica picked it up before the ringtone finished. “Nate? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I tried calling last night and left a message—”
“You did? I must have erased it or something. Oh, Nate, Alex is missing!”
“Missing?”
“No one has seen or heard from him since the day he flew out of here. The last communication put him over the mountains during that storm. As soon as the weather cleared, they started a search, but there’s nothing. Nothing!”
“Wait a second,” Nate said. “What about the aircraft’s emergency beacon?”
“Nothing,” she insisted. “Absolutely no trace. You know how he likes his old equipment and refuses to update. And now another storm is brewing, so they have to call off tomorrow’s search, and he’s out there in the cold—” Her voice broke off while she excused herself and blew her nose, then she was back, a little calmer but not much. “We had a big argument before he left, Nate. I told him not to bother coming home. What if those are the last words I ever say to him?”
Nate took a deep breath. Alex was his best friend, so Nate knew about the occasional arguments. Money was tight at times; in-laws were an issue; his work was demanding. Hers was, too. They both wanted children and yet had struggled conceiving.... Things almost everyone had trouble with at times. But Nate hadn’t known things had gotten this bad between Alex and his wife.
After a long hesitation, she spoke again. “I’m just going to blurt this out, Nate. Maybe Alex disarmed his own beacon. Maybe he decided to cut his losses with me and start fresh.”
“No,” Nate said. “He wouldn’t do it this way.”
“How do you know? He’s a detective in the Blunt Falls police department—if anyone could figure out how to disappear, it would be Alex.”
“He wouldn’t bail on you or his career or his family,” Nate insisted, hoping with all his heart he was right.
“You never know what really goes on with people,” she said, her voice ragged, tired. “You can know them so well and yet not know them at all. Anyway, I didn’t want you to find out he was missing on the news or read it in a paper.”
“I appreciate that,” Nate said.
“Sheriff Gallant told me that Mike Donovan is dead. ‘Murdered,’ he said. Nate, what’s the world coming to?”
Nate had no pithy reassurance to offer. His head was reeling with the images of Alex crashed, injured, helpless in the bitterly cold mountains. “Are you alone?” he asked Jessica just as Sarah emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, damp hair clinging to her beautiful face. She limped over to the bed and perched on the edge, staring at him. Apparently the tone of his voice and the urgency of the conversation had alerted her to his distress.
“My sister is here. I’m okay. How about you, Nate?”
“I’ll come as soon as I can,” he said. “We’ll find him.”
“I hope so,” Jessica responded, and she just seemed to fade away.
Nate quickly filled Sarah in on the details, explaining he would leave for Montana the day after tomorrow. She nodded thoughtfully, then winced as the movement apparently hurt her strained muscles. “What a horrible coincidence,” she said, rubbing her neck with one hand.
He got up and approached her. “Let me do that,” he said. “Come sit in the chair.”
She sat down in his vacated chair and he gently began massaging her neck and shoulders, delighting in the petal softness of her skin and the pure beauty of her back. But even while he enjoyed the scenery, he found himself thinking, at first to himself and then aloud.
“Is it a coincidence?” he said, trying out the words.
“It has to be,” she responded. “How could it be anything else? I mean, one man is shot and another’s plane disappears. The only thing they had in common—”
“—was a shooting they were part of in Shatterhorn, Nevada, months before. And me.”
She grabbed his hand and pulled him around to face her. He sat on the bed so she wouldn’t have to strain herself to look up at him. “And someone’s been trying to kill you since that same day,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about something that happened outside of Vegas when I was on my way up here. One of my tires blew on a nasty piece of highway. At the time, there was a lot of dust blowing across the road, so I’d slowed way down, and traffic was relatively light. I remember thinking had I been going the speed limit or if traffic had been heavier, the resulting crash and repairs might have been a whole lot worse. As it was, it delayed me by two or three hours.”
“So now you’re thinking it wasn’t an accident?”
“In light of everything else, yes. I’d stopped for a late breakfast at a real busy truck stop because I’d left home at the crack of dawn. I was there about twenty-five minutes. The tire blew five miles down the road.”
“I’m getting chills,” Sarah said, hugging herself.
“If I’m right, that means Mike, Alex and I were all targeted on the same day, which just happens to be right after Mike asked us to meet him here. Both the editor and the mayor heard Mike say he was asking us to come and who knows how many people they told. I think from what I’ve heard since then that your father was shut down by so many people he was getting desperate to be heard. He thought he saw a pattern, but he was too mixed-up in his thinking. He thought something horrible was coming tomorrow.”
She nodded and winced again.
He looked at her closely. She was shivering and pale, and he was suddenly ashamed he hadn’t insisted she spend the night in the hospital. But how could he protect her there? Time was running out and their enemy was faceless. The attack on Sarah had changed the stakes. “I retrieved your suitcase from the garage before I found you,” he said. “I’ll go get it out of the truck. You need something warmer than that towel.”
“Don’t go,” she said.
He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. The action jarred loose the towel and his breath caught as it slipped to the floor. “And your mother tried calling you today,” he added around the sudden lump in his throat.
“My phone is dead and the charger unit is in my suitcase.”
“I’ll go get it.”
“Not now,” she said. “It’s a car charger. Anyway, I’m very tired.” She rested her head against his shoulder. “I don’t need to talk to my mother right now, and I certainly don’t need clothes to stay warm—not when I have you.”
He picked her up in his arms and held her, kissing her soft lips as he gently laid her down on the bed. A few minutes later, they were under the sheets, making heat of their own. When they finally parted, Sarah fell asleep almost at once, but Nate lay awake, staring into the dark, thinking....
He kept picturing the last page in Mike’s notebook. A big number twenty-eight circled in red ink.
A cold fist seemed to punch him in the gut as his brain ran through dates and months until he reached May. What day was Memorial Day on this year?
He’d bet it was the twenty-eighth.
Had Mike suspected another shooting would occur in late May?
Chapter Fifteen
Sarah woke up first. She must have groaned when she rolled on her side, because Nate’s arms suddenly surrounded her. She could tell he’d fallen back to sleep when his breathing once again turned slow and steady.
Her handbag lay on the bedside table, and carefully, so as not to awaken Nate, she reached inside for Johnny’s letters.
Nate’s embrace tightened. She left the letters where they were and turned in the circle of his arms to kiss him awake.
“Morning breath,” he warned her without opening his eyes.
“I’ll take my chances,” she said, giving him a chaste kiss.
“How are you? How do you feel?”
“Fine,” she said. “Antsy.”
“Me, too,” he said as though coming fully awake, and she could sense him thinking: this was
the day.
What exactly that meant might still elude both of them, but there was no denying the relentless feeling something was going to happen soon. This was the day the country celebrated its presidents both past and present. Sarah hoped Nate’s buddy Dan had made more headway figuring this out than her father had.
Nate disengaged himself and got out of bed, walking to the bathroom in that sure-footed way of his, totally at ease with his body. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be. The man was built perfectly, muscles defined without bulging, good health exuding through his pores. She was still staring at him as he looked back from the bathroom door and winked at her.
Eventually, Nate retrieved her suitcase from the truck cab and they made it into their clothes. Then Nate called his friend Alex’s wife for an update, and from the stoic look on his face and the paucity of conversation, Sarah could tell nothing had changed. She was unsure why he asked the woman to consult a calendar, or why he nodded as she spoke.
“Alex is still missing,” he said. “And according to Jessica, Memorial Day falls on the twenty-eighth of May this year, as in the number twenty-eight circled in red ink. It makes sense something would happen on that date, as it ties in with all the other shootings on similar holidays.”
“Of course,” Sarah said.
He handed her the phone. “Your turn.”
It was obvious Sarah’s early-morning call had awakened her night-owl mother from a sound sleep. She hung up after five minutes of hedging to find Nate staring at her.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“She apologized for going to the bar. She wants me to come back to Reno. She wants to talk to me.”
“And?” he said.
“And I’ve heard it all before.” She cupped her forehead and closed her eyes for a minute. “I told her I’d come when I could. Let’s get some breakfast.”
“How about I bring something back from the motel office and we eat it here?”
“That sounds good,” she said and laid her head back against the chair. A second later she heard the door close and lock behind him. “Come on, painkiller,” she whispered.
It felt good to be back in jeans and a sweater, although she’d had to trash her boots after the medics cut apart the right one to remove it from her injured leg. She’d brought along running shoes and laced the right one gingerly. As she waited for Nate to return, she thought about going to the nightstand and getting Johnny’s letter, but her leg hurt and she just wanted to sit still. Five minutes later, she heard a noise at the door as though Nate was having trouble opening it, maybe because his hands were full. It wasn’t until she swung it open that the thought crossed her mind—what if it wasn’t Nate?
But it was, and he entered the room in a rush. It was obvious by his expression something was wrong. He closed the door and slid the deadbolt, turning to look at her.
“Now what?” she asked, her heart suddenly racing.
“Stewart Netters is dead.”
Sarah stared at him a second. “Jason’s father? The editor of the
Shatterhorn Gazette?
”
“The motel management had the television on. He was shot sometime early this morning.”
“Poor Jason.”
“They’re looking for Jason in connection with his father’s death,” Nate interrupted. “Someone saw him leaving the newspaper office in a dead run. They interviewed the sheriff’s department.”
By this time, Sarah had turned on the set in their room and found the Reno news station covering the story. A woman’s anguished face filled the screen. Sarah looked up at Nate. “That’s Giselle Netters, Jason’s mother.”
“Turn it up,” Nate urged.
“I don’t believe it, not for a minute, not any of it,” Giselle was saying. “Jason would never, ever do something like this. He loves his father. He would never hurt him. Stew couldn’t sleep last night—he was troubled about something—so he went in early to the office. The sheriff’s department has this all wrong, I swear. They should be looking for the person who murdered my husband, not wasting time trying to make a case against our son. Jason, please, if you can hear me, come home....”
Her tear-streaked face was replaced by that of an anchorwoman sporting rigidly coiffed red hair. “You’ve been listening to the alleged attacker’s mother, Giselle Netters, wife of shooting victim Stewart Netters. Mr. Netters’s body was discovered early this morning by an employee. He’d been shot once in the chest with what sources claim is a .380. Shatterhorn mayor George Bliss was unavailable for comment.”
The newswoman paused before adding in a more modulated voice, “Viewers will remember the small community of Shatterhorn faced another disaster just last Labor Day, when a nineteen-year-old gunman by the name of Thomas Jacks injured five and killed four in a crowded mall before turning his weapon on himself. And in a strange twist of fate, the man who was with Jacks as he took his dying breath was shot and killed three days ago by an unknown assailant. Speculation is growing that perhaps Jason Netters was involved with that shooting, as well. In other news...”
“Turn it off, please,” Nate said.
Sarah was happy to do as he’d requested. For a moment they both sat there staring at each other, and then Sarah took a steadying breath. “Maybe this is it,” she said. “Maybe it’s over.”
“What do you mean?” Nate asked her.
“Dad speculated something would happen on Presidents’ Day, and it has.”
“I don’t think so,” Nate said.
“There are similarities,” she insisted. “A shooting committed by a young man—”
“But not random,” Nate interrupted. “A son killing his father is never random. And Jason didn’t then kill himself—he apparently fled. If he’s guilty. If he did this.”
Sarah, feeling deflated, nodded. As horrible as this recent event was, she’d experienced a few moments of pure relief—the worst was over at last. But now she could see there was no way to know that, not until they found Jason.
“Are you hungry?” he asked her.
“Not anymore.”
“Me, neither. Let’s drive over to the mayor’s house and ask him what happened in Netters’s office yesterday after I left. Maybe he’s not making a public comment because he has information the sheriff doesn’t want him to reveal.”
“Would he tell us?”
“Probably not, but even knowing he has something might help and maybe Gallant would share. It’s someplace to start.”
They left the room soon after that, pleased to see the weather system that had appeared so threatening the night before had barely dusted the streets with snow. Both of them were on the quiet side. In an abstract way, Sarah recognized the care with which Nate checked the cars behind them, the pedestrians on the street, his eyes constantly scanning everyone and everything as though he was looking for a killer.
Perhaps that was because he was.
* * *
I
T
WAS
OBVIOUS
to Nate that Mayor George Bliss lived in a style befitting his family’s wealth, from the locked rod-iron gates at the head of the curving driveway to the white mansion visible inside the fenced grounds. An American flag, beautiful against the grayish sky, waved above the roof. A call box sat next to the gate complete with a video monitor, which Nate got out of the truck and activated.
A decisive voice he recognized from a phone call made a couple of days before responded. The image showed a balding man with a prominent, thin nose. “Yes?”
“I’m here to see Mayor Bliss,” Nate said.
The man looked annoyed as he said, “You media people have been told over and over again that the mayor isn’t giving statements right now.”
“I’m not with the media,” Nate said, giving his name. “And you are?”
“The mayor’s secretary, William Tucker. I’m sorry, sir, but I was just leaving. If you’ll try again tomorrow—”
Nate tried out a smile. “Mr. Tucker, I need to ask Mayor Bliss a couple of quick questions.”
The man’s irritated frown curved a little. “Are you the Nate Matthews who was at the mall last Labor Day?”
“That’s me.”
“I see. Nevertheless, the message is the same. The mayor is indisposed.”
“In what way?”
“Sir, in deference to the high regard in which the mayor holds you and your friends, I will tell you what I haven’t divulged to the media. Mayor Bliss is not presently in Shatterhorn.”
“Can you tell me where he is?”
For a moment, it appeared a challenging glint flared in the man’s eyes. “He flew out this morning for Helena. I’m not supposed to advertise that information, so please don’t share it. The mayor and Mr. Netters were good friends. This horrible...event...has hit him hard.”
“May I ask what he’s doing in Helena?”
“He’s attending a Presidents’ Day celebration to show support for the governor. He agreed to go just last night.”
Presidents’ Day.
“Okay. Well, thanks for your time.”
“Come back tomorrow morning,” the man said curtly. “I’ll make sure the mayor is expecting you.”
Nate got back in the truck and faced Sarah, who had leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes. She looked delicate and beaten, her face a little black-and-blue, her lips pale. He swallowed a knot as she opened her eyes and met his gaze. “Well?”
“Bliss isn’t here,” he told her, his voice choked. What was he doing with this woman? She was hurt; she should be home in bed. If he truly cared for her, would he keep dragging her into danger? Wouldn’t he insist she go back to Reno or Virginia, where it was safe, instead of subjecting her to this awful series of violent situations that just never seemed to stop?
Because it was suddenly very clear to him that the situation with her mother, while volatile, had never put Sarah’s life in imminent danger. He and Mike had brought the violence, and it was still following Nate around like a very cruel shadow. Sarah was a victim every bit as much as her father, and all Nate had done was replace her needy mother with his own needs. True to form, Sarah had followed that misguided sense of loyalty that seemed inherent to her soul and almost died because of it. Again.
He cleared his throat. “I’m going to take you back to the motel, where I hope you’ll lock yourself in the room and not answer the door unless it’s for food you ordered yourself.”
Her eyes widened. “Where are you going?”
He told her about Helena as he started the truck. “Do you know where it is?”
“A couple of hours driving, far less by plane,” she said.
“What about the roads? If the storm dumped snow, they could be impassable.” Unbidden, he pictured Alex lost in those mountains, freezing, hurt.
“No, they should be fine. It’s not a bad drive.” She narrowed her eyes. “
Why
are you going to Helena?”
“To see the mayor.”
“But why? The chances you’ll even be able to get close to him seem remote, and you said he’ll be back by tonight.”
“Tonight I’m going up to that B-Strong camp.”
“Why?”
“I want to get a feel for the place, because tomorrow I need to drive to Blunt Falls to see what I can do to help find Alex.”
She was quiet for a second. “I can’t leave tomorrow. I have to take care of moving the coins and contacting a lawyer.”
“I know,” he agreed. “And your mother wants you back in Reno.”
She looked down at her hands, then at him. “What are you really saying, Nate?”
He paused for a second, measuring his words. “I’m saying maybe it’s time we each took care of business. You have your family. I have this.”
“Do you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Why can’t you let the police take care of it?”
“That’s not the way I work.”
“You’re beginning to sound like my father.”
His mouth opened, but no words came out. He wasn’t even sure what they were fighting about, only that her accusation hurt like salt rubbed in an open wound. After several seconds of tense stillness, he muttered, “When you’ve been in law enforcement as long as I have, you get a sixth sense about things.”
“You’re talking about a gut feeling,” she said. “What is your gut telling you?”
“That the mayor is in danger.”
“From Jason?”
“I’m not sure. But he and Stewart were both in Jason’s father’s office yesterday, and Jason is hiding something. I can guarantee you that. It’s worth a drive to Helena and that’s why I have to go. But there’s no reason for you to tag along.”
“No need for me to tag along?” she repeated, obviously annoyed. “Well, it’s not that easy. This isn’t just about you, Nate.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Didn’t you? I’m going, too.”
“Sarah—”
“Don’t you know by now that there is no point arguing with me?”
“That’s kind of scary, isn’t it?”
“I’m usually pretty reasonable,” she objected, her voice dry.
“No, I mean it’s kind of scary that I know that about you.” He glanced at her as he said this and his expression struck her as uneasy.
“I see your point,” she said softly. “But isn’t it kind of nice, too?”
“Yeah,” he said, but it came with a quick turn of his head and, after that, utter silence.
* * *
S
ARAH
CLOSED
HER
EYES
,
drifting in and out of restless slumber. Nate had the heat turned up and that felt good, because everything hurt more today than it had the day before.