Dangerous Reunion Read online

  The only thing out there besides the creek and the woods was a pair of tunnels where the train tracks crossed the water, wide, shady and muddy. According to his great-aunts, in their youth, hoboes used them as resting spots while waiting for the next train. Anyone wanting to pass through that area would do so on the railroad tracks, where ties and gravel provided a reasonably level surface.

  Anyone passing through who wasn’t worried about being seen.

  Someone just wanting to steal a basket of vegetables? Not likely.

  He pulled out his phone and opened a satellite map feature. As he zoomed in, blobs formed into shapes: lines cutting through woods, clearings growing larger, houses becoming visible. The final image confirmed his assumption: in the rough triangle formed by the Mueller, Brown and Pickering houses was nothing but trees. No driveway snaking through, not even a hint of a trail. The only passable way through was the train tracks.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt to bring a dog out here. CCPD didn’t have a canine of their own, but there were several trackers they’d worked with before who volunteered their dogs’ services. The heavy rains likely would have destroyed any scent of the Muellers or their kidnapper, but that bit of tomato had been tossed there after the rain, and anyone who’d taken this route to the house so soon after the owners’ disappearance was definitely someone Ben wanted to talk to.

  He texted Morwenna, asking her to contact their first-choice volunteer, and got back a quick On it. As he slid the phone back into its case, behind him, Yashi slapped at an insect, drawing his attention back to her. To quote Great-Aunt Weezer, she looked like a horse rode hard and put away wet. Everything about her was limp and damp, from her hair to her dress to her very self, and lines etched the corners of her eyes and her mouth.

  And yet she was still double-take triple-take stop-a-man-dead-in-his-tracks beautiful. He’d never been particularly drawn to blondes, had never cared about the color of a woman’s eyes, but one night he’d awakened in the middle of the night beside her, the lamp on the bedside table still lit, and realized that somehow, at some time, his definition of a beautiful woman had narrowed drastically to this woman. Not her hair, her eyes, her golden skin, not her breasts or the curve of her hips or her amazing legs, but everything that was her.

  After they’d broken up, he’d figured he would eventually get past that, but he hadn’t. Sure, he could look at other women and agree that, yes, they were beautiful, but it didn’t mean the same thing. They didn’t have the sucker-punch-to-the-gut effect on him that she did.

  A mosquito buzzed his ear a half second before she swatted another one. “I was wondering where the bugs were,” she said ruefully. “Now I just wish they’d go back.”

  “August is meant to make us appreciate September.” Or so his mother had claimed. Of course, she’d had six kids at home who went back to school the third week of August, so she had likely referred to that rather than cooler days.

  “I can appreciate September just fine without being steamed and eaten alive by skeeters in August.” She climbed the steps ahead of him, her dress too damp to swish but still allowing a pretty picture of her legs. “Lolly would have a fit if she saw all this mud.”

  “Lolly will be thrilled to see every clump and clod of it. Besides, Will, Brit and Theo all have experience at scrubbing.”

  Ben gazed across the road at his house with momentary longing. It was cool inside and there were leftovers from last night’s dinner in the refrigerator and two dozen things he’d rather be doing, even if one of them was just lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling. But after stopping by to check on Yashi as Sam had asked, he still had a list of people he needed to talk to before calling it a day.

  When they reached the driveway, he watched her pick up the baskets and put them in the passenger seat. Her skirt pulled snugly when she bent at the waist and her top half disappeared inside the car, revealing a lump in her pocket. He’d taught her to shoot a long time ago and picked out the weapon for her. It had surprised him, having spent his entire adult life as a cop, that seeing her with the compact pistol at her waist had given his usual arousal a little kick.

  She straightened, caught him looking and raised one brow. “I could have put it in my purse, and then where would I be when I needed it?”

  How had she known—? Because she knew him. Because she’d listened when he’d told her, If you’re going to carry it, wear it. Don’t stick it in your pocket, don’t tuck it in your waistband, don’t drop it into that bottomless pit you call a purse. Holster. Clip-on or shoulder.

  She’d listened to everything he said, even throwaway remarks that had been all joke and no truth, that she had known to be all joke and no truth. Things he’d said in private. In bed. Naked. Just him and her and Bobcat, giving Ben baleful looks between catnaps.

  And then she’d gotten him on the witness stand at Lloyd Wind’s trial and taken those remarks out of context to use against him. To bring his character into question and to convict an innocent man.

  He waited for the clenching of his jaw, the tightening of his nerves, the sense of betrayal and loss—those things that always accompanied memories of the end of their relationship. The anger that she’d sacrificed him for her career. The hurt.

  A muscle in his jaw twitched, but that was about it. There was too damn much other stuff going on to focus on old regrets.

  A car came around the curve to the west, slowed to a crawl at the clearing where the Mueller house sat, and the passengers, both front and back, began snapping pictures with their cell phones. Ben might have ignored them if they’d been kids, finding some stupid thrill in taking photos of a house where a crime had occurred, but these were women at least in their fifties. He shifted, blocking Yashi from their view, and gave them a hard look as they passed.

  Neither of them had stopped with the picture taking.

  “Bet they’re already sharing them on social media,” Yashi said, her voice as hard as his expression. “Got to be first on their friends list to stir up the ghouls. Whatever happened to empathy, respect and decency?”

  “The internet. World’s best invention.”

  They finished the statement together: “World’s worst invention.”

  He swiped away the sweat trickling toward the corners of his eyes, then pushed shut the Bug’s door. “Don’t come out here alone again.”

  He didn’t know what response to expect from her. Assistant DA Baker had always—almost—respected Detective Little Bear’s advice. Away from work, Yashi Baker had sometimes found Ben Little Bear hardheaded and old-fashioned. So far, as family member of kidnap victims, she’d been amenable and helpful.

  She looked around them, her gaze sliding over thick stands of trees, boulders bigger than her car, leaf canopies and tangled bushes, briars and weeds gone wild, and a shudder trembled through her. Was she thinking how isolated the place seemed, given that it was within city limits? Considering how many hundreds of hiding places were out there? How many countless secrets the woods could hold?

  He loved the isolation. With his job, he needed the lack of other neighbors, the hundreds of trees per person, the quiet and peace. Yashi had loved it back then, too. Right now, though, he imagined it was hard for her to find peace in the place where Will and Lolly and Theo had been violently taken from their home. Hence, the pistol in her pocket.

  After a bleak moment, she gave a shake of her head. “No. I won’t.”

  She walked around the little yellow car and opened the door, but before she could climb inside, he spoke again. “Yashi...do you need anything?”

  It was a question they had asked each other a thousand times: on the way to each other’s house, on a trip to the kitchen for a drink, when heading out of the office for anything. The answer had been no, as often as not, but the offer had always mattered. Now her expression turned bittersweet. “Just my family.”

  “Will seeing Brit tomorrow
help?”

  She nodded.

  “Lois will make arrangements.”

  After another nod, she slid into the car, finally releasing her grip on her phone, flexed her fingers, then backed around his truck and headed toward town. Ben called Morwenna as he walked to the truck.

  “I was just getting ready to text you,” she said in her bright way. It wasn’t that Morwenna didn’t feel complete sympathy for the victims the police department dealt with. Bright was just the way she was. “Did you know they have competitions for search and rescue dogs? They get to practice tracking and get prizes, and it makes the babies happy. Anyway, Booger and Zeus are both on their way home from Kansas City from just such an event. Booger’s mom said she would call you in the morning. Will that be too late?”

  “He’s a bloodhound. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as ‘too late’ for him.” Zeus, despite the more noble name, was a beagle and a very good scent tracker, just not as good as Booger. Besides, with a good twelve inches or more of dead leaves piled on the ground under the trees, little Zeus might get buried, while nothing stopped the bigger, brawnier Booger from pushing on through.

  After getting off the phone with Morwenna and climbing into the truck, Ben hoped that he was big and brawny enough to share that trait with the dog. That nothing would stop him from pushing on through.

  * * *

  Monday morning Yashi left her office less than an hour after she got there. She had paperwork to deal with, a couple of clients to call, but she was too frazzled to sit at her desk in an empty building. Regular everyday noises made her jump, reminding her of the prickling of her nerves at Will’s house yesterday, and when she tried to concentrate, her mind diverted back to the only thing that truly mattered right now: her family.

  She’d delivered Lolly’s baskets yesterday before heading home. Juanita Lewis might have been the secretary in an office of youngish accountants, but she was also the mother hen who’d watched over them and made sure the older people—or the clients—didn’t eat them alive. Tears had come to her eyes when Yashi handed her the vegetables. If she’d known anything at all about the kidnappings, she’d hidden it well.

  Kirby Adams had been concerned, too, he and his wife sitting beside each other on their sofa and holding hands. He told her he’d given a list of Brit’s teammates and the names of other teams and coaches in their league to the detective who’d interviewed him, and he’d asked her to please let him know when she had news. He was young enough and handsome enough, she’d thought, to catch the eye of most teenage girls, but maybe instead it was Brit who’d caught his eye. Maybe this happily-married-guy thing was camouflage. Maybe his wife, at twenty-six or twenty-eight, was too old for his tastes...or, more likely, Yashi was seeing things that weren’t there.

  It had been her job once to make judgments about people, to study evidence, to decide whether the police had built a sufficient case to convict a person of a crime, then to persuade a jury of that. It hadn’t given her any kind of know-all magic, hadn’t enabled her to look into a person’s eyes and detect his guilt or innocence. She had no evidence that Juanita Lewis or Kirby Adams was even remotely involved in the kidnapping, and looking at them through the lens of suspicion wasn’t fair to them nor healthy for her.

  The call from Lois Gideon telling her she could see Brit at ten was what propelled her out of the office. It was another mucky, yucky day, the heat and the humidity both hovering in the high nineties. She broke a sweat as soon as she stepped out of the building, and the interior of her car was as stifling as an oven. As soon as the engine was running, she rolled down the windows, turned the air-conditioning to high and peeled out of the lot and onto the highway to get some wind blowing through the Bug.

  Because she hadn’t had any appointments on her calendar, she’d dressed in capris and a sleeveless top, and she’d braided her hair before securing it into a knot at her nape. As she sped toward town, she fumbled on a pair of dark glasses, then punched a button on the dash to start her favorite CD. Wayman Tisdale had been a gift to Oklahoma basketball, Ben used to say. Yashi thought his better talent had been his music. His jazz CDs never failed to make her feel—well, if not happy, at least better.

  There was plenty of time for happy when her cousins were home.

  She had put together a small bag for Brit the night before: a box of pickle pops to go in the freezer, a few magazines, an assortment of nail polishes and gems, her own iPod with a wide assortment of music and a small journal with pens filled with pink, lime and purple ink. After one more stop, she drove to the address Lois had given her, recognizing the house as Quint Foster’s. Cedar Creek didn’t have a lot of options to protect a minor that didn’t involve juvenile facilities. The only place safer than this, in Yashi’s opinion, would be Sam’s or Ben’s house, but they couldn’t put little Sameen in possible danger, and they needed Ben out working on the case.

  After parking next to Quint’s old truck, she gathered her bags and walked to the door. He must have been watching from the window, because he opened the door before she’d had a chance to juggle the bags so she could knock. He ushered her in, closed the door and locked up behind her.

  Yashi gave him a steady look up and down. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, along with a weapon and his badge on his belt. He’d aged a few extra years since she’d last spent any time with him—losing his fiancée would do that to a man—but he was as handsome as ever, and a hard-earned contentment had settled over him, softening his features. “You look good, Quint.”

  “So do you.”

  He hugged her, and the years slipped away, taking with them her regret for not attending Belinda’s funeral, for not reaching out to him when she died, but she hadn’t known if she would be welcome. After her stunt in the courtroom with Ben, for the short time she’d remained on the job, she’d become the ADA that no cop wanted to deal with. A few, Ben included, had been openly hostile. Lois had chided her. Sam and Quint, then assistant chief, had been polite but disappointed in her.

  She’d never had anyone in her life to disappoint before, and it had been much worse than she expected.

  When he stepped back, his nose wrinkled. “Do I smell pickles?”

  She smiled. “Some people bring flowers or candy. I bring pickle juice.”

  “Huh. Brit is in the kitchen.” He gestured toward the open door between the dining room and kitchen.

  “Have you put her to work washing dishes?” Yashi teased as they headed that way.

  “That’s JJ’s job, and she protects it fiercely. She’s afraid if someone else does dishes, then she’ll be expected to actually cook something.”

  Brit didn’t jump up to greet Yashi the way she expected, in part, probably, because of the sizable bundle of tan fur curled in her lap. Its nose was hidden behind folded paws, but it lifted its brown eyes to inspect Yashi. The eyes narrowed at the pickle juice smell but widened when catching the scents from the other bag. “This is Chica,” Brit said, giving the dog a hug that lingered. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

  “Gorgeous,” Yashi agreed. Even if it wasn’t true, who insulted a pit bull who was at the perfect level to eat your face? She set the bags on the island, sliding the smaller one to Brit, then gave her a cautious hug, making sure Chica didn’t mind. “How are you, sweetie?”

  Brit leaned her head against Yashi’s shoulder. “I’m okay. I mean, I’m not, like, in a jail cell somewhere with other kids who are in trouble, right? And Chica sleeps with me and growls if she hears anything, and Officer Lois or Officer Quint or Detective Logan is always here. She’s nice. She’s from South Carolina, and she beat up that girl that killed the rich girl and assumed her identity a while back, and the girl was, like, half her age.”

  Yashi smiled, too. She’d read about the case earlier that year—had even gotten a call from Hank Benton asking if she would represent his son, the boyfriend, Zander. She’d told him no. Everyone was entitled to
the best defense possible, but that didn’t mean it had to come from her. Getting involved with that case, when the killers had also tried to kill Quint and JJ, would have been impossible for her.

  “JJ’s half again her age,” Quint said from the other side of the island, where he was chopping ingredients on a board. “She was twenty-five. JJ’s thirty-seven.”

  Brows furrowed, Brit did the math. Yashi could actually see the moment “half her age” and “half again her age” revealed their separate meanings to her brain. “Oh. Big difference. Good thing she’s not here to kick my butt.”

  Drying his hands on a towel, Quint tossed it on the island, then headed toward the back door, where he lifted a leash from a hook. “Chica, wanna go out?”

  The dog shifted from lazy and too comfortable to a tan blur streaking across the tile to the door. Yashi caught Quint’s gaze and gave an appreciative nod, then slid onto the stool next to Brit, nudging her with one shoulder. “Want me to put your treat in the freezer?”

  Brit started to push the bag toward her, then stopped and unfolded the top. Her mouth tilted in the faintest of smiles when she lifted out the carton and saw the chocolate chip ice cream floating in a sea of warm caramel sauce. “I’d probably better eat it now. I wouldn’t want any of the caramel to go to waste. You want a bite?”

  “No, thanks, sweetie.” If Wayman Tisdale made her happy, Wayman and ice cream made her deliriously so. She’d devoured her own rocky road cone sitting in the Braum’s parking lot. “I delivered the baskets to Mrs. Lewis and Coach Adams yesterday.”

  Plastic spoon still depositing food into her mouth, Brit hugged her again. “Thank ’ou. Mom’ll be—” She removed the spoon. “Mom will be glad.”