The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy Page 5

  “Yeah.” He could hear the question in Alice’s voice, but he wasn’t sure he had the right questions, let alone any answers. “What’s going on in her head? She was almost killed this morning. I can understand her panicking, taking off. But this,” with a sweeping gesture he indicated the bland empty room, “this isn’t panic.”

  Alice turned slowly, studying the room as if it might give up more information if she just looked hard enough. “No, it isn’t.” She frowned. “She’s decided on some course of action, but I don’t think it includes us.”

  “She doesn’t trust us.” If she had tarred him with Neuman’s dirty brush—well, she ought to have more sense. He saw amusement in Alice’s face. “What?”

  “It isn’t personal, Matt.”

  The hell it isn’t, he wanted to snap back. Couldn’t because Alice wouldn’t understand. Which left him nothing to say that made sense. Luckily Riggs came back, looking more melancholy than when he left. Matt snapped at him instead, “What you got?”

  “Doorman wasn’t much use about Gwynne. Says she left in a private car. He doesn’t remember the tag, though he was pretty sure it was local. Apparently the romance writer has great legs.” Riggs leered good-naturedly as he held out a computer sheet. “Here’s a list of her calls. I dialed them on my way up.”

  “Who’d you get?”

  Riggs shrugged. “What? Not who. Computers. You ever had one of them whine in your ear?” He stuck a finger in the offended orifice with a pained look. “I faxed the list in. We should have something by the time we get back.”

  The cops arrived, filling the emptiness with crime scene techs. The woman detective from the safe house gave him a tired nod before getting down to business.

  At the door, Matt hesitated, then looked back. The late afternoon sun shone in the windows at a cruel angle, bleeding what little color there was out of the room. Dust hovered in the beams of light. The coconut scent had faded, leaving the pervasive smell of hotel and drying blood to reclaim the air. Despite the bustle of activity the room felt more empty than the bloody, burned out safe house he’d stood in—was it only this morning? It felt longer. A lifetime longer.

  He felt all of his forty-five years, plus some. Maybe it was running into Hayes again. He didn’t want to think about the past, hated postmortems on it. Just reminded him of what he couldn’t change. What was gone. The lives of friends. His marriage. The confident idealism of the young man he had been.

  Odd that Dani Gwynne was clearer in his mind right now than his ex-wife. He hadn’t seen Judith for almost ten years, but they had been married for eight—just long enough to find out how wrong they were for each other.

  Judith hated what Matt did. Despite her sleek image and high profile job, she had kept her sixties prejudice towards cops and Feds. Matt thought she’d get over it. She thought he’d get over being one. Instead they got over each other. Hayes’ entry into the ranks of hit men—and Matt’s problems in dealing with it—had helped speed the demise. Judith’s infidelity hadn’t helped either.

  Ironic to think the day his divorce was final was the high spot of that year. What he remembered of it. His brothers had taken him on a drinking binge that cost him three days and gave him the worst hangover of his life. He had returned to his work free of distractions to face the ugly reality that there were things he couldn’t change no matter how good he did his job.

  He shook his head. This case was messing with his head big time. There was an itch he couldn’t scratch between his shoulder blades. Maybe it was because of that bastard Hayes popping up on the horizon. Or Gwynne dropping off it. It didn’t matter. A man couldn’t live half his life around horses and not know a serious pile of shit when he saw it in his way or wish he knew a way to avoid it.

  Alice touched his arm, bringing him back to the present. “Find something else?”

  Just some old memories, but he couldn’t tell her that. He hunched his shoulders impatiently. “No. Let’s get out of here.”

  FIVE

  His elbows propped on a littered desk, Matt rubbed his weary eyes with the heels of his hands. He didn’t try to hold back a sound that was half sigh, half groan. It was long after midnight, long after the retreat of the summer sun. Behind him the mountains were hidden, the city at their base a myriad of patterned lights. He dumped another cup of coffee down his throat, but despite the rat-a-tat of his heart, he got no lift in spirits or energy.

  After the setback at the hotel, Matt had returned to the office determined to be optimistic. Only Alice had expressed doubt in a speedy resolution.

  Riggs was derisive when she voiced it. “Of course we’ll find her. We’re the Marshals, Alice. She’s a romance writer. No contest.” Hours later, his face lined with exhaustion, Riggs had obviously been forced to reassess the mettle of the romance writer. He’d paced into the room, passing Alice’s desk with a snapped, “Don’t say it.”

  “What?” She had looked a bit too innocent and Matt found he still had a grin in him.

  “You know what.” Riggs dropped down in the chair in front of Matt’s desk. “Nada. Zip. Zero. Sorry, Matt.”

  “Wonder how Bates found out Dani was still alive?” Alice voiced the million dollar question.

  “The coroner promised to sit on the ID until tomorrow,” Matt said. Which meant zip. Bates was a wise guy with longevity because he had sources inside the law enforcement community. It would be stupid to assume they could keep anything from him. The Service had not got its reputation by being stupid—though there were exceptions, he had to admit, thinking of Neuman.

  Matt gave Riggs a quick rundown on their lack of progress in finding the rat in Neuman’s woodpile. About Neuman’s debts and McBride’s rich fiancée. “Both our boys have reasons to sell out. Both could use an influx of cash. For all we know, they could be working together. Once we knew Hayes was hunting, we told Neuman about Oliver’s death. Idiot has no clue where Gwynne might go for help.”

  “So far,” Alice said, “they both appear too shook up to have ideas, let alone good ideas.”

  “Great.” Riggs’ mouth opened in a jaw popping yawn. Before it was completely finished, he asked, “What about Gwynne’s laptop? Anything helpful there?”

  Alice propped an elbow on her desk, then her chin on her hand, caught his yawn and passed it on. “Maybe. We found out she’s been using the modem in her lap top to surf the Internet almost from the moment she went into protective custody.”

  “Oh?” Riggs subsided deeper in the chair, lowering his chin to his chest. “What does it mean?”

  “We’re not sure,” Matt admitted, fighting against the insistence of the shared yawn. Tired was not an option.

  “She could just be doing research…” Alice began.

  Riggs lifted his head. “She writes romance novels. Only thing she’d need to know…”

  “Don’t say it, Riggs, until you’ve actually read one, just—don’t.”

  Riggs studied her face and decided not to. “Any indication she’s left the area?”

  Matt shook his head.

  “What about who picked her up? We figure out where and how Gwynne contacted someone?”

  Matt let Alice answer that one, while he finally gave in to the compulsion of the yawn. He quickly passed it back to Riggs.

  “You know that fancy laptop Gwynne bought?”

  Riggs nodded.

  “Well,” Alice continued, “it seems she can also use it as a telephone.”

  Riggs blinked, opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again to ask, “What about the wire taps? Anything there.”

  “No…” Matt stopped. “Son of a bitch. She doesn’t have to phone home. She’s been emailing half the country. Alice, get someone back on her agent. Riggs, get with Sebastian. I want to know if Gwynne contacted anyone she’s been emailing regularly.”

  “I’m on it.” Alice picked up the telephone. Riggs nodded, dragged himself out of the chair, and shuffled out with the yawn in tow. It lasted at least until he was out of si
ght.

  Matt leaned back, his hands beating on the arms of his chair. He already had people running a cross check to see if any of the people she had been chatting with online were local. Their computer guy, Sebastian had been quick to point out she might have more than one way onto the Net. It might not be possible to get a complete list of her online contacts.

  “Like death and taxes, networks go down. All the web’s surfers gotta have alternate access.” Sebastian, a spare cartoon with a stand-up shock of red hair, sat tonelessly in his beat-up, government-issue chair as he tried to explain the unexplainable. A genius with computers, he’d started hacking as a teen on a Commodore 64, been caught where he wasn’t supposed to be, then recruited by the Marshals Service, since it takes a hacker to find one. So far he had not disappointed.

  Access costs money, so Matt directed Henry to sniff out her money trail and then turned back to Sebastian for some more bad news. There might not be a money trail. There were a lot of ways to get free, anonymous access to the Internet. Matt heard a “but” in Sebastian’s voice and straddled a chair across from him. “So?”

  “There’s more than one way to search the Internet for information and people. I know this guy, Boomer Edison, a real character. Looks like a football player, thinks he’s a cowboy, is a computer genius with a nifty little program that searches for online identities.”

  “Identities?” Matt knew what the Internet was not—a person, place, or thing. He had a vague idea of what it was—the name given the monstrous cyberspace frontier of computers, networked world-wide into a faster-than-the-speed-of-light information exchange. What did identities have to do with that?

  Sebastian leaned back in his chair, his hands with their extra long fingers moving in a version of sign language. “A lot of surfers like the Net because it’s a place where there are none of the usual visual cues that people use to pigeon-hole each other. No one is fat or thin, short or tall, young or old, you don’t even have to be male or female. There’s only your handle—the nickname you choose—and your words to define who and what you are. Some people create different handles and identities, for different gathering places on the Net. It’s not as strange as you might think. We’re all different things to different people. Net surfers just admit it.”

  “Okay.” Matt could understand the concept. His ex-wife had been a lot of things to a lot of men during the decline of their marriage. Matt rubbed the bridge of his nose. “And this Boomer’s program does—what?”

  Sebastian spun to face him. “It takes a known identity, analyzes written posts associated with it, then searches for similarities in writing style, content, word usage to produce a list of possible matches. All we need to give him is a good representative sample of Gwynne’s style—which we have right here in her computer’s output file.”

  It sounded like a real long, long shot, but Matt gave him the go-ahead. Anything to add a new strand to the net he was trying to throw around Dani Gwynne and, by extension, Jonathan Hayes.

  Hours later with nothing new on the horizon, Matt silently admitted to rising concern. He shoved aside the last of the reports and stood up, stretching his aching back and cramped muscles before turning to the window. With his hands in his pockets, he stared down at a city laid out in lights. The dark sky was moon-less, the stars hidden by a drifting cloud cover.

  Tomorrow would be a good day for climbing if the cloud cover held. Keep the temperature down, long as it didn’t rain. He wished he were up at the cabin, waiting with his brothers for first light. Attacking a rock face, feeling for cracks and fissures, fighting granite and gravity. In motion. Anything but standing still and wondering what to do next. Wondering what the romance writer would do next. Wondering, most of all, what Hayes would do next.

  He heard the low hum from the air conditioning, felt the rising chill now that there was only his body heat against a thermostat set to cool a crowd. The place even smelled deserted. Old sweat. Stale coffee. Staler perfume.

  He didn’t mind being alone, had made it a personal choice. After his divorce an almost female-free life had seemed a blessing. When had it become a habit? Something he had stopped thinking about?

  He hadn’t stopped looking. He wasn’t dead, just unwilling to climb the slippery slopes and look inside a woman’s head. When they asked and he was around, he went. Which wasn’t often. The job was a parasite eating away at his free time. He had done nothing to cut it back. Why go home, when the apartment he shared with his brother was usually empty? More entertaining to be out kicking bad guys’ butts.

  He felt Dani’s eyes boring into his mind, digging up his secrets. Would her real eyes be as penetrating? He gave in to her insistence and turned to face her. In the safe house her eyes had entreated him. Now they mocked him. How could a pair of photographic eyes make him wonder if he had been missing something? He had been happy before he met her, would be happy again when she testified and was back in New Orleans. She was a romance writer, so of course she wanted a girl for every guy.

  The mockery in her eyes seemed to deepen. With a muttered curse, he turned back to his desk. He was too tired. That’s all. The day had started too early and gone on way too long. Now it was too late to go home. Probably meet himself coming back. He rubbed the back of his neck. He could stretch out on the couch in the employee’s lounge long enough to take the edge off tired.

  He should have gone to sleep the minute he lay down. Usually he could sleep anywhere, even on a couch that was too short and as comfortable as a slab of cement. This night he stared at the ceiling with sleep gritty eyes while bits of Dani’s online posts played in his head.

  …Men think we can’t live without them, but it’s chocolate we can’t live without…

  …I think GHOST was a hit because we all want to believe evil will be punished in the end—though it’s hard to believe good will triumph when you’re sitting in the dark and out of M&M’s…

  What was she doing, what was she thinking? He had gone over every detail in her file, got a glimpse inside her head through her online posts that Sebastian had printed out for him. What did it mean? There was no logic in them that a guy could hang his thoughts on. They were all awash in feelings, in emotions. Emotions didn’t put away bad guys. Emotions left big gaping holes in your flanks and got your friends killed because you weren’t paying attention.

  He sat up, then stood up, found himself looking out the window without a conscious decision. She had guts, he’d give her that. What was it she’d written to one friend?

  Like the willow tree, I bend, not break, though sometimes I wish it were the other way around.

  Was that the easy answer to the romance writer with a purple boa, who surfed the Internet under the noses of her protectors, left Sebastian eating her cyber-dust, and vanished into the city night lights like a seasoned pro? She bent, but didn’t break?

  A fire engine siren wailed in the distance. He could see the flicker of its red lights heading east. He leaned his forehead against the cold glass and wondered which light shining out of the dark was the one she was standing in.

  * * * *

  Dani would be the first to admit that going to a country western bar probably wasn’t the best decision in her present circumstances. Wasn’t the worst either. Getting blind, stinking drunk would be the worst choice. No matter how appealing insensibility was, it was not an option.

  The soda, sadly not her usual, cradled between her hands lacked the ability to blunt the feel of Dark Lord hunting her. Thank goodness the honky tonk country band was playing loud enough to ease the sensation. With a killer and the Feds on her heels, she’d wondered about the wisdom of going out with Carolyn Ryan and her writer’s group, who were now out on the floor pushing their tushes with a carefree confidence that Dani could only pretend to feel.

  She would envy them if they weren’t such a friendly bunch. There was no room for envy in the midst of their kindness. No room for anything but the need to hold it all together. It helped that there were different sta
ges to trauma, just like there were differences in an ocean when you’re drowning. Dani had seen all those stages when Meggie died, knew each one intimately.

  That first, knock-you-overboard, white-edged wave was followed by a shell-shocked disbelief at finding yourself in deep water. Then there was a period of helpless floundering. Luckily the shock sets in fast, providing a measure of protection as the body accustoms itself to this new order of existence. This semi-numbed period was sometimes marked by an efficient coping that lulls you into thinking rock bottom could be avoided, or at least well managed.

  Unfortunately, there was not a dignified or graceful way to drown. In the end, grief fills you up, weighs you down without mercy. The collision with rock-bottom was so overwhelming, you almost don’t notice that there was no way left to go but up. When you do, the decompressing trip to the surface was a dreary, endless exercise without shock’s buffer to blunt the pain.

  After Meggie’s death, Dani had made it back to the surface of her life. Instead of landfall, she had found herself bobbing in a world forever changed. One where grief was an ocean surf that sometimes knocked her down with its wildness. At other times it seemed content to lap a melancholy reminder that memory was all she had left of her little girl.

  Dani knew the drill. Knew where she was in the process. She didn’t know how long she would be there. Only time would tell that, time that was friend and enemy. She couldn’t speed it up or slow it down, couldn’t control what others would do with their allotment. So she sat in the honky tonk, inhaling the scent of booze, sweat and tobacco. Exhaling the stench of blood, fire and flesh. Letting the pounding music fill her up. Using the chattering crowd as a buoy to stay afloat.

  A cowboy at the other end of the bar lifted his beer can in her direction. After a slight hesitation, Dani mirrored the move. She’d played this part on the community theater stage back home, knew just how wide to force her plastic smile when the cowboy, a cop—she was very familiar with the breed by now—exchanged his bar stool for the one next to hers.