Into the Fire (46 page)

“No. But when they took Naked Guy here into the cabin, we had a few minutes of pretty intense oh-my-God. We thought maybe
he
was going to be the sacrifice.”

Using the mouse, Eden clicked through the pictures, and seeing, in rapid succession, Naked Guy’s exit from the burning house was both humorous and bizarre. Eden ran it backward and then forward, rubbing her expanded belly with her left hand. “It’s like he’s being born,” she mused. “Symbolically. Which would explain the lack of body hair. Which you’ve got to assume was intentional. I mean, he’s got his eyebrows, so it’s not some weird no-hair medical condition. What I don’t get is, why the fire? If I were trying to symbolize birth, it would be from darkness to light, from wet to dry—not leaping from a burning building.”

“Rising from the ashes,” Hannah realized. “It’s not a birth, it’s a rebirth.” Was it possible?

She’d had a feeling that she’d seen the Naked Guy before, but until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to her that he could be…

Tim Ebersole…?

Hannah had seen pictures of the Freedom Network leader, but never without the beard and his thick, dark head of hair. She pulled the computer closer to her, took the mouse out of Eden’s hand, excited by the possibility. Murphy couldn’t be found guilty of murder if Ebersole were still alive. “We need to find a picture of Tim Ebersole without his beard.”

Eden still hadn’t put two and two together. “The dead guy?”

“The guy most in need of a rebirth.” Hannah typed in the URL for the Freedom Network’s website. She’d visited the site often enough and had learned to brace herself for the ugliness of its home page. Ebersole was known to be camera-shy, but there was definitely a picture of the man on his bio page and…

Huh. It was gone.

Hannah quickly surfed through the site and…

Someone had pulled all of the photos of Tim Ebersole. There wasn’t even one included in the article about the national day of mourning, called for by Craig Reed and the other FN leaders.

She jumped to Google, and went to the latest newspaper articles about Ebersole’s death. The picture at the
New York Times
website was blurry, and in it Ebersole had his trademark heavy beard.

Eden tapped her on the arm. “I’m pretty sure there are computer programs that’ll compare faces or bone structure or—” She turned her head, a sudden sharp movement. “I hear something.” She stood up, moving toward the front windows, but then turned to look back at Hannah, alarm in her eyes. “A car’s coming!”

Time went into slow motion, as all of Hannah’s options clicked clearly into place.

Grab the camera—she’d already done that when the word
car
was still on Eden’s lips.

Grab her pack.

Grab a weapon—Hannah was still carrying the grease-coated handguns, but she still didn’t know if they were little more than a threatening prop. Two quick strides brought her to the gun case, her keys already in her hand. She grabbed the lightest weight rifle and ammo, some extra for the handguns, jamming it into her pack.

Grab the girl. “Get back from the windows!”

Option A: Go out the back, hope whoever was coming for her was unaware of the trail, unaware of her car parked at the base of the hillside.

But with her bad ankle, weighed down further by a heavily pregnant young woman, they weren’t exactly going to fly down that trail. And being caught in the open by people who quite probably wanted to kill her?

Not good.

Which left Option B: Lock the windows and doors and hunker down. Call for help.

“Lock the front door,” she ordered Eden, while she went to the back, but God, it was too late, a man was already coming inside.

And the world switched from slow-mo to strobe, like some cheap action movie without a budget for special effects.

He was tall, he was dark, but even backlit the way he was, Hannah knew that he wasn’t Murphy, and she dropped the unloaded rifle and pulled out the handgun, aiming it at him through the ziplock baggie, shouting, “Freeze!”

But he didn’t freeze.

Maybe his world was as silent as hers, or maybe she hadn’t been loud enough, or maybe he couldn’t tell that she had a weapon inside of this baggie, so she squeezed the trigger, pumping a bullet into the frame of the door, just to the left of his head.

At least that was where she’d intended to aim it, but he fell to the floor like a stone.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE

T
ess was trying her hardest not to be distracted, but Sophia knew it was a struggle.

They’d both expected
some
kind of response from Nash, to the text message Sophia had sent about needing backup.

Of course, it was entirely possible he was already in Mexico—apparently that was where he went when he ran away from life. It was also possible, wherever he was, that he was too drunk to hear his cell phone ringing.

Maybe it’s time to move on.
Sophia and Tracy, both, had gently made that suggestion to Tess last night.

But that’s what Jim wants me to do,
she’d argued.
He’s here. I know he’s still here. He’s waiting for me to leave, to give up, to quit. He needs to see me walk away. But I’m not going to. I
won’t
do it…

Now, Sophia was driving Tess’s car, and before she pulled onto the dirt and gravel drive that led to Hannah Whitfield’s cabin, she braked to a stop. “Ready?” she asked the other woman, who had far more experience as a field operator.

Tess checked her sidearm and nodded.

At the start of the half-hour ride out here from the Dalton motel, they’d discussed the best way to approach Hannah’s cabin. They knew that if she believed the Freedom Network was hunting her she’d be leery of all visitors.

But they’d agreed that a completely overt approach would work best. Sure, Hannah might see their car, get spooked and run. On the other hand, if they crept up on her through the woods, she could well open fire. Dave had said she was most likely armed.

So Tess had written a sign with a black Sharpie on the back of their motel invoice: WE ARE MURPHY’S FRIENDS.

Sophia had to rev the car’s engine to make it up the steep driveway, and gravel spun beneath the tires. She pulled to a stop in front of the cabin, turning off the car as Tess got out, holding the sign up, with two obviously weapon-free hands.

The cabin looked much as it had when Sophia was here yesterday, the door tightly shut. It was silent and still, no birds chirping, nothing moving.

But then, from inside the cabin, someone started shrieking—“Freeze!” “No!”—and the unmistakable sound of a gunshot exploded, echoing in the morning heat.

Eden had thought it was Izzy—that shadowy shape of a man coming through the cabin’s back door—and when she’d seen Hannah raise her gun, she’d screamed. “No!”

It was useless, futile—screaming at someone who couldn’t hear her, and as Eden had watched in horror, the gun went off and the man slumped, lifeless, to the ground.

Hannah had killed him. She’d killed Izzy, except whoever was lying there dead wasn’t Izzy after all. His hair was darker and he wasn’t as tall or as wide, but he was definitely dead, lying in a growing pool of blood.

Hannah was on her knees next to him—was this Murphy?—saying, “No, God, no,” as Eden sobbed both her relief and her fear, then, “Get me a towel! Eden! Now!”

What did Hannah think? That a towel was going to help a bullet wound to the head? Oh, crap, she was going to throw up.

“Do it!” Hannah shouted, and she was still holding that gun, so Eden forced back the bile that was rising in her throat and scrambled for the kitchen, just as the front door—that she hadn’t yet had a chance to lock—burst open.

Hannah didn’t hear it, but she felt it, and saw it—in the sudden shift of Jim Nash’s still slightly glazed eyes.

She hadn’t shot him—Jim Nash, from Troubleshooters.

He wasn’t dead as she’d first believed, because no way could anyone have survived a pointblank gunshot to the head, except as Hannah had dropped to her knees beside him, he’d stirred, and God, opened his eyes, and she’d realized that a golf-ball-sized chunk of wood had been ripped from the rough-hewn walls by the force of her bullet, hit him in the head and knocked him out.

He had one hell of a gash, and it was bleeding profusely, as head wounds often did, but he tried to sit up, which was when his gaze shifted left, over her shoulder.

Whoever’d been approaching in that car had come through the door, and Hannah turned, bringing her gun hand up into firing position. Except Nash then moved, and with more force than she would ever have believed possible from a man who mere moments earlier had been unconscious, he threw himself on top of her, on top of her weapon, bringing it down and knocking it out of her hand where it skittered, still in its plastic bag, across the floor.

A petite woman, with the kind of Glinda-the-good-witch coloring and complexion that Hannah had dreamed of having, back when she was five and still had Cinderella aspirations, stopped the weapon with one tiny foot.

“We’re friends,” she said, looking directly at Hannah and speaking clearly. “Of Murphy’s. From Troubleshooters. I’m Sophia and this is Tess. You’ve clearly already met Jim Nash. Dave Malkoff sent us to help you.”

And Hannah sagged with relief.

“I’m all right,” were the first words out of Jim Nash’s mouth, as Sophia closed the cabin door behind her.

Tess just shook her head in disbelief. “This is what you call backup?” she asked. She was livid. No doubt she’d first thought, as Sophia had, that Hannah had shot Nash, that he was bleeding to death, or even already dead. “This is how you
help
?”

She had every right to be angry, but there were other far more pressing questions to be answered first. Such as, what on earth was Eden Gillman doing there? “Is Izzy here?” Sophia asked the girl.

But Eden, delivering a kitchen towel to Hannah, who used it to stanch the flow of Nash’s blood, shook her head, no. She was clearly shaken by what could well have been a catastrophe. But there was no time now to
what if.
Or even try to figure out why Eden was here without her fiancé. No, Izzy was her husband now. The girl was wearing a slender gold wedding band on her left hand.

“Eden, sit down before you faint,” Sophia ordered. “Jim, do you need help getting cleaned up, or…”

“I’m fine,” he said, which was such a bald-faced lie, it was all she could do not to laugh in his battered, blood-splattered face.

“Then go wash up,” she told him, turning to Tess. “Someone needs to—”

“Stand guard,” Tess finished for her. “I’m on it.” She went out the front door without looking back, closing it tightly behind her.

The impending conversation between Tess and Nash was most likely going to get noisy. But both operatives were professionals, and Sophia knew it wouldn’t happen until later.

Sophia held out a hand to help Hannah up from the floor. “Did you get what you came back here for?” she asked her. “Dave said something about…a letter?”

“Yeah, not yet.” Hannah limped over to the kitchen sink to wash Nash’s blood from her still-shaking hands.

Dave had told Sophia that Hannah Whitfield reminded him of Tess, and she could definitely see why. Hannah was taller than Tess—and more buxom—but they had similar coloring. Dark hair, fair complexion, similarly shaped faces with wide, generous mouths that, in better times, would be equally quick to quirk into a warm smile.

There were similarities, too, in the clothes they chose to wear. They both dressed for efficiency and comfort, although Hannah leaned more toward the Lieutenant Starbuck end of the spectrum with her clunky boots, cargo pants, and T-shirt.

They had the same no-nonsense attitude, and probably the same inability to see themselves accurately, as the enormously attractive women that they were.

Sophia waited until Hannah turned back around to say, “Well, find it, fast, so we can get out of here.” She took out her cell phone—she’d promised Dave she’d call him upon contact with Hannah.

“There’s something else I have to do,” Hannah told her. “There are photos I need to e-mail to the FBI, ASAP.” She glanced at Eden, who was sitting, silent and pale at the dining table, holding what looked like a disposable cell phone to her ear, as if she were listening to voice mail messages. “We got them downloaded to the computer, but I still need to…You wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a clear, mug-shot quality photo of Tim Ebersole anywhere online, would you? I checked the Freedom Network website, but they’ve pulled all their photos of him. Which is kind of weird.”

“I’m not sure,” Sophia admitted. “But I’d bet Dave would know. What’s going on?”

“This is going to sound crazy,” Hannah said, “and maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part, but…I think it might be possible that Murphy didn’t kill Tim Ebersole. I think it’s possible that Ebersole’s still alive. That Murphy and I saw him yesterday morning.”

Sophia stood there, about to dial Dave, uncertain of what to say. Nash had come out from the bathroom to listen, towel wadded up and pressed against the side of his head. She met his skeptical eyes briefly before looking back at Hannah. “I’m pretty sure Ebersole’s remains were carefully identified. Using a number of scientific tests. Dental records, DNA…”

“I know,” Hannah said. “I’m probably wrong. But…tests
can
be manipulated. And we have these photos. I just want to see a recent picture of Ebersole. Preferably without a beard.”

“Photos can be manipulated, too,” Sophia pointed out. “Even if you do have a photo of him, who’s to say it wasn’t taken before he died.”

“I am,” Hannah said, defensively. “I took these pictures. Yesterday morning.”

“I believe you,” Sophia soothed her. “It’s just…with photographs so easy to doctor, the FBI may require slightly more substantial proof. If your goal is to free Murphy—”

“Murphy’s free,” Eden announced from her seat at the table.

Hannah, of course, didn’t hear her, so Sophia repeated her words for the deaf woman.

“What? When?” Hannah looked at Eden, who was holding up the disposable cell phone.

“Dave called back, a few minutes ago, probably during all the screaming,” she announced. “He said to tell you that Murphy’s coming here—and he’s mad as hell that you put yourself in danger. Oh, and also?” She laughed, but it was on the verge of hysterical. “Dave says that Sophia and Tess are on their way.”

N
ORTH OF
D
ALTON
, C
ALIFORNIA

Murphy’s disposable cell phone rang, and he looked at it, to see who was calling.

Which was kind of stupid, since only two people had this number. Dave. And Hannah.

It was Hannah’s disposable cell number flashing on the cheap little screen, so he answered it. Not that he’d be able to talk directly to her, which was just peachy keen. Just what he wanted—to have
this
conversation through an intermediary.

“Yeah,” he said, as he tucked the damned thing under his chin.

“Murph. It’s Sophia. Ghaffari?”

As if he’d forgotten her, or had more than one friend name Sophia.

She didn’t give him time to respond. Or maybe she did, and he simply didn’t use it quickly enough. “I’m here, at the cabin in Dalton, with Nash and Tess. We’ve got Hannah. She’s safe. I’ve got you on speaker, so she can talk to you directly.”

“Did she find what she went there for?” Murphy asked, waiting as Sophia communicated his words to Hannah.

“I did,” Hannah answered herself.

“Soph, don’t tell Hannah what I’m saying,” Murphy said. “I’m talking to you right now, okay? I want you to burn it. Just take a match and—”

“Murph,” Sophia started, her tone conciliatory.

“It’s a letter that I wrote, asking Hannah to help me kill Ebersole. I don’t remember writing it, so she thinks it’s proof of temporary insanity, but I think it’s what they’ll use to tie her to me as an accomplice to murder, so burn—”

“What if the Freedom Network’s not after us because they think you killed Tim Ebersole?” Hannah spoke over him, probably able to tell from Sophia’s expression what he was saying. “In fact, what if they
know
you couldn’t have killed him—because he’s still alive?”

“What?” Murphy laughed despite himself, but then got upset. What kind of painkiller had they given her at the hospital? “Damnit, Han, are you high?”

Again, she spoke over him. “I know you probably think I’ve lost it, but Murph, those pictures we took? At the compound? I think the hairless naked guy is Tim Ebersole.”

“Sophia,” Murphy implored.

“We found a photo of Ebersole,” she told him, “taken about twenty years ago, before he grew the ZZ-Top beard. Of course, now we’re dealing with a twenty-year age difference, but—”

“Why would he fake his death?” Murph asked.

“
I’m
definitely not high,” Sophia continued, “and comparing the men in the two photos? It could be Ebersole. Murph wants to know why he would fake his death,” she added, obviously speaking to Hannah.

“Because it would be a total hat trick win for him.” Hannah had clearly given this some thought. “He was under investigation for tax evasion,” she pointed out. “Not only would that case be dropped, his death would invigorate the Freedom Network financially. I’ve got to assume they had an insurance policy for him—bingo, instant funds, but on top of that, hundreds of FN members would donate money in his memory. And then there’s the whole martyrdom dealio. A good assassination always gets the mob mentality revving.
They killed our leader
—even though two weeks ago they were going
Tim who?
But now the Freedom Network’s back in the news, all those fringe groups that were considering splintering off repledge their allegiance, new members join, and a new leader steps in—only most people don’t realize it’s the same leader with a new name, risen from the ashes.”

“Soph, express my total disbelief and ask Hannah how the store tags on the dishes and towels play into her conspiracy theory,” Murphy said, waiting while his words were repeated.

“Shut. Up,” Hannah said. “Murph, you need to see these photos—it’s
him.
And you know what? It does play in. It totally reinforces the idea that Tim
didn’t
spend months at that cabin on sabbatical. He was in seclusion, prepping for his impending death, and then waiting for his ‘body’ to be discovered in a cabin where no one had eaten a meal or taken a shower. God, I wonder who it really was who died. We should ask the FBI to check the Freedom Network’s records, see who left the organization—no doubt for personal reasons—back in March.”