Known (9 page)

She heard the far-off hum of the snowmobile a split second after Chris turned his head toward the front door.
Thank goodness. They’re coming back.
She rushed to the window and looked down the long drive, willing her mother and Frisco to appear. A tiny figure on a snowmobile came around a curve and Violet squinted.
Is Mom driving?

“Where’s the ranger guy?” she asked out loud. Chris silently watched over her shoulder as the snowmobile came closer to the cabin.

Violet stared. Her mother’s pale-green coat had stuff on it. Red stuff.

“What the
fuck
?” Chris muttered under his breath.

He strode to the door and yanked it open.

Chris leaped over the porch steps, his vision locked on Gianna.

She stopped the snowmobile and jumped off, nearly tripping as her boots sank into the snow.

“What happened?”

“Frisco’s dead.” Gianna gasped between pants as she stumbled toward him. “Someone shot him. At the cabin.”

He grabbed her forearms. Her eyes were wide, half her face covered in a light spray of red. A heavier spray covered the shoulder and front of her coat. She followed his gaze.
“Oh, my God.”
She yanked one arm away and smeared the mess more with her glove. He pulled her hand away from the blood.

“Mom!”

Gianna looked past him. “I’m okay. I’m not hurt.” Chris thought her voice was extremely calm for that of someone who’d just witnessed a violent death.

“Whose blood is that?” Violet squeaked.

Gianna swallowed. “It’s Frisco’s. He’s been shot.”

“What? Is he okay?”

She blinked at her daughter, her mouth moving but no words forming. She shook her head at Violet.

Chris tightened his grip, pulling her attention back to him. “What happened?” he repeated. He led her up the porch steps, wanting to get out of the exposed yard. She pulled away from him and yanked off her jacket, holding it out from her as if it were poison.

“I don’t know. We had just stepped out of the cabin when someone shot at us. Twice. I managed to get out of the way, but Frisco . . . and they broke a window of my Suburban.
Someone is over there. We need to go to the police
,” she pleaded with Chris. “And there was a dead man in the cabin—he’d been shot and burned. That’s what you smelled.”

Violet clamped a hand over her mouth and stared at her mother in shock.

Chris’s brain shifted into analysis-and-survival mode. “Did you see the shooter? Did they have a vehicle? Was there just one person?”

“I didn’t see anyone. Or a car,” Gianna forced out. Her pupils were dilated and Chris saw a vein pound at the side of her neck.

If they come by foot, it could take half an hour to get here. We left a clear trail to my cabin yesterday.

By vehicle, they could be here any minute.

“Let’s get inside,” he ordered. He gave Violet a small push on her shoulder. Her wide-eyed gaze was still locked on her mother’s bloody face.

“No! We need to go to the police!” Gianna argued, planting her feet.

Chris pointed at the snowmobile. “That won’t hold three of us.” He thought about his vehicle in the shed and for the hundredth time analyzed the depth of the snow and ice.
It might handle these conditions. Or would I be risking our lives even more?
Basic survival rules indicated that they stay with the shelter, but the murder had changed the rules. “Who do you pick to stay here alone?”

Gianna looked from him to Violet, who’d stepped just inside the door and into some semblance of cover. She stared back at her mother.

Indecision fluttered across Gianna’s face.

Chris had already done the analysis. He wouldn’t let the two women leave on their own, and he wouldn’t leave anyone behind in the cabin. That left the three of them hunkering down.
Unless we risk traveling through the snow in my vehicle.

At least he was well armed.

“Can you shoot?” he asked Gianna in a low voice.

She pulled a gun out of the pocket of the bloody coat. “I took this off Frisco after he went down. I wanted something to protect myself with. But no, I’ve never shot one.”

Crap.

“Inside.” He took the weapon and coat from Gianna. They entered the house and he locked the door. “Violet, would you check all the locks on the windows? And close all the shades.” They should already be locked, but he needed to cross the verification off his mental list.

He spread out the coat on his kitchen island, keeping the human-tissue spatter from touching the surface. He grabbed a roll of paper towels to tackle the worst of the goop.

“You can’t do that! That’s evidence!”

He met Gianna’s gaze. “If we have to leave the house, this coat is all that stands between you and freezing to death. Do you want some of this cleaned off so you can use it or do you want to save the coat for a crime scene technician?”

She didn’t answer.

He handed her the roll of paper towels, and strode across the room to his gun safe and spun the dial. After a moment of silence, he heard the tearing of a paper towel and the soft sounds of her jacket being wiped. He felt like an ass, but someone had needed to get her brain thinking in the right direction.
Survival mode.

He’d spent years in survival mode, always looking over his shoulder and lying awake at night waiting for sounds that indicated he and Brian had been hunted down. When the assassin finally arrived, his preparation had paid off, and he and Brian survived.

When the assassin had Brian in his grip, Chris had learned he was capable of taking human life.

He pushed away the memory, but the adrenaline raced through his veins again and he welcomed the reminder to keep his guard up—even when his ghost had been eliminated. Frisco’s murder proved that evil still moved in the world. Avoiding society as much as possible didn’t prevent horrors from touching Chris’s life.

The buzz in his veins was familiar. Like a song he hadn’t heard in a long time. His skin tingled with an awareness that he’d nearly forgotten, and he wondered if his reflexes had grown rusty. He pulled a rifle, a double-barreled shotgun, and another pistol out of the locker. His primary weapon lay in a drawer in the kitchen island where Gianna silently worked on her coat.

Why didn’t I grab that first?

Rusty.

He lay the three weapons on the counter next to Frisco’s weapon and reached around Gianna to push in on a nearly invisible drawer. It popped open, and she gaped at the gun inside. He hadn’t worried about either of the women finding it. It was on an end away from the other drawers and required a special release. Brian knew how to open the drawer. Chris had schooled him early in gun safety and use. His son had a healthy appreciation for the power of guns and treated them with respect.

“What the hell is going on?” Gianna said under her breath. She tossed a bloody paper towel in the garbage and ripped off another. She dampened it and attacked the smears on her coat. She’d removed 90 percent of the matter and it looked good enough in Chris’s opinion, but she scrubbed at the brownish discolorations with fervor. He watched her hands and saw them tremble.

“Who knows you’re up here?” he asked quietly. He’d asked her the same question yesterday, but he wondered if she’d have a different answer now.

Her hands stopped midscrub and wide brown eyes met his. “What are you asking?”

“I’m asking if there is someone who’d like to hurt you or Violet,” he whispered.

Her horrified gaze flew to her daughter, who sat on the couch with her knees up under her chin and Oro pulled tightly to her side.

“No one wants to hurt us,” she hissed at him.

“Think hard. You’ve been possibly drugged, nearly burned, and now shot at.
Think!
”

“We just happened to be in the path of some crazy people in the woods! I’m not a target for anyone!” She kept her voice to a harsh whisper, glancing nervously at Violet to make certain she hadn’t heard.

She could whisper all she wanted. Chris suspected Violet knew and heard a lot her mother didn’t want her to. He studied Gianna’s expression, searching for deceit, and didn’t see it. But he did see doubt; his questions had rattled her, and he wondered if she was playing down his concerns in an attempt not to alarm Violet.

It’s time for both of them to be alarmed.

“I think someone is focused on you or Violet,” he stated slowly. “And I’m going to operate as if they’re coming here next.”

“Operate? What the hell are you?”

“Someone who knows how to stay under the radar and protect myself.”

Silent eyes searched his. “What happened to you?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “No time for that now.”

The flash of pain in Chris’s eyes vanished immediately. He might have scars on his neck and face, but he had even bigger ones on the inside. Scars that’d toughened him into some sort of robotic human. He’d barely shown any emotion since she’d returned. He’d acted and spoken as if people were shot every day and they just needed to follow a checklist to handle the situation.

Gianna didn’t know whether to pity him or be thankful.

A little of both.

She blew out a breath and looked down at her coat. It was ruined. Her scrubbing had pushed the blood deep into the fibers and she knew it’d never come out. She didn’t care; she had no desire to wear the coat again. Frisco’s open skull flashed through her mind. She’d seen a lot of head injuries come across her table, and she’d neatly opened plenty of skulls. But she’d never been present when lives had been obliterated.

Oh, Lord.

Her vision tunneled, and she leaned forward on her hands as her knees suddenly felt liquid. Chris grabbed her shoulder and shoved a stool against the backs of her thighs. She sat and rested her forehead on the countertop, waiting for her blood pressure to normalize.

What if the shot hit me instead? What would have happened to Violet?

“Mom?”

“I’m fine. Just a bit dizzy all of a sudden.” To her ears, her voice sounded too high.

Chris rubbed at her shoulder. “Take your time,” he said softly. “It’ll pass. It’s just everything catching up with her,” he said to Violet, who’d moved off the couch.

She thought back to Chris’s question. “The agent who rented me the cabin is the only person who knows we’re here,” she said quietly. “I may have mentioned to some friends back home in New York that we were taking off for a few days, but I never said where we were going. I mainly said something to let them know why I wouldn’t be answering any calls or emails. Same with the new office in Portland. I only said I was going to be unreachable for a while.” Her vision started to clear, and she sat up to meet his serious gaze. “That’s the truth.”

He nodded. “Can you think of anyone who’d be angry or upset enough to want to harm you? Did you piss anyone off because you didn’t report the autopsy results they wanted to hear?”

She understood his question. Relatives didn’t want to hear that their loved ones had committed suicide or indulged in dangerous behavior that’d taken their lives. Sometimes a relative would swear their loved one had never, in their entire life, touched the drug that had shown up in the tox report. Or Gianna wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a cause of death—it happened. Concrete evidence was always needed. She couldn’t assign a cause of death based on her suspicions. She’d been questioned on her results several times; it came with the job. Yes, there had been people who had disliked her results, but not enough to want to harm her.

I don’t think they would.

“What? You’ve thought of something.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said hesitantly. She’d firmly put the Sullivan case out of her mind, but Chris’s prodding had brought it to the forefront. It was the only one—that she was aware of—that would fit his description. The Sullivan family had a few nuts in its tree. “I don’t think this is the time to sit down and analyze my past, right? I don’t want to make guesses about the past, and we need to worry about the
right now
.”

“True.” His gaze prodded her.