Mountain Investigation (17 page)

G
RAY’S WORLD HAD GONE
soft and warm, smoothing out all the edges he’d lived with for so long. Mariah was curled up against him, her back to his front and his hands folded with hers beneath her chin.

Yet, at the same time, she surrounded him as surely as the warm mists and the water that ran from their bodies. He breathed her in, felt her in every cell of his body. He’d just spent himself inside her, yet he wanted her again already. He’d been her first lover in all the ways that mattered, the first to be with her for her own sake, and his, not because of some nefarious plan.

The thought of Lee and al-Jihad brought too much reality into a moment where it didn’t belong, so Gray pushed the outside world aside and touched his lips to Mariah’s neck, kissing the soft place behind her ear. She shuddered against him, raised their joined hands to her lips, and pressed a kiss into the center of his palm.

The simple gesture, one of love and acceptance, sent a poignant jolt through his system, and a whispered thought:
I wish.
He wished he were a better man with a different life. He wished he could offer her a home and a lifetime. Those wishes were so strong, yet so in
compatible with the things that had driven him for so long. And still, part of him said,
What if?

What if he put aside his drive for revenge and made a new life for himself? For them? He could turn in his gun and badge; they could rebuild the cabin, and then…

And then what? He was a cop from a family of cops. He knew policework, loved it. He didn’t have any hobbies, didn’t know who or what he’d be without the job. More than that, there were Ken, Trish and Catherine, and all the others al-Jihad and his men had killed. They no longer had their lives or loves. Didn’t he owe it to them to put off his own until justice was served?

Still, he wished. And because he wished, because the desire to make an impossible change was so strong that it nearly consumed him, he eased away from her. “We should swim back out and check the phone. If Lee and the others have left the vicinity, they may have taken the signal scrambler with them.” When that came out more coolly practical than he’d meant it to, he consciously softened his tone. “Besides, I could do with one of those energy bars. You just about used me up.”

She lay still for a moment, then rolled away from him and sat up, her gloriously naked female form silhouetted against the silver rain. He couldn’t see her expression, but her voice was carefully neutral when she said, “Back to reality, then?”

“Back to reality.” When that seemed pitifully inadequate, especially considering the undeniable depth of what had just happened between them, he tried to explain. “It’s not that—”

“Don’t,” she said, interrupting with the single, soft word. “Please, don’t. I didn’t mean for this to complicate things. I just…I wanted a better memory. Which is exactly what you’ve given me.”

“What if I want more than that?” he said. He should’ve been shocked by his own words. Instead, they felt exactly right.

“Do you?”

“Maybe.”

She shifted, and a glint of refracted moonlight allowed him to see her small, sad smile. “Even if that ‘maybe’ had been a heartfelt ‘yes,’ my answer would be that I’m flattered, but we both know I’d need and want more from you than you’re willing to give.” She paused, and when he didn’t argue, she nodded. “Yeah. Thought so.”

“If it helps at all, I wish things were different.”

“But not enough to change them.”

Something squeezed tight in his chest. “I can’t.”

She nodded. “Then there we are.” She leaned into him and touched her lips to his, surprising him. The heat gathered, sparked higher. But then she eased back, with that same sad smile in place. “Goodbye, Gray.”

Neither of them was going anywhere at that moment, but he knew what she meant, knew that this was the end of anything physical between them, which was something they probably shouldn’t have started, but he’d be damned if he’d regret it. She wasn’t the only one who’d made new memories just now.

He tipped his head in acknowledgment. “Goodbye, Mariah. And good luck.”

Together, they slipped into the warm mineral waters,
ducked beneath the waterfall and swam to the flat boulder where they’d left their clothes and supplies. They dressed in awkward silence and she rummaged through her dusty pack for food and water while he checked his phone.

The signal was good, and a text awaited him:
Tracking your GPS; chopper ETA 30 min.
The time stamp said they were down to less than ten minutes.

He showed the message to Mariah, who smiled sadly as water dripped from her hair like tears. “Well, then. Back to reality it is.”

“Yeah,” Gray said, and turned away, gritting his teeth at the sudden realization that he damn well didn’t want to go back to reality. He wanted to stay exactly where he was.

T
HE PICKUP WENT SMOOTHLY
, with no sign of Lee or al-Jihad, which left Mariah wondering whether they should’ve tried to sneak back to the cabin rather than hiding up at the glen. But, by the same token, she couldn’t regret the decision, or what had come after. New memories were precious things.

Not wanting the others to know what had happened between them, she consciously avoided looking at Gray as the helicopter flew them down off the ridge, back to Bear Claw City. Instead, she huddled in the blanket she’d pulled from her knapsack, trying to recapture the warmth of the hot spring without thinking of the things she and Gray had done to each other, the feelings he’d unleashed in her.

It was impossible not to think about the emotions, though. They overwhelmed her, consumed her and
made her deeply afraid that she’d done the unthinkable and had once again fallen for the absolute wrong guy.

Realizing that she’d heard someone say her name, she looked to the front of the passenger area of the helicopter, where Gray was huddled with two other agents while talking into a radio headset. He was looking at her, one elegant eyebrow arched to suggest that he’d asked her something. When their eyes met, heat sparked low in her midsection, hotter now than before, because now she knew how it could be with a man like him. Or rather, with
him.

She cleared her throat. “Sorry, I was zoning out.” And then some.

“A car is going to meet us at the landing pad with the statuettes. Once you’ve pointed out the right one, we’ll take it for analysis and the driver will take you to your parents.” Gray rapped out the summary, making it clear that what happened next wasn’t open to discussion. He wasn’t the soldier now, or the man. He was pure, cold federal agent.

“Fine,” she said dully, suddenly sick of it all. She’d tried to make the right choices before and she’d been wrong at almost every turn. This time she’d play along with the Feds, and hope for the best. What else could she do? She was tired of fighting when she never actually won.

She must’ve dozed off after that, because the next thing she knew, the helicopter was landing with a shuddering bump, and she was suddenly surrounded by armed men snapping terse, clipped orders to one another as they hustled her off the aircraft.

Fear kicked in, and she instinctively looked for Gray. He was still talking into his radio headset, but met her eyes and nodded. She couldn’t tell if the nod meant “You’re okay, go with them and I’ll be right behind you,” or “It’s over.”

Knowing they’d said their goodbyes already and it wasn’t the time or place to ask for more, if she’d even meant to, she went with her escort. Moments later, she was staring into the trunk of a dark SUV, where her mother’s ceramic clowns were arrayed like a small army of terminally cheerful, red-and-white painted gremlins.

“That one,” she said, pointing out a floppy-footed guy with green suspenders.

“You’re sure?” The question came from Gray’s friend, Fairfax, who had hopped out of the SUV as they approached.

“Positive. That’s the one Lee kept asking me about when he was holding me prisoner. That’s what he wants from me.” A stinking clown. There was irony there, she was sure of it. She just couldn’t see it through the heartache.

At Fairfax’s nod, two of the men guarding her took possession of the statuette, bundling it up and spiriting it away. Fairfax gestured to another man and slammed shut the rear deck of the SUV. When the agent approached, Fairfax gave him low-voiced instructions, then turned to Mariah. “Special Agent Sykes here is going to drive you to your parents’. Do you need anything before you go?” The look in Fairfax’s dark blue eyes made the question far less casual than it should have been.

She didn’t want to think about what Gray might
have told his friend about them, didn’t want the pity she thought she saw in Fairfax’s expression. “I’m fine,” she said tightly, and yanked open the passenger door of the SUV before either of the men could get it for her. She climbed up and moved to slam the door shut, but Fairfax caught it before she could.

“Gray said he’d call you at the safe house,” he said, keeping his voice low so it was just between the two of them.

She shook her head. “He doesn’t have to. He doesn’t owe me anything.”

“He seems to feel differently,” Fairfax said. “How about you?”

“I just want to get this over with,” she said, which they both knew wasn’t an answer.

He seemed to accept it, though. He shut the door, tapped the roof of the SUV and moments later Special Agent Sykes hopped into the driver’s seat. Sykes was probably in his late twenties, lean to the point of gauntness, with blond hair and pale eyes that looked almost colorless in the glow of the dashboard displays. He didn’t say anything, but that was fine with Mariah. She just wanted to be left alone.

The agent drove them away from the airport, through the city and out the other side, into the ’burbs. A sick feeling gathered in Mariah’s stomach as the landmarks started looking all too familiar. “Where is this safe house exactly?”

As he rolled to a stop at a red light, Sykes reached out and patted her hand. “In your case, the word
safe
might be an exaggeration.”

Before she fully processed the words, before she could pull away or scream or react at all, he grabbed her wrist, yanked her arm across the console, and plunged a needle into the meat of her forearm.

Mariah screamed and tore away, then grabbed for the door handle. But before she could get the door open, the world began to spin, then yaw. Then go black.

The last thing she was conscious of was Sykes putting both hands back on the steering wheel and hitting the gas when the light went green, his lean-featured face impassive and his voice impossibly gentle when he said, “That’s right. I’m taking you home where you belong.”

Gray paced the length of the Bear Claw crime lab, which took up most of the basement of the PD. He was keeping an eye on things inside the lab while Fairfax watched the front and rear entrances, making sure their secure investigation stayed that way.

These days, trust was a hard thing to come by. Gray counted himself lucky that Fax and his fiancée, Chelsea, knew and trusted several members of the Bear Claw PD, who had helped them take down Muhammad Feyd and foil the stadium attack the previous year. Those trusted members of the PD, along with FBI forensic investigator Seth Varitek—also a friend of Chelsea and Fax’s—were hunched over the ceramic clown statuette in the main room of the three-room lab, a large area filled with machines and long counters. So far they’d been at it twenty minutes, and hadn’t yet figured out what made the clown so important.

“This had better not be a decoy,” Gray growled under his breath the next time his pacing brought him near Fairfax.

“If it is, we’ll deal,” Fax said. “At least it’ll free us up to do what we’ve got to do.”

“And what is that?” Gray spun on him. “If this clown thing doesn’t pan out and give us a solid lead on where the bastards are and what they’re planning next, we’re not a damn bit further along than we were before—” He broke off, frustration bringing an unfamiliar tightness to his chest.

“Hey.” Fax gripped his shoulder. “She’s safe, okay? Sykes called in to say he’d made the delivery, that there were hugs and tears all around when she was reunited with her parents.”

Gray stopped dead. “What did you say?”

“Sykes called to say—” A shout from the lab interrupted Fax midsentence.

Brain buzzing with dread, Gray spun on the CSIs. “It’s not there anymore, is it?”

Varitek’s eyes narrowed. “That’s right. We found a space chipped out of the statuette and then concealed again—looks like the size and shape of a flash drive, but it’s empty. How did you know?”

“Because Mariah isn’t close with her parents, not in the slightest. No tears. No happy reunion.” Gray headed for the stairs at a dead run. “Call the safe house. Talk to someone
other
than Sykes and confirm that she’s there.” But in his gut, he knew she wouldn’t be.

Sure enough, by the time he arrived at the in-city safe house, the phone and radio traffic had confirmed that Mariah had never arrived at her intended destination, and Sykes’s SUV had been found abandoned in the state park north of the city.

Still, Gray continued on to the safe house. Full of cold rage, he checked in with the security detail and let himself into the second-floor condo where Frank and Ada Shore were being protected.

He didn’t know precisely what he’d expected them to look like, based on the few, tight-lipped details Mariah had shared, but he hadn’t been prepared for the couple he found holding hands on a love seat in the condo’s main room.

Mariah’s mother was a small, elegantly dressed woman with short, graying hair and kind eyes. Her father was tall and slightly stooped, with the deflated-balloon look of someone who’d gone through a recent weight loss. His expression, however, went hard when he caught sight of Gray. Letting go of his wife’s hands, Frank rose to his full height and faced Gray squarely. “What’s happening? Where’s Mariah?”

Gray didn’t answer immediately because he couldn’t trust himself to be civil, and insults weren’t going to help him find her. Besides, he wanted to be mindful of the older man’s heart condition. Still, he needed answers. “Where would Mawadi take her?” he asked, his voice laced with deadly intent.

Frank’s eyes went blank, then heated to fury. “He’s got her? What the hell are you people doing? What kind of protection is this? We’ve given you everything you’ve asked for, and the one thing we’ve asked for—that you keep our daughter safe—hasn’t happened.”

Two years earlier, or maybe even as recently as a couple of weeks before, Gray might have responded with a threat, or by telling Mariah’s father exactly what he
thought of parents who put themselves first, always. But getting to know Mariah had changed him. She’d reminded him that the victims of terrorism weren’t the only ones hurt by the bombs and attacks. The effects reached far and wide, and were sometimes mixed with guilt and culpability, but that didn’t make them any less real.

So instead of attacking, he laid it out as simply as he could. “They got past us again. I won’t apologize for it because I’m not sorry—I’m furious.” He paused, and his voice went rough when he said, “Mawadi already had possession of the computer files he’d hid in the statuette—Sykes took them during transport. So we have to assume that Mawadi took Mariah for revenge. She had the guts to leave him, and for that he wants her dead. More than that, he wants her to suffer—she said that was his way. So I’m asking you—I’m begging you—to think. Where would he take her, someplace nearby, if he wanted her to suffer?”

“I don’t…I don’t know.” Mariah’s father seemed to sink into himself, deflating further. “I didn’t know any of it. She never told us anything was wrong in her marriage, never even hinted at it.”

“That might’ve had something to do with the fact that you never listened to her,” Gray said, unable to help himself. “If you’d—” He snapped off the words. “Never mind. Not my business.”

“No, I don’t think it is,” Ada said. She rose to join her husband, standing at his shoulder to form a united front, one that excluded Gray just as he imagined it had excluded Mariah. But then Ada’s expression softened,
and she reached out to take one of Gray’s hands in both of hers. “But it seems like Mariah thought otherwise.”

His voice went thick. “She’s told me a few things.” And she’d given him a gift beyond measure, he was starting to realize. She’d reminded him how to feel. He’d been numb for so long, he almost couldn’t bear all the emotions bombarding him now—fear for her, grief for how he’d left things between them, and anger at the parents who’d made her feel that she had to solve every problem on her own.

“We love her,” Ada said simply. “We always have, though we haven’t always shown it as we should, and we weren’t always the best of parents.”

“You took the clown back,” he said, which wasn’t the most important point by far, but had stuck with him as the crowning injustice. “She defended the damn thing from her bastard of an ex, and you took it away from her.”

Ada’s eyes filled. “We were moving away. I wanted something that reminded me of her.”

“Next time, ask for a damn picture. Or, better yet, stay put and take care of your daughter.” Gray knew he was being harsh, and when he saw Frank’s color change, going from ruddy to sickly pale, he feared that he’d gone too far, that he’d compromised the older man’s health once again in his efforts to do the right thing.

But Frank regained his composure with a visible effort. He gripped his wife’s hand as if it were his anchor, and she leaned into him, bumping his arm with her shoulder. The bond between them was palpable;
Gray recognized their true, lifelong love, like the partnership his parents had shared, the connection he’d sought but never found.

Until now, he realized. He’d found that connection with Mariah. It wasn’t that they were incompatible, it was more that they were very different on the surface, but alike underneath, in the fundamentals. They were both opinionated and stubborn, comfortable being alone, but so much happier when they were with the right friend—or lover. At least he hoped she felt the same way, because at that moment, he realized that he was so much more alive with her than without her, that he wanted her in his life.

“I’m sorry,” Ada said, tears spilling over and tracking down her cheeks. “I don’t know where he would take her. We lived less than a half hour away from them, but we barely knew them as a couple.”

Gray’s head came up. “Wait. Where did they live? Where exactly?”

It had been in the investigative files, but he hadn’t done much more than glance at the information in passing, because the small house where the couple had moved right after their marriage had been searched extensively and then released from the evidentiary chain. As far as he knew, it had been sold but never occupied, and still stood empty.

What if that had been part of the plan?

Mariah had gone to her marriage bed a virgin, gone into the marriage full of hopes and dreams, only to see them gradually crushed beneath her husband’s insidious brand of evil. What better place to make her suffer
and die—in Mawadi’s twisted brain, anyway—than back at the house where the torture had truly begun?

Frank thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know exactly, and my address book is back at home. Somewhere north of the city. I remember that much.”

They’d found Sykes’s abandoned SUV north of the city.

Gray gritted his teeth. His mother could’ve recited his last three addresses by heart. At one point, when he’d just wanted to be left alone to wallow, that sort of love had felt smothering. Now he realized that it was a gift.

“Never mind. I’ll get my people to look it up.” He spun and headed for the door, calling for Fairfax to get on the horn to Johnson and have a team meet them at the address.

“Special Agent Grayson,” Ada said from behind him. The soft plea in her voice made him stop, even though every fiber of his being said he had to hurry, that each second could be Mariah’s last.

He turned back. “What?”

“Please tell her…please tell her we’re sorry.”

“Tell her yourself when I bring her out,” Gray said. Then he turned away and headed for the car at a dead run, praying that he could get her out, that she and her parents would have a chance for reconciliation. And hoping to hell he got that same chance with her.

M
ARIAH AWAKENED DISORIENTED
, and for a few seconds thought she was still dreaming—a nightmare of times
past, when she’d thought she was losing her mind, seeing a demon inside the skin of the man she’d married.

She was back in the bedroom they’d shared, back to awakening with him staring at her, and with the prickly, sore sensation that he’d been fondling her too hard, pinching her breasts to the point of pain, though he’d always denied touching her while she’d slept so deeply she’d been almost certain he’d drugged her.

Drugged.
The thought brought Sykes’s image, and the pain of an injection. The memories snapped her to the present, and warned her that she was in serious trouble. She started to struggle, only to find her wrists and ankles bound tightly and affixed to something solid behind her.

The bastard had tied her to the wall again.

“Awake now, Mrs. Mawadi?” Lee asked, though he hadn’t used the name
Mawadi
when they’d been married. They’d been Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm. He nodded and smiled his all-American smile. “Good. I’ve been waiting for you to come around.”

He rose to his feet, making her aware that she wasn’t on the bed they’d shared, but rather lying on the carpeted floor of what had once been their bedroom. That was more evidence that she was in the present, that this wasn’t a dream. She knew the old house had been stripped of furniture because she’d signed the auction papers herself, though she hadn’t been back since the day she’d been escorted out by several FBI agents, including Gray.

Gray.
The name sighed in her heart, but she didn’t
say it aloud, didn’t want to give Lee the leverage. Instead, she glared at the man she’d once thought she loved. “Revisiting old haunts, Lee? Not very smart of you. The FBI is keeping watch on this place.”

He gave her a backhanded slap, his expression never changing from one of polite indifference. “Don’t lie to me. Our information indicates the surveillance was lifted months ago.” He smiled, and the look in his eyes chilled her blood. “You and I should have a little while longer before the feebs track us down. Plenty of time to get reacquainted.”

Mariah tasted blood and her own fear. Her insides trembled and she was sorely tempted to crawl inside herself and pretend none of this was happening. But she wasn’t that woman anymore. She was tougher, stronger. So rather than let loose the whimper that wanted to break free, she said, “What did you hide inside the statue, Lee? What didn’t you want them to find?”

His face split in a self-congratulatory smile and he drew back, fiddling with a small, flat remote control–like box, tossing it from one hand to the other. “Nothing that’ll help you, that’s for sure. Those files are part of the larger plan, one we’ve been working on since well before I picked you up at that crummy coffee bar. And the clown…ah, the clown. It was pretty freaking clever of me, wouldn’t you say? I figured if you died, your cold bitch of a mother would take it back. If you lived, I figured you’d keep the stupid thing, even if you ditched the rest of our stuff. Which I knew you’d do, because you’re just what al-Jihad said you’d be—a disloyal bitch who ran the second things got tough.”

“You tried to kill me. You call that things getting tough?”

He hit her again, then sucked her blood from his knuckles. “You don’t leave a man like me, Mariah. I don’t believe in divorce. I don’t recognize the court’s power to do something like that. Which means you’re not only still married to me, you’re an adulterer.”

“How did you know—” She bit off the words, but it was too late.

“I didn’t before, but I do now. You just confirmed it, my unfaithful little wife.” He leaned in and put his face very close to hers, eyes suddenly blazing. “It was Grayson, wasn’t it? I heard about the way the two of you were looking at each other.”