Ties That Bind (6 page)

In short, the man was one to be reckoned with. Gage stood next to the chief, giving him several surreptitious glances. She knew Gage was summing him up. She almost wished he would make the wrong judgment call and underestimate Chief Roberson.

She could also tell from the way they stood next to each other that they had never met until tonight.

“Sam and I have worked together,” Gage said, getting right to the point. “We were on an undercover case last year.”

“Oh, well, that’s good. Then you’re familiar with each other, and can quickly put together a top-notch team to stop this … whatever it is. I expect you’ll cooperate fully with Detective Flint, right, Montgomery?”

A gleam in his eye told her he was perfectly well aware that she knew Gage and that this might be a volatile situation. She remembered the chief talking about his academy friend who was the “big honcho” in Salt Lake and felt her stomach begin to churn. Was this how she got the job in her hometown? Had Gage never really been gone from her life?

Maybe the whole Clarkston fiasco been common knowledge for everyone in Kanesville, including her boss. Maybe she’d been hired out of pity. So where did Gage Flint measure in?

Sam felt the sudden narrowing of her throat, the urge to cry abruptly, surprisingly strong. The one reaction that could bring her down. She swallowed back the tears. Maybe she owed Gage more than she knew. And that was a bitter bite of acid.

She hated that
he
was the trigger.

“I need to run down a few things with Flint, and then he’s all yours,” Roberson said. He motioned at Gage to follow him over to the computer, and Sam turned away and swallowed hard. She was pretty sure that it couldn’t get any worse. A difficult case—three cases—the man she loved in high school, and the man who had made her feel like no other but thrown her to the wolves when things got hot.

Great.

She closed her eyes and remembered the beginning. The day she met Gage Flint—those flashing eyes whose electricity she felt the moment she shook his hand. A thrill of excitement had rolled through her body as she realized that her placement undercover meant constant contact with this man.

But then the case … it had been the beginning—and the end.

*   *   *

She remembered standing for the first time in the big warehouse/kitchen supply store belonging to the Clarkstons, undercover on the biggest case of her young career. She kept her eyes on the floor, meek, submissive. The man who stood in front of her, carrying a clipboard and eyeing her up and down, was mollified by her subjection, even though she was wearing jeans and a loose T-shirt. The girl who stood next to her, Mary Ann, wore a long dress, work boots, and had her hair in a thick braid twisting down her back. She kept her eyes down as well. Sam was a quick study and had learned from Mary Ann what was needed to survive in the Clarkston clan.

The group was closed, secretive, and tightly woven, and infiltrating them was not going to be easy. Sam had become friends with shy, ungainly Mary Ann, who was known to be the daughter of one of the highest leaders of the Clarkston order. Befriending the sad, lonely, mousy girl was easy. It hurt Sam to see how truly alone Mary Ann really was, but she had a job to do.

They’d met at the Salt Lake City Public Library, because it had been set up that way. Mary Ann didn’t know.

Sam had bemoaned her lack of a life and her lack of a job, and before she knew it Mary Ann had brought her into the very entryway of the Clarkston clan—their main business, a kitchen supply store. Getting further than that had proved difficult.

The Clarkston “organization,” as those in the know referred to it, maintained a remarkably low profile in Utah, despite the fact that they were building a huge financial empire.

Getting close to understanding just how much money the Clarkstons had had taken police detectives months, and they still only had a ballpark figure. They knew that the holdings were worth at least $200 million.

But you wouldn’t know that driving by the shacks and shanties where the Clarkston wives lived, scattered throughout North Salt Lake and Salt Lake City.

Tracing the clan’s holdings was difficult, given the Clarkstons’ penchant for placing businesses and real estate holdings under corporate titles and other names. This device managed to shield them from direct scrutiny.

The easiest way in, as far as the investigating detectives had seen it, was through Mary Ann. And an entry level position at the kitchen supply store that also served as the church’s headquarters and place where they held their Sunday meetings.

The undercover job not only introduced Sam to the intriguing Gage Flint, but for once she thought she was going to be able to be the savior. She might actually be able to save someone, to change someone’s life.

This time, she might make a difference.

*   *   *

After Roberson finished up with Gage, he sent him over to Sam and turned to one of the techs dismantling the computer. Gage met her eyes without restraint, and she fought to maintain her composure, forcing a look of ice over her face.

Don’t react … don’t react.…

“So, we meet again.”

“I don’t need your help.” The words tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop them.

“That’s not very friendly, Sam. I think your chief wants us to work together in the spirit of police brotherhood.” His eyes glinted with humor, making her even more uptight. Anger burned in her stomach. It matched the electricity she felt, which pissed her off. On her first big case she had wanted to prove something and the electricity sparking between her and Gage was an additional bonus. Or so she’d thought.

“Look, I have work to do, and I really don’t need your help. I appreciate the offer, but we’re fine.”

“I think I’ll just stick around and see what’s what.” He smiled at her. “Since the chief invited me, it might be bad manners to just leave.”

She looked over at the chief, who was listening to the tech with interest, seemingly unaware of Gage and Sam’s confrontation. She turned back to the tall, muscular man and talked herself into a form of composure.

“I have no doubt that this was not an invitation, and did not just happen by accident,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “You forced your way in here. Or used your connections to get here. The only question I have is why? Why are you here?”

“I’m here to help,” he said calmly.

“I don’t need your help,” she said again, through clenched teeth. “Go back to Salt Lake. Any ideas you have are of no interest to me.”

“Sam, are you ever going to get past the Clarkston case?”

She crossed her arms and glared at him. She could feel her lips tighten, and her scalp tingled as she watched his eyes narrow.

“What? Why are you looking at me that way?” he asked.

“Get past the Clarkston case?”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Get past the fact that a young girl was about to be married to her fucking uncle, literally, and was scared out of her mind?”

“It happens every day. We couldn’t stop it. Her only hope was for us to bring the entire family down, and free her that way. And you know it.”

“No, no I don’t, because later that night she ended up dead, didn’t she?”

Sam knew her voice carried across the office, and she self-consciously looked around before motioning him closer.

He stepped closer, but there was fire in his eyes. His broad chest moved rapidly, and she saw he had his hands in fists. He took another step closer, then spoke: “She died, because you let her think she might be able to get away. You gave her hope. Your job was not to help her escape. It was to bring down that family. And you failed.”

His words cut into her like she was nothing more than warm butter and he was holding a spoon.

“I could have saved her.”

“You got her killed.”

Sam turned and walked away from him, fighting back tears, because neither one of them would ever know the truth. Could she have saved Mary Ann? If it hadn’t been for Sam, would the timid girl just have gone along with her family’s horrendous plans and married a man—her uncle—who didn’t want her? Unhappy, molested, but alive—was that a better life?

Sam would never know. And neither would Mary Ann.

Then Sam turned and walked over to D-Ray and Paul, the lesser of two evils. Paul was the past and sad memories, but Gage was still with her. It pissed her off that she couldn’t forget him. Even worse, she wanted to hate him and knew she didn’t.

EIGHT

Sam pulled up into the driveway of her town house, located in the middle of Kanesville, a short walking distance from just about everything, including the police station. Of course, she never walked anywhere. She either sped in her car or ran on foot.

The tree-lined road to her home was dotted with older houses on each side, abodes that had been there since long before her birth. Her own town house was newer and stood out like a sore thumb among the small redbrick and white cottage-type houses that made up old Kanesville. She both liked and hated the location. Much like her life.

She’d known all along these weren’t suicides. The fact that someone had taken pictures of the dead bodies proved it. Add to that Gage’s reappearance in her life—if only her work life—and she wanted to scream. Now what? And why?

The night air was stifling and hot, still nearly eighty degrees, but she hadn’t turned the air conditioner on for the short drive from the school to her house—she had a chill that would not go away.

The pictures of those three teenagers danced through her head, and she closed her eyes tightly, then opened them, hoping the images would be gone. It didn’t work; the slide show seemed permanently engraved.

She left the department vehicle parked in the driveway, enough to the side that she could get her own personal vehicle out of the one-car garage, should she need it. She slammed the door shut and hit the keypad to lock it, then headed for her front door. She hadn’t expected to be this late, so there was no burning porch light to guide the way. A shiver ran up her spine. She pulled her small flashlight off her duty belt and shined it at the door.

Juggling her keys through her fingers, she cursed silently as the hair on her arms stood upright. She finally found the right key and inserted it into the lock. A shuffling through the grass closed in on her rapidly. She fought back a scream. Pushing open the door, she accidentally dropped her flashlight. The unmistakable squeaking sound of feet moved softly but quickly through wet grass. The automatic sprinklers came on every night at 10:00 p.m. What might have been the silent approach of a predator was instead given away by the moist lawn.

She dropped her keys on the ground, reached into her duty belt, and drew her gun.

Whipping around, she screamed, “Freeze, or I’ll blow your balls off!”

A sudden harsh bark and growl told her that she had been frightened by the neighbor’s cocker spaniel, a particularly loathsome creature who was apparently nocturnal and did not like people. Including Sam. Undoubtedly he had been leaving a doggie present on her lawn, despite the fact that she had made numerous trips across the street to talk with his owners about him running loose and pooping in every yard but his own.

She watched as he turned his head away from her, snout high, probably affronted by her verbal assault on his doggie genitals, and trotted back across the road.

Her heart slowed down as she flipped on the inside light and spotted her flashlight back behind a long-empty clay pot. Sam reached down to grab it, her hand touching something warm and small. She squealed and pulled her hand back. Standing to reach inside the house, she flipped on the porch light, scanned the perimeter for intruders one more time, then looked back down at the place her flashlight had fallen. Next to it was a small, dead rodent.

Sam shivered, realizing she had touched it. And it had been warm.
Not dead long.
She looked across the street at the cocker spaniel’s house, eyes narrowing in suspicion. But dogs didn’t bring warm, dead presents. She’d heard cats did, but she had no cat.

Shaking off the feeling this was not an accident, she carefully picked up her flashlight, avoiding the mouse, and entered her lukewarm town house. She shut the door behind her, engaging the dead bolt. Cleaning up the mouse would have to wait until D-Ray dropped by. A girl had her standards. She plucked her keys off the ceramic tile entryway and flipped on the hallway light.

There was little doubt that her first major case on the Kanesville force was creeping her out. She was damned glad she didn’t have to explain to the cranky old lady across the street why she had shot the family pet—as horrible as he was.

She headed to her room, removing all her police paraphernalia and placing it in her bedside table drawer as she always did. Then she quickly shed her clothes for shorts and a tank top.

Her air-conditioning seemed to have two settings: warm and warmer. She hadn’t got around to calling a heating/AC company to fix it yet, so the house was toasty. Just what you didn’t want on a hot Utah summer night. Sam walked into her kitchen and pulled the chain on the ceiling fan above the dining room table, hoping to get a little circulation going in the stagnant air.

She opened the fridge and looked inside, pulling out one of her protein drinks. One of the few things she could stomach, that didn’t make her feel like she had to go throw up, because … Because why?

Because you think you’re too fat. You have body dysmorphia, like Michael Jackson did. Good thing you can’t afford plastic surgery. You don’t see yourself like you really are. Skin and bones.

“Shut up, Callie,” she said to the voice in her head. She’d long since resigned herself to speaking with her dead sister—maybe it was the only reason Sam had stayed sane all these years. Or maybe she wasn’t sane.
Don’t go there.

As she was taking a long sip of the chocolate protein shake, the doorbell rang. She jumped, spilling chocolate down her white tank top.

It was late. Too late for visitors.

Heart pounding, thinking of Gage, Sam hurried to her front door, trying unsuccessfully to wipe off the chocolate stain. When she reached the door, she peered through the peephole.