Elusive (On The Run Book #1) (4 page)

Had it been quick? Had he known
what was happening or was he pulled under immediately? Zoe knew he’d fought. If
he’d been conscious, he would have kicked and wrestled with the current. Her
throat felt tight.

She’d hoped if she saw it herself,
she might see something that would give her some optimism, but the water was
still high and moving at a rapid clip. If he’d gone in unexpectedly, or hit his
head...

A twig swept by, rocking back and
forth on the current. Her gaze followed it under the bridge, until she couldn’t
see it anymore. She let out a ragged breath and turned away from the water.

She swiped at her eyes and
realized she was cold. The brisk wind was buffeting her suede jacket and pushing
the fabric of her weathered jeans against her legs. She paused to lean down and
look in the window of Jack’s Honda. There were a few odds and ends—napkins and
sunglasses—on the passenger seat, but it was his phone that she focused on. He
always had that phone with him. He was constantly connected. He could text
faster than she could type. At first, she’d thought his dedication to the
business was admirable and his speedy texting was impressive, but gradually the
traits became irritating. He was always firing off texts, during dinner, while
he was jogging, and even at night. His phone was on the nightstand beside the
bed—or at least it had been when they were married. Jack had said it was
because they were a start-up business and things would eventually calm down,
but when Zoe woke up one night and found him replying to a text at three a.m.,
she’d decided that day might never come.

She turned away sharply, a wave of
sadness breaking over her. She didn’t want to look at that abandoned phone. The
rush of emotion surprised her. She was divorced. She and Jack had moved on.
They weren’t even part of each other’s lives now, not really. She felt a sharp
pain somewhere in the region of her chest as she remembered their last
conversation. Utility bills were all they had to talk about.

She went back to her car and
watched the movements of the people downstream. As the sun rose, the shadowy
figures slowly resolved themselves into men moving along the creek banks,
people in boats, and figures in scuba gear. Her phone rang several times. She
ignored it. A helicopter circled overhead. Gradually, the searchers moved
downstream, farther way from her. She wondered what they would do when they
reached the point where Deep Creek emptied into Humbolt Lake. It wasn’t that
far away. Less than a mile. Would they stop then? Zoe thought a complete search
of the massive lake would be nearly impossible. The people receded in front of
her almost as if they were being carried downstream, becoming smaller and
harder to see. There was no change in their movements, no excited calls or
hurried gestures.

She decided to leave when a tow
truck rumbled up and parked in front of Jack’s Honda. She couldn’t watch
anymore. She stopped and talked to an officer. She showed him her I.D. and told
him she was Jack’s next of kin. Zoe wondered how she could feel so numb and
detached and yet almost achy at the same time. She told him if they needed to
tow the car, they could take it to her house. She found her card from the auto
service that Jack had insisted that they have.

Amazingly, it was something she’d
kept up even after the divorce. Not her normal style, which was more haphazard,
but the annual bill had arrived at a time when she had a little extra cash and
renewing it seemed like the smart, responsible thing to do. The tow truck
driver said something about impound, so she shrugged and went back to the
Jetta. She pulled away from the busy scene, not really caring where the car was
towed. She would sort it out later.

She drove aimlessly for an hour,
until the sun was completely over the horizon and the roads became impossibly
clogged with traffic. She pulled into a 7-11 and bought a coffee. It was too
hot to drink, so she held it in her hands, staring at the dashboard. She needed
to call Sharon and Connor. She took a cautious sip of the coffee. It was bitter
and burned her tongue. She put the coffee down and picked up her phone. Five
phone calls and seven text messages from Helen. Yep, she was upset.

Without listening to the messages
or reading the texts, she sent a text to Helen. “I’m fine. Will call later. GO
TO WORK!” Zoe hit send. Next, she brought up the number for the GRS office, but
stopped before dialing. It was too early, and this wasn’t a conversation to
have on the phone. As much as she disliked Connor, she should go there and tell
him face-to-face what had happened.

It was a few minutes after eight
when Zoe pulled into the parking lot of the office complex, thinking of the day
she’d met Jack. He and Connor looked at one of the office suites she owned. The
suites shared the same middle wall, and the layouts mirrored each other. Each
suite had two separate offices as well as a reception area. She’d rented the
suite on the left to an accountant with the unlikely name of Kiki. Jack and
Connor had been looking at the suite on the right. They had been running their
business out of Connor’s apartment, but it was doing so well they were looking
for office space.

Connor had white blond hair, a
perfectly tailored suit, was thin to the point of gauntness, and hypercritical.
The carpets weren’t clean enough, the rooms were too small, and the location
was too far away from downtown. He was at least six-five, and he’d looked down
his long, sloping nose at her the whole time. Jack, on the other hand, had an
upbeat personality and thick, dark brown hair with a bit of a wave to it, and
blue, blue eyes. He was all optimistic excitement. The office was fine. Exactly
the right size for a start-up and the location was the best part—they wouldn’t
have to fight the traffic. He’d smiled widely and said, “It’s great. We’ll take
it.”

She shook her head to banish those
images. So much had happened since then. She scanned the parking lot, but
didn’t see Sharon’s white minivan. She must be running late, but there was
Connor’s precious Beemer wedged into the last space on the back row to protect
it from door dings. She gripped the door handle on the office’s front door and
pushed, calling out, “Connor? It’s me, Zoe.”

There was no answer. He was
probably on the phone. He always was. While Jack preferred to text, Connor
liked to talk. More like, hear himself talk, Zoe thought as she took a few
steps toward Connor’s office, then her pace faltered. Underlying the smell of
copy paper, ink, and old coffee, there was a funny smell...not a gas
leak...something else. Something faintly rancid. Had a mouse or something died in
one of the walls? Zoe had seen (and smelled) some pretty gross stuff as a
property manager. She’d been called on to remove dead mice from traps and the
bathrooms—well, people could be disgusting, especially when they didn’t have to
clean up after themselves.

She walked to Connor’s office door
and stepped into the doorway. “Connor,” she said uncertainly. His oversized
executive leather chair was turned slightly away from her, but she could see he
wasn’t on the phone. He sat motionless, one arm aligned neatly on the armrest.
“Connor?” She repeated, her voice almost a whisper. Her heart began to thump in
her chest. She wanted to leave, but forced herself to take a few hesitant steps
until she could see his face. His thin blond hair hung limply over his
forehead, but didn’t conceal the bright red bullet hole between his open eyes.

––––––––

ZOE wasn’t sure how long she stood
like that, staring at Connor’s body, but it was probably only a few seconds
before the front door opened, then solid clicks sounded as someone stepped
across the small tiled entry area.

Zoe jerked around. “Hey, Zoe, are
you in here?” called a female voice. “I saw your car.”

Sharon. It was Sharon, her voice
reassuringly normal. Zoe pressed her shaking fingers to her mouth then said,
“Yes, I’m in Connor’s office.” It came out breathy and odd sounding. Sharon
would know what to do. She was a forty-five-year-old divorced mother of two
boys who never took any crap from anyone, including Connor, the most frequent
distributor of crap Zoe had ever seen.

“Why do you sound out of breath?
Have you taken up jogging, too?” There was the sound of something, paper or
files, being slapped down on a desktop, and then Sharon appeared in the doorway
of Connor’s office. “Am I going to be the only lazy bum around here—” She
stopped speaking when she saw Zoe’s face, then Connor’s body.

“Oh. My. God.” Zoe had taken a few
deep breaths and expected that she would need to calm Sharon down, but Sharon
only shook her head and put her hands on her ample hips. Looking remarkably
composed, she said, “Well, I can’t say I’m awfully surprised.”

“You knew this was going to
happen?” Zoe asked.

“Not this exact thing,” Sharon
said. Her short, dark brown hair feathered against her plump face as she shook
her head. “But I knew someday he’d push someone too far.”

“Should we check for a pulse?” Zoe
asked, reluctantly. She’d always steered clear of Connor, and she wasn’t about
to go near him now.

“No. He’s dead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Honey, I worked in a nursing home
for two years before I went to work for the boys. He’s not going to have a
pulse. He’s probably been here all night,” Sharon said, matter-of-factly. “He
was wearing that suit yesterday. Come on, let’s get out of here. The police
won’t want us to touch anything.” Sharon ushered Zoe out of Connor’s office and
pushed her down into the visitor’s chair positioned in front of her desk before
she picked up the phone to dial 911.

“We should leave. What if whoever
did that is still here?” Zoe said, standing up quickly.

“I’ve already been in Jack’s
office—I had to drop off some files and,” she paused, looked over her shoulder,
and said, “I can see there’s no one hidden in the bathroom. The door’s wide
open. You better call Jack while I call the police,” she said, her fingers
poised over the phone’s keypad.

“Jack’s missing.”

During her rambling morning drive,
Zoe had rehearsed several ways to break the news to Sharon and Connor. That
bald statement hadn’t been one of her choices, but it was all she could come up
with at the moment. “The police think he’s dead. They’re not officially saying
that, but I know they’re not hopeful. He was caught in the storm yesterday and
tried to wait it out under a bridge. He slipped into the water and they’re
searching the creek now, but...” Zoe shrugged. “Like I said, they’re not
hopeful.”

Sharon plopped down into her
chair, the phone dangling from her hand. “Both of them...gone?” Zoe nodded. She
finally had stunned the unflappable Sharon. “Did you see either one of them
yesterday?”

“Sure,” Sharon said. “They were
both here in the morning. Jack left at noon like he always does, and I didn’t
see him after that. I left early for the dentist and didn’t come back. Connor
was in there yammering away on some conference call when I left,” she said, and
then she looked slightly ashamed, as though she’d just remembered Connor was
dead.

“Something weird is going on,” Zoe
said, worriedly chewing on her lower lip. “One business partner disappears and
the other is shot on the same day? That can’t be a coincidence. Jack came by
the house to shower like he always does after his run, but I didn’t see him. Do
you think he came back here before...” Zoe raised her eyebrows at Connor’s
doorway.

“I don’t know.” Sharon slapped the
phone down and wheeled her chair to her computer. She moved the mouse then
began typing. “I’m the network administrator. I can see when they last used
their computers.” She tapped a few more keys then leaned back in her chair. “Connor
used his computer yesterday morning—just his e-mail, though. Jack used
his—Word, e-mail, a few spreadsheets, Internet searches, all normal stuff from
seven-thirty until eleven-thirty. Then he logged on to the Internet again
around twelve-thirty.”

“But he was at home around then,”
Zoe said.

They stared at each other for a
moment then Sharon said. “I better make that call to the police.” She picked up
the phone and told the 911 dispatcher that there had been a murder.

Zoe asked in a low voice, “Can you
think of anyone who’d want to hurt both of them?”

Sharon tilted the phone away from
her mouth and said quietly, “You know what Connor was like—he ticked off half
the people he met, but murder? No. And Jack? No. No one.”

Zoe nodded. “Exactly what I was
thinking. But I haven’t talked to Jack about, well, anything lately. How was
the business going? Did they have anyone who might...want them out of the way?
That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?” Zoe said, amazed she was having this
bizarre conversation.

“No. Everything was fine.
Fantastic, even. The stock has been through the roof. We’d gotten a lot of good
press lately. And we had some interest from a possible new client in Italy.”

“But competitors? Someone who’d
want Jack and Connor gone?”

Sharon’s mouth quirked into a
wiggly line, discounting that thought. “No. We don’t have any serious
competition. That’s why we’re doing so well.” Zoe heard the distant wail of
sirens and had an urge to bolt for the door. She wanted away from this crazy
situation, but she forced down the desire to escape.

––––––––

Dallas

Wednesday 11:26 a.m.

––––––––

ACROSS town, Jenny Singletarry
looked around Jason’s Deli for Special Agent Mort Vazarri. He’d either be here
or down the block at Arby’s. She hoped he was here because she didn’t have time
during her lunch hour to make another stop. She spotted him in the back corner
eating alone. She hurried to get some food for herself then slid into the booth
across from one of her most important contacts. “How’s the tuna sandwich,
Mort?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Same as always,” he
said, his voice monotone.

Mort was a burly guy of about
fifty, but he looked as though he should be collecting social security checks.
His physical appearance hadn’t changed much in all the time Jenny had known
him: medium height and build with a thatch of thick hair, which had gone gray
prematurely when he was in his late thirties. She had once told him his hair
made him look like a mad scientist. She’d been seven at the time. She’d had her
arms hooked over the backyard fence and her feet braced on the support boards
to boost herself up so she could see what their neighbor, Mr. Mort, was
harvesting from his garden that ran along the side of the fence. He’d laughed
and asked her if her mom wanted tomatoes. He didn’t laugh much anymore, not
since his daughter’s leukemia diagnosis. After two years of treatment, tests,
and hospitalizations, she’d passed away.

Unlike his physique, which was
unchanged, his face reflected all the stress and grief and pain of his loss.
His personality had changed, too. Instead of his normal friendly manner, he was
withdrawn and almost listless. The washed-out version of Mort worried her, not
because she was afraid he’d quit or move away and she’d lose a source, but
because she’d known him forever. She’d been fascinated with him when she was a
kid.

The FBI agents she saw on TV or
in the movies were always young and handsome or they were slightly older and
troubled, but still handsome. They were nothing like her middle-aged neighbor
who told great knock-knock jokes and gave away tomatoes. In fact, Jenny thought
that her incessant drive to discover the truth—her aspiration to be a
reporter—could be, partially at least, traced back to her desire to find out
the truth about Mort—was he
really
with the FBI?

She’d spent long hours observing
him on weekends from the safety of her upstairs window, which overlooked his
house. She kept careful notes. He mowed his grass, weeded his garden, and had
conversations with her dad about the brown patches in their lawns. It seemed too
mundane for a real FBI agent. Then one day, his wife Kathy had invited her
inside their house and Jenny had seen proof: his badge. And she’d also seen the
pictures lining the hallway. Sequenced in a timeline, the photographs traced
his time in his military uniform, then in a tuxedo for his wedding, and later
in his police uniform. At that point, the pictures shifted to their daughter.
Walking slowly back down the hall, turning back time as it were, Jenny realized
she’d learned her first lesson in truth. The truth of Mort belied all those
television stereotypes. Mort was real and the truth was more surprising to her
than the made-up stuff.

During college she’d kept in touch
with Mort and Kathy in a distant way, dropping in to see them for a few minutes
during Christmas or spring break when she was home. She always took a mystery
novel for their daughter, Ellen, who was several years younger than Jenny.
Ellen had been a surprise baby who had arrived when they were in their late
forties, long after they’d given up on having a family so it seemed especially
devastating when she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. She fought for
two years, but died when Jenny was in her senior year. It was only after Jenny
returned home with her new journalism degree that she realized how bad off Mort
was.

She didn’t know much about
clinical depression—the health sciences were about as far away from journalism
as you could get—but she was willing to bet that Mort was seriously depressed.
His partner of fifteen years retired and moved to the Alabama Gulf Coast, and
his new, younger partner tended to rub him the wrong way, to put it mildly.
Kathy seemed to find a vocation at the cancer society. She immersed herself in
fundraising, patient education, and cancer prevention awareness. She would
never be the same after her daughter’s death, but she seemed to find solace and
support in her volunteer work. Mort, on the other hand, seemed adrift, removed,
and almost indifferent, which was such a contrast from the usual spark and
verve that characterized him before Ellen’s illness and death.

Jenny knew from experience not to
ask how he was. She’d only get his standard answer: fine. She dipped a spoon in
her tomato soup and stirred. “So I hear you and Mr. G.Q. are working on a new
case.”

The corner of his mouth turned up.
“You throwing around that non-existent press pass again?”

She raised her chin. “I’m a
legitimate employee of the
Dallas
Sentinel News
.”

“Yeah, but last time I checked,
the obit writer didn’t need to know about on-going FBI cases.” He grinned
briefly before finishing off the last bite of his sandwich.

“All I need is one good break to
move up to News,” she said, then steered the conversation away from her rather
unfulfilling current job. “Is G.Q. around?”

“Nah,” Mort wiped his mouth with a
paper napkin. “He’s over at Nordstrom’s perfume counter. New girlfriend—Alana,
I think—works there.”

“How long do you give it?”

“Let’s see, this is the first
week...probably two more weeks. A month tops.”

“I give it less than a week.”

“You’re on. Twinkies or
Twizzlers?”

“Twizzlers, no question. Well,
either way, it’s good to know one of Dallas’s top twenty-five eligible
bachelors isn’t going off the market.”

Mort tossed his napkin onto his
plate with a bark of laughter. “Not anytime soon.”

“It’s good to hear you laugh,
Mort,” Jenny said and then immediately regretted it because his face shut down.
She’d committed the cardinal sin—she’d mentioned his emotional state, something
he avoided at all costs. “So about this case,” she said quickly, pulling her
notepad from her bag. “I hear that GRS stock holders aren’t happy.”

“Where did you hear that?” Mort
asked, his arms folded across his chest.

“My friend Hank works in Local
News. He mentioned it.”

“Is someone working on a story?”
His face was neutral, but Jenny knew he wanted to know if the paper would throw
a spotlight on one of his current investigations.

“Yeah, me,” Jenny said pertly.
Mort shook his head, and she continued, “No one’s really digging into it yet.
They’re shorthanded as it is, after the lay-offs, and it’s still local election
season. Almost everyone is covering the primary run-offs and the local school
board elections.” She leaned forward. “This is my chance.”

“Are you sure you want to work for
that editor?” Mort asked. “I hear she’s a real piece of work.”

Jenny lowered her voice. “Word is
that it won’t be long before she’ll be at a local television station.” The
newsroom editor at the
Dallas
Morning Sentinel
, Anna Thessanta, was a twenty-five-year-old shrew
who could shout anyone down and seemed to survive on a diet of Starbuck’s
lattes, carrot sticks, and a few almonds thrown in for protein.

“Why don’t you do that—work in TV?
That’s where all the action is, right? Newspapers are dying.”

“I’m not TV material. I’m too
plain.” She lifted a strand of her lank, brown hair and pushed her glasses up
the bridge of her nose. “That’s not for me,” she said with a shake of her head.
“And I see what you’re trying to do—distract me. But I’m not falling for it.
The rumors about GRS sound pretty bad.”

“Well, it sounds as though your,
what-do-you-call-it, blog, website thing is going pretty good. Kathy reads it
everyday,” Mort said, sidestepping the GRS topic.