Flee the Night (9 page)

Andee had struggled to keep them oriented as they slogged through the forest—no easy task in the darkness under direction of flashlight. At best, she had them in a five-hundred-yard radius of her guesstimation. The advent of the highway lent some indication of their position. At least it was marked on the topo map.

“I think so,” she answered and knelt on the road.

The ELS and GPS systems that logged the position of the base camp would reel the team back in. But Micah wanted to move faster. The body posture of the dog—perked ears, tail up—told Micah that Sherlock had been after someone—Emily or another human. Micah didn’t want to waste time finding the ranger or the local, exhausted SAR team and talking them into an official call-out.

He toggled the radio. “SAR-1 to Base.”

“Base, SAR-1. Go ahead.” Sarah’s voice over the radio sounded tight, as if she were dealing with her own frustrations and not well.

“Our POS is negative. We need a CERT team. We’re 10-19 but need a pickup.”

“10-4, SAR-1. What’s your 10–20?”

Micah handed the radio to Andee, who rattled off their estimated position.

“What’s your ETA?” Sarah asked.

“Give us twenty minutes,” Andee responded.

“And tell Micah that we have a 10–14.”

Micah frowned at Andee. Sarah had someone on her tail? He motioned for the radio. “Come again, Base.”

“Local ranger type. Wants to talk to you.”

Micah remembered his conversation with Ranger Hank Billings that ended with, “I’ll take a look around, but I don’t want you tromping through the woods, ending up another casualty.” Obviously Ranger Billings hadn’t decided to head for the local pub after work. Maybe Micah had acquiesced too quickly for the man to be fooled.

He made a face. “Copy that.” It was probably time to get the locals involved anyway.

Dannette gathered in Sherlock and attached him to his lead while they waited for Conner and Sarah to pick them up. An overhead cluster of thunderheads, still jockeying for position, obscured the moon and released a miserable, fine drizzle. Micah couldn’t pry the image of Emily—dirty, scared, and nearly hypothermic—from his mind. He stomped along the ditch, wanting to hit something hard.

Micah didn’t know what made it worse—that Lacey had had a daughter all these years and he hadn’t known it or that he had stood at the foot of her bed and called her a liar.

What part, exactly, of the last seven years was fiction … or fact?

Conner pulled up first, followed by Sarah in Dannette’s truck. Dannette loaded Sherlock into the dog carrier in the back—a long box filled with straw, food, and water—while Sarah trudged up to Micah, murder in her expression.

The woman was from New York City, a paramedic who didn’t rattle easily. Micah had seen her stare down a frantic gang of townspeople bent on running into the woods after a missing teenager—and becoming victims themselves—without flinching. Someone had shaken Sarah off her moorings.

“Get this guy off my back,” Sarah growled as she met him.

Micah raised his eyebrows and looked past her. “Hank Billings?”

“Yeah. Says the park closes at dusk. Says we’re breaking the law.”

Hank Billings at night didn’t look at all like the clean-cut, uniformed, glassy-eyed ranger Micah had met earlier in the day at Ranger HQ. Billings swaggered when he walked, and with his black jacket and cowboy hat, he looked like someone out of a Kevin Costner Western. “I didn’t say that.”

“You did.” Sarah turned and Micah thought he saw smoke in her eyes. “You said, ‘What you folks are doing might be called going over the line.’”

“Right.” Ranger Billings stared at her. “You’re jumping to the wrong conclusions, missy. I was inferring that you might be going overboard with your search. I put in a call to the local SAR team, and they said there was no one left at the wreck, that all the survivors had been brought in. You should be checking the local hospital, folks.”

“I was there. Emily wasn’t.” Micah’s own tone—terse and on the don’t-push-me side of angry—startled even himself. He hadn’t realized he’d invested so many emotions into this search. Micah sighed. “We have reason to believe there is a six-year-old girl out here in her pajamas, freezing and lost. We were just headed into town to talk to the CERT and see if we could get them to do a call-out. I appreciate your checking up on us, but we’re fine. And all done here.”

Hank Billings must have done time in the army. He stood six-foot-something and didn’t so much as take his eyes off Micah, let alone flinch. “Okay. Contrary to popular belief, I wasn’t checking up on—”

“Hounding us is more like it,” Sarah said, and both Micah and Hank stared at her as if she were a rattler reared back to strike. “You deliberately stood outside my truck and listened to me … my …” She swallowed and turned away, her arms across her chest.

A smile quirked up Micah’s face. “You were singing, weren’t you?”

Sarah had few cracks, but when they opened, she had only one fix—singing.

“I like ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ Reminds me of my mama.” Hank shrugged, as if he had no idea he’d just seen inside Sarah’s heart.

Micah slipped an arm around Sarah. What Hank Billings couldn’t know is that singing had saved her life once upon a time. “We could use some singing right now. A little girl’s trail has vanished. And only Jesus knows where she is,” Micah said gently.

Hank looked at him, a frown on his face. “I’ll follow you into town. You might need some backup. Our team is pretty tired after the last two days.”

Maybe Micah had misjudged the man.

As Sarah stalked away, Hank’s gaze followed her. “I made her mad.”

“Yeah. She’ll be okay. Doesn’t like people to see her soft side.”

“She has a soft side?” Hank cracked a lopsided smile as he sauntered back to his truck.

Micah watched him go, wondering if they’d have to shake him, or if he’d come in handy.

“What’s the weather say?” Micah asked when climbed into the truck next to Conner.

He was on the Internet, working his palm PC. “It’s going to get down to the thirties tonight.” Conner’s expression gave no hint of hope.

Micah felt his chest knot while they drove back to their hastily set-up base camp.

Fifteen minutes later, he got out of Conner’s truck, climbed into his own. “I reserved us rooms at the Tree-Line Motel. I’ll meet you there later. I need to swing by the hospital first.” The thought of Lacey’s eyes emptying of all hope in front of him punched a burning hole in his gut.

Hospital visiting hours were obviously long over. The parking lot glistened under the glare of lights. The rain misted in their rays, evidence of the gloom beyond. Micah shoved his hands in his pockets and headed toward the doors, feeling his failures like Freon in his veins.

He walked past Lacey’s guard, preparing to do some fancy maneuvering, but the man didn’t stir. Sunken in sleep, he looked like he no longer felt Lacey was a threat.

The guard obviously didn’t know her like Micah did.

Or did he? In fact, there was so little Micah knew about this woman that the questions suddenly felt alive, burrowing through his chest. Like, why, exactly, did the NSA think she had murdered someone? Why had her daughter been traveling under a different name? Or even, why had it taken her seven years to call him?

Actually he could answer that last question. Pride. Hurt. Betrayal. Only whose betrayal? Hers or his?

He stood at the foot of her bed, watching her sleep, her head lolled to one side. His lucky penny. Her red hair was tangled, matted against the pillow, and in the darkness, she looked so peaceful. So unlike the woman he’d seen in Kazakhstan, blood dripping from her hands. Her voice rushed back to him as it had so many times, and he remembered the way she grabbed him by the shirt, eyes ferocious on his. “Help John.”

But it had been too late. John’s aorta had been severed. His life flooded on the floor, his blue eyes glassy. Micah nearly lost ten years of composure right there in the middle of the gutted warehouse.

He’d held together long enough to scoop Lacey into his arms and race through the Almaty streets toward the hospital. Long enough for her to moan, her hands curled around her body, “Oh, it’s all my fault. My fault. I killed him.”

He stared at her now, his throat thick, those words pinging in his head, and for the first time he wondered if maybe he should have stuck around long enough to decipher the meaning of those words.

Maybe there were a lot of things he should have stuck around to do. He trudged to the window, scraped a hand over his hair, and stared out into the darkness. Regrets seemed to line every conversation he had with Lacey over the years.

“Micah?” Her voice, soft, full of hope, made him wince.

He heard her shift, then a quick intake of breath as she sat up.

He turned, stared at his feet. He couldn’t look into those gray eyes. “Lacey, I … we found her trail and followed it.” He closed his eyes, feeling sick. “We lost it. I don’t know. We have a dog and he just lost it. I’m so sorry.”

She stayed silent. No moan. No mourning cry. Nothing. Then again, Lacey was a spy … or had been. She could mask the truth like a Shakespearean actor. Although her eyes were hard and still, the way she swallowed once, then twice, sparked something deep in his gut.

“You’re not … very surprised by this information.”

When she looked away from him, the feeling in his gut blazed to an inferno.
Oh no, what if
… “Lacey … they haven’t … found her, have they?” The idea of Lacey’s—John’s—daughter down in the hospital morgue made him reach out for the back of the chair.

She shook her head.

“She’s not dead?” he asked in a thin voice.

Lacey closed her eyes, as if the answer pained her.

He sat down, emptied. He heard only the thumping of his heart and the soft swish of rain outside the window. “Lacey, what is it?”

“Micah, I have to ask you to leave. I’m sorry, but I have to … handle this on my own.”

“What’s going on?” He heard the rush of anger in his voice, shocked that he could race from sympathy to fury so quickly. Lacey had always had the uncanny ability to light a match under his emotions. Still, he’d douse them to cinders before he let them get out of hand. He hadn’t earned the nickname Iceman because of his propensity to let himself unravel.

“She’s … I think she’s okay. For now.” Lacey was fisting the covers in her hand, her slung arm clutched tightly to her body.

He noticed her wrist, a reddened mark where the cuffs had been. “Thank you for coming to help me.” She didn’t look at him, but he heard the tremor in her voice. “I … appreciate it.”

“Appreciate it?” His voice rose and he fought to stifle it. “I haul my body across two states and spend part of the day and night tromping about the forest and you
appreciate
it? What do you think I am, the cavalry? The local national guard? Honey, you’re going to have to do better than that.” He pounced to his feet, a thousand questions screaming in his brain.

The wide-eyed look she gave him froze him on the spot. As if she were … afraid of him. As if she thought he might mean something else by his words.

Micah had no idea what had happened to her since that ugly night in the dingy warehouse, but he had a feeling it wasn’t good. He sat again on the chair, his body shaking. “I’m sorry. I … just meant that you can’t kick me out of your life again that easily.”

“I thought you’d be relieved,” she said in a whisper-thin voice. “I thought … well, that you wanted me to erase your name from my mind.”

Oh yeah, he had said that. Now he felt like a class-A, prizewinning jerk. “Maybe I just want to help.”

She stared at him, and he noticed the faint glistening of tears film her eyes. She licked her lips and opened her mouth, but no words emerged. When she closed it, she swallowed and looked away. “You’ve done more than I could ever expect. Get away from me, Micah. I’ll only cause you trouble.”

Now what was that supposed to mean? But it was his own words that startled him. His voice softened, and if he wasn’t mistaken, he said, “I’m a big boy, Lacey. And I’m not afraid of a little trouble.”

But he was in trouble. Big, big trouble. And looking at her, a single tear streaming down her cheek, he knew that he was a liar.

He was very, very afraid.

Chapter 6

“LACEY’S UP TO something. I know it.” Micah paced the motel room, worry knotting his thoughts. “I saw it in her eyes.”

“Sit down. You’re making me dizzy. I can’t think with you prowling.” Conner lay on one of the two double beds, a pillow crunched behind his neck, legs crossed at the ankles. Micah had caught him in his room, surfing CNN and FOX News. “She just told you to leave?”

Micah stopped, glanced at his reflection in the mirror, and shuddered. He looked like he’d done a two-day tango with the Tasmanian Devil, whiskers bedraggling his face, his hair in spikes from where he’d raked it one too many times. No wonder she’d asked him to leave. Only … he couldn’t dodge the niggle that she’d been lying about Emily’s being safe. Throwing him off the case for his own good. The haunted look in her eyes called out to him and followed him like a moan to the motel.

“Something happened today while we were out searching. I returned with this horrific news that her daughter had been out there and we didn’t find her, but Lacey was completely calm. As if she already knew that our trail had gone cold.” Micah turned away from the ghastly person in the mirror and leaned his hip against the dresser, crossing his arms over his chest. “I think someone has her daughter.”