Irrefutable Evidence (19 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

Just after midnight, Christmas Eve

“It’s Christmas Eve,” Sasha announced as she cut into her pecan pie with the side of her fork.

Connelly leaned across the table to give her a whipped cream-flavored kiss. “Happy Christmas Eve.”

She smiled and licked the curl of whipped cream off his upper lip. “Same to you.” Her smile faded. “Does this seem like overkill to you? We’re running from the potential of a threat. We don’t even know if we’re in anyone’s sights.”

His expression matched hers in seriousness. “No. It doesn’t feel like overkill. Hank saw Yim’s body. Hank said to run. Running was the right call.”

“What’s it like?” she mused.

“What’s what like?” he asked before shoveling a wedge of pumpkin pie into his mouth.

“What’s it like to have a partner who you trust with your life? I mean, I trust Will. I respect his opinion. I like working with him. But I wouldn’t pick up and head for the hills on his say so.”

Connelly considered the question. “Hank’s not my partner, technically, but the dynamic’s the same. In law enforcement, your partner’s, well, your partner. It’s like any other committed relationship, like having a spouse. You trust him implicitly because you’re in it together. You know he has your back. You’ve been through ugly things together and come out the other side.” An embarrassed look crept over his face as if he’d said too much. “Anyway. It’s like a marriage.”

“Except for the sexy times?” she teased to lighten the mood.

He swallowed another bite of pie. “I guess that depends on the partnership.” He threw her an exaggerated wink.

She giggled then pushed her plate away. The waitress raced by on her way to the kitchen and stopped in her tracks at the sight of the uneaten slice of pie.

“You don’t like it?” she asked, her blue eyes big with worry.

“Oh, no, it’s delicious,” Sasha assured her. “My stomach’s just a little jumpy.”

“You sure? I can bring you something else?”

“No, please. Really, it’s great.”

She pursed her lips but cleared the plate. “You folks headed home for the holiday?”

“Not exactly. Romantic getaway,” Connelly stage whispered.

“Huh, well, suit yourselves. I know if it were me, I’d be looking to have my romantic Christmas getaway on a tropical beach, not in the path of a massive winter storm.”

You and me both, sister,
Sasha thought, as the waitress hustled away with the dirty dishes.

“What was that she said about a storm?” Connelly asked.

“I have no idea.” She shrugged then scanned the old-fashioned diner for a television tuned to CNN or The Weather Channel, but in true vintage fashion, there was no television. “How much longer is the drive?”

“Another three hours or so. We should hit Kitty Hawk around three thirty. Then all we have to do is find the house.”

She felt tired just thinking about it. “I’ll drive the rest of the way. You can catch a nap.”

He gave her a grateful smile. “Thanks. Want a coffee for the road?”

“I guess.” Diner coffee didn’t sound remotely appealing to her, but she needed the jolt it would provide.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

Hank was tiptoeing up the front steps to his house with the third and final armload of wrapped presents that he’d been hiding in the trunk of his car when headlights arced over his back. A dark vehicle slowed to a stop even with his front walk. He dropped the packages to the ground and reached for his gun.

The car’s passenger window buzzed down and Agent Javon’s youthful face smiled out at him.

“It’s just me and Brenner. Don’t panic,” she said.

Hank pocketed the gun and furrowed his brow as he walked out into the street and neared the car. Did this girl actually think he had the capacity to
panic
at this stage in his life? Ah, youth.

“What are you kids doing? Out for a joyride?” he said in response.

Jamie killed the engine and leaned over. “We’re about to be. Show him, Javon.”

She held up a small black rectangle of metal.

“I’ll bite. What is it?”

“It’s a ghost rider. A GPS tracker available to anyone who’s willing to brave a Best Buy at one o’clock in the morning on Christmas Eve,” Jamie said.

Hank shook his head. The sheer volume of spying tools available to the general public was a real problem for law enforcement. Too many people secretly recording their nannies and tracking their ex-wives led to nothing but trouble.

“So?” he said.

“So, it’s the same model as the one Carlucci stuck under Leo Connelly’s SUV. And Agent Javon here is a bona fide geek girl programmer,” Jamie answered.

“Okay?”

Javon started talking enthusiastically—and so quickly that Hank had trouble following her. “So it was pretty easy to hack the online program to tap into the unit that Carlucci is using.”

“Wait? How was that easy?” Hank asked.

She eyed him slowly. He could almost hear her thinking
this dude is old; he’s never going to get my digital magic.
But she adopted a diplomatic tone. “It was easy to do, but it’s hard to explain. Just, trust me. We’re tagging along on the tracker. It’s like there’s a virtual line splitter.”

“Okay, if you say so. So where are they?”

“They just got off Route 64 and are headed south on Route 158.”

“Route 158, where’s that take them?”

“Only one place. The Outer Banks of North Carolina. Know anywhere they might hunker down on the barrier island.”

“No. I can’t think—” Hank stopped. His synapses, aged and analog though they may be, fired and he smiled. “As a matter of fact, I might.” He’d been the winning bidder when Will auctioned off the out-of-season week at Laura Peterson’s palatial beach house the previous spring. But then the Bennett kids had entered his life and he’d never managed to take a vacation.

“Hang on.” He pulled out his smartphone and squinted at the display in the dim glow cast by the streetlight. He rattled off a milepost and street address in Kitty Hawk and then slid the phone back into his pocket.

“Who lives there?”

“No one. It’s a beachfront vacation home for an expatriate living in France. She rents it out from May to September. The rest of the year it’s vacant.”

“Excellent place to hole up,” Brenner remarked.

“It is,” he agreed.

“Well except for the weather,” Javon interjected.

They both turned to look at her. “You know, Winter Storm Petra is bearing down on the coast?”

Hank gave her a blank look.

“FEMA’s issued a strongly worded statement advising holiday travelers to avoid the barrier islands. But they’ve stopped short of mandating an evacuation. Still, it’s going to be pretty hairy. And Deputy Director Cooney’s going to crap his pants if he tries to land a whirly bird at Langley AFB. They’re under a ground stop and there’s no room at the inn.” She sounded inexplicably excited about the prospect.

“So what do you say? Feel like chasing a killer into the eye of a storm with me and the desk jockey?” Jamie asked.

He did, and he didn’t. Twenty years ago—heck, twenty months ago—he’d already have been in the backseat. But his life was different now.

“I can’t.” He gave Javon an appraising look. “Do you have a weapon?”

“Not Bureau issued, no. And we don’t have time to make any additional stops, according to Brenner.”

Hank scratched his nose while he thought through his next step. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled his Beretta M9 back out. “Treat her well, would you?” He handed it butt first to Javon and indicated the box magazine. “That’s a fifteen rounder. You a righty or a lefty?”

“Righty, sir.”

He smiled. Something about holding a handgun made a federal agent snap to attention, even a geek girl programmer.

“You know how to use that thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t lose it. And if you happen to run into Cooney and his entourage, you didn’t get that thing from me.”

“No, sir. What thing, sir?”

He nodded approvingly and tapped the side of the car. “Get out of here. Safe travels. Go get my friends.”

Jamie Brenner’s expression could only be described as fierce. “You can count on it.”

He started the engine and the car sprang to life. Hank watched them drive away until the taillights disappeared in the night. Then he retrieved his fallen Christmas gifts and crept into his house full of sleeping children.

CHAPTER
THIRTY

Sasha sipped her lukewarm coffee, thankful for the generous pour of milk the waitress had dumped into it. She didn’t think she could have drunk it black. Not tonight. She really hoped she wasn’t coming down with something.

She glanced over at Connelly, whose head lolled against the headrest. It was putting a crick in her neck just to look at him sleeping in that position. She rolled her hunched shoulders and pressed the button to move the driver’s seat even closer to the steering wheel. The Lexus SUV was not designed for the (almost) five-foot-nothing driver, she thought, not for the first time.
That’ll teach you to let your gas tank drift toward empty,
she thought, also not for the first time.

The drive was deathly boring, dark and dull. But she was making good time. Another hour and they’d be in Kitty Hawk.

As if summoned by her hubris, a thunderclap shook the vehicle and out of nowhere a gust of wind pushed it sideways. She swerved back into her lane.

Great. Just what she needed—an interesting drive.

The jerking woke Connelly, who bolted upright. “Are you okay?” he gasped.

“I’m fine. The wind’s picking up. I guess that storm the waitress mentioned is coming. Sorry if I woke you.”

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the back of his fist. “It’s okay.” He blinked at the dashboard clock.

Raindrops splashed down on the windshield, fast and thick. The tempo picked up, and within a mile the rain was pounding on the SUV in a rapid drumbeat. The wipers swished crazily, at high speed. Their squeaking added to the din.

She gripped the steering wheel more tightly and squinted into the wet night. Visibility was getting worse. If there was a car anywhere ahead of her, she couldn’t see it. Overhead, a stoplight swung wildly, its wire bouncing in the gale.

“It’s raining a little bit,” she remarked mildly, mainly to convince herself that she was calm and in control.

“Are you good? If you want to pull off to the side and hit the flashers, I’ll take over,” Connelly offered.

She was about to say yes, but then she saw the standing water ahead. “Hold on!” she shouted instead.

She slowed the car as much as she could and the force of the water did the rest. They lurched forward through what had to be a foot of water. The SUV bucked and jerked, but they cleared it.

She didn’t dare take her eyes from the road to look at him. “That was something,” she said without moving her head. “Where are the flashers on this thing?”

He leaned forward and pressed the red triangle. The
shick, shick, shick
noise of the blinking emergency flashers joined the cacophony of the wipers and the rain beating on the hood and roof of the vehicle. Another thunder strike boomed outside. And a long, jagged bolt of lightning tore the sky in half.

Her palms were sweating but there was no way she was stopping in zero visibility to switch places with Connelly or for any other reason. She locked her eyes on the road ahead and resolved to drive through the storm, telling herself it had to let up.

As it turned out, it didn’t. It rained steadily for the next seventy-five minutes. If anything, the downpour was only more torrential when they reached the turn off for the Kitty Hawk beach.

The SUV sloshed through another enormous puddle of standing water at a bend in the road flanked by two flooded parking lots. The lot to the right had a metal guardrail fronting it. A sign reading ‘Public Beach Access. Park at Your Own Risk’ was bolted to the railing.

She turned into the lot and killed the engine. “Let’s leave it here and walk along the beach until we find Noah’s place,” she suggested.

Connelly looked at her as if she’d left her brain at the diner near Richmond but he didn’t object. “Sounds good.”

“No, it doesn’t. It sounds horrible. But spending another second trapped in here sounds even worse,” she told him.

“Fair enough.” He zippered his jacket to his chin and cinched his hood tight around his face.

Her coat didn’t have a hood, but she rummaged through his backseat and found a Penguins cap. She pulled the brim down tight over her eyes and shoved her hair through the back of it in an improvised ponytail.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Ready.”

She hit the button on the key fob to unlock the doors, and they both braced themselves and ventured out into the downpour. She locked the doors and tucked the fob away safely, then grabbed her husband’s hand and they raced toward the beach, splashing through puddles of icy cold water.

Despite the wet wind whipping in her face, the freezing rain, and the general raw misery of the night, the run invigorated her. She found herself laughing as she ran.

They sprinted until they reached the beach. They slowed their pace to a fast walk. Sasha’s shoes slipped and slid in the wet sand, unable to gain traction. The rain streamed off the bill of her hat in a steady flow. The sky was too dark for her to see the ocean through the downpour, but she could hear it crashing and churning.

Connelly peered out at her from under his hood. “It’s got to be close to four in the morning. It would be awesome to find the Petersons’ house and get some sleep. Do you have any brilliant ideas?”

She had lots of ideas for locating the house, but they all involved using a phone or a Web browser. “Nope,” she said.

“Yeah, me neither.”

Even in the dim light, Connelly’s fatigue was visible on his face. Sleeping in the Lexus seemed like a recipe for a cold, wet, unrestful night. He needed a warm bed with a firm mattress. Running water would be a welcomed bonus.
Think; think like a big firm law partner who had more money to spend than time to spend it.

“Okay. Let’s see. I’m sure Noah wouldn’t have built a house close to a public access, so if I had to guess, I’d look for a place that’s halfway between two beach access areas on a lot that’s big enough to provide some space on either side.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, it’ll also be the biggest house on the beach—without a doubt.”

Connelly’s white teeth flashed in the darkness as he laughed. He pointed down the beach. “Like that?”

She turned and looked over her shoulder. About five hundred yards away, a ship’s watch stood proud and tall over the neighboring houses. It was the crowning glory on an enormous house, and it was visible from where they stood thanks to two halogen spotlights mounted on the house’s roof and trained on a giant driftwood sculpture of a porpoise that spun atop the cupola like a crazed weathervane.

“Just like that,” she said, laughing with relief.

“His neighbors must have hated him,” Connelly muttered.

She didn’t bother to explain that irritating his slightly less rich neighbors was probably a large part of the motivation for the ostentatious display. She was just surprised his wife hadn’t reined him in. But at the moment, she was grateful for Noah Peterson’s need to announce his personal worth as loudly as possible when he’d been alive.

“Come on, let’s get the SUV and figure out how to get in the house.” She grabbed his hand and they tore off back to the parking lot.

When they reached the Lexus, she dug out the keys. “Here. Your turn,” she said through chattering teeth as she pressed the fob into his palm. She clambered into the passenger seat and sat shivering while he readjusted the seat and mirrors to better suit an adult-sized driver.

“It’ll warm up fast,” he promised as she turned up the heat.

“It’s okay. We’ll be in the house soon enough.”

He glanced at her. “How do you feel about my breaking a small window to get in?”

“We’ll do what we need to do. Laura will understand.” She stated it with complete conviction. While it was true that
Laura
would understand, Sasha was less sure about the reaction of the Outer Banks’ local law enforcement personnel if they were called to respond to a break-in at a multimillion dollar beach house on Christmas Eve. Judging by the way Connelly raised his eyebrows, he had the same concern.