She knew Eve had left, but she’d never asked why. Clay had never told Erica that Eve hadn’t wanted her. Even if Erica asked, he wouldn’t say. The truth was too harsh for a ten-year-old. He’d rather walk through fire than hurt his child.
The cell phone clipped to his belt chirped twice before he noticed. Sighing, he answered with a clipped utterance of his name.
“Chief!”
Clay knew immediately by Jo Nell’s tone this was no false alarm. She was as tough as they came and didn’t panic easily.
“I just got a call from Hogan,” she panted. “She’s in the canyon. Says someone’s shootin’ at her!”
He was sprinting toward the Explorer before she finished the first sentence. “Where?”
“Ranch road. Northwest side.”
“I’m on my way. Call Jett and Dugan. Get them out there. Send an ambulance, too, will you?”
“Sure thing.”
He hit End as the Explorer tore out of the driveway. The speedometer hit sixty as he dialed his home number. Heidi Huffschmidtt answered on the fourth ring. The Amish woman cooked and cleaned for him and Erica five days a week and worried about them getting enough to eat the other two. “Heidi?”
“Yah?”
“I have an emergency to take care of. Can you stay for a couple more hours?”
“No problem, Chief. I just put out the rhubarb pie and might just have me a piece.”
“Thanks,” he muttered and disconnected.
The speedometer reached ninety as he hit the highway. Picking up his mike, he put a call out to Marty. “What the hell’s going on?”
An instant of static, then Jett got on the line. “I’m en route, Chief. Jo Nell said they got shots fired in the canyon.”
“What’s your ETA?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
Clay was only five minutes away. “Loop around and enter from the southwest ranch road.”
“That’ll take longer.”
“Yeah, but if someone’s trying to run, that’s where you’ll intercept.”
“Roger that.”
Clay made the canyon in record time. He blew the stop sign at the ranch road and hit the dirt doing fifty. Midway down the northwest side, he spotted headlights and picked up his mike.
“Hogan, you there?”
Silence hissed. If she were able, Clay knew she’d respond. Why wasn’t she answering?
The remains of dusk were little more than a pale gray layer of clouds lying on the western horizon. But Clay could still see. The hairs at his nape prickled when he spotted Hogan’s cruiser. He could tell by the angle of the headlight beams that the vehicle was in the ditch.
Following the ranch road, he found the place where the car had left the road. “What the hell?”
Deep tire grooves marred the sandy soil. What would compel her to drive over terrain she didn’t have a chance of traversing without getting stuck?
He continued on, and the cruiser loomed into view, a wrecked ship listing on a sandy beach. Clay parked a few yards away, scanning the surrounding area as he snatched up the radio. “I got a visual on Hogan’s car. No sign of her.”
“Roger that, Chief,” came Jett’s voice. “I’m coming up from the south, ETA five minutes.”
“No lights or siren.”
“Ten four.”
Clay racked the mike. Grabbing the flashlight, he slid from his vehicle, but he didn’t turn it on. He didn’t want to give away his position if there was, indeed, a sniper in the canyon.
Where the hell was Hogan?
Drawing his revolver, he started toward her vehicle, praying he didn’t find a nightmare. Concern scraped up his back when he spotted the driver’s side door standing open. Clay peered inside. Relief slipped through him when he didn’t find her. When he didn’t find blood. No shattered windows. She’d left her flashlight. He made his way around the vehicle, noticed the right front tire was flat.
He scanned the surrounding scrub, listening. “Hogan!” he ventured after a moment.
“I’m here.”
Clay spun, flipping on the flashlight with his thumb. The sound of breaking brush and crumbling rocks drew his eye, and he swung the beam right. Marty pushed from a stand of mesquite. Even in the dim beam from the flashlight, he saw blood on her face. A coating of dust on her uniform.
“What happened?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He crossed to her, put his hands on her shoulders. Looking into her eyes, he was torn between shaking her and pulling her to him.
“Ambush.” Her entire body vibrated beneath his hands.
That was the kind of word the Marines used in Iraq, not in Palo Duro Canyon. In fact, Clay had never heard it used in relation to anything that happened in Caprock Canyon, Texas. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
She was far from okay. But at least she wasn’t seriously injured. For now, that was going to have to do, because he needed answers.
“How long ago?” he asked.
“Five minutes.”
“Where are they now?”
“Ran. You must have scared them off.”
“Maybe you ought to start at the beginning.”
“I answered a possible drunk driver call.” She fell into cop mode, but her eyes went repeatedly to the steep and rocky area from which she’d emerged. “I had a flat. Got out to change the tire. Almost immediately I came under fire.”
Clay gaped at her, disbelief warring with an uneasiness he didn’t want to feel. But he found his own eyes scanning the ridge to his right. “Are you sure?”
“What do you mean, am I sure? How could I not be sure? I know what a rifle report sounds like.”
“Calm down. All I’m asking is how you know it was a sniper and not a stray bullet from a hunter.”
“Because he fired at least a dozen times. If I hadn’t taken cover, I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you right now.” She gulped a breath and coughed. “In case you’re not reading between the lines here, Chief, there’s a sniper in the canyon and he shot at a cop.”
A chill slid down his spine at the thought. The chill deepened to something unfathomable when he imagined someone watching them through the crosshairs of a rifle. He looked her up and down. “You sure you’re all right?”
“I don’t have any holes in me, if that’s what you mean.”
“You’re bleeding.”
She flinched when he reached out and touched her face. “I slid on some loose rock and fell about twenty feet.” Some of the bravado leached from her.
He scanned the shadows surrounding them, refusing to allow the uneasiness to take hold. “Any idea who?”
“Male. Blue shirt or jacket. Fast runner, so he’s probably young.”
Clay felt his eyes narrow. “Let me get this straight. You have no backup. You’re not wearing Kevlar.” He flicked her vest-free shoulder with his thumb and forefinger. “You’re at an obvious disadvantage. And you gave chase?”
“If you’re working up to a nice rake over the coals, it gets worse.”
“I can’t wait to hear it.”
A breath shuddered out of her, betraying the attitude she put so much effort into projecting. “I’m pretty sure there were two shooters.”
“Two?”
“On either side of the canyon. One armed with a rifle. The other with a handgun.”
“And you surmised this how?”
She looked a little offended. “I know my weapons. I know what a rifle sounds like in relation to a handgun.”
“Not always easy to distinguish.”
“In this case, it was.”
She stared at him, holding her ground. He could tell some of the adrenaline was giving way to relief. The kind of weak-in-the-knees relief that came with a disaster narrowly averted.
Clay didn’t know what to think about her assertion that there were two snipers on the loose in Palo Duro Canyon and shooting at cops. It wasn’t that Clay didn’t trust her judgment. But Marty had been through several months of extreme stress. She’d seen a child murdered in cold blood. She’d seen her career go down the drain. She’d moved to a new town, started a new job. She’d lost her partner.
He was pretty sure she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He ought to know. He’d been back from Kuwait for almost ten years, and some days he still felt the disorder sneaking up on him. A sound or a smell that would take him back to the night he’d pulled the trigger when he shouldn’t have.
Shoving the dark memories aside, Clay gave Marty a hard look. “You sure about this?”
Her expression turned incredulous. “You don’t believe me.”
“I’m asking you a question.”
“I’m sure.”
“In that case, I’ve got to call the sheriff’s office. They’ll send a few officers, step up patrols. Get some dogs out here. Maybe organize a manhunt first daylight.” He gave her an assessing look. “Did you fire your weapon?”
She nodded.
“How many times?”
“I don’t remember.” He knew enough about adrenaline to know that was usually the case with cops who had to fire their weapon. Most thought they’d fired less than what they really had. He wondered if that would be the case with Marty.
Twin pairs of headlights slashed through the darkness, telling him Jett and Dugan had arrived. Clay raised his flashlight so the other men could find them.
“Chief? Everyone okay?” Jett arrived out of breath.
“Everyone’s fine.”
Dugan trailed Jett, his flashlight bobbing with every step. “What happened?”
Marty faced the men. “Someone took a shot at me.”
Jett’s eyes widened. “Damn.”
Dugan flashed a look at the chief she couldn’t quite read. “Any idea who?”
“No.” Clay looked around. “It’s too dark to do anything tonight. First light, we’ll see if we can find any brass.”
“I dropped my gun when I fell,” she said.
“Where?”
She pointed toward the stand of mesquite from which she’d emerged.
“We’ll find it,” Jett said.
“Folks hunt dove this time of year,” Dugan put in. “You think it was a stray shot or what?”
“It wasn’t a stray bullet,” Marty snapped.
Clay glanced sharply at her, but addressed Jett. “Get on the horn and get Rodney out here to tow her car, will you?”
“Sure thing, Chief.”
Jett left for his cruiser with a speed that told Clay he didn’t want to hear what came next. Clay couldn’t blame him. He had a few things to discuss with Marty. He wanted every detail and a time line. Then he needed to broach the possibility that she was suffering from PTSD. The only question that remained was how the hell he was going to do it.
NINE
Marty sat at the small interview table, feeling more like
a suspect than a cop and hating every second of it. Six months ago she would have laughed—and maybe even thrown out a few not-so-complimentary names—if her superior had questioned her account of what happened.
Someone had tried to kill her tonight. Two people, more than likely. The question was who and why. Was it random? Or had someone targeted her specifically? Was the incident related to something that had happened here in Caprock Canyon? Did it stem from the scuffle in the bar the other day? Or was someone angry because of what she’d done in Chicago?
One culprit that came to mind was Smitty. Marty had humiliated him in front of his coworkers, gotten him into trouble with his superior. He’d been off duty at the time. He would certainly have access to guns and know how to use them. But how did that explain the second shooter? That brought her to her next problem. Was she absolutely certain of what she’d seen?
Before she could ponder the most disconcerting question of all, the door to the interview room swung open. Marty glanced up to see Clay walk in, looking like he was about to face off with John Gotti.
“What? No rubber hose? No tape recorder? No bamboo slivers?”
“Dugan found your weapon.” Setting the gun on the table, he took the seat across from her. “I read your statement.”
“So you believe me?”
“I believe
something
happened in that canyon.”
He may as well have slapped her. The surge of anger sent her to her feet. “I know what happened, damn it. Someone took a shot at me.”
“Two people. Two weapons.” He leaned back in the chair and studied her. “No hard evidence. No motive.”
“It’s in the report.” She stared back at him, hating it that she was breathing hard, that she was uneasy. “Can I go now?”
“Sit down. I want to talk to you about something else.”
Marty resisted for a moment, then lowered herself into the chair. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, the way a doctor might look at a patient in the moments before he announced some dreadful disease.
For a moment the only sound came from the buzz of the fluorescent light above. She fidgeted, realized belatedly what she was doing and stilled.
“Did you talk to a mental health professional after what happened in Chicago?”
She choked out a laugh. “Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Did you?”
“I was a little busy getting fired.”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“I’m not the enemy here.”
“You’re undermining my credibility.”
“I care about you.”
His words sucked every combative word right out of her throat. She wanted to ask him how he could possibly care about her when she hadn’t exactly been on her best behavior. But that would be too telling a statement. She didn’t want him getting that close to knowing her frame of mind.
“What you should care about right now is that someone took a shot at one of your officers,” she said.
Clay scraped a hand over his jaw and sighed. “Did you know I did a tour of duty in the Middle East?”
The question knocked her off balance. “I didn’t know.”
“I spent two years as an MP in Kuwait. A few months before I came home, I was involved in a shooting.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to hear it. You need to understand I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been in your shoes.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” But she got the uneasy sensation he was about to fling some unpleasant surprise her way.
“Three months before I was sent home, I shot and killed a thirteen-year-old girl.”
Her vision tunneled on his face, his expression, the pain he couldn’t hide in his eyes. She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing.
“It happened at a checkpoint. Me and another MP had the graveyard shift.” He clasped his hands in front of him and looked down at them. “It was hot that night. Ninety degrees. No wind. We were smothering beneath all our equipment. Three o’clock in the morning, someone approached the checkpoint on foot. My partner was already walking up on the person, yelling at them to stop.
“They didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop thinking about the rash of suicide bombings, and I knew this was exactly the way it happened. I told my partner to back away, but she didn’t. I started yelling at the suspect. I could see it was a female. I saw something dark in her hand. I swear to God it was a gun. When she still didn’t stop, I fired my weapon.”
For the first time Marty realized a sweat had broken out on his forehead. His hands were clenched in front of him, but she knew if they weren’t, they would be trembling.
“I fired four shots,” he said. “Every one of them hit home. For a few seconds, all I felt was relief. That there hadn’t been a bomb. That both of us were still alive. That the fanatic on the ground was dead.”
Clay fell silent. For several seconds he stared at his hands. Then his gaze met Marty’s. “Only later did I learn that the dead woman wasn’t a fanatic at all. She wasn’t even a woman yet. I’d shot and killed a thirteen-year-old girl. The dark object in her hand wasn’t a gun, but a bottle of water. She didn’t know English. She didn’t know we were telling her to stop. She’d been bringing us water.”
Marty stared at him, her heart pounding. This was the last conversation she’d expected to have with him. But she thought she knew where he was heading with it.
“I’m sorry,” she managed after a moment.
“Me, too. But it’s done. You can’t go back. You find a way to move on.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“It’s relevant.”
She waited, not sure she wanted to hear what he was going to say next.
“Killing that kid was tough to swallow. I screwed up. I took a life that never should have been taken. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About her. About what I could have done differently.” He smiled, but it looked sharp and unnatural on his face. “I started having nightmares. Flashbacks. A smell or sound could take me right back to that moment. Finally, my commanding officer forced me to go see a shrink. A month later I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Marty was already shaking her head. “I don’t have PTSD.”
“I want you to talk to someone.” He slid a card across the desk, but she didn’t pick it up.
“Shrinks are full of shit.”
He smiled again, but this time she could tell he was truly amused. “Maybe.”
“Then why—”
“This guy is a psychiatrist, but he did two tours in Vietnam. He was a cop in Atlanta for six years. You’ll like him.”
The last thing she wanted to do was talk to a shrink. But for the first time, she acknowledged that her reluctance had more to do with what he might say about her as opposed to any philosophical reason.
She picked up the card, slid it into her uniform pocket and met his gaze. “None of this changes the fact that someone took a shot at me in the canyon tonight.”
“Deaf Smith County Sheriff’s Office is stepping up patrols. We’ll look for brass tomorrow.” His gaze drilled into hers. “You’re sure it wasn’t a stray shot?”
“I know it wasn’t.”
“You do have a penchant for pissing people off. Any ideas who might have done it?”
An odd sense of relief went through her that he was at least asking questions that needed asking. The problem was she couldn’t tell if he was pacifying her. “Maybe someone local didn’t like what I did in Chicago and decided to take matters into their own hands.”
“What else?”
“Maybe I ticked off someone at the bar the other day.”
“The guy’s in jail.”
“Maybe he had a buddy.”
“Worth checking out.”
Marty debated whether to tell him the other theory that had come to mind. “Whoever did it knows how to handle a weapon.”
Clay’s eyes narrowed. She knew it the instant he realized where she was going. “You mean Smitty?”
She nodded. “What do you think?”
“I can’t see him taking a shot at you. That’s not his style, Hogan.”
“I thought I should bring it up.”
“Consider it duly noted.” He rose. “I’ll let you know if we find anything tomorrow.”
“I want to be there.”
“Take the day off.” He softened the words with a smile. “Go to the grocery, for God’s sake.”
“You’re giving me the day off to go to the grocery?”
“Whatever works.”
“I need to be there, Settlemeyer.”
“No dice.”
Feeling angry and awkward, Marty got to her feet, picked up the Glock and holstered it. “Are we finished here?”
“For now.”
Nodding, she started toward the door.
“Hogan.”
She turned. “Yeah?”
“Make the call.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said and walked out.
“Dura.”
Katja stopped pacing and glared at her brother. “The only dumb bitch around here is you.”
“I told you not to fire your weapon!”
“I had her in my sights.”
Radimir crossed to her and got in her face. “If that were true, she would be dead now!”
“Stop it. Your veins are popping out. You’ll have a heart attack.”
“Crazy woman! Are you trying to ruin everything?”
She’d been holding on to her temper. But there was only so much she could tolerate. “I have no plan to stay in this pigsty much longer.” Spinning, she bent and slid her hand across the beat-up coffee table. The wrappers of the fast-food restaurant flew to the floor. “This place is not fit for a pig.”
“We stay until the job is finished.”
“We could have finished it tonight.”
“We take her down with the stun gun, not the rifle. That was the agreement.”
“I would have only wounded her. That way, I would still get my time with her.”
“And filled the car with blood? Stupid woman! You fired on her and that gave her time to call the cops. You just about ruined everything.”
Katja licked her lips, enjoying her brother’s anger, anticipating the culmination of their trip. “Nothing is ruined.”
“Now the cops are suspicious. We have to worry that maybe she knows we’re here. That’s going to make our job twice as difficult.”
“If you’re not up to it, let me know.”
“Katja . . .”
“You’re a slug,” she snapped. “You’re fat and move too slowly.”
“And you are like a young lion, excited by the hunt, but inexperienced.” Softening, he crossed to her. “You have to be patient.”
“I want to kill her.” It excited her just to say the words aloud. It was a sensation that was almost sexual in its intensity. Katja would never admit it to her brother, but she’d nearly climaxed while she’d been working on the fat cop from Chicago.
“You’ll get your chance,” he cooed. “But we have to be careful.”
She stared into her brother’s eyes, felt her respect for him waning. She’d always secretly thought he was soft. Big talk on the outside for everyone to see, but a coward where it counted. Rurik was different. He was courageous and bold, and she wished it were Radimir in prison, enduring the beatings and rape instead of her more audacious older brother.
Katja wasn’t afraid of anything. Not the gangsters she’d hung with since she’d been a gangly girl. Not the police who would like nothing more than to send all of them back to Moscow. Certainly not Radimir.
“When?” she asked. “I hate this place. I’m getting bored.”
“A few days.” Reaching out, he smoothed her hair with his hand. “We wait for the right moment. Get her when she’s alone. Use the stunner. Bring her here. When we do . . .” He shrugged. “You can spend hours with her the way you did with the fat cop in Chicago.”
Warmth flooded her at the memory. “He screamed like a pig.”
“So will the woman,” he assured her.
“Yes, she will.” Katja’s lips pulled into a smile. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Marty wasn’t good at downtime. She defined herself by
her work. Without it, she invariably felt a little lost. As if she didn’t quite know who she was or where she fit into the scheme of things.
The good news, she supposed, was that she’d gotten through the night without buying another bottle of vodka. It hadn’t been easy; she should have been pleased with herself. But bad news came with the dawn.
Marty was on the phone with Peck before finishing her first cup of coffee.
“Rosetti was taken down with a stun gun.” Peck sounded as if he’d been up all night. “They took him to an unknown location. Someplace private. They bound him, stripped him, and just freakin’ went nuts on him.”
“Cause of death?”
“No one’s talking. Prelim report is due out any day now. But those sick bastards did some bad shit.”
“Like what?”
“I heard they injected acid beneath his skin. Cut him. Burned him.”
“My God.” Marty closed her eyes. “Any leads?”
“We got squat.”
“Any idea who might have done it?”
“The general consensus is that this is not the work of some amateur sociopath. The people who did this knew what they were doing. They were prepared and armed with some pretty effective tools. They knew how to inflict pain. They’d kept him conscious and aware by administering amphetamines . . .”
Unable to listen to more, Marty removed the phone from her ear. Outrage squeezed her chest, and for a moment she couldn’t catch her breath. Rosetti had died a long and unimaginably savage death.
“Hogan, you there?”
She returned the phone to her ear. “You catch these sons of bitches, Peck. I mean it. Find them and bring them in.”
“It’s just a matter of time.”
But Marty knew that wasn’t always the case. She knew that if this was some kind of professional job, they could already be overseas and the crime might never be solved.