Jess took a deep breath. “You were right: They were listening to my calls. They got to him. They
killed
him. Because of me.”
Her voice shook at the end.
“
Not
because of you.” Mark lowered himself down beside her and pulled her into his arms. When her gaze continued to seek the tarpaulin’s opening in order to keep visual faith with that mangled car, drawn by guilt and shock and fear and a whole jumble of other churning emotions, he caught her chin and made her look at him instead. “Not because of you, do you hear? Because of whatever sick thing that ’s happening here. He ’s a victim just like Mrs. Cooper and the rest. Just like you.”
Her eyes clung to his. He let go of her chin to stroke gentle fingers over her cheek.
“You hear?”
“Yes, okay, I know.” She tried to get a grip, but she was too shaken. “Oh my God, I talked to him just a little while ago. He was asleep. He ’d probably be waking up about now, getting ready to go into work. Instead he’s
dead.
”
She was breathing way too fast and too shallowly, maybe getting close to hyperventilating, and she tried to consciously deepen her breathing and slow it down.
“There ’s nothing we can do for him.” Mark’s jaw looked tight. His eyes were dark and hard in the uncertain light. “Except stay alive to figure this thing out, and bring these bastards down.”
“I hate this.” Despite its fierceness, her voice was a mere breath of sound.
“I know.”
He pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her, silently offering what comfort he could. Resting her head against his chest, she soaked up his warmth and listened to the steady beat of his heart. Closing her eyes, clutching his shirt front with both hands and holding on as if for dear life, she tried to calm herself, to force her emotions back.
I should never have called Solomon.
That was the thought that kept running through her mind. But
should’ve
s and
would’ve
s and
could’ves
were wasted: What was done was done, and there was no undoing it. If she hadn’t overheard that “sugar,” she would probably be dead now, too. Or if she hadn’t leaped from Mark’s car, or if Mark hadn’t followed her to Davenport ’s office—there were a dozen
or
s. She—and Mark, too—could still die at any time. The killers on their trail were probably only a step or so behind. As she faced that, fear, cold and solid as a block of ice, settled in her stomach.
I don’t want to die
.
I don’t want Mark to die
.
Especially not now that I’ve figured out I’m in love with him.
The anguished thought was both ridiculous and true.
For God’s sake, get a grip.
Holding on to Mark as if one of them would vanish if she let go, she did her best. Finally, her natural determination asserted itself. If the key to her survival—and Mark’s—lay in identifying who was behind all this, then that was just exactly what she was going to try to do.
Blocking out everything else, she started turning pieces of the puzzle over in her mind.
By the time the truck rattled over the skeleton-like scaffolding of the 14th Street Bridge into D.C., she was feeling calmer. She also had a plan.
“We need to check the phone records.” Loosening her hold on Mark’s shirt, resisting the urge to smooth out the wrinkles her desperate grip had made in the cloth, Jess tilted her head back to look up at him. If she felt self-conscious about the heated kiss they had so recently shared, well, she ’d be damned if she would show it.
Hey, I kiss big, studly guys like you all the time.
That was the attitude she needed to cultivate. If she ’d been stupid enough to fall head over heels for the hottest guy around, at least she was smart enough not to let him know it. Accordingly, the look she gave him was her lawyer look, businesslike and cool.
“Phone records?” He frowned slightly as his eyes slid over her face.
Jess nodded. “Mrs. Cooper’s, Davenport’s, maybe Harris Lowell’s. We should be able to tell from them where Mrs. Cooper was heading that night and who the others were talking to. Maybe that’ll give us a direction to start looking in.”
“Great idea—except I’ve got a nasty feeling I’ve lost my clearance to access things like that.”
The truck slowed slightly as it bounced around a downward sloping curve, and with a quick glance out the opening Jess realized they were on an access ramp.
“I can do it,” she said.
He looked surprised. “For real?”
“I checked phone records for Mr. Davenport all the time. All I need is a computer.”
Mark gave her a slow-dawning grin. “Baby, where ’ve you been all my life?”
Before she could reply—the truthful answer was “For the last few months, I’ve been right under your nose”
—
their attention was distracted by the truck coming to a shuddering stop. Another glance out through the tarpaulin’s opening confirmed that they were at the bottom of a ramp, presumably waiting at a traffic light.
“First thing we ’ve got to do is get off this truck,” Mark said as the truck started moving again, clattering through the intersection and picking up speed. “Sooner or later the driver’s going to stop for real. Or someone is going to spot us.”
Jess nodded.
They were in a mixed residential and commercial neighborhood, she saw as the truck stopped again, hopefully one with a number of stop signs. They probably wouldn’t get a better opportunity. Apparently, Mark thought so as well, because he thrust her purse at her.
“I’m going to crawl to the back.” He was holding her shoes, presumably intending to carry them himself. “You follow me. Next time the truck stops, we jump.”
“What happens if the driver sees us?”
“That’s a chance we’ll just have to take. What’s he going to do, call the police? By the time they get here we’ll be long gone.”
He extracted himself from under the tarpaulin and crept to the tailgate, crouching there at the corner, staying low, looking back at her. Jess realized that she could see him quite clearly even as she forced her increasingly stiff legs to work, and she crawled laboriously to join him. Dawn was breaking in earnest. Bright bands of pink and gold streaked the eastern sky, and the rising sun limned the roofs of the two- and three-story brick buildings, surrounding them with a shimmering gold. The air was crisp and cold, particularly after the stifling warmth under the tarpaulin. A quick glance around as she reached Mark told her that they were driving through a block of small restaurants and shops, none of which were open yet, as far as she could tell. The sidewalks were, thankfully, deserted. Even as she swept a nervous look around, the truck slowed again. Mark jumped off while it was still moving, then reached up for her as it shuddered to a halt, grabbed her under the armpits and lifted her down at the corner, where it was possible to avoid the tailgate.
Her knees were shaky and the concrete was cold as ice, but with his arm hard around her waist they made it onto the sidewalk. A wary glance back at the truck found the driver, a man in a baseball cap, still looking forward as he got under way again, pulling on through the intersection. If he had any idea he had been carrying stowaways, he gave no indication of it.
“I don’t think he saw us,” Jess said.
“Just in case, we’re out of here.”
Mark kept his arm around her as they hurried along the sidewalk before ducking into an alley.
“I need my shoes,” Jess reminded him once they were out of sight of the street. Her poor bare feet were freezing.
“Oh, yeah.” Stopping, he handed them to her, waiting while she slid her feet into them. Glancing up once she had her shoes on, she saw that he was looking at them with disfavor.
“When I decided to wear heels, I didn’t know I was going to be running for my life,” she said defensively.
He snorted. “I’m surprised you can even walk in those things.”
“My legs are a little unsteady,” she admitted. Which was an understatement. They felt stiff and unwieldy and her knees were weak and her lower back throbbed.
“I’m not surprised.” His eyes met hers. The smallest of smiles touched his mouth. “I can always carry you again.”
“Not necessary. Come on, let ’s go.” She started walking. She could feel him watching her critically.
“Let me know if you change your mind.”
Catching up, he offered her his arm for support in a gesture that would have been almost courtly under different circumstances. Jess slid her hand into the crook of his elbow, grateful for the support. Leaning against him, moving carefully as she tried to work some of the stiffness out of her legs, she realized something: She would be perfectly happy to snuggle up against his side for the rest of her life.
I’m in love with him.
The thought wasn’t a joyous one. Rather it filled her with dismay.
Think it hurt when he didn’t remember you in Mrs. Cooper’s office? Wait till this is over and he gives you a chuck under the chin and walks away.
Of course, that cheerful image was predicated on the idea that one day this
would
be over, that the two of them would come through it and survive, which was looking iffy at best. Reminded of how much danger they were in, Jess pushed the awful truth about her feelings for Mark to the back of her mind. Before it became a problem that she had to deal with, they had to get out of this alive.
“They have public-access computers at the library. That’s where we need to go,” she said. Jess spared a quick, longing thought for her own laptop, which would be waiting on the desk in her living room right where she had left it. More than anything else in the world, she wanted to go home to her apartment, which, she guessed, was not an option.
“Later. The first thing we want to do is get out of this area as fast as we can.” Mark cast a quick, assessing glance back over his shoulder, and Jess felt a corresponding nervous chill.
“We weren’t followed”—she was almost sure—“so how could they know where we are?”
“By now they’ve probably realized they missed us at the 7-Eleven. Sooner or later, I’m guessing they’ll either remember the truck or check the store’s security cameras and find it and have a eureka moment. There ’s lots of ways they can trace it, from something simple like running the tag and going to talk to the owner to zeroing in on the route it took this morning with satellite imagery.”
“Satellite imagery?” Jess felt sick.
“Baby, we’ve got eyes in the sky that can spot a mosquito on the roof of a building. Whoever this is, you can bet they have access. The problem is knowing where to look. And in the District, there are a lot of people to look at.”
They reached the end of the alley and emerged onto 2nd Street, according to the sign. She was vaguely familiar with the area, which was a mix of fifties-era boxy concrete rectangles and older restored brick buildings. It was home to a plethora of federal agencies, including the FAA, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services. None of them were open to tourists, and, more important, none of them were open this early. Up the street, there was an old woman walking a dog. Just beyond her, a homeless man pushed his belongings in a shopping cart. The rattling of the wheels on the uneven pavement jangled Jess’s nerves. Other than that, this street, too, was deserted.
So much for his assertion that because there were lots of people in D.C., finding them would be harder. There weren’t lots of people
here.
And the idea that a satellite might be recording their every move right at that very moment gave her the willies.
Jess’s toe caught on something and she stumbled.
“You okay?” Mark stopped to steady her. Regaining her balance, she nodded, and he added, “I vote we head for the metro and put some distance between us and where we got off the truck as quick as we can.”
“Just a minute,” she said. Mark was scruffy, but then he looked hot scruffy. She had a strong feeling that she was scruffy, too, and she knew from experience that she definitely did not look hot that way. Unzipping her purse, she dug into it even as she spoke. “It would be better if we looked as normal as possible. Let me brush my hair.”
“Now?” He looked at her with disbelief, but she was already dragging a brush through her hair. Finishing, she ran her brush over his.
“Hey.”
“Your hair was sticking up.”
“Nobody’s going to notice
me.
”
“They might.”
“If people are gonna be looking at us that close, you probably ought to know that you have dirt on your face.”
“Really?”
“I was kidding.” He groaned as she dug through her purse for the wet wipes she carried and carefully wiped her face. Then she pulled out a tube of the neutral pink lipstick she always wore and slicked that over her lips. Since she never wore much makeup anyway, Jess calculated that she now probably looked pretty close to normal. Except for the bruises and stitches, of course.
“You all done?” he asked.
Jess ignored the too polite tone. “Yes.”
“Good.” Taking her arm, Mark started walking, and she, perforce, went with him. “Look, I know this area. There ’s a metro station two blocks over. It would be nice if we could get there before the people who want to kill us catch up.”
The reminder made her shiver. A few minutes later Jess spotted the brown pole with the M sign on it that indicated a metro station. So close to the metro there were numerous people around. Nervously her gaze slid over a couple of college-age men in hoodies and jeans wearing backpacks, a blond middle-aged woman in the kind of bright polyester uniform that a dental assistant or pediatrician’s assistant might wear, an older guy in a suit carrying a briefcase, a woman about her own age in a Denny’s uniform. All were hurrying toward the metro. None spared so much as a glance for her or Mark. None looked like a threat.
Mark stopped dead. Glancing at him in surprise, she discovered that he was staring at the intersection directly ahead of them as if he’d seen a ghost. A red light was holding up cross traffic, while a taxi sped through to zoom past them with a rattle and a whoosh of air.