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“I don’t know. But it won’t happen again.” He began to turn away. “I’m going to call my area director and have him send someone to escort—”
“No!” Incautious fury spilled through her at his dismissal of the situation he’d created. She grabbed his arm, noticing as she spun him back to face her that the muscle beneath her grip was rigidly hard. “You’re going to tell me what just happened here, for God’s sake!”
Suddenly remembering Joey, she cast a swiftly contrite glance in the direction of the bed. He was obviously too deeply asleep for anything short of an earthquake to rouse him, but she lowered her tone nonetheless.
“Is it how you get off, Agent Connor?” With a shaky hand she pushed a stray curve of hair off her cheek. “Do you try something like this with all of the women you flash your badge at, or did you just figure you’d give it a shot with me?”
She tightened her grip on his wrist. “You’d better believe I’d report you if I had any intention of letting you take me in, but I don’t. I’m leaving here with Joey, and the only way you can stop me is by using that gun you’re holding. My opinion of you right now isn’t the greatest, but I don’t think you can bring yourself to shoot an unarmed woman.”
Releasing him abruptly, she picked up her purse from the dresser beside them and stalked over to Joey’s backpack, on the floor beside the bed. She bent stiffly and grabbed one of its straps, but as she lifted it the flap opened and the contents of the bag tumbled out onto the floor.
Tess squeezed her eyes shut against the sudden prickling of tears she could feel behind her lashes. They were tears of anger and frustration, she told herself. They weren’t tears of fear or worry. This wasn’t working out the way she’d planned, but in a few minutes she could still be on her way with Joey. In a couple of hours they would be on Navajo Nation land, where Virgil Connor’s bullying tactics would slam up against a solid wall of red tape when he attempted to—
“I’m not going to shoot you, Tess.” He didn’t sound bullying, he just sounded tired. “For what it’s worth, it won’t come to that and you know it. Look at me.”
She ignored him. Squatting down on her heels, she began to gather up the collection of small-boy treasures that had fallen from Joey’s backpack, replacing them as carefully as she could manage with her trembling fingers.
There was a dog-eared collection of baseball cards, held together by a doubled-over elastic band. Joey was obviously a baseball nut like she was, Tess thought, trying to distract herself from the man standing silently beside her. It would be something they could talk about on the drive ahead of—
“Look at me, Tess.”
There was a reluctantly hard note in his tone. Her fingers closed around a carefully folded piece of paper before she unwillingly raised her eyes to his.
“Don’t bother.” Despair washed over her. “I know what you’re going to say.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. “I’d better say it anyway, just so we’re clear here. I’m a big man. You’re what…five-three? Five-four?”
“Three,” she answered him tonelessly. “I get it, all right?”
He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I wouldn’t even have to try, Tess. But I don’t want it to go down that way and I don’t think you do, either. Hand me the car keys.”
He needed the keys because she’d left her own gun locked in the glove box. Tess understood he wasn’t going to let this situation get out of control again.
That was what Virgil Connor was all about, she realized. He liked well-defined boundaries, smooth-running operations, everything falling into place the way it should. He could react to the unexpected, the illogical, but his immediate response was to bring it back under control, which made his actions with her a moment ago all the more inexplicable. Despite her accusations, she knew instinctively he’d crossed a line with her that he’d never crossed before in his life.
And that knowledge was supremely unimportant. All that mattered was that she’d failed a small boy who’d thought she could protect him. She looked at the paper in her hand, recognizing it for what it was before she began unfolding it.
“They’re in my purse,” she said flatly. “Get them yourself.”
In the creased newspaper photo she was dressed in some kind of pseudo-camouflage outfit and standing in a desert. The wonders of computer graphics, she thought briefly. The picture had been taken in the Eye-Opener’s parking lot, her figure superimposed against a generic desert scene later on. The tabloid’s photo-tech had also punched up the Rambo-like smeared grease under her eyes and the fake blood soaking one arm of her fatigues to a brilliant red, probably because it had looked too much like the ketchup it was.
The surrounding article had been torn off. Joey likely knew it by heart anyway, she thought.
“Is that you?”
Tess hadn’t even noticed that he’d hunkered down beside her to retrieve her purse. She let him take the picture from her.
“No, that’s not me.” She began to gather up the rest of the scattered odds and ends that had fallen from the backpack. “That’s who Joey thinks I am, but that’s not me.”
“What are you supposed to be doing here?”
Under the bed was another photograph facedown, this one not a clipping from the tabloid but a tiny photo-booth snapshot that must have originally been attached to a strip of pictures. She reached past him for it.
“I’m covered in blood so I guess I’m supposed to be taking a breather after going up against Bigfoot or a mutant lizard or something,” she replied curtly. “You said you were going to tell your area director to send someone out. Will Joey and I be riding back to Albuquerque in different vehicles?”
“That’s correct procedure.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw him shrug. “You’re my arrest. He’s my witness. I’ve pulled enough stupid plays tonight without adding to them by transporting the two of you in the same car.”
He looked away. “And if I could take back just one of the mistakes I’ve made since spotting you in that diner it would be the way I moved in on you a few minutes ago. I behaved like a jerk. If you’re wondering whether I’m going to be the one taking you in, don’t worry, I’ll hand you over to the agents Jansen dispatches when they come.”
He got to his feet. “I’ll make that call now.”
“That’s not why I asked.” Still clutching the second photo, she stood, too. “Can you give me some time alone with Joey? Just a few minutes, that’s all I need.”
Dark brows drew together. “What for?”
“To tell him he was wrong about me,” she said unsteadily. “I owe him that much, Connor. Joey Begand came to me thinking I was someone I’m not, and I should have set him straight right away. Instead, I let him go on believing in a bunch of faked photos and stories, and told myself I was doing it for him.”
She lowered her gaze. Aimlessly she turned over the small picture in her hand. “It’s too long and dreary a story to get into, but it’s more likely I was doing it for myself. I think I needed to believe that for once in my life I could—”
The breath in her lungs suddenly vanished, taking with it the rest of her unfinished sentence. A giant fist wrapped around her heart and squeezed, tighter and still more tighter. Her hand shaking, Tess brought the tiny photo up until it was only inches from her face.
It couldn’t be, she thought in shock. It just couldn’t be—life didn’t operate that way. Connor was right, she’d been living in the Eye-Opener’s fantasy world for so long that she’d lost touch with reality. Coincidences this colossal were reserved for the outlandish stories she dreamed up, not for—
It wasn’t a coincidence at all. It was why Joey’s mother had read everything she’d written, she realized, her throat closing in pain, why Darla Begand—so that was the name she’d taken, Tess thought achingly—had made Tess Smith out to be a hero to her small son. It had been the only connection Darla been capable of making with a past she’d tried to blot out.
“I can’t leave you alone with Joey, but I’ll let you explain things to him.” Connor was watching her. “He’s a kid, Tess. He’ll get over it the way kids do when they find out there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny, for crying out loud. Right now you should be worrying about yourself. You’ve convinced me that you didn’t have anything to do with Leroy and what happened at the safe house, but you’re still facing serious charges. Kidnapping a child’s the worst of them.”
“Not if I had the right to take Joey. Not if I was his guardian, for all intents and purposes.”
Tess met his eyes and saw the impatience, quickly suppressed, that flickered through them. Connor’s lips tightened, and when he spoke, some of the harshness he’d previously displayed had crept back into his tone.
“But you’re not. Like I was saying, you should be thinking about calling a lawyer. Do you have—”
He bit off his words with a muttered oath and his hand shot out to grab hers as she reached down for her purse. She drew swiftly back.
“I’m not going for a weapon, Agent Connor. I need to show you something.”
“I don’t think so.” The brief humanity he’d shown a few minutes ago had gone. In its place was distrust. “I let those amber eyes of yours lull me into letting my guard down once already. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“My eyes are plain brown, for heaven’s sake.” She pressed her lips together. “If you’re worried I’ve got a weapon stashed in here, then you get my wallet out for me. It…it’s important,” she added. “I think you’re going to want to see this before you make that call to your director.”
She let go of her purse. He narrowed his gaze assessingly at her. “All right. I’ll let you show me whatever it is you think is so important, and then you stop stalling and allow me to make my call without having to keep a gun trained on you every second. Deal?”
“Deal.” She bit her lip as he extracted a leather wallet from the jumble of junk in her purse. “Open it. Pull out the plastic photo protector under the flap.”
He complied and handed the small sheaf of photos to her. In return she handed him the tiny one from Joey’s backpack.
“That’s Joey and his mom,” she said. “I guess she didn’t have the money for a department-store portrait, so she had their pictures taken together in one of those booths.”
“Yeah, it looks like. His hair’s slicked down, and she obviously arranged the two of them in a pose before she activated the camera,” Connor agreed.
He glanced at the curled-up figure in the bed beside them. “From what I know of his background, he’s already had more than his share of rough knocks, poor kid. His father was killed in a car accident before he was born, and his mother apparently couldn’t seem to keep even the menial jobs she occasionally found. He pretty much grew up on the street. When she died and he was put into the system, he kept hanging around his old haunts, like the alleyway where he saw MacLeish kill Quayle.”
He held the photo out to her. “It’s always better when family can step in and take over the responsibility for a child, instead of them being shoved into an already overloaded system. Too bad Joey wasn’t one of the lucky ones.”
“Joey’s luck just changed.” Tess didn’t take the picture he was holding, but instead slipped one from her wallet. “Everything just changed, Agent. This is a picture of me and my sister, the last one taken of us together. She ran away when I was nine and she was seventeen. Years later I tried to find her, but I never learned what had happened to her.”
She swallowed, and forced her next words past the lump in her throat. “Until now.”
She handed him the photo from her purse. She saw his gaze sharpen, saw him glance from one picture to the other. He looked up from the two photos to her and she nodded.
“That’s right, Joey’s my nephew. His mom was my sister. I…I guess Darla’s monsters got her in the end,” she said unevenly. “I’m not going to let that happen to her son.”
Through her tears she stared at him. “Whatever authority the FBI thought they had before Joey’s aunt showed up, I’m the one keeping the monsters away from him now.”
Chapter Four
“Even if it was my decision to make, I couldn’t let you waltz out of here with a federal witness just because you say you’re Joey’s aunt.”
Raking a hand through his hair, Connor turned from the woman sitting on the edge of the bed and moved restlessly to the window, something he’d found himself doing with increasing frequency since Tess had discovered the photo she seemed to think clinched her claim to Joey. Despite the heated discussion they’d been engaged in since, he still hadn’t been able to make her understand that her position hadn’t changed to any great degree—certainly not enough to have stopped him from phoning Area Director Arne Jansen with the news that the boy had been found.
At the end of the line of units a single light was burning in the motel’s office, but otherwise the darkness outside was undisturbed. He hadn’t expected the two backup agents Jansen was sending to have arrived yet. He’d just needed a break from the angry gaze Tess was lasering at him. He turned to face her again.
“I agree the Agency fumbled the ball in guarding Joey, but I promise we won’t slip up again. If you care for your nephew at all, you have to see that professionals can protect him from a couple of killers better than one untrained woman could.”
“But as you say, your team of professionals has performed pretty poorly so far.” Abruptly Tess stood, shooting a glance at the sleeping child in the bed she’d just risen from. “And you can’t protect him from an enemy you don’t even know about.”
Her words were barely audible, as if she was of two minds whether or not she wanted him to hear. Connor frowned.
“Just what does that mean?”
Her back to him, she was gathering the few articles she’d earlier set on the dresser, but he guessed that her task was no more valid than his glance out the window had been. She was avoiding his eyes, or trying to. Unfortunately for her every nuance of her expression was caught in the dresser mirror in front of her, and with a start Connor realized the emotion shadowing her features wasn’t fear.
It was terror. And terror was far too strong a reaction to have anything to do with his call to Jansen.
In the diner he’d been briefly convinced that Tess Smith was unbalanced. She wasn’t, he knew now. Her actions over the past two days might have been rash and poorly thought out, but she’d been well aware of the risks she was running and the consequences of what she was doing. She hadn’t known then that Joey was her nephew, so why had she chosen to take those risks and damn those consequences?
It was a question he should have asked himself before, Connor told himself. Why hadn’t he?
Because you’ve been too busy replaying that kiss you forced on her in your mind, a voice inside his head jeered.
“What do you mean, I can’t protect Joey from an enemy I don’t know about?” With an effort he shut off the jeering voice. “Did he see someone that night at the safe house? Is there a third person working with Leroy and MacLeish?”
Under the white tee she was wearing her shoulders tensed. “I’ve already told you Joey didn’t see anyone the night he escaped, and he’s still blanking out when he tries to remember exactly what happened between MacLeish and the retired agent who was killed in that alleyway. It’s too bad the Agency’s doctors didn’t take the time to find out what caused Joey’s mind to take refuge in a temporary amnesia.”
He was getting tired of talking to the back of her head, Connor thought impatiently. Between the white of her shirt and the silky black strands of her tousled haircut the nape of her neck seemed disarmingly vulnerable, for some reason.
He scowled. “The shock of seeing a man killed caused his amnesia. The on-site evidence, plus the fact that MacLeish was badly wounded himself, indicated that Quayle didn’t go down without a fight. Watching a violent struggle end in murder isn’t something any nine-year-old should have to go through.”
“I agree. But that wasn’t the first time Joey had witnessed violence.” Finally she turned to face him, her expression closed. “He’s not Beaver Cleaver, Connor. He hasn’t been protected from the seamier side of life, the way children should be. From what Joey’s told me, Darla did her best by him while she was battling her own demons, but he’d seen street fights before, even if they’d never resulted in murder.”
Her mouth tightened. “This is probably going to sound just as crazy to you as the Hangar 61 story. Have you ever heard of something—” her gaze wavered “—or someone, called Skinwalker?”
Earlier this evening his thoughts had gone to the year he’d spent at the Double B Ranch so long ago—the year he’d been thoroughly humiliated by Chorizo, the year a tough but compassionate Del Hawkins had turned his life around. But Tess’s unexpected question brought back his most recent visit to the ranch and the unsettling events that had threatened the Double B just over a month ago.
Those events had eventually been proven to have been orchestrated by an ex-con named Jasper Scudder, but even Del’s normally hardheaded composure had been disturbed by the warnings of Navajo matriarch Alice Tahe, who’d predicted that the evil spirit her people called Skinwalker had been behind Scudder’s actions…and that although Scudder had perished, the presence of Skinwalker still threatened the Double B and Del.
With no disrespect intended toward either the old lady or her traditional beliefs, Connor thought now, he just didn’t buy into the existence of a supernatural big bad. So when Alice Tahe had spoken about a thing that walked like a man, talked like a man, but was all the darkness from the beginning of the world personified, he’d dismissed her Skinwalker as merely one of the myths of the Navajo people.
From her tone, he got the feeling Tess didn’t. A slight impatience rose up in him.
“Yeah, I’ve heard the legend. Why?”
Something sparked behind the amber of her eyes. “Because that’s who I’m protecting Joey from, Agent. You might believe he’s in danger from MacLeish or Leroy, but Joey’s convinced Skinwalker’s the one who wants him dead. And although I wasn’t brought up in the Way—the Navajo Way,” she added in explanation, “I’m Dineh enough to think he could be right.”
The spark in her gaze fanned to a tiny flame, and color lent a wild-rose tinge to the cinnamon of her skin.
“Don’t you get it yet? He doesn’t remember what happened between Quayle and MacLeish because everything else was blotted from his mind when he was almost killed himself. I don’t know if there was a third person at the safe house the night of the ambush…but there was a third presence in the alleyway the day Quayle was murdered. Joey swears it was Skinwalker. And he says that just before the police showed up, Skinwalker started toward the Dumpster where he was hiding to kill him.”
“Skinwalker,” Connor repeated. “We’re talking about the Navajo Skinwalker, right? An evil ghost, uses his shapeshifting powers to take on the form of a man or a wolf or whatever he wants?” He glanced at the small sleeping form in the bed and then back at her. “I guess it’s possible a kid might see him as the bogeyman, if he’d been told stories about him in the past, but encouraging him in that belief—”
“Is that your theory?” Her gaze darkened. “Joey translated his terror at witnessing Quayle’s murder into something a nine-year-old could understand—a monster, just like the ones other children see hiding behind a half-open closet door?”
“Or just like the ones you make a living writing about,” Connor agreed, not bothering to soften the edge in his voice.
Now it made sense, he thought, annoyed with himself for not figuring it out before. Now he knew why she’d risked going on the run with the boy long before she’d discovered there was a family connection between them. He didn’t know who he felt angrier at—her, for turning out to be the journalistic equivalent of a conartist, or himself for not seeing from the start what she was up to. Hell, for all he knew maybe she’d somehow faked that photo she’d conveniently found in her purse.
“That’s what all this was leading to, wasn’t it? You hoped you could get a National Eye-Opener front page out of this, complete with you in your ghost-busting gear facing down some guy in a monster costume. Lady, whatever hare-brained notion you’ve got of parlaying a federal investigation into journalistic glory for yourself—”
“Journalistic glory?” The pink in her cheeks flared to bright patches of anger. “In a rag like the Eye-Opener that gets shoved between the milk and eggs in a sack of groceries? I’m not that delusional, Agent, and even if I were I wouldn’t use a child’s fear to my own advantage.” Her voice shook. “Believe me, I know how damaging that can be.”
Her vehemence rang too true to have been put on for his benefit, Connor thought. And behind it was something else—something that held an echo of pain and guilt.
But he’d allowed himself to be distracted by Tess Smith’s seeming vulnerability once already, he reminded himself. Any pain he thought he detected in her voice wasn’t his concern.
“Let’s say you didn’t intend to use this in one of your stories.” He shrugged. “What does that leave me with—that you really believe Joey saw an evil spirit in that alleyway?”
“I told you you’d think it was crazy.” Her gaze was shuttered. “But yes, if Joey says Skinwalker’s after him, that’s enough for me. He needs to know someone’s on his side.”
As she spoke, Connor was half-convinced he could feel the warmth of her breath on his own lips, could discern the faintest scent of cloves and carnations coming from her. There was no good reason why he kept thinking of flowers when he looked at Tess Smith, he thought in irritation.
Besides, his involvement with the woman had begun with her leveling a gun at him. If he needed a botanical reference to compare her to, a cholla cactus was probably his best bet—wild fuchsia blossoms behind a formidable barricade of thorns.
But neither her prickliness nor his own inappropriate musings were enough to completely distract him from the care she’d taken in framing her answer to his last question. He knew with sudden certainty what she was trying to hide.
“You don’t believe in any of this, either, do you?” He frowned. “You said you weren’t brought up in the Way. Admit it—Skinwalker’s nothing more than a dim folkloric tradition to you, like the kelpies my Irish grandmother used to tell me about were to me.”
“He’s real to Joey.” She bit off the words. “And despite my sketchy knowledge of my own heritage, I have more respect for the old stories than to dismiss them completely.”
