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But Everly hadn’t met Matt yet.
He checked his watch. He had no more than five minutes before he needed to clear out. He had one last task, just in case Everly balked at taking the renegade Matt Guiliani on as his new best friend.
He took a floppy disk from his pocket and planted on Everly’s computer documents that would make it appear that Everly had conspired against his brothers in The Fraternity. That with the brilliant assistance of a powerful Phoenix attorney, Everly had siphoned millions of dollars off the deals The Fraternity made providing illegal arms and hired killers. The guy in Phoenix routinely played such undercover roles for the Department of Justice.
Everly was about to find himself between a rock and a very hard place.
ELLIOTT BRADEN BOARDED his flight at Heathrow, brimming with a certain bonhomie. The Americans had already deployed their undercover cop into international affairs that did not concern them. Braden had been assigned the watchdog job of Interpol “liaison.” Surely the most glorified term for the thankless and impotent position of making sure the Americans did not screw it up.
In fact, he knew they would. He knew they didn’t know when to quit. Americans prided themselves on their never-say-die attitude.
In a haze of contempt, both for his superiors in Interpol and the necessity of involving the Americans, Braden took his first-class seat, graciously accepting the crystal goblet of Chenin Blanc from the flight attendant. The aircraft took off after a delay of only seven minutes.
He had no desire to embroil himself in the Americans’ doggedness, but he supposed his sacrifice might pay off handsomely in the not-too-distant future. Very soon now he would meet them.
Garrett Weisz. J. D. Thorne. Matt Guiliani.
These were the players, the heart of the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-TruthSayers task force, the men running the current undercover operation against Kyle Everly. And as touchingly loyal to one another as blood brothers, all incapable of minding their own petty, provincial business, even when their loved ones were threatened.
The small son of Garrett Weisz, for instance, a child named Christo. He’d been kidnapped by leaders of TruthSayers when Weisz, Thorne and Guiliani’s undercover operation threatened them. The threesome prevailed and the child was restored to the bosom of his family. The TruthSayers were left without much leadership.
Months later, their numbers greatly reduced, the rabid TruthSayers made an attempt on J. D. Thorne’s life. And then on the teenage son of Thorne’s girlfriend, a Seattle detective named Ann Calder. Enter Kyle Everly. The wealthy local rancher and Truth-Sayers sympathizer had, for some inscrutable, arrogant reason, lent his considerable resources to the straightforward attempted assassinations of J. D. Thorne and Ann Calder.
The trained killers failed. Guiliani rescued the teenager. Everly, however, proved untouchable. That fact had done nothing to faze the dogged investigations of Weisz or Thorne, least of all Mateos Guiliani.
Such a hero, Braden thought.
But Braden was stuck. Interpol had enough to move on a few of the other suspected members of La Fraternité but nothing concrete on its wealthiest and therefore most powerful member, the wily, wealthy, twisted rancher. To make a clean sweep and put an end to their scattered reign of terror, Everly must be caught up in the sting, and the other unconfirmed members with him. But he was an American citizen, and it was Guiliani who could, if all went as expected, force Everly’s hand.
Such an unexpected bit of luck, Braden reflected.
He allowed himself a vinegary little smile. Perhaps the stars and the planets had aligned themselves in just the most pleasing configuration. Perhaps Guiliani would give him the most amazing coup de grâce.
He blinked, and lifted his goblet in silent salutation.
SATISFIED WITH HIS night’s work, Matt shut down the computer and turned soundlessly in Everly’s leather chair. Staring off into the night, he took a few moments more to visualize his first face-to-face meeting with his quarry. In his mind’s eye, he watched Everly’s trademark, guileless smile fade dead away.
Matt left the computer and started toward the back of the house when he heard a vehicle approaching. His senses went on high alert, his pulse slowed. He had no fear of being caught. He could still slip away unseen in a matter of seconds. But his thirst for the chase had been whetted.
He decided to go back and let the sting begin. To let Everly find him here now rather than in the morning. He moved silently as a ghost back into Everly’s study and took up a position to the side of the picture window looking out, within several feet of the front door.
It was Everly who had driven into the yard. Matt watched him turn toward the garages, cut the engine, get out and shut the door on his shiny black Lexus four-wheel-drive. Deep in conversation, he had a cell phone plastered to his ear.
He turned back momentarily, clearly expecting Geary to have appeared by now to put the Lexus away. Still talking, his breath making puffs in the freezing air, he strode back to his vehicle, jerked open the passenger door, leaned in and laid on the horn.
Interesting, Matt thought, that Dennis Geary still didn’t come running.
Everly must have decided to ignore it. He left the Lexus with the door open, reached the first riser and kicked the dirt off one boot and then the other as the motion-detector turned on the porch light. He took the next two steps in a single stride, landing him on the veranda.
He cast a look over his shoulder, grimaced, then snarled into the phone and moved out of Matt’s sight. He had only cracked open the door when a shot rang out in the valley of the Bar Naught. The cell phone went flying onto the floor of the entry, and Kyle Everly fell with a sickening thud to the floor of the foyer.
A powerful shudder roiled through Matt’s body. Seconds passed in its grip. He thought he heard another shot, but revised his opinion in a split second. What he’d heard was the cell phone crashing onto the parquet floor, and behind that, an echo of the gun blast. He moved swiftly to the front door, careful to stay concealed. A massive amount of blood had already pooled on the hardwood floor. Too much loss to survive? Matt laid a finger at Everly’s carotid artery. He felt nothing.
Everly lay dead in his tracks.
A chill train wreck of emotions rose up in Matt. To see a man dropped in cold blood without warning, shot in the back like that, crossed the line. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. He crossed himself with the motions his mother had taught him when he was too young to know what he was doing. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take…
He wasn’t sure he believed any of that anymore. He knew if there was a hell, Everly deserved to be set on that path. But shooting Everly in the back had never occurred even in the stark revenge fantasies Matt had harbored.
The freezing night air rolled in through the open door, but failed to carry off the stench of blood. Aware of the commotion the shot had caused in the stables, of horses half-frenzied, he fought the overwhelming temptation to return fire blindly just to draw it again. He might get a fix on the direction the shot had come from or the direction the shooter had moved. There was no other noise. No sounds of a retreating vehicle. But even if the ruse worked, how would he explain his own presence?
The murder of Kyle Everly changed everything. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see that Everly’s death opened the door to a huge power struggle among the members of The Fraternity. That someone would move in soon to fill the vacuum of power.
Matt made the split-second decision to reinvent himself and his mission. He could not be seen here tonight. He moved out of range of Everly’s bloody corpse, stood and began to move soundlessly away. He snatched up the papers he had printed and shut down the computer.
When he left there must be no hint that anyone had been inside the mansion at the moment of Everly’s demise.
No more than sixty seconds had passed. Still no one appeared in the yard to check out a shot in the dark, but the turmoil in the stables escalated.
Six months ago what Matt knew about horses could have fit onto the head of a pin, but even then he’d have recognized the high-pitched whinnying and the sounds of hooves crashing against barriers for what it was. The edge of stampede behavior in what amounted to a lockdown situation. A disaster waiting to happen to very pricey animals.
Was it the gunshot, or the scent of death permeating the frozen night air that incited the panic?
Fiona Halsey had to have her hands full.
Matt moved through the silent house toward the back. Through the open front door where Everly lay dead, Matt heard a male voice bellowing. “What in Sam Hill’s going on? Fiona!”
Geary, Matt assumed. He stripped off his gloves and stuffed them along with the printouts into his duffel bag, then let himself out through the back door. He reversed his earlier sabotage to the alarm system and then, hugging the exterior walls of the ranch house, circled round to its southwest corner. There, crouched out of sight at the base of a box-elder hedge, he watched.
Geary came out of the bunkhouse, stuffing his arms into a heavy parka as Matt took up his position.
“Halsey!” His hair tousled, indignant as hell, Geary hunched down into his coat and started for the Lexus with its interior light burning and the passenger door still hanging open. Some realization must have kicked its way through to his foggy head.
Geary stopped bellowing for Fiona, whose hands he had to know were full-up taking care of the horses. He froze in his tracks. He turned slowly and stared hard at the front door gaping wide open under the porch lights. A siren began to wail in the distance. Geary’s girlfriend popped out of a door in the bunkhouse. “Dennis, what’s going on?”
“Get back inside, you idiot!” he barked, bellowing again for Fiona as he ran to the porch.
Then Fiona Halsey let herself out of the barn. Her long, dark blond hair hung heavily down her back; tension rode her hard. “Geary, I swear, if you don’t cut it out—”
She never finished the sentence. The siren grew more and more shrill, and she forgot whatever she’d been thinking about the blaring horn and gunfire and Geary’s subsequent bellowing.
Geary had launched himself up onto the porch and out of Matt’s line of vision. “He’s dead, Halsey! Everly’s dead!” he shouted over the shrill noise of the oncoming siren. “What the devil? D’you do this?”
Focused now on her, Matt watched disbelief replace the irritation on her face. His knees stiffened and the cold brought on a shiver. He watched her lips shaping the answer to Geary’s question, Don’t be an ass, Dennis, but what Matt supposed must be the sheriff’s SUV, brakes screeching, turned off the highway and up the country lane. The siren drowned out the sound of her voice.
Belatedly, maybe goaded by the shrill approach, she ran toward the porch herself as Geary’s girlfriend closed herself back into the bunkhouse.
Matt snapped shut his binoculars and shook his head in disbelief over the unlikely speed of the local law enforcement arriving on the scene. Was it the sheriff Everly had been talking to when he was gunned down?
Matt drew a deep, silent breath and faced the crucial decision—stay or go. He had only seconds to conceal himself in a better position to observe what went on, or to head back up the mountainside. He could observe perfectly well from the spot where his horse was tethered, but he wouldn’t be able to hear what was said.
He scanned the gabled roofs of the house, the barn and the bunkhouse, then backed around the length of hedge, keeping his options open for those few seconds as the sheriff’s vehicle slammed to a stop and two men piled out.
The larger of the two, clearly in authority, was Dex Hanifen, the Johnson County sheriff. “Fiona? Geary? What’s going on here?”
His deputy, Crider, scurried up to the porch at the front door where Everly’s body lay collapsed. “Oh, my God, Dex! It’s Kyle! Deader than a doornail.”
Hanifen stared. “No way—”
Crider began to moan, cutting him off. “Yeah, boss. He’s shot in the back. Jeez, Dex, the blood!” He swore, and then gagged and retched and threw up.
Hanifen cut loose a blue streak about contaminating a crime scene and all but flew up the steps and as quickly hurled Crider off the porch. He shouted at Geary, ordering him to his side. “I need some help here.”
The man stalled. “You want me to look around, Dex? I could see—”
“Sure, Geary. I’ve got a moron deputy woofing his cookies in the middle of a crime scene, and I’m dead certain the murderer’s waiting around to be discovered,” Hanifen snarled. “Now get your butt over here and give me a hand with this freaking mess.”
The moment Geary stepped reluctantly forward, Matt moved out. He chose the roof of the barn so that if he slipped, the noise would go unnoticed. He circled around, far outside the perimeter of the yard lights.
At the west end of the barn he climbed onto the paddock fence and gripped the edge of the roof. He swung forward hard and jackknifed his body onto the rooftop, landing with a lot more noise than he’d hoped.
“What the hell was that?” he heard Crider shout.
“The horses, you ninny.” Hanifen’s voice. Wildly grateful for the sheriff’s preoccupied impatience, Matt nevertheless plastered himself to the roof. Scraped raw in the maneuver, his hands felt on fire, but he didn’t move, hardly breathed.
Matt heard Hanifen get on the radio and order in help to seal off, search out and protect the evidence. “And the horses are getting whacked out, so whatever you do, don’t put on the siren.”
Matt gauged his position on the roof and moved crabwise to situate himself before Fiona went back into the stables. He just glimpsed her entering below him as he molded himself to the asphalt shingles to watch what was going on.
Not another five minutes had passed before a second vehicle with the county sheriff’s logo pulled into the yard. If the killer had made any tracks, if the shell casing had been left on the ground, if any number of possible clues to the killer’s identity remained in the drive or yard, Matt thought the sheriff’s crew was doing one hell of a job laying waste to the evidence.
He stayed on the roof growing stiffer, colder and more irritated by the moment for nearly two hours. Photos were taken of Everly’s position when he fell over dead. Hanifen conducted a cursory search of the house and ruled out the necessity of bringing in crime-scene technicians.
The murder, after all, had taken place on the front stoop by a shooter outside the house.
One would think, if one didn’t know better, Matt thought, that the sheriff didn’t give a damn about preserving the integrity of the evidence. Matt had to wonder if there was any percentage at all in staying on the roof, observing, listening.
Then, just as he’d decided to move out, Matt got his payoff. Hanifen and Crider wound up virtually beneath Matt’s position, leaning in against the stable wall, lighting their smokes.
“I’ll bet you anything the princess killed him,” Hanifen’s underling was saying.
“Maybe,” the sheriff returned, “but I’m not taking her in tonight.”
“But—”
“But what?” A cloud of smoke chased the sheriff’s abrupt interruption, wafting upward toward Matt.
“Well, she’s a flight risk for one thing—”
“Oh, stifle it, Crider,” Hanifen snapped. “This is not New York and you are not on NYPD Blue. Fiona Halsey has motive up the ying-yang, she had opportunity, and—”
“And more than enough firepower to arm a small nation, let’s not forget…” Crider trailed off.
Matt could almost feel through his frozen senses the quiet wrath coming off Hanifen. His words dropped out like chunks of glacier. “What firepower would that be?”
Exactly, Matt thought. What firepower? Was Crider blabbing about an armory in existence on the Bar Naught? And one Fiona Halsey knew about?
But Crider cleared his throat and backpedaled like a demon. “You know. Just what’s stashed…in the inside. And Fiona’s gotta have a rifle herself.”
More glacier shedding. “You’re a fool.”
“I know when to keep my mouth shut,” Crider protested.
“Like now?”
“But, Dex, it’s just you and me out here—”
“I don’t ever want to hear a word that even rhymes with ‘firepower’ out of your mouth again. You got that?”
“Yeah,” Crider answered, sullen-voiced.
Hanifen went on. “I don’t want to hear any disrespect in regard to Fiona Halsey, either.”
“You gone all soft on her, Dex?”
“Shut your trap, Crider. That little girl and I go back a long way.”
“She’s not a little girl anymore.” The fool dug his hole deeper. “You gonna just let her get away with it?”
How, Matt thought, did the guy dare taunt Hanifen? But to his utter disbelief, Hanifen let the ridicule go.
“She’s not going to get away with anything.” He tossed his cigar butt into the yard. “Here’s what’s not going to happen. I am not gonna have the whole damned county down on my head for railroading the local princess.”
Chapter Two
The first time he met Fiona Halsey face-to-face, Matt found himself staring up the barrel of her cocked, .30-30 lever-action rifle. The Remington was a beauty, powerful enough to fell a moose from several hundred yards out. And it still had the faint acrid scent of burnt gunpowder.
“Back away from Soldier Boy,” she commanded, “and keep your arms in the air.”
He raised one arm but left the other on the scarred, discolored withers of the Arabian.
It was already some kind of natural miracle that Matt had survived the standoff with Soldier. He’d had about two seconds’ warning when, apparently for no real reason other than to amuse himself, Crider had elevated the searchlights attached to the sheriff’s second vehicle and started the beacon rolling.
Who knew? It was possible the fool still would not have caught sight of Matt even with the searchlight glaring full on. It was just as possible that even in the sweep of the beacon halfway up the mountain, Matt might not have been spotted.
He’d reacted as if his body weren’t stiff from the cold, crabbing his way back over the rooftop, expecting to hang out on the dark side of the roof for a while. The only trouble was, the floodlights on the paddock side of the barn had been turned on in the exhaustive search for clues, and now lit up not only his escape route, but the slant of the roof as well.
He had only one decent chance to escape detection and that was to duck into the stall of a killer horse named Soldier Boy. He estimated where he had to be to turn himself off the roof and into the stall and then he prayed for a second time in one night.
