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It took a lot of willpower with those eyes gazing into his, liquid and shimmering with held-back tears, but he held himself aloof, gruff and immobile. “Just tell me one thing. Who has custody of that little girl? Right now. You said they’d been to court. Did the judge make a ruling?”
She nodded, not looking at him, not answering. She didn’t have to. Her silence only confirmed his worst fear.
Furious now, he jerked his arms away from that featherlight touch and slapped one hand to his forehead. “Oh, man. The judge gave the father full custody, didn’t he? And you two took her, anyway. In direct violation of a judge’s order. Jeez. That’s kidnapping, don’t you know that? Jeez.”
He paced off across the concrete slab, trying to think his way through the disaster. His boots made loud scraping, crunching noises on the gravelly surface, and to him it sounded like his whole life, all his hopes and dreams, ten years of hard work and struggle, slip-sliding away into an abyss of failure.
He stopped, turned and looked back. She was standing where he’d left her, in a pool of light from the yard lamp, arms folded across her waist, head bowed, looking nothing at all like a hijacker or kidnapper. Looking like a lost traveler.
His heart lurched, then sank into his stomach. “I can’t do it,” he said, walking back to her, his voice echoing the harsh sound of his boots on that gritty slab. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you commit a felony. That’d make me guilty, too. I can’t do that. I just can’t. I’m sorry….”
He expected her to argue with him. What she did was worse. She waited until he’d run out of words and then, still staring at the ground, lifted a hand to brush at something on her cheeks. After a moment she hitched her shoulders in a resigned sort of way and said in a muffled voice, “I saw the law books in your truck. You studying to become a lawyer?”
C.J. let out the breath he’d been holding, and all his anger went with it. “Yeah. Trying to. I’m almost done—on my last semester of law school, in fact. Then all I have left to do is pass the bar.” And meanwhile keep from committing any felonies.
He wasn’t all that surprised when she seemed to understand.
They’d begun walking back toward the truck, her with her head down and her arms still folded across her middle, him with his fingertips poked into the tops of his hip pockets, feeling guilty and mean. When they reached the place between the headlights where they’d have to part company and go to their respective sides of the truck, for some reason he felt reluctant to let her go. Then she angled a look up toward him, and to his surprise there was a ghost of a smile on her lips.
“I sure picked the wrong truck to hijack,” she said.
He managed a ghost of a laugh. Then, about to turn away, he stopped and jerked back to her. “Out of curiosity, why did you? Pick me, I mean.”
Her eyes came to rest on his face and her smile lingered a wistful moment before fading. “You were the last,” she said with a shrug. “I couldn’t very well have witnesses. Even if I hadn’t had to use the gun, somebody might remember seeing us get in a truck, might even remember which truck we’d gotten into. So I waited until everyone else had gone. You were the last to leave.” After a pause she softly added, with a brief reprise of her smile—ironically tilted now, “And you were kind to Emma.”
C.J. grunted, the way he might if he’d been socked in the stomach. Obeying some compulsion he didn’t understand, he put his hands on her arms, up near her shoulders. He was shocked at how real she felt—and that was how he thought it, while at the same time acknowledging how ridiculous it was to think that way. Real? He knew she was no fantasy, in spite of ethereal grace and fairy-tale beauty—he’d felt the weight of that pistol of hers in his own hands—but it jolted the healthy red-blooded male part of him anyway, the tactile proof that there was a flesh-and-blood woman underneath that sweatshirt, a body warm and pulsing with vitality, slender and supple and wiry strong. He felt the jolt in his own muscles and nerves, all the way down to the pit of his stomach.
“Look, I’ll help you turn yourselves in,” he said, rushing the words because it had become gravely important to him that she see how right he was about this. “Okay? I’ll take you to the police station, see you get a lawyer. Hey—” he flashed her his dimples “—my family’s lousy with lawyers. My brother Troy’s wife, Charlie—this is right up her alley. I’ll give her a call as soon as we get back on the road, have her meet us—”
“Thanks, but that’s not necessary.” Her voice was remote.
“It’s the best way,” he said. “Trust me. You can’t keep running forever, not with both the law and—” He stopped for a moment, remembering the gray sedan, and the dark and purposeful men he’d watched in his rearview mirrors. “If this guy, this…”
“Vasily,” she grimly supplied. “Ari Vasily.”
C.J. nodded. “If this Vasily guy is a killer, and he has the kind of resources you say he does, what makes you think you—or your friend and her little girl, rather—would ever be safe as long as he’s after you?” He paused to listen to himself, liking his own reasoning more and more. “No—the best thing, I’m telling you, is to turn yourselves in. Tell your story to the police. They can protect you. Then, we get you a good lawyer—”
“Thanks, but you’ve done enough.” Her sardonic little smile reproached him. He let go of her and stuck his hands underneath his arms, then stood there feeling vaguely embarrassed while she hitched up her sweatshirt and took her cell phone from its holster. “I would like to make a couple of phone calls, though. If you, uh, don’t mind?” she added when he didn’t get the hint she was asking for privacy.
“Oh…oh, yeah, sure,” he said, catching on, and was about to leave her there when she stalled him with a questioning gesture.
“Where are you taking us? To turn ourselves in.”
So, at least it looked like she was calling her lawyer. He thought about it, then told her the name of the next major stop on up the interstate in South Carolina, which he knew to be a town big enough to have its own courthouse and police department but small enough not to be too overwhelmed with bureaucracy.
She repeated the name under her breath, then said very softly, “Don’t…say anything, okay? Let me tell them…please?”
He nodded and went around to his side of the truck.
When he climbed into the cab he saw the sleeper curtain was pulled wide open. The woman, Mary Kelly, was sitting in the middle of it, rocking her daughter back and forth while the little girl sobbed and shivered and tried to hide her face against her momma’s neck.
C.J. felt a stab of pain in his heart. “Well, hey there, sweetheart…what’s wrong?” He reached across the back of his seat to pat the kid’s back, and again felt awful when she flinched.
Her momma tried halfheartedly to come up with a smile. “Oh, it’s nothin’, she just had a nightmare—she gets them sometimes. She thinks the bad men are comin’ to hurt me.” Her smile quivered and went out, and C.J. felt another twist of pain, this one in his guts.
Armoring himself with his own smile, he said, “No bad men here, darlin’, just me, ol’ C.J.”
He looked around for something—anything—that might put a stop to those tears, and his eye lit on a little flat package tucked behind his sunshade. It was a toy, one of those action figures based on the latest cartoon-character craze, which apparently involved a bunch of little bitty girls with super powers and great big black eyes. He’d bought it in the last truck stop he’d hit for his niece Amy Jo—Jimmy Joe’s little girl—who happened to be nuts about the cartoons, and he figured one little girl probably wasn’t all that different from another, right? Anyway, it seemed worth a try.
Plucking it from behind the sunshade, he tapped the kid’s arm with it. “Look here what I found, darlin’, just for you.”
Her momma picked up her cue and sang out, “Oh, Emma, looka here—it’s your favorite! What do you say? You tell Mr. Starr thank you, now.”
So, like any child above the age of two being raised in the South, Emma had to sit up straight and sniffle out a “Thank you, sir.” She could have been dying, and she’d have pulled herself together and managed it somehow.
It broke the ice, though, and by the time Caitlyn joined them in the cab he and Emma were good buddies, and she was telling him all about which particular supergirl this action figure was and the names of all her friends, and all the cool things they could do. She hadn’t quite got so far as to sit on his lap, but she was leaning against his knees and drowning him with her eyes, which, it struck him, bore a fair resemblance to those little cartoon supergirls’ eyes.
It made his heart hurt to think how sweet and little she was and how badly she wanted to trust somebody, and what a lousy hand life had dealt her so far. And how he was just about to make it worse for her, maybe, at least for a while.
In the long run, though, he knew he was doing the right thing, what was best for her and her momma. He’d had close brushes with some bad apples like this Ari Vasily, and if there was one thing he’d learned from the experience it was that dangerous people like that were best left to the professionals to deal with. And as for the courts, well…sure, they got it wrong sometimes, but they generally straightened things out sooner or later. The thing to do was get a good lawyer….
Yeah, and that got him thinking again about the pile of law books under his passenger’s feet, and the exam waiting for him back in Georgia, and the hard work and tough years it had taken him to get to this point and what it would mean to the rest of his life if he blew it now. That gave him the resolve to put the Kenworth in gear and do a turnaround through the abandoned gas station’s parking lot, and a few minutes later he was back on the interstate, growling his way toward South Carolina.
Anderson’s Main Street, which ran straight down through the town and past the courthouse square on one side and the police station on the other, had been landscaped and refurbished in the old downtown section and was closed to big-truck traffic. Following the truck route signs, C.J. found a place to park one street over, with a well-lit and mostly empty parking lot between him and the police station’s back door. With the big diesel engine throbbing and the air-conditioning blowing cold, he looked over at Caitlyn and tried to think of something to say that would justify what he was doing to her. She looked reproachfully back at him, not making it any easier for him.
As he tried to read her eyes, it struck him how tangled up with one another two strangers could get in a short period of time, under the right circumstances. He felt again that strange reluctance to let her go, a dragging weight of denial at the realization that she was going to walk out of his life forever.
It was Mary Kelly who broke the edgy silence, hitching herself forward in the sleeper so she could look out the window. “Why’re we stoppin’ here? What is this place? Caitlyn?”
But she already knew. C.J. opened his mouth to explain, but before he could get a word out, her head was swiveling toward him, her mouth a big round O of dawning realization, and panic and denial in her eyes.
Caitlyn reached around and put a gentling hand on her arm. “It’s okay,” she murmured, as if she were soothing a child after a nightmare. “It’s going to be okay.”
Mary Kelly wasn’t buying it. She shook off Caitlyn’s hand, looking like a hunted animal. Her eyes darted back and forth between Caitlyn and C.J., and her voice was high and scared. “No—I—we can’t go in there! We can’t go to the police—they’ll send us back, you know they will! They’ll lock us up and take Emma. He’ll take her away, you know he—”
“Shh,” Caitlyn hushed her, with a warning tip of her head toward Emma, who was waking up and looking scared by all the commotion. “It’s going to be okay. I promise—”
“It’s the best way,” C.J. broke in, meaning again to explain himself but only sounding harsh and angry with his gravel-filled voice. “You couldn’t keep on running like that, not with…” He, too, tipped his head toward the little girl, not daring to meet those big dark eyes peering at him over her momma’s shoulder. “Sooner or later either the cops are going to catch up with you, or somebody worse will. And then what’re you gonna do? Somebody might get hurt, for sure it’s going to be traumatic for her. You want her to see her momma arrested? Shot? Hauled away by force? Remember what happened to that little Cuban kid?” He was shouting by this time, and Mary Kelly just kept staring at him until finally a tear pillowed up on her lashes and slipped away down her cheek.
Well, that did it. He said, “Aw, hell,” under his breath and turned around in his seat so he was facing forward and didn’t have to look at her or her kid anymore. Instead, he stared squinty-eyed at the windshield while his heart thumped in shallow, trip-hammer beats.
Beside him, Caitlyn unhooked her seat belt and got turned around and up on her knees on the seat so she could look Mary Kelly eye to eye. “It’s going to be okay,” he heard her say in the kind of firm, confident way parents do when they talk to their kids. “I promise. Okay? Come on—let’s go inside. Emma, you first—give me your hand, honey. Come here to me.” She opened up the door and started backing out, showing the little girl how to climb out of the sleeper.
C.J. cleared his throat. “Uh, you want— Maybe I should go in with you,” he said, not happily.
Caitlyn shook her head, and that ghost of a smile, the ironic one, hovered around her lips. “That won’t be necessary.”
“You sure you don’t want me to call my sister-in-law? She’s in Atlanta—could probably be here in a couple hours.”
Her eyes zeroed in on his, flared silver for one incredible moment. Then the shutters came down and she looked away. “Thanks—we’ll be fine.”
Emma was standing beside C.J.’s seat, peeking at him past his shoulder. He felt something nudge him there, and looking down, saw the supergirl action-figure toy he’d given her, clutched tightly in her hand. She waggled it at him, both a shy and silent thank-you and a wave goodbye. Then she scrambled across the seat and dropped down out of his sight.
Mary Kelly followed, brushing at her cheek and moving like somebody going to her own execution. At the last minute, framed in the doorway of his truck and her face a mask of shadows, she paused. “I’m not blamin’ you, Mr. Starr, and I want to thank you for all you done for Emma and me. I truly do believe you just don’t know what it is you’ve done.” She sniffed, tried hard to smile one more time, and then she, too, dropped to the ground. The door closed with a flat and final thunk.
C.J. sat and watched them cross the mostly empty parking lot, bathed in light that turned everything a washed-out bluish gray, like death. Caitlyn had her arm around Mary Kelly’s shoulders, and Emma was clinging to her momma’s hand and sort of hop-skipping the way little kids do to keep up. He didn’t know whether he expected them to bolt and scatter for the shadows like flushed mice before they got to the entrance or not, but he didn’t take his eyes off them until they’d disappeared inside the police station.
He felt wrung out…drained. He couldn’t seem to talk his muscles into moving, not even enough to do what needed to be done to put his truck in gear and pull off down the street.
Which, C.J. told himself, was maybe a good thing. Because it was probably the only thing keeping him from going after them and bringing them back. And that, he knew, would be the biggest mistake of his life.
Chapter 3
What else could I have done?
C.J. had spent the last twenty-four hours asking himself that question and still hadn’t come up with an answer. His mind played and replayed it for him while he was churning up the interstate, like a piece of music sung to the rhythm of his eighteen tires. It was there in the background noise of his thoughts while he dropped off his load in Jersey, got new marching orders from his dispatcher, made his way down to Wilmington. Now, with an overnight to kill waiting for his load to be ready, he was holed up in a motel room with nothing but his thoughts, and he’d never been in worse company.
What the hell was I supposed to do? I didn’t have any choice. I didn’t! Stretched out on the bed in his undershorts and T-shirt, he stared up at the ceiling and argued with his conscience. What would it have cost you to drop them off at the airport? They could have at least rented a car there. Most likely nobody would ever have known you were involved.
Most likely…
C.J. wasn’t all that comfortable with “most likelys.”
The TV program he’d been watching without really seeing had ended and the eleven-o’clock news was coming on. He reached for the remote. Maybe he’d have better luck on HBO; nothing like gratuitous violence to numb the mind and quiet a restless soul.
While he was feeling around for the remote amongst the tumble of bedspread and yesterday’s newspaper he heard the anchorman begin his intro. And then…
“Topping the news this evening: a niece of former president Rhett Brown is in jail tonight in South Carolina on contempt charges, after refusing to comply with a judge’s order to reveal what she knows about the whereabouts of a Florida millionaire’s missing daughter. For more on this breaking story we go to…”
With remote in hand and scalp prickling, C.J. jerked around and squinted at the TV screen. Too late. He caught only the barest glimpse of a file-photo head shot before the scene shifted to a young, slightly windblown woman correspondent standing in a nighttime courthouse square lit by old-fashioned-style street lamps, the wide empty courthouse steps behind her.
“Yes, Tim…it’s quiet here now, but this was the scene earlier this evening, when Caitlyn Brown, niece of former President Rhett Brown, was taken from this South Carolina courthouse in handcuffs….”
The scene was pushing, shoving crowds of reporters, grim-faced men in uniforms and suits surrounding a slender figure wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up to hide her face.
“Ms. Brown was ordered to spend the night in jail after she refused to obey Judge Wesley Calhoun’s order to divulge the whereabouts of five-year-old Emma Vasily, who is the daughter of Florida billionaire, Ari Vasily. The little girl had been missing since Tuesday, and is the object of a nationwide hunt….”
On the television screen, the knot of law enforcement bodies loosened to reveal glimpses of the lone hooded figure sitting in the back seat of a police car. She turned her head and looked straight into the camera, and for one heart-stopping moment her eyes flared silver.
“The child’s mother, Mary Kelly Vasily, allegedly took her daughter from her school in Miami Beach only hours after a Florida judge had granted sole custody of the little girl to Mr. Vasily, also granting Mr. Vasily’s request that the mother be denied visitation….”
The young reporter stood alone once more in front of the deserted courthouse. A windblown strand of hair teased her cheek as she earnestly continued.
“Details are still sketchy at this time, but according to police sources, around 9 p.m. yesterday Mrs. Vasily, accompanied by Ms. Brown, walked into the police station here and gave herself up. The little girl was with the two women at that time, that much is certain, but what happened after that is unclear. As nearly as we can ascertain, the child apparently left police headquarters in the custody of a woman who identified herself as a representative of family services, but it now appears that woman may have been an impostor. Here’s what we do know—more than twenty-four hours later police and social service agencies still have no idea where the child is. Little Emma Vasily seems to have vanished into thin air.
“Just what Ms. Brown’s involvement is in the case is also unclear, but police investigators must have strong reason to believe the president’s niece has some knowledge of Emma’s whereabouts, because this morning they asked a judge to order Ms. Brown to tell what she knows. She was given until the close of court this afternoon to comply, and when she refused, Judge Calhoun ordered her to jail.
“Mr. Vasily, who arrived this morning from Miami expecting to be reunited with his daughter, has been unavailable for comment, but at a press conference just before noon a visibly angry chief of police promised a full investigation into his department’s handling of the whole affair, and vowed to remain personally committed to finding the little girl and returning her safely to her father. Back to you, Tim.”
A sharp pain in his chest reminded C.J. of the breath he’d taken in some time back and hadn’t gotten around to letting go. He released it in a gust of swearing and mashed the power button on the remote, cutting off the anchorman as he was launching into news of the latest statehouse scandal. He hitched himself around on the bed till he’d got his feet on the floor and reached for his cell phone. His heart tapped hard against his ribs as he punched a number programmed in the autodial.
“Hey, bro,” he said to the groggy voice who answered. “Wha’d I do, wake you?”
“What? Who’s that—C.J.? Naw, you didn’t wake me. I just dozed off watching the news. What’s up?” There was an audible yawn. “Where in the hell are you? Everything all right?”
“I’m okay.” Well, it wasn’t much of a lie. “Hey, is Charly around?”
“She’s right here. Aw, hell—you’re not in jail, are you?”
C.J. shrugged off that conclusion and the low opinion of his own character it reflected. Where his brothers were concerned, he’d accepted the fact that it was going to take a while to live down certain escapades of his misspent youth. “Just let me talk to her, okay?”
There was a pause, and then in a molasses-thick Alabama drawl, “Hey, C.J.—honey, how’re you? What’s up?”
“Hey, Charly. You see tonight’s news?”
“I’m watchin’ it right now. What part in particular?”
“The president’s niece getting jailed for contempt.”
“Oh, yeah. I did catch that. What about it?”
“Well, I’m…I think I’m sort of involved. Or…I might be.”
“What? Lord’s sake, how?”
He told her the whole story, then waited through a thinking silence. A quickly drawn breath.
“You did exactly the right thing, if that’s what you’re askin’. I don’t think you have anything to worry about. The police are probably gonna want to ask you some questions—that’s to be expected. If you want me—”
“That’s not…” C.J. rubbed at his temples with his free hand. “It’s not me I’m worried about. What I was wondering…I was thinking, you know, maybe you could go up there, see if she needs anything…”
“She? You mean the mother—what’s her name—Mary Kelly? Hon’, you know she’s probably lookin’ at kid—”
“Well, her, and…uh, Caitlyn.”
“Caitlyn?”
He said a bad word under his breath. “Miz Brown, then—the president’s niece. Whoever.” He paused, but his sister-in-law didn’t say anything, so he added in self-defense, “I didn’t see any sign of a lawyer on that news footage, did you? Aren’t they usually right there, shielding their client from the buzzards? I offered, you know—to get her one. Well, hell, I’m the one turned ’em over to the cops, it seemed like the least I could do.” He’d about rubbed a burned spot on the skin of his forehead, but it hadn’t done a thing to help the pounding inside his skull.
“Don’t you go blamin’ yourself,” Charly scolded. “Those women are grown-ups, they made their choices, one of which was to involve you in their mess. It’s not your fault their choice of getaway driver turned out to be a law-abidin’ citizen.”
C.J.’s face stretched into a grimace nobody was there to see. “Yeah, well…I’d feel a whole lot better about that if I knew she had somebody in her corner, is all. I know she made at least one call after I told her I was turning her in, and I just assumed… But I’m thinking that must’ve been how she arranged for somebody to pick up the little girl. If she did, maybe—”
“C.J., she’s the ex-president’s niece, for Lord’s sake. Do you seriously think they won’t have the best lawyers money can buy?” C.J. didn’t say anything, and after a moment she let out an exasperated breath. “Okay, look, do you want me to see what I can find out for you?”
It was his turn to let a breath out in a rush of relief. “If you wouldn’t mind? I’d go myself, but I’m stuck up here in Wilmington waiting for my load. Soonest I can get there is—”
“Best you stay out of it,” Charly said in a warning tone. “If she gives you up as the person who gave her a lift and the cops come lookin’ for you to ask you questions, that’s one thing. Otherwise, speakin’ as your lawyer and as your brother’s lovin’ wife and therefore family, I’m advising you to keep your distance. For all kinds of reasons, startin’ with the fact that if this Ari Vasily is as dangerous as these gals make him out to be, you don’t want to mess with him. And like I said, it’s not like she hasn’t got resources. She’s the president’s niece.”
