“What are you doing?”
“Putting on some clothes and shoes.” He stopped halfway up the stairs just long enough to add, “Bring your gun.”
CHAPTER 32
Jeffery had begged Sam to get the photos he needed for part two of his profile piece and have them ready for him first thing in the morning. She should have done it earlier but Otis P.’s tall tale, whether fiction or fact, had freaked her out. She couldn’t help wondering if there was some poor woman’s body stuffed in a culvert, her orange socks hidden by mud and leaves.
When they left the prison all Sam wanted to do was go home. All week she had gotten home late, after her mother and son were already in bed. After Otis P.’s tale, Sam wanted to be with her family. She had decided to go home instead of straight out to get the photos Jeffery ordered. For once she’d put work second.
She had dinner with her mother and son, almost like a normal family. Then she cuddled up next to little Ignacio, or Iggy as most of his friends called him. He read to her as they snuggled in his bed, roles reversed. They both fell asleep. When her mother woke her, Sam wanted to stay put. The day had already been a long and crazy one, but she had promised Jeffery.
She was used to his giving her a laundry list for background photos or footage that he absolutely had to have. She had given up asking questions a long time ago. She’d clock the extra hours and he’d make sure she was compensated. These days she could use the extra cash, and taking photos at all hours was still better than waiting tables, which is what she did for too many years while she went back to school. She’d never have been able to do any of it without her mother taking care of her precious son.
Rained slowed interstate traffic. By the time she arrived at the address Jeffery had given her it was late. On nights like this one, crawling out of a warm bed and going out into a cold driving rain made it a bit harder to remember that this was her dream job.
She slipped the plastic covers over her equipment and zipped up her rain jacket, pulling the hood over her head. The rain had let up a bit. She parked two blocks away from the housing development on Jeffery’s directions. There was no way she could leave her car on the street and not be noticed. It was a neighborhood that was used to BMWs, Lexuses, and Mercedes-Benzes. Her ten-year-old Chevy would have had the local sheriff checking it out and maybe even towing it before she got back.
She followed a path behind the huge fenced-in lots alongside a steep drop-off. She flicked on a flashlight to get her bearings, then turned it off. Now that the rain had changed to a steady drizzle, she could hear water rumbling over the rocks below. She caught a glimpse of the stream and the rocky walls.
She paused and squatted down, resting her camera bag on the wet grass. She’d prepared her equipment in the car, pulling on rain sleeves, though her camera was supposed to be waterproof. The hood over the lens and the infrared strobe were expensive additions, courtesy of Jeffery.
When he had given her the new pieces she joked about turning her into a paparazzo. Jeffery didn’t find it amusing. He was an award-winning journalist, soon to be anchor-slash-host of his own daily news show—or at least that was his hope. Sam wondered if he realized he was getting too old to run with the young bulls in this industry.
He’d come a long way from what he called his humble beginnings as a high school teacher. Sam didn’t know why this wasn’t enough for him. But his own show had become yet another obsession. He seemed determined to make it happen no matter what he had to do. No matter what Big Mac demanded. He didn’t care how many hurdles Sam had to jump, because he knew her future had become intertwined with his.
She just wished she could make him understand why requests like this one, in particular, certainly made her feel like a paparazzo. He was doing this sort of thing more and more. The line began to blur between real journalism and sensational reality TV. If only he could see her now.
Sam was fumbling in her pocket for her flashlight when she noticed a beam of light ahead of her about a hundred yards. The shadow of a man followed.
Sam froze.
Maybe it was a resident walking his dog, though this was much too bumpy and steep to be a walking path. And she didn’t see a dog. The man seemed focused on the house on the other side of the fence. The brim of his baseball cap pointed in that direction.
Who was Sam to judge? Here she was, late at night, sneaking around to get photos of that very same house.
Twigs snapped in front of her. Something stirred in the tall grass that lined the ridge. She slipped to her knees and held her breath. She tried to reassure herself that wildlife probably lived down closer to the stream. It was probably a beaver or raccoon. Whatever it was, it was moving away from her and in the direction of the man.
She eased her camera up, slowly, quietly, keeping her eyes on the grass. The zoom lens made the camera heavy enough that she had to use both hands. She started to raise it to eye level.
“Put down the gun.”
The voice from behind startled her so much she jumped. But instinct made her grip the camera tighter. At first she thought the warning was meant for the man ahead of her, but when she looked up for him, he was gone.
“Put it down.” The woman’s voice came with measured breaths.
“It’s not a gun.” Sam’s hands shook but she kept them from moving, from flinching under the camera’s weight. Would the woman really shoot her? In the back? “It’s a camera,” she tried to explain. “I’d rather not put it in the grass.”
Oh God, she couldn’t believe she’d said that. Jeffery would certainly say she had grown a pair of cojones.
“What the hell are you doing back here?”
“Wildlife photography,” Sam said without missing a beat, realizing Jeffery had taught her to be an instinctively good liar. “There was something in the grass.” Not entirely a lie. Even her mother would agree that lying for self- preservation was forgivable.
“At night?”
Sam shrugged. She was already going to hell. Then she said, “I have an infrared filter.”
The woman came around to face her, shining her flashlight into Sam’s eyes. She could still see the outline of the gun aimed directly at her face. Suddenly she realized this wasn’t a suburban housewife with a neighborhood watch group.
“Since when does a cable news station sponsor wildlife photography?”
Now Sam recognized the woman’s voice. The target of Jeffery’s documentary had just made Sam a target.
CHAPTER 33
Back in the warm, dry kitchen Patrick suggested coffee to distract Maggie from still wanting to shoot the woman with the camera. He’d never seen Maggie so angry and wondered if she’d rather have found a serial killer stalking her than this photojournalist.
He insisted that Maggie prepare the coffee, pretending he didn’t know where she kept the filters. Fact was, he’d made coffee in her kitchen more in the last month than she probably had in the last several years. Since they’d come in out of the rain Maggie hadn’t put down her gun. She did so now, stuffing it into the back of her jeans’ waistband so she could make the coffee.
Patrick grabbed a stack of towels from a linen closet in the hall and offered one to the woman who had introduced herself as Samantha Ramirez. As she thanked him, her eyes—a gorgeous mocha brown—held his for a second too long before she probably realized he wasn’t on her side. He still wasn’t clear how this woman and Maggie had met. Maggie kept mentioning a hit piece on CNN. Ramirez didn’t offer any explanation. She seemed to
