property to his friend Joe Garrison, loaded his two horses in a trailer behind his truck and headed south to Alabama and a new life with his bride.
Sam wished he could tell Riley what he was doing, he reflected later after Hannah had left. Hell, he wished he could tell Kristen. Lying to her about the text message had bothered him a hell of a lot more than keeping it a secret from the rest of the police. She’d put herself on the line for him and Maddy, more than once. She deserved his trust.
She deserved the truth.
But he couldn’t tell anyone what he had planned. Not until he had Maddy safely back in his arms.
CARL MADISON GOT INTO the passenger seat of Kristen’s Impala and reached for the seat belt. The dashboard clock read seven o’clock on the nose.
“The perimeter’s in place.” Carl told her. “We’re using tracker teams who know the lay of the land. Burkett won’t have a clue they’re there.”
“He’d better not,” Kristen answered, her neck already beginning to ache from the unrelenting tension. After passing most of the afternoon working up background information on Stanhope Burkett, she was worried that Sam’s decision to go it alone might have been the right one after all.
For one thing, Sam’s nemesis was a former St. Louis police officer who probably knew quite a bit about setting traps-and avoiding them. He’d quit the force not long after his son’s death and had spent most of the past ten years off the grid, if the lack of a paper trail was anything to go by.
For a while, he’d popped up here and there, speaking to antiwar groups about what he called the “Kaziristan cover-up”-officers getting away with “friendly fire” murders of the enlisted by blaming the victims. But that paper trail had gone cold four years ago after the embassy siege in Kaziristan had changed public sentiment in favor of more military involvement in the area, not less.
The most recent mention of Stan Burkett she’d found was the one that troubled her most, however. The FBI had noted in passing, on a report regarding possible antimilitary activity among some of the more anarchistic antiwar groups, that a man named Stanhope Burkett had been offering survival training to some of the groups for free.
There was no telling where Stan Burkett was keeping Maddy or how easily he might see through Carl’s carefully positioned perimeter. She had no idea what he’d do if he spotted the trackers or suspected the police were watching.
And worst of all, Sam Cooper was thirty minutes away from walking right into the middle of the whole mess.
She glanced at the clock again. Five after seven. Time seemed to be creeping.
“You holding up okay?” Carl asked.
She nodded. “Just worried.”
“You’ve grown attached to the kid. And her father.”
She didn’t answer, her mind full of the reasons she’d given Sam for walking away. With Maddy in danger and Sam putting his life on the line, she wasn’t nearly as sure now that she was doing the right thing. What if she was turning her back on her best chance at happiness? At a real family?
“Carl,” she said aloud, “what do you know about my mother’s condition?”
Carl gave her an odd look. “Her condition?”
She forced the words out. “Her madness. Why did she go crazy? Was it a genetic condition?”
He hesitated a moment. “I thought you knew.”
She turned to look at him. “Knew what?”
“It was part of her court proceedings. They assessed her condition to see if she could be treated.”
She looked down at the scar on the back of her hand, which glowed faintly in the light from the dashboard. “I’ve never read the case file. I guess I was afraid to.” She forced herself to meet Carl’s gaze. “What was wrong with her?”
“She had encephalitis a couple of years after Tammy was born. You must have been around eight. She’d have been in the hospital a week or so-do you remember?”
She nodded. That had been a couple of years after her father had left the family for good.
“The encephalitis apparently caused irreparable damage to the part of your mother’s brain that controlled her impulses.” Carl’s expression was gentle. “She probably started losing her mind immediately, a little at a time.”
Kristen felt her whole body begin to tingle as relief washed over her like floodwaters. Encephalitis, not genetics.
Carl reached across the car seat and touched her cheek. “I thought you knew, kitten. Have you been worrying all this time that you’d turn out like your mama?”
She blinked back tears, her throat constricted with emotion. She just nodded.
“Oh, baby.”
The radio crackled. “Team Two, in position.” A second later, Team One repeated the call-in.
Carl looked at Kristen. “Game on.”
She nodded, still trying to process what he’d told her about her mother’s condition. She wasn’t going to go mad the way Molly Tandy had. And whether or not she could be a good mother was up to her alone.
It changed everything, she realized. The life she’d thought she could never have was a possibility once more.
But not if something happened to Sam Cooper or his daughter.
BELLEWOOD MANUFACTURING’S Gossamer Ridge mill had been out of business almost ten years, and as abandoned buildings do in a small town where nothing exciting ever happened, the old mill had fallen prey to vandals and thieves. Sam spotted the building’s timeworn, graffiti-riddled facade as soon as he rounded a curve in the packed-gravel track that had once been the mill’s main drive.
He had parked his Jeep a few yards from the main road, near enough that he could make it back quickly if the need to grab Maddy and flee arose, but not so close or so exposed that his car was an easy mark for sabotage. He was playing by Burkett’s rules, for the moment, but he wasn’t an idiot.
The sun had set about a half hour earlier, days growing longer as June and the hot Alabama summer approached. A half-moon gazed down in cool blue dispassion, hidden more often than not by silver-edged storm clouds gathering in the western sky, heavy with the threat of rain. When the moon disappeared, the path ahead grew as dark as a cave, the lights of civilization too distant and few to temper the gloom of nightfall.
Sam picked his way carefully through the high-growing grass that had once been the mill’s front lawn. Broken liquor bottles and cigarette butts littered the ground beneath his feet, a blighted obstacle course on his path to the mill. He cursed as his foot hit the curve of one bottle, twisting his ankle. He bent to rub the aching joint, taking advantage of the chance to double-check the Glock tucked in the holster tied to his ankle.
He’d come alone, as Burkett said.
But he’d also come armed.
The interior of the mill was even darker than the outside, and smelled of dust and old beer. He pulled a small penlight from his pocket and switched it on. The weak beam illuminated only a few feet ahead of him. He saw the broken hulk of a curved wooden reception desk ahead, tumped onto its side, boards missing and gouges dug out of the wood.
Sam turned off the light and listened a moment. He knew he might be walking into a trap, but he’d had no choice. He just wished that whatever Burkett had planned for him, he’d get on with it. He was tired of waiting.
He decided to try the direct approach. “Burkett? Are you here?”
Silence greeted him, thick and cold.
He turned on the penlight again and started a methodical tour of the mill, going from room to room, trying to keep a map of where he’d already been firm in his mind.
He had reached the main floor of the shop, an enormous area littered with the stripped skeletons of what machinery the mill hadn’t been able to sell when it closed up shop. It looked eerily like an industrial abattoir, strewn with metal limbs torn from their mechanical bodies and electrical wires disemboweled from their metal husks.
A low hum against his hip made him jerk. He’d left his phone on vibrate in case Burkett had sent him any last- minute text messages, though he’d put all regular calls on automatic forward to his voice mail.
He pulled the phone from his pocket and flipped it open. The display panel lit up. One text message.
His heart in his throat, he accessed the message.
