beard and buzz cut the hair.
“What’s his name?”
“I’ll tell you in just a sec.” She checked the number on the file and cross-referenced it with client records. “Abner Jones. If that’s not his real name, he’s incredibly unimaginative when it comes to aliases.”
“Your dad does background checks on his students before he admits them into the school.”
“A determined person could fake his identification and past as effectively as Dad has set up his own aliases.”
“Did Jones attend with anyone else?”
Josie checked. “His record isn’t cross-referenced with any of the other soldiers in training during the same session, but their records are probably a good place to start for possible connections all the same.”
“How will you do that?”
“Hotwire and I will compare their files and the information from their background checks for anything they might have in common. Dad’s trainees are from all over the world; even coming from the same state would be a pretty significant connection for two students to have.”
She brought up the list of soldiers who had attended the training camp with Jones and printed it off along with the individual files for each name. Thank goodness her laser printer had been left behind by the thieves. It had probably been too unwieldy to take, being larger than the small television they’d lifted from the living room.
When the reports stopped printing, she handed them to Daniel without meeting his eyes. “Why don’t you start going through these while I see what I can find on Dad’s possible aliases? You’d probably be more comfortable spreading them out on the table in the dining room.”
And she would be more comfortable with him out of the room. Her heart was still hemorrhaging, and she had to cauterize the wound, but she needed some time to herself to do it. It wasn’t his fault she’d fallen in love when he’d only fallen in lust, but having him around while she came to terms with that truth was more than she could bear.
Daniel got up without a word, but stopped at the doorway. “You never asked what you smelled like to me.”
“No. I didn’t.” What could he have said? Maybe that she smelled like sex, or stupidity.
She recognized the thought as a bitter one, but not necessarily an untrue one.
He waited as if expecting her to ask the question she had no intention of asking. “You smell like everything a woman could or should be.”
With that he walked out, and Josie sat staring at an empty doorway in a state of incredulity.
Had she heard him correctly? Because if she had, none of what he’d said earlier made any sense, or did it? Maybe he’d only been talking about female perfection in a sexual sense. She smelled like everything a woman could or should be in bed.
She wasn’t deluding herself into believing it could be anything else. Not this time.
Daniel made coffee and took a mug of it to a quiet, preoccupied Josie before sitting down at the dining room table as she’d suggested in order to go through the records.
It was hard going, though, trying to concentrate. He’d hurt her again, and that was the last damn thing he wanted to do. When she’d said he made her feel safe, he’d felt as if someone had taken a shredder to his insides. Of all the things she could rely on him for, things he’d do everything in his power to give her, safety was not one of them. He wasn’t trustworthy with a woman’s life.
His mother had learned that the hard way, teaching him an indelible lesson in the process.
But he hadn’t told Josie that. He’d merely told her not to count on him, like she didn’t matter to him, which was nowhere near the truth. He hadn’t been honest with her, and she deserved better than that from him. In fact, he’d out and out lied to her when he implied she had nothing to do with his decision to find her father and the men who’d tried to kill Tyler.
Unlike Josie, who had told him she didn’t lie very well, Daniel was an old hand at it. He’d started young, explaining away the occasional bruises on his small body to teachers as nothing more than the result of horseplay or clumsiness. He’d been so good at it, they’d never once suspected the man who had sired him made a habit of beating his beautiful wife and small son when he drank too much.
Daniel had kept right on lying when he faked his age to enter the army at the age of sixteen. He’d been the size of a man, but as undisciplined and untrained in the art of fighting as a small child.
That had changed, but his ability to overcome an aggressor hadn’t helped his mom when she needed it. Daniel wasn’t any good at protecting women…even the ones he loved. Not that he would allow himself to love Josie. To do so would be nothing better than emotional suicide. That was another lesson he would never forget that his mother had taught him.
However, that didn’t mean he could leave her believing she meant nothing to him. Very few people knew the truth about his past, but Josie had earned the right to be one of them.
Chapter 13
Daniel didn’t get a chance to talk to Josie alone for several hours.
First, the detective from the Arson and Explosives Division of the state police showed up ten minutes earlier than expected, and then Hotwire returned from dropping off Claire. He was carrying a box with a new laptop in it for Josie. She went into raptures, and Daniel and the detective both had to sit idly by while she quizzed Hotwire on what the computer could do.
Discussion eventually got back to the investigation. After Josie showed the picture of Jones to the detective, he unbent enough to tell them that a known white supremacist group had a paramilitary compound near the GPS coordinates for the laptop.
Unfortunately, FBI intelligence revealed there were only two ways into the compound: up a narrow path that could be traversed on foot or by a small, powerful ATV, or by helicopter. A clearing suitable for landing was located near the compound, but it would be impossible for the helicopter to land undetected.
“What about parachuting in?” Josie asked.
“It would have to be a long jump for the plane to be high enough not to be suspect,” Daniel replied before the detective had a chance to. “And a drop from that altitude would make it difficult to land on target unless the clearing is fairly large.”
The detective shook his head. “None of you are parachuting in anywhere, undetected or otherwise. This is an official federal investigation at this point, and while they are cooperating with state authorities, the FBI and National Forest Service aren’t going to take kindly to a bunch of mercenaries stepping on their toes.”
“I’m no longer a mercenary,” Josie informed him.
“You’re not FBI either. Stay out of it,” was the detective’s uncompromising response.
Josie’s mouth set in a mutinous line Daniel had learned meant she was about to get stubborn. “These people tried to kill my father. I want to know why.”
“You would do better using your resources trying to locate Mr. McCall than the assailants.” The officer stared Josie down, which was quite a feat in Daniel’s opinion. “If you interfere in a federal investigation, you could be facing charges.”
“I have no intention of interfering,” she said in a tone that would have shriveled most men.
The state police detective merely nodded. “I’m glad to hear that. Stay out of airplanes and we’ll be just fine.”
Glaring, she opened her mouth, and Daniel thought the time had come to interfere. “Why would this group target Tyler McCall?”
Detective Johnson met Daniel’s eyes. “You recently bought in to the school, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“That could be the reason right there. This group is ideologically opposed to Caucasians going into business ventures, or any other legal tie, with non-Caucasians.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Josie’s moss green eyes shot derision at the detective.
