Abandon

Nineteen

With just her desk lamp on in her darkened living room, Mackenzie peered at the eyes of the man in the police sketch. She couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about Rook and how she should have just waved goodbye in the rain and distracted herself from her desire for him with a stiff drink.

Except she didn’t have any liquor in the house.

She had regrets, she decided. Not for herself – she’d be fine. She was fine, her body still humming, suffused with the aftereffects of their near lovemaking. Whatever it was that had gone on in the kitchen…

Her regrets – her fears – were for him. He was obviously in the middle of a sensitive investigation that involved people she knew. He was ambitious, driven, good at his work.

With a hiss of frustration, Mackenzie shook off that line of thinking, and said aloud, “Rook knows what he’s doing.”

That was what she should keep in mind.

She turned her attention back to the sketch. The drawing didn’t capture the strangeness of her attacker’s eyes. She tried to understand why she’d focused on them. Did they truly hold the key to why he seemed familiar to her?

Why had he attacked her and not Carine? Was it, at least in part, because he’d known Carine wouldn’t recognize him? But he hadn’t seemed concerned that Mackenzie would. He’d even taunted her, using her name.

Why?

The telephone rang – the house’s hard line. Since she was there only temporarily, Mackenzie hadn’t bothered getting a line in her name, relying instead on her cell phone for personal calls. She picked up.

“Burning the midnight oil tonight, are you?”

It was a male voice, hoarse and unrecognizable. “Who is this?”

Click.

Did he know she was up late, or had he just dialed her number at random? But she remembered the wrong number she’d received at Bernadette’s lake house over the weekend. Another coincidence she didn’t like.

She grabbed her gun and ran out to the porch. Was her caller watching her, stalking her? The air smelled of rain and wet grass, and the cloud cover made for a dark night. She walked down the steps, slick from rain, and out to the driveway, listening for the sound of a car – or a man hiding in the shrubs. She wouldn’t be thinking about squirrels and wild turkeys tonight.

She walked to the end of the long driveway. Streetlights cast eerie shadows, and nearby houses had living-room lights on, their residents, no doubt, enjoying a normal evening at home. The only cars visible were parked in driveways.

Was this man watching her from a hidden, darkened car?

She returned to the house, her slip-on sneakers soaked by the time she sat at the table in the kitchen. She kicked them off and reached for her cell phone, dialing Nate Winter’s number.

“Did you and Sarah ever get crank calls here?” she asked when he picked up.

“No. What’s going on?”

She told him about the call, skipping any mention of Rook’s visit. Nate didn’t interrupt. When she finished, she decided she didn’t want to sound paranoid, and added, “It could have been anyone. I’m not suggesting it was the man who attacked me.”

Nate was silent a moment. “Do you want me to come over?”

“And do what? There’s nothing to be done tonight. The caller didn’t use my name. On most occasions I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”

“Mackenzie…”

“It’s okay. Sorry to disturb you.”

“Anytime,” he said softly. “You know that. But you’ve had a rough week. You need to give yourself time -”

“I just want to figure out where I’ve seen the man who attacked me. We need to find him before he hurts someone else. Because he will, Nate. I know he will.”

“If he does, it won’t be your fault. It’ll be his doing and his alone.”

“I had him. I had him, and he got away.”

“Then you didn’t have him, did you?”

She sat back, stung. And yet, she thought, she appreciated Nate’s clarity – his blunt honesty. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

“Don’t be afraid to ask for help. You’re not in this thing alone. Understood?”

“Yes, understood.” Still, she knew – as did Nate – that raising the alarm over as dubious and amorphous a call as the one she’d just received wouldn’t inspire confidence. “Say hi to Sarah for me. She’s doing well?”

“She’s heading over there tomorrow to mark out a new dig.”

“Alone?”

Nate didn’t answer right away. “No,” he said finally. “She won’t be alone.”

When Mackenzie hung up, she realized her wet feet were cold – surprising, given the relentless heat. She headed to her bedroom, wondering if she’d overreacted to the call. She’d been in the middle of studying the sketch, reliving the events of last Friday, and, admittedly, was a little off balance.

Not just a little.

Maybe it was the ghosts, she thought, pulling back the covers on her bed, and imagining Rook with her in the process. Damn near making love to him hadn’t exactly helped her get centered. What should she make of their relationship?

She sighed. “Nothing. That’s what you make of your relationship.”

Because to do otherwise was to distract her, distract him and risk another axing by voice mail. Too much was up in the air. Tonight they’d let their hormones and emotions get away from them, but so be it. It was time to be sensible. She needed to stay focused on her work, on healing. And on assisting investigators in any way she could to find their knife-happy guy in New Hampshire.

Without, of course, crossing too many lines.

Not that showing up at Harris’s house in the middle of an FBI search had crossed any lines. She hadn’t realized the search was under way – why would she? Cal Benton had turned up asking about Harris before she’d left for New Hampshire, and Rook had gone there looking for him. And Mackenzie knew Harris, if not well.

Stopping by his house after work made perfect sense.

Nor, she thought as she undressed, mindful of her stitches, did she regret letting Rook back into her kitchen.

“Letting? You all but dragged him,” she said aloud.

But she didn’t laugh or even smile at her attempt at humor as she fell into bed. She liked being around him. She had since they’d ducked out of the rain together.

He was here because he’s working an investigation.

A point to remember. Andrew Rook was a tough-minded, focused law enforcement officer. If he thought she had information the FBI had a right to, it’d be under the hot lights with her.

Cal.

But Cal’s illicit weekend was a personal matter unrelated to Rook’s investigation.

Mackenzie’s feet finally felt warm. She kicked off the covers, feeling a dull ache in her injured side. Maybe she should rethink her decision to keep quiet about Cal sneaking off to Bernadette’s lake house for a fling. The facts were what they were. She hadn’t created them – and just who was she protecting by staying silent? Was telling herself that she was just minding her own business and being discreet a rationalization?

If it was her investigation, she’d want to know all the facts about any parties involved, and decide for herself what was material and what wasn’t.

Probably Rook would, too.

On her way to work in the morning, Mackenzie checked in with Gerald Mooney, her state police contact in New Hampshire. “An organic farmer came forward,” he said. “He thinks he might have picked up our guy hitchhiking.”

“Where?”

“Sorry, I can’t give you any details until we have more solid information.”

Meaning until they’d checked out the farmer and where he’d picked up and dropped off his hitchhiker, followed any trail the hitchhiker had left and all the spokes off that trail. In other words, they wouldn’t tell her more until they were satisfied they wouldn’t jeopardize their investigation. Above all, Mooney wouldn’t want to say anything that could get out and end up alerting the attacker and causing him to hurt someone else.

Mackenzie was the “victim,” and she didn’t like it.

“Is news about the farmer out?” she asked.

“Partially. Let’s just say it’s a strong lead. He doesn’t own a television. He didn’t see the sketch until he was in town to pick up supplies and happened to notice it up on a community bulletin board.”

“What about the other victim? How’s she doing?”

“She’s out of the hospital. She has a long recovery ahead of her. What about you?”

“I get my stitches out tomorrow. I’ll be doing jumping jacks before you know it.”

She thought Mooney might have chuckled. “I’ll keep you posted as I can,” he said.

An organic farmer. A hitchhiker who fit the description of her attacker. Mackenzie debated thinking up an excuse to fly to New Hampshire, but when she got to her desk, Joe Delvecchio, her chief, a stocky, no-nonsense man in his early fifties, dumped a stack of files on her desk.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“You’re a Ph.D., Stewart. Go through the files and see what you make of them. Meeting at one.”

“ABD.”

“What?”

“All But Dissertation. I don’t have my Ph.D. I joined the service to get out of writing my dissertation -”

His glare stopped her. “Meeting’s here. Happy reading.” He took two steps, stopped and turned back to her. “Next time you get a weird phone call, you call me. You don’t call Nate Winter.”

Ah. So that was it. “Got it, Chief.”

But he wasn’t finished. “And if you get an itch to go visit some old friend the FBI happens to want to talk to, don’t scratch it.”

“Harris Mayer isn’t a friend -”

“We work with the FBI in this office. We don’t work against them.”

Mackenzie started to speak, then decided to keep her mouth shut.

The chief softened slightly. “If I didn’t think you weren’t smart, I’d have given you more time to go through those files.”

“Thanks, Chief. I appreciate that. Did you hear about the organic farmer and the hitchhiker?”

“Is this like a knock-knock joke or something?”

She rocked back in her chair, wondering if he’d add another fifty files to her stack if she told him about her contact with the detective in New Hampshire. But she hadn’t done anything wrong, and neither had Mooney.

Delvecchio stared at her, apparently expecting an answer – or maybe a funny joke. She gave him the rundown of what Mooney had told her.

“Progress in the investigation,” he said. “That’s good news.”

“It’s gutsy for this guy to hinge his freedom on getting someone to pick him up hitchhiking.”

“Think that’s what he did?”

She considered the chief’s question and shook her head. “He had a plan B and a plan C. He’d have hijacked a car, or stolen one – and he probably had another knife squirreled away.” She paused, but Delvecchio didn’t comment. “Which doesn’t make him sound like a deranged hiker to me.”

The chief looked at her with something approaching satisfaction. “We’ll find him, whoever he is.” He pointed to the stack of files. “You just do your reading.”

“It won’t take me until one,” she said. “I had to read four hundred books in five months studying for my orals.”

Delvecchio didn’t respond to her humor, although what she’d said was true. For a split second, she thought she might have gone too far, but he sighed. “See? Smart. That’s what everyone says about you, Stewart. You’re smart. You’ll be running the damn show around here in ten years if you get your head screwed on straight.”

“My head -”

But he walked away, and Mackenzie knew she’d been dismissed. She grabbed the top file. It was on a cold fugitive case. All the files were on cold fugitive cases.

Why wouldn’t Delvecchio think her head wasn’t screwed on straight?

“Gee,” she said to herself, “let’s think a minute.”

She’d dated an ambitious, well-regarded, tough-minded FBI agent who broke all her rules about staying away from law enforcement types and happened to be investigating – on some level – a federal judge who was her lifelong friend. Even if Bernadette wasn’t suspected of wrongdoing, Delvecchio wouldn’t like having one of his new deputies in the middle of an FBI investigation.

And she’d found herself in a knife fight while wearing a pink swimsuit. She’d blocked a slash of her attacker’s knife with a beach towel.

She’d recognized her attacker, but couldn’t place why or where.

To top off her bad luck, she’d received a creepy phone call in the middle of the night and hadn’t called Delvecchio.

Lots of strikes against her, Mackenzie thought. Time to duck and cover. The best way to prove herself right now was to walk into the one o’clock meeting prepared, knowing every damn file the chief had given her to read.

The meeting lasted for an hour, but bled into another meeting that last for two hours. Mackenzie’s eyes were rolling back in her head when she returned to her desk. But it was solid work – the start of a joint task force to pick up fugitives who’d been on the lam for way too long. If she hadn’t wowed anyone with her expertise, insight and command of her particular stack of files, she’d at least held her own.

“Nice job in there,” a senior deputy said as he passed her desk. He didn’t even give her a chance to thank him. But she didn’t want to get a reputation just for research and analysis – she wanted to do fieldwork.

She’d head to the firing range. She was getting her stitches out in the morning. Shooting a few rounds wouldn’t hurt.

Like all her plans since her morning coffee, that one went out the window when Juliet Longstreet turned up. Just back from specialized training, Juliet was tall, blond and very fit, an experienced marshal who was also from northern New England – Vermont – and had experience with a case that had reached into her personal life.

She’d also worked with Nate Winter for a time in New York.

“Ethan and I want to take you house hunting tonight.” Ethan Brooker was a former Special Forces officer, now a White House advisor; he and Juliet were engaged to be married in the fall. “We’ll grab a bite to eat on the way.”

“Is noncompliance an option?” Mackenzie asked.

Juliet grinned. “No.”

“Then I’d be delighted.”

“Good. We’ll meet you back here in an hour.”

Mackenzie realized she wouldn’t even get a chance to head home and change her shoes. She saw Nate’s fingers in the house hunting idea. Had he put Juliet and Ethan up to it out of concern for her welfare – or out of concern over what she’d do next?

Maybe, Mackenzie thought, Juliet and Ethan were just trying to befriend a new deputy in town who’d just survived a knife fight.

Probably not.

But sooner or later, she’d have to find a place to live. The leaks would be fixed, and the house eventually would open to the public.

If the leaks were the work of the resident ghosts, Mackenzie didn’t want to be around for what they cooked up next.

“I’ll be ready,” she told her new friend.

Juliet nodded, obviously satisfied. “Do you have enough to keep you busy for the next hour?”

“You bet. If I look the slightest bit bored, someone will shove a stack of files at me. Idle hands and all that.”

“You’re learning.” Juliet grinned. “See you soon.”