Benjamin Kris loved snow. It gave him a kid kind of glee, that ribbon of excitement inside pulling tight as anticipation grew to an almost unbearable point. Snow meant a lot of things to him, all in the past now. It triggered a series of images: snowmen and forts and snowball fights; anthills on mirrors and powder stuck to nostril hairs; money—his first big score, fifties and hundreds cascading onto his prone and laughing body on the bed of a cheap motel on Valentia Street in Denver. Nicole. It was no surprise that she would be stitched into his imagination and into this little trip to wonderland.
She could have busted him; instead she’d slept with him. More than once. And every time it had been too good to talk about. But women couldn’t be trusted.
The thought was sobering. Even Charlene had messed up. She had played when she should have been working.
He shifted in the seat and the leather crackled. They cruised down Main Street, USA, Charlene glued to his side in the back seat of the Durango—Montana’s winter limousine. The shops had been renovated recently, painted earthy colors, and twinkled with holiday lights.
“Could be a Christmas card,” he said.
“It’s beautiful,” Charlene agreed. But then, they had the heater pumping and she was bundled up in faux fur—at her insistence. Benjamin wanted to buy her the real thing, but she was a member of PETA and Women for Humane Cosmetics.
They approached the crossroads where the police station sat kitty-corner to the only bar in town. Such an easy walk to the tank, it could be self-service.
“Stop here a minute,” Benjamin ordered the driver, a man he’d often used and whom he’d sent ahead of them by two days in order to secure the right ride and get acquainted with the layout of the town. Specifically the roads in and out of Toole County and the rolling stretches of land that could be used for the disposal of bodies and evidence—if such a need occurred.
Benjamin was an accomplished escape artist. The Magician’s secret to that: he left no witnesses because he created none. He kept a quiet demeanor and frequented places for the rich and pretty, where he blended in better than most. When he had to speak, he was neutral. Otherwise, he smiled as much as the next guy but no more. He didn’t smoke, nursed a drink, and never dabbled in the goods of his trade.
But Toole County was different. He was known here, by none other than the head of law enforcement. As the father of the sheriff’s son, he had pull with her.
The thought was dark and settled on his brain like a cat teasing a favorite toy, and he laughed, enjoying himself. Catnip. Nicole was that for him. Tormenting her gave him an insane kind of pleasure.
“Benjamin?” Charlene prompted. “Why are we stopped in the middle of the road?”
He considered his next move. Contact. That he’d decided before the day dawned. But when and how?
He’d waited long for this moment. He’d mapped out scenarios in his mind—all the possibilities in Nicole’s reaction and how he would handle each. He couldn’t have been more ready.
He spoke to the driver. “Pull in at the police station.”
There was an initial wave of hesitation—the natural response of a man who had spent his life doing wrong—and then the driver pulled forward, hit the indicator light to signal his intentions, and executed a clean turn into the parking lot adjacent to Nicole’s office. And that made him smile too. He was looking at the product of Nicole’s slow, downward spiral. She’d been on the fast track to captain and beyond, but she’d given it all up to raise their son in a safe environment, away from the violence and drugs of Big City life and the father who had played a role in creating him. That part wasn’t so nice, but he was a changed man. While Nicole had taken a step down the ladder, Benjamin had ascended by leaps.
“Wait here,” he instructed, and felt Charlene’s hand tighten on his arm.
“What are we doing here?”
Always, they carried out their business as shadows that moved across the wall. He understood her apprehension but pried her fingers from his arm.
“I want to say hello to someone,” he said. He climbed out of the SUV and lifted the hood of his parka. The snow was coming down steadily, and he had spent time on his appearance.
The entrance to the police station had Nicole’s name on it in bold black lettering.
He liked that. He’d bet Jordan was proud of it.
Inside, the lobby was warm and lit with fluorescent tubing. A woman in uniform sat behind the desk. She addressed Benjamin and he stepped forward, lowering his hood and pulling the top toggle of his parka open.
“How can I help you, sir?”
“Is Nicole around?”
“Pardon?”
“Sorry.” He smiled—an easy slide of his lips that didn’t seem at all practiced but reached his eyes and carried a wattage of charm that was neither too much nor too little. “The sheriff? Is she in?”
The woman cocked her head to the side and considered him. “Does Sheriff Cobain know you?”
“Old friends,” he told her. “And I’m in town for a few days. If I come and go without dropping in on her and Jordan, well, that would be grounds for arrest.”
That was lame. As a rule he wasn’t a punster, but he was nervous. And he blamed Nicole for that. The last time he’d seen her, she’d put the cuffs on him and the flared tip of a loaded .357 to his temple. She’d threatened him with all the things she could do to him. All legal, and she had the goods. Before that, he’d been the one jerking her chain. He’d liked that a lot better. He’d liked that so much he was willing to walk into the lion’s den just so he could pull her strings and watch her dance to his tune. Again.
The woman frowned, but before she could complain, he held his hands up in surrender. “Sorry. You’ve probably heard a thousand bad jokes just like that one.”
“And that’s all in one week,” she assured him.
“Could you just tell her Benjamin came by?”
“Sure. You have a number?”
He watched her scribble his name on a pink memo pad.
“She has my number.” He’d had a few hundred phones since seeing her last, all disposable and tossed away, but if she had wanted to contact him, she could have. Nicole was an excellent detective. Accommodated. He’d seen the plaque, the gold star. He’d even watched her hustle a few scumbags into the back of a car. He’d liked that about her, until she’d turned it on him.
He pulled up his hood and pushed out into the flurry of snowflakes and the rapidly dropping temperatures.
Lars was already at the station when Nicole pulled up, steam rising from the hood of his cruiser as the engine cooled.
Lars had questioned the help, from equipment rental to baristas, but no one had seen Mrs. Esparza or her daughters.
Daisy had seen only Joaquin leave. He’d had the keys to the Tahoe in his hand and strode through the lobby and out the doors without comment.
There was a lot of activity at the Spa, but Lars had followed the cleared, paved path from a back door, around the rustic building, and into the adjacent parking lot. It was possible Mrs. Esparza had left using that route. Possible that her daughters had been with her. But there were no discernible prints on the stone, and those in the snow beside it were too numerous and layers deep, such that it was impossible to know for sure.
No one had seen or heard anything. The family could be on the slopes. They could be en route to the station, hoping to connect with Dr. Esparza; they could be at the morgue for a parting moment with the victim. Or Joaquin and his mother could be searching, as Nicole and Lars and the entire department would be, for the lost girls.
“So where does that leave us?” he’d asked.
“Not knowing, but believing their kidnap is probable.” They would work that angle with Dr. Esparza. They would do it in a circuitous manner, hoping the man would provide answers that led them to a confession of another kind.
She parked beside his cruiser and cut the engine, then pushed out into the thickening snow. She didn’t have far to go before she found Lars, hovering in the lobby as he unbuttoned his parka and unwrapped the scarf from around his neck and ears, which were a persistent shade of flamingo.
“If a kidnapping, do you think Mrs. Esparza and Joaquin are delivering the ransom?” he asked.
“Depends on the currency,” she said. She pocketed her skullcap and removed her gloves. “At this level, Big Pharm and the doctors who orbit it are in a totally different stratosphere. Money probably isn’t it.”
“Loss prevention,” Lars said.
And she agreed. “Nueva Vida. And there’s only one person still breathing who has it.”
“All roads lead back to Esparza.”
Nicole nodded. “We have a strategy,” she reminded him. “Let’s use it.”
He waved her ahead of him, but they didn’t get far. The desk clerk called them back.
“There’s a message here for you, Sheriff.” She pushed the pink memo toward Nicole. “He came by about an hour ago.”
Nicole picked up the slip of paper and read it. A single word. A name. But it had a visceral effect on her. She felt the blood drain from her head and spiral to her feet. Years of practiced control kept her from wavering, even as her world tilted.
“He was here?” She heard her voice as if from far away. Small. And she hated that. Small was how he’d made her feel. He’d had a hold on her back then, until she’d turned the tables. Until she had slithered with the other reptiles of the underworld and gathered the evidence she’d needed to pry his fingers from around their son’s neck and keep him caged as he belonged.
He’d admitted to uncivilized behavior. She knew him to be an animal.
Benjamin Kris. He hadn’t left his last name, but he didn’t need to. He hadn’t left a phone number, but she already had it.
“You okay, Nicole?”
She felt Lars draw near. He tapped a finger on the memo, putting enough weight into it that the paper bent, and read the name.
“Who is he?”
“What,” she corrected. “What is he.”
“Buzz the door, Fern,” Lars spoke over Nicole’s head, then turned and led the way. He refrained from grabbing her elbow and escorting her, and she appreciated that. As they paced down the hall, then through a series of desks, she felt the blood simmer in her veins, beat heavily in her temples and wrists. Slowly, the roar of a lion was building in her throat.
When they reached her office, Lars stood aside and waited until she’d passed through to follow.
“What is he?” He leaned back against the closed door, his cheeks still flushed from his time outdoors but his eyes steady.
But she still hadn’t decided what to tell him.
“It’s a personal matter.”
“You’re afraid of him,” Lars said. “In six years, I’ve never seen that from you.”
She wanted to deny his words, but that would make her a liar.
“He hurt Jordan,” she said. “And I let him. Until I found a way out.” A way that was still viable. So why was Benjamin here now?
“He’s your ex.”
“That implies too much of a relationship on our part. He’s Jordan’s father, and let’s leave it at that.” She had defied every reasonable doubt when she’d become involved with Benjamin, and she’d paid for that in numerous ways. But he no longer had that kind of hold on her, she reminded herself. “We haven’t seen him in eight years.”
“Why is he here now?”
She walked around her desk and sat down. She placed her hands on the calendar blotter and stared at them. She felt the slight tremor moving through them, but it wasn’t visible. Her fingers were slim, the nails short and buffed and covered with a coat of clear lacquer. They weren’t the hands of a killer, but they could have been. She’d done many things with her hands, more out of love than ignorance. But she would have killed Benjamin to save her son. She’d made that decision before their last confrontation. She had laid it all out for him, the evidence that would send him to the state pen for twenty-plus, and next to it a full chamber in a .357 she’d bought off the street. “It’ll take one shot, no doubt between the eyes,” she’d told him, and he’d known she was an expert marksman. “The rest will be for the hurt you inflicted and the hate that’s burning in my belly.” And then she’d offered him an out. The decision was easy, and Benjamin had never made bones about it—if anything took too much effort, he wasn’t interested. “Door number three,” she’d told him. “We never see you again.” And she’d opened her hands in a gesture of freedom.
A freedom he didn’t deserve. He’d killed a man and Nicole had watched him do it, but he wouldn’t have spent a day behind bars. The courts didn’t like video evidence and she’d had little more than that to offer. Nicole would have been portrayed as a spurned lover, an officer of the law who must possess questionable morals to have involved herself with a drug dealer and possible murderer. She would have had no credibility and her eyewitness testimony would have been scrapped. She would have lost her job and possibly her son. And when she remembered that, the decision she’d made eight years ago softened around the edges.
She’d heard from Benjamin four years later in the form of a check—one hundred thousand dollars. In the memo line he’d written child support. It had ignited an anger in her. A spark of fear. Both emotions were unwanted. Benjamin had no right to think of Jordan as his son. The insinuation that he did, she received as a threat, one that brought back searing memories of the harm he had caused.
Her response had been as brief. A home-burned DVD delivered by personal messenger. It was forty-seven seconds that documented the end of a young man’s life. Benjamin entered the scene with the gun already in hand. He walked swiftly toward his target, extended his right arm, and pulled the trigger when just three feet separated them. As the body fell, folding at the knees before it pitched forward, Benjamin kept walking, sliding the gun into a coat pocket, rolling his shoulders. At one point he turned toward the camera. It was a clear shot, even at ten times the resolution. He’d received her message and hadn’t contacted her since. Until today.
“If anything happens to me,” she told Lars, “or to Jordan, I want you to come and get this—” She opened a side drawer in her desk and reached into the back. She pulled out and held up a plain white envelope. His name was scrawled across the front. There was a key inside and nothing more.
He took it in his hand and weighed it.
“Safe-deposit box?”
“At the credit union,” she said. “Your name is on the POA.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I added it a few months after I met you.”
“But never told me about it.”
“I didn’t think it would come to this.”
“You think he came here to kill you?”
“I don’t know what to think.” She took the envelope and replaced it, then sat back and considered Benjamin’s motive for turning up in Toole County. “Benjamin is a drug dealer,” she revealed. “High class. Mostly Vicodin, because that’s easy to push and Benjamin doesn’t like to work. For select clients, he’s delivered on Valium and Ritalin.”
“A white-collar scumbag?”
“When I knew him, he was making that arduous climb from street vendor to retail. As far as I know, he’s prescription drugs only now.” She caught and held his gaze. “People die around him, Lars.” A thread of queasiness squirmed through her stomach, but it needed to be said. “Jordan could have been next.”
She watched anger draw the features of his face taut.
“How’d you get tangled up with him?”
“I was a different person then.” Reaching. She’d thought about it a lot, and that was the best description of who she’d been. She’d been flailing in the water, surrounded by the sewage of a crooked department and trapped by a code of loyalty she’d thought would snuff the life out of her. Benjamin hadn’t seemed like such a bad guy compared to all that. In fact, his crimes, up until that point, had been mild compared to those of some of her colleagues. “And I didn’t know who he was. Not at first.”
Lars nodded. “Why the move to prescription drugs?”
“Cocaine meant dealing with a seedy lower class, and Benjamin felt he was above that. He liked things clean. He liked a certain type of person, and he surrounded himself with them.”
“He wanted to drive to work in a Mercedes and lunch with people who could locate Ghana on a map?”
“Exactly.”
“What’s in the box?”
“A treasure map,” she told him.
“X marks the spot?”
Nicole nodded. “There are several of them.”
“That’s a lot of evidence.”
“And still maybe not enough.”
Lars nodded. “He knows you’ve got it?”
“Of course. I gave him options,” she said. “I wanted to kill him, but we settled on a deal we could both live with.”
“So maybe he wants to change the terms.”
Nicole had already come to that conclusion. Blue Mesa was small. It didn’t even show up on most maps. You had to have a reason to come here.
“Don’t let him get to Jordan,” Nicole said. She heard the warble in her voice and hated it. “If it comes to that.” If Benjamin killed her and left Jordan unprotected.
Lars pushed away from the door and stepped into the center of the room. “He’d have to get through me to get to either of you.”
Nicole swallowed the emotion gathered in her throat. She held Lars’s gaze. “Thank you,” she said, “but I don’t deserve it.” She troubled over her next words and decided on simplicity. “He killed a man, Lars, and I watched him do it. Hell, I filmed it and several other criminal acts he’d committed along the way. Evidence,” she assured him. “I needed to get Jordan away from him, and Benjamin wasn’t budging. He had a cop in his back pocket and did everything he could do to keep me there.”
“Why didn’t you turn the evidence over to the DA?”
Nicole shook her head. “It wasn’t enough. There were no guarantees Benjamin would go to jail.” She felt her composure slipping. “He beat Jordan. Badly. There are photographs of it.” She nodded toward the envelope and the key to the security box.
“Your word is enough for me,” he said. “And as far as your decision goes, court is always a crapshoot. Juries are unpredictable and video evidence is no slam dunk.” His gaze grew ponderous. “He has stones coming back here. I don’t like it.”
“Me either.”
“Don’t let your guard down.”
“No chance of that.”
“Where’s Jordan now?”
“Home with Mrs. Neal. I’ve added my address to patrol. A car will cruise by every hour.”
Lars rolled his shoulders and nodded. “Okay,” he said, and moved them back into the case. “You think he’s involved with Esparza?”
The thought was stunning in its simplicity, and Nicole sat forward and chewed on it. “Prescription drugs and doctors is not a farfetched match.”
“Add the Big Pharm companies … Maybe Benjamin continued his climb up the ladder.”
“He had big dreams,” Nicole said, and she knew Benjamin’s work ethic—do enough and a tad bit more so that he looked committed, a team player, when all he really wanted to be was the captain. “Yeah,” Nicole said. “Could be.”