“Your brother-in-law?” Brick asked as Mo pocketed her phone and walked toward him and his pickup. She nodded without looking at him. “You all right?”
He watched her look away to hide her raw emotions. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“I wish that were true.” When she met his gaze, he reached over to brush a lock of her hair back from her face. “You’re having second thoughts.”
She shook her head. “You have no idea what I’m thinking.”
“I see more than you think. You’re conflicted about all of this.”
“Of course I am,” she snapped and tried to step past him, but he blocked her way. She sighed. “What is it you want me to say? That maybe you’re right and I’m wrong? Don’t you think I wish that were true?”
“What if it is?”
She glared at him, clearly losing her patience. “Here is the problem. When we find her, and we will, you’ll still be debating it all in your mind. She will use that against you and you’ll end up dead.”
“You’ve made her into a monster with powers that don’t exist.”
She scoffed at that. “This woman’s greatest advantage is that she doesn’t look or act the part. It’s her strongest defense and most dangerous attribute.” She pulled out the folded note he’d found on his pickup’s windshield. “You think I don’t want to find out if this is true? You think I don’t want to believe that my sister didn’t take her own life?”
“Why would Natalie lie?” Brick asked.
“It’s nothing but a distraction. So instead of going after Natalie, I chase my sister’s death only to find out it was all a lie. But by then, Natalie is long gone. She’s living in someone else’s house, taking care of a patient for a family who has no idea what horror has walked through their door.” She pushed past him. “We need to get moving.”
MO FELT CLOSE to tears. She couldn’t help being upset. She hated hurting Thomas more than he was already suffering. Add that to her disappointment. They’d come so close to catching Natalie. She could feel the note in her pocket, the words burned into her brain. Tricia was having an affair. She didn’t want to believe it. Just as she didn’t want to believe any of this was happening.
And yet, it was happening. It had happened. What if Tricia really did have another man in her life? Did that really change anything? Unless it was true and Tricia hadn’t taken her own life. All Mo could think was, why hadn’t she known? She and Tricia used to be so close. How had she not known what was going on with her own sister?
“Where to now?” Brick asked as they climbed into the pickup cab again and he started the engine.
She pulled out her phone to call up a map and tried to get her emotions under control. Thomas’s phone call had gutted her. She kept thinking of the wedding. Her sister had been so happy. The two had been in love since college. Everyone said they made the perfect couple. But after trying so many times to have a child and failing... Is that when everything changed?
“Take 287 north,” she said to Brick and pocketed her phone. “We’ll watch the truck stops, the convenience stores.” In truth, she had no idea what Natalie would do now. “She’ll be wanting to get rid of the vehicle she’s driving.”
“While you were on the phone, I spoke to one of the neighbors. He said she left in a hurry, driving a tan older model two-wheel-drive pickup, so she’s already dumped the car she stole in Big Sky,” Brick said.
She looked over at him. “Nice work.”
“This one sounds like it might have been cheap enough that she bought it with the money she’s stolen so far.”
Mo nodded. “I suspect Natalie’s been living on the run for a long time, afraid to stay anywhere for too long. She’s at the point now that she’ll do whatever she has to do to survive.” A part of Mo felt that way, as well. She’d given up everything—her job, the life she’d made for herself, her savings—to find this woman.
What am I doing? Chasing a possible killer and if so, when and how would it end? She feared the answer.
FROM DOWN THE STREET, private investigator Jim Cameron slid down behind the wheel as he watched the two climb into the pickup. He held the phone tighter to his ear.
“I’m looking at them as we speak,” he said into the phone. “The female cop and the deputy marshal.”
“Did they find Natalie?”
“No. Apparently she went out the back before I got here.”
“Stay on it. This has to end.”
He thought about the elderly couple that had cruised by in a sedan earlier—before the cop and the deputy had arrived. He’d noticed the way they’d stared at the three-story house.
“There’s this old couple,” Jim said. “I’ve seen them too many times and they drove by, both of them staring at the house.”
“I’m not worried about some old couple. Stay on the cop and the deputy. Make sure they don’t find Natalie first.”
Jim shook his head. As many people as there appeared to be after this woman, himself included, none of them had gotten their hands on her except for whoever had abducted her in Big Sky. And the woman in question had managed to escape.
“Keep me informed.” The line went dead.
Jim disconnected and sat up a little. The cop and the deputy had been sitting in his pickup unmoving so far. This had seemed like a simple enough job when he’d taken it on. If he wasn’t getting paid so well...
He tried not to question what exactly was going on. It seemed to him that Natalie Berkshire was doing her best to crawl into a hole and stay there. Why roust her out? Why keep forcing her to run? Why not let her land somewhere and then throw a net over her?
The pickup with the cop and deputy was moving again. He waited a few moments before he fell in behind it.
BRICK DROVE THROUGH the residential area toward the center of town. Mo was lost in her own thoughts. What would Natalie do now? Run! What choice did she have? This time, she might run farther and be harder to find.
They were almost to the main drag in town when Mo saw the lights of police cars and what appeared to be a wreck in the middle of the intersection. As they drew closer, an officer waved him around the two-vehicle accident. She saw that a sedan had been involved—and a tan older model two-wheel-drive pickup.
“Isn’t that the couple we saw eating the ice cream cones last evening?” Mo asked as he started to drive past the couple the police were talking with.
“Maybe, but that definitely looks like the description of the pickup Natalie was driving,” Brick said.
“Stop.” Mo threw her door open and she was out, slamming it behind her. She heard the cop order Brick to keep moving as she disappeared into the crowd gathered at the scene.
“Did you see what happened?” she asked several people on the street.
“That older couple T-boned that pickup with the woman inside,” a man told her. “I swear that elderly driver sped up just before they collided.”
“What happened to the woman in the pickup?” Mo asked. From where she stood, she could see that the driver’s side of the pickup was caved in—and the passenger door was hanging open.
“She got out of the passenger side and limped off before the cops arrived,” a woman said. “She was hurt, bleeding, but she took off down that way. The police are looking for her. Maybe she thought the accident was her fault and she wanted to get away. Or she was so shaken up that she didn’t even know what she was doing.”
“How badly hurt was she?” Mo asked.
“She was limping,” one of the bystanders told her. “And bleeding.”
“I bet she doesn’t get far,” someone said.
Mo wouldn’t have taken that bet.
She continued down the street until she spotted Brick. He’d pulled over into the first parking space he’d found and now stood next to his truck, waiting. That he knew she’d find him made her realize how much their relationship had changed. Only this morning he’d thought she had taken off. She didn’t know what had changed or when—just that it had. Smiling to herself, she realized she was actually glad to see him and had to swallow the lump in her throat as she joined him and told him what she’d learned.
AS BRICK CLIMBED behind the wheel, he pulled out his phone. “There’s something I want to check.” He called his father’s cell. The marshal answered on the first ring. “Brick—”
“Before you start in, didn’t you tell me that the woman at the convenience store said the man in the motor home was elderly?” He knew he’d hit on something when all he heard for a moment was silence.
“We found the motor home,” his father said. “A forensic team found evidence that it was the one where Natalie Berkshire was held captive.”
“And the elderly driver?”
“Herbert Lee Reiner and his wife, Doris Sue, out of Sun Daisy, Arizona. They’re grandparents of a woman whose baby died. Natalie was the nanny. I have a BOLO out on them.”
Brick felt his stomach drop as his father described the two. “They just tried to kill Natalie in Ennis. She’s on the run again, although injured after her vehicle was rammed by their car. I just thought you’d want to know.” He disconnected before his father could lecture him and turned to Mo to tell her what he’d learned.
“So we head up Highway 287 north?” he asked as he started the pickup and glanced in his rearview mirror. He’d seen a dark SUV earlier. But now he saw nothing suspicious.
“Change of plans,” Mo said. “What would you do if you’d just lost everything again and were now injured?”
“Go to the hospital?”
“Not just any hospital. You’d go to where your ex-husband the doctor worked. He’s a surgeon at the hospital in the state capital—and not that far from here.”