At daybreak, Janeal curled up in a fetal position on her cot, gripping the sides of her head, facing the wall. Her brain seemed to be on fire, and she had no pills. Robert was such an opportunist; she’d watched him go through her things and take the pill bottle as she stood outside the window. How long would it take him now to find out who Jane Johnson was?
What happened last night was so far from what she had envisioned that she couldn’t think straight. She couldn’t sleep. She was a walking zombie. Her empty stomach heaved at the thought of food. But this confusion was only temporary. Soon she would have another plan.
Sanso had broken down her door and tumbled out her open window, landing at her feet, at the same moment sirens lit the main driveway with screaming light. She didn’t wait to ask him what he would do; this mess was his to fix. She’d raced for the garden room door and made a show of emerging from the library as the entire house lit up with officers and frightened women.
Robert put himself at the center of their activity. He insisted on being present for every interview and also insisted that Katie not leave his side. He allowed local law enforcement to do its job while keeping his finger in this pie as an authoritative, relevant party.
He had stared at Janeal for the duration of her ten-minute interview. She tried to keep her head down, her eyes averted. She lost her focus several times, lost her words, lost her confidence and could only hope it came across as trauma.
To Robert, though, she believed it came across as revelation. His eyes bored into her skull like laser beams, igniting her latest, unbending pain. He knew she was not Janice, and yet he didn’t ask her a single question. Was he protecting her?
She could leave now, as the chaos of the evening dissipated in the dawning sun. But if she left, she would have to utterly vanish, as she had the first time, fifteen years ago. Jane Johnson would have to disappear and Janeal Mikkado would have to start a new life all over again as yet another woman.
After all that she’d accomplished!
As Janeal’s headache intensified, her hatred for Katie grew. The sense of fury that welled up in Janeal was unexpected and inexplicable. This woman who should have died in that fire had lived to take it all back—Janeal’s mementos, Janeal’s one true love, Janeal’s carefully constructed life.
Katie Morgon should be twice dead by now.
She heard women coming down the hall, talking in low voices. Breakfast would have ended by now. The scene had been cleared about two hours ago. Janeal got up, rode out a wave of nausea, and pressed her ear to the door. They paused right outside her room, presumably because they occupied the shoe boxes on each side of her.
“. . . off-site,” one said.
“Why?”
“To keep her from having a breakdown I guess. Or maybe they’re worried someone will retaliate and come after her.”
“So they’re going to hide her?”
“I think they want her to have some space. I know I wouldn’t want to look at that bloodstain right outside my door.”
“She’s blind, remember?”
“Still.”
“I can’t believe she almost killed someone.”
“Well it’s lucky for you she scared him off. Who knows how many of us that creep might have taken out?”
“Where are they taking her?”
“Some top-secret bunker? How should I know?”
Janeal withdrew her ear. Katie was leaving. And Robert was probably going with her. Who knew where Sanso had gone? If he found Katie before she did, he’d kill Robert too. She had to move quickly.
As quickly as possible under the weight of this staggering headache.
She cursed Robert for having taken her relief.
In thirty seconds she loaded her tote bag with her few items and walked out of her room, heading in the direction of the first morning class she was supposed to attend, which was three doors on the other side of Lucille’s office.
Which happened to be empty when she passed. She paused, leaned inside the entry, and checked out the key hooks hanging above the bookcase.
A single key still hung under Kia.
Janeal lifted it swiftly and dropped it into her tote. After Katie left, she’d follow.
The morning sun was still cresting the tops of the trees when Robert attempted to help belt Katie into the Hope House van and closed the passenger door. She yanked the buckle out of his hands and held on to it while she argued.
“It’s unnecessary to whisk me away like some damsel in distress.”
“I told you she’d buck,” Lucille said from the driver’s seat.
“Getting you out of here makes sense,” Robert said. “Don’t take it personally. I’d do whatever I had to to protect anyone in your shoes.”
“What if I’m not the one who needs protection? He could have come for you, or for—”
“Sanso came out of your apartment. He left a ligature inside the door. He might have choked you.”
“He couldn’t have known it was my room.”
Robert closed the van door and leaned in through the open window. “Let’s argue about what he was really up to later, okay?”
Katie frowned and continued to turn the diamond ring on her hand as she had for the past several hours.
Lucille held on to the steering wheel, looking softer than Robert had seen her this week.
“My guys will be here in another hour,” he said to Lucille. “I need to walk them through their investigation and then I’ll come down.” He reached out to tuck Katie’s hair behind her ear, hoping it would be a comforting gesture. She withdrew, and Robert found her irritation endearing. Strong woman.
“Thanks for what you did last night.” He could offer her that much, now that it was over and they had emerged unscathed.
She lowered her eyes and buckled in.
Lucille reached across Katie and gave Robert a sheet of paper. “Here’s directions,” she said. “I wouldn’t take her there if I didn’t think it was the best place for her to be.”
“Will she rest?”
“I’ll rest. No need to talk about me like I’m not here.”
“I’m sending an officer to follow you and set up camp until I can get there. I don’t want Katie anywhere near this place.”
Lucille’s face hardened. “Lukin, if you have put my girls in any more danger than they’ve already experienced—”
“I will surrender my hide to you myself. Try not to worry, Lucille. A halfway house is the last place in the world most of these people want to be. Their sights won’t be on you.”
Robert turned to Katie. “Try to sleep. I’ll come as soon as I can.” She nodded and he stepped back from the van and leaned against the Kia’s hood while Lucille pulled out.
Back in the house, he turned down the first hall that led to Janice’s room and pulled out his cell phone. He withdrew Jane Johnson’s prescription bottle from his shirt pocket. It had cracked during his confrontation with Sanso, and the lid no longer stayed snug. But the pharmacy label was still intact.
Itching to finally confront Janice now that the locals had gone back to their precinct, he called Harlan. He needed more information about this woman.
Sanso said she was an old flame. That was a riddle Robert would have a hard time cracking, considering he didn’t recognize Janice. He’d dated only a handful of women in the last fifteen years. She didn’t look a thing like any of them.
Although . . .
She bore some similarities to Janeal Mikkado. But it would be like his mind to play that kind of a trick on him, wouldn’t it? He’d been thrown forcefully back into his past since arresting Sanso. Maybe this was another one of Sanso’s games, a low and dirty trick.
“Any leads on Jane Johnson yet?”
“Our guys out there tell me the address she used to rent her car turned out to be bogus, and the credit card goes to a PO box in Manhattan. But your friendly neighborhood pharmacist was more helpful.”
Robert tapped the bottle with his finger, rattling the pills.
“The meds are for chronic migraines. Our guys in New York went to her address, a swanky Broadway apartment, but no one answered. Neighbor said the Jane Johnson who lives there works for All Angles magazine. You ever read that?”
Robert’s mind had already left the conversation and gone in search of something Brian Hoffer had said during their drive up to the house. Something about the publication being interested in Katie.
“I don’t suppose the warrant covered a search of her home.”
“No way, nohow.”
“You check out the magazine offices?”
“Yeah. She’s one of their power players. Her personal assistant says she’s on medical leave. Went down to Bethesda for some testing or a clinical trial or something. We’re looking into it.”
Bethesda, his foot.
“Did you get a physical description?”
“About five-nine, one twenty-five, age thirty-two. Auburn hair, dark brown eyes. You think she could be your mystery resident?”
“The height and weight fit, but not much else. Janice looks older.”
“I’ll send a photo to your phone.”
“I’ll look for it.”
Robert clapped the phone shut and proceeded down the hall. Time for Janice to explain a few things.
Her door was standing open when he arrived. The room was empty, not only of her, but of her things. He saw the fitted sheet peeled off one corner of the mattress and lifted the pad off the cot. A torn edge and loose filling suggested that something had recently been pulled out of it.
The pants hanging in the closet were gone.
Robert headed toward the rooms where the morning sessions were being held. He passed Frankie, who carried an armload of linens, and asked if she’d seen Janice. She shook her head.
Classroom 1: no Janice.
She was not in the library either, where the other meeting took place.
Robert checked the garden room, the bathrooms, Lucille and Katie’s office, then glanced out the window at the parking lot. The Kia was gone.
Who was driving it?
Only staff members were authorized to drive the community cars, and all five—
His phone chirped to alert him to the arrival of a photograph. Half certain that the Kia was in the possession of one Jane Johnson, Robert ran to his truck, forced his key into the ignition, and swung the truck into a reverse arc that put it on the winding dirt road down the mountain.
Holding his phone on the top of the steering wheel, Robert punched through his menu options to retrieve the new photo. A circling clock indicated it was loading. His eyes flickered to the road, then back.
The two-inch display wasn’t designed for high-resolution digital images, but the face that appeared there could have been a fax of a postage stamp and he would have recognized it. Robert hit the brakes to prevent his shock from taking him off the edge of a curve, then pulled over and stopped.
Janeal Mikkado was as beautiful as a thirtysomething as she’d ever been as a teenager, with that stunning auburn hair, cropped to her shoulders in this photo. Smiling brown eyes, full lips, wide-set cheekbones. Robert stared until the phone’s battery saver caused the photo to blink out.
He called the image back up.
How had she survived too? Why hadn’t she tried to find him?
Why had she taken another name? Janeal was Jane Johnson . . .
. . . who was Janice.
Who was connected, in ways he didn’t understand until now, to Salazar Sanso.
She had betrayed them all. And she would do it again to preserve this deal she had struck with the devil.
Robert let his phone close as his ire increased. He pulled back onto the road. He saw it now, the similarity between Janice and the teenager who had been buried so long in his own mind. If Janice had smiled even once, that might have made her artificially blue eyes and dull hair color look like the Halloween costume that they were.
He wanted to sob and scream at the same time. He found himself capable of nothing more than squeezing his phone and the steering wheel in a death grip. The truck moved down the dirt road at an unsafe speed.
He opened the phone again and punched in Katie’s cell number, but she didn’t answer. Given all the events of the previous night, Katie probably never retrieved her phone from her room, and Lucille didn’t carry one. The women had been gone at least ten minutes. He checked the Google map Lucille had printed out for him. Their destination was listed as twenty-four minutes away. He accelerated and looked at his useless cell phone.
He called Harlan again.
“What can you do to find me a cell phone number for Jane Johnson?” he asked.
Harlan didn’t have a quick answer.
“Someone at the FBI?” Robert prodded.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Harlan said.
“You’ve got ten minutes.”
“Hey, you’re talking to your superior, buddy.” And Harlan belly laughed.
Robert couldn’t laugh with him. “Then don’t let me keep you.”
When he hit Highway 68, he turned north toward Taos, exceeding speed limits by at least twenty-five miles per hour. If he was lucky the highway patrol would be elsewhere today.
He hoped and hoped that Lucille was a law-abiding driver, and that Janeal was following at a distance that would help him to find her before she caught Katie. It was clear enough that Janeal was following her. The only question he couldn’t answer was why.
He waited for his phone to ring, doubting Harlan would be able to put him in touch with Janeal in time.