Kacey left the wall when the aroma of Asian food hit her nostrils. She was hungry.
And a guy who walked away from an argument he was pretty much guaranteed to win—to cook—didn’t seem as frightening to her as the one who had a wall of monitors set up in his laundry room.
She didn’t relish going out into the night. Most particularly not if what he’d said about two men being on his property was true. Having seen the time stamp on the photo on his phone, she was inclined to believe that part.
Question was, were they working with him? Was he holding her for them?
She was alive. Dry. Rested. Needed her ankle bandages changed. Had no footwear that fit her. No means of transportation.
And no immediate plan for the next step she should take.
Standing several feet away from him, she watched from the side as he tossed veggies in a wok. “How do I know you aren’t one of them?”
He didn’t even glance up at her question. “How do I know you aren’t into something illegal, got in over your head, and almost got yourself killed?”
The question threw her.
He doubted her?
But...
“My name is Kacey Ashland. I’m from Bullhead City. I teach first grade. You can look me up on the school’s website.”
All stuff her abductors would have known. Or could have easily found out. Facts he might already know.
Things she hadn’t wanted to tell him if he was unrelated to her abduction, but still some kind of creep.
She had many valid reasons to doubt her rescuer.
She’d never even considered that he’d doubt her.
Was he just gaslighting her? Trying to confuse her, to take her attention away from what he didn’t want her to see or figure out?
When one couldn’t trust one’s own brother and police force how could she possibly discern the trustworthiness of a complete stranger?
Devon, if that really was his name, had pulled out his phone, typing and scrolling with his left thumb as he continued to stir with his right hand. The man was competent at a lot of things. She’d give him that.
Putting down his phone, he grabbed a squirt bottle with some dark liquid concoction in it, doused the vegetables before adding cooked rice from a bowl.
That was it? She’d come clean and he was just going to...cook rice?
What was it with men?
The thought shook her. Until that week, she’d been quite fond of the opposite sex.
“How do you know those two men aren’t already back on your property? Heading toward us?” She was in trouble. Way over her head. Cooking wasn’t the answer.
“I have an alert set on my phone. It goes off anytime there’s any movement on any of the cameras, and before you ask, every inch of my land is covered by them.”
Wow. That went beyond paranoid.
What kind of weird freak had she inadvertently floated into?
One who’d saved her life.
But why?
“So you’d know if I snuck off during the night,” she said, making sure they were on the same page.
“Yep. But if I saw the movement was you, I wouldn’t do anything to stop you. I’d just watch to make sure you got safely off my land.”
He was dicing chicken he’d taken from another pan.
“That system must have cost you a load of money.”
With a shrug, he didn’t miss a chop as he said, “Peace of mind comes at a cost.”
He’d said he didn’t trust the police. At the moment, she didn’t trust anyone. Peace of mind seemed like a pipe dream.
She had to eat to stay alive. Her earlier thoughts came back to her.
But she had to move forward, too. She couldn’t just not die. She had to figure out who she was running from, what Kyle had gotten into, and do whatever it took to make certain that...
Starting to tremble as a vision of the two people living in the house next to hers came to mind, Kacey used every ounce of strength she had to block all feeling. To keep her mind on one step at a time.
As long as the attention was on her, as long as it was thought that she was the only one who’d seen anything, who knew anything, the others would be safe.
She had to believe that.
And if whoever took her thought she was dead...then the threat died with her, right?
Was that her plan, then?
To stay temporarily dead?
Until she could figure out what Kyle had gotten into, or the police could. If they even bothered. The fact that she’d been abducted right after turning in the bloody knife didn’t bode well. Were the police in on whatever was going on?
She couldn’t stay dead indefinitely. Her mom was doing well. But another flare-up would come, rendering her physically incapable of caring for a ten-year-old on her own.
And the worry of Kacey being gone would exacerbate the situation. Stress would bring on the rheumatoid arthritis that made it impossible for her to walk even with her walker.
Unless Kyle had Kacey covered on that one. Made up some story about her visiting him up at his place in the mountains and deciding to stay a few days to help him with...whatever...during her summer break from school.
Mom would believe that. And since there wasn’t cell service up there, no one would be expecting to hear from her.
Surely, her twin would have done that much.
Her host was dishing up dinner. Two plates. He put one on the table. And then moved toward her to hand her the other.
She knew when she took it that, by doing so, she’d made her decision. She wasn’t heading out just yet.
She had no plan.
Pulling out the chair furthest from Devon at the table, she sat on the edge of it, plate in front of her, and picked up the fork he’d laid across it before handing the meal to her.
She still didn’t trust the man. Living alone in the middle of nowhere. All those screens. He’d said he didn’t trust cops. There was something very odd going on with him.
But she’d watched him prepare the food and spoon his own out of the same pan from which he’d taken hers. Since he was eating it, since she hadn’t died eating the sandwich he’d prepared earlier, she figured the sustenance was safe.
And so, she ate.
“Why don’t you trust cops?”
The question came at Devon just as he was relaxing into his meal. Used to eating alone, to enjoying the simple pleasure of good taste, he didn’t welcome the interruption.
But he didn’t want her to run off into the night, either. Whether she was part of his sting operation or not, the woman was in some kind of trouble. He needed to find out what it was. To help if he could.
A first-grade teacher. She’d checked out just as she’d said she would. Not just on the school website. He’d sent off a quick text to a friend of his at Sierra’s Web, too. He’d helped out the firm of experts on a missing baby case in Vegas the year before, and had brought them officially into his current situation, as well. They also were handling a very private matter for him.
“My father was framed by them.” He chose the words carefully. Purposefully.
She suspected that she’d turned in a knife that someone in the police department didn’t want found. She hadn’t specifically said so, but the implication had been there.
He instantly related to her predicament.
If he could form even a small bond of trust with her...
She’d stopped eating. Was looking over at him, that blond hair falling around her face like a partially open curtain.
“He was found dead, with a significant amount of contraband in his trunk, and a key to a storage unit that was also filled with it.” All sickeningly, frustratingly, true.
“Oh my God, Devon. I’m so sorry...” The shock on her face couldn’t have been faked. And shouldn’t matter to him, either. He didn’t know her.
Didn’t intend to get to know her, beyond doing what he could to see that she was safe. And arrested, if she was in any way associated with the drugs traveling on the Colorado River.
Schoolteachers weren’t immune from making money on the side—given the right, sometimes desperate, circumstances. Or from substance abuse disorders, either, though Kacey wasn’t exhibiting any signs of needing a fix.
“The official theory was that he’d been heading up some national distribution channel of illegal goods, starting with DVDs back in the day, but also ammo, tobacco, alcohol and even makeup—all illegally imported and sold tax-free across the States. They say he knew the cops were onto him and so he loaded up his SUV, took the key to the storage with him, and attempted to drive his SUV over a cliff and into Lake Mead.” All true.
Just leaving out the part that Hilton Grainger had also been chief of detectives in Las Vegas at the time. And the fact that his only child, Devon, had been a rookie cop.
He also didn’t bother to mention that the year before, his father had been caught having an affair with a detective from Colorado. The old man had owned up to the wrongdoing and had been spending every free minute of his time making up to his wife and son, repairing the emotional damage he’d done.
There was no doubt in Devon’s mind—nor his mother’s—that his father had been sincere in his regret. And in his desire to make things right.
Just as there was no doubt that his father was not a crooked cop. Just the fact that the case had never made the news, he’d never been charged...his mother had received his father’s full pension...too much had been wrong about the whole thing.
Bottom line for Devon being that he was his father’s son. Had grown up in the man’s shoes, walking side by side with him, learning from the very beginning, what it took to be a man who risked his life every day to keep others safe. No way Hilton Grainger would ever, ever have dishonored the badge.
“The official theory?” Kacey’s question, still seeming to brim a bit with the compassion he’d first heard moments before, brought him up out of his muck.
“There was never any proof found that linked him to any of the covert operations. And the accident, upon investigation by an independent agency, was ultimately ruled just that, an accident.”
The taste in his mouth was not good. No fault of his cooking.
Maybe not his best move, bringing it all up. “It happened almost ten years ago,” he quickly inserted into the conversation before things went any further.
He’d wanted to give her reason to bond with him.
Not to pour out his guts. Or gain sympathy.
What he also wanted was his father’s name cleared. And had Sierra’s Web, nationally renowned as the best of the best, working on taking care of that.
Devon in the meantime set about solving a seemingly impossible case and bringing at least a five-state-wide commendation to the Grainger name. Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado each had one person, and only one person, actually working the operation he was heading up. The detectives and their corresponding captains, a total of ten people, were the only people who knew about the sting.
Because, like him, others believed that whoever had been moving contraband all those years ago never stopped.
And that the merchandise had changed to lethally charged substances being sold to high schoolers.
Granted, he was the only one who strongly believed that the distribution channel from the past was one and the same as their current, untraceable, transportation service.
But then, he was the only person on earth who’d grown up hearing Hilton Grainger’s thoughts every day.
“What did your father do for a living?”
“He worked for the city.”
“Quartzite? Was he the mayor or something?”
He shook his head. “Las Vegas. He worked for the mayor.” Technically. The police commissioner did. Hilton Grainger had served at the pleasure of the commissioner.
And Devon had just given Kacey Ashland his last truth.
He needed her to trust him enough for him to get what he needed from her. And for her, too, if she was truly an innocent victim who’d just been trying to do the right thing by turning in a bloody knife.
He did not need to get tangled up with anyone. Especially not her.
Just didn’t sit well with him that she’d shown up right where he’d been—his proposed route for the day had already been logged with the recreation company for whom he worked—bound and left to die. That a suspected middleman had been booked on a tour that day. And that Kacey was from Bullhead City.
The known hub of at least some of the drug activity. Stuff confiscated in Bullhead the previous fall had been tested against illegal narcotics killing kids in Virginia. Same exact product.
Directly across the river from Laughlin, Nevada—a town nearly an hour’s drive from Las Vegas and yet still in his father’s jurisdiction.
Had her supposed near death been staged, waiting for him to appear, to involve him?
Strange that he saves Kacey and then immediately has trespassers on his property.
Something just didn’t feel right about it all.
Just as Hilton Grainger had suspected something off in the weeks before he’d died. His father hadn’t said so. Had been too busy trying to make amends with son, Tommy, to talk much to cop? But Tommy had known Hilton had been having trouble with some of the guys at work. With the police commissioner. Tommy thought, at the time, it was because of the affair. His father had not only fooled around with a detective, but she’d been the daughter of a Colorado commissioner.
In the end, there’d only been one man Hilton Grainger had trusted who’d deserved that trust, an old army buddy whose life Hilton had saved.
A man who’d turned out to be wealthy in his own right, though he hadn’t wanted anyone he served with to know that. Billy Collier had just wanted to offer his life for his country like everyone else. Coming from a wealthy family didn’t give him the right to let others die for him, he’d said.
And when Hilton had died in shame, Billy had been the only one who’d risked his own reputation to stand up for Hilton at his funeral, and afterward.
Billy had been largely responsible for getting Tommy’s mother her pension.
Kacey Ashland, even if she was innocent, was not a Billy Collier. She wasn’t a friend that he could trust with his life.
And Tommy, who’d become Devon over the past year, was his father’s son through and through. Raised so much in his likeness he sometimes felt like they were twins born in different generations.
One thing his father had given him was a strong sense of self. Devon knew who he was. And who he wasn’t. He’d learned from Hilton’s mistakes. He wasn’t trusting himself to be faithful to a long-term relationship. And he wasn’t trusting anyone else, period. He was just going to get the job done.
Whether the past and present situations were related in any way or not.