Manhunt in the Wild West
Jessica Andersen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Copyright

Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, JESSICA ANDERSEN is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes you’ll visit her at

www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say “hi!”

Chapter One

WWJBD? Chelsea Swan asked herself as she headed out to the loading dock of the medical examiner’s office of Bear Claw, Colorado. The e-speak stood for What Would James Bond Do? and served as her mantra, though some days she replaced 007’s name with some of her other favorite fictional spies: Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, Jack Bauer and the like.

Regardless of who she was trying to channel on a given day, the mantra meant one thing: don’t be a wuss. On the scale of fight or flight, Chelsea fell squarely in the “flight” category, which wouldn’t be such a big deal if another part of her didn’t long for adventure, for the sort of danger she read about and watched on TV, and experienced secondhand through her bevy of cop friends.

She’d gone into pathology because she’d wanted to be near police work without actually carrying a gun, and because she liked medicine, but didn’t want to be responsible for another human being’s life. She was good at fitting together the clues she found during an autopsy, and turning them into a cause of death. She liked the puzzles, and the knowledge that her work sometimes helped the families understand why and how their loved one had died. Occasionally she’d even even assisted the Bear Claw Creek Police Department in finding a killer, and the success had given her a serious buzz.

Most days the job was rewarding without being actively frightening. Then there were days like today, when even James Bond might’ve hesitated. Chelsea figured she was entitled to some nerves, though, because while she was certainly no stranger to death, today was different. The dead were different.

The four incoming bodies belonged to terrorists, mass murderers who’d been incarcerated in the ARX Supermax prison two hours north of Bear Claw, and who’d died there under suspicious circumstances. The knowledge that she’d be autopsying their bodies in under an hour gave Chelsea a serious case of the willies as she headed out to meet the prison transport van. No matter how many times she told herself the dead deserved justice, she couldn’t talk herself into believing it in this case.

Besides, the bodies came with major political baggage, which meant the ME’s office would be under microscopic scrutiny.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have a choice in the matter.

Three of the men, who went by the names of al-Jihad, Muhammad Feyd and Lee Mawadi, were international-level terrorists who’d been convicted of the Santa Bombings that had rocked the Bear Claw region three years earlier. The fourth, Jonah Fairfax, had tortured and murdered two federal agents in the days leading up to a bloody government raid on a militant anarchists’ compound up in northern Montana, and had apparently hooked up with the terrorists inside the prison, despite being in 24/7 solitary confinement. The four were seriously bad news.

Chelsea, who usually managed to find the upside of any situation, wished the prison had stuck to its standard procedure of handling everything internally, including autopsies. Unfortunately, budget cuts had forced Warden Pollard to pare back his medical staff. When the four prisoners had died of unknown causes within an hour of one another, Pollard had requested an outside autopsy and the state had turfed the bodies to Bear Claw.

“Lucky us,” Chelsea muttered as she pushed through the doors leading to the loading dock, which opened onto a narrow alley separating the two big buildings that housed the ME’s office and the main station house of the Bear Claw Creek Police Department.

Two other members of the ME’s office were already waiting on the loading ramp: Chelsea’s boss and friend, Chief Medical Examiner Sara Whitney, and their newly hired assistant, Jerry Osage. Under normal circumstances there wouldn’t have been a welcoming committee for the bodies, but these were far from normal circumstances. The deaths had gained national media attention at a time the ME’s office would’ve strongly preferred otherwise.

That worry was in Sara’s eyes as she turned to Chelsea, but her voice held its normal brisk, businesslike tone when she said, “I’m glad you’re here. Chief Mendoza wants me to come out front and say a few words for the cameras so we can sneak the van in the back way while the newsies are distracted.” Sara slipped out of her fall-weight wool jacket and held it out, revealing a jade-toned skirt suit that perfectly complemented her shoulder-length, honey-colored hair and arresting amber eyes. “Take this in case you’re waiting long.”

The mid-October day was unusually cool, thanks to a sharp breeze that brought frigid air down from the snow-covered Rockies. It was just another change in the unusually unpredictable weather they’d been having lately. The mix of snow squalls and torrential downpours had triggered landslides in Bear Claw Canyon as well as the hills west of the city, taking out roads and at one point even prompting evacuation of the Bear Claw Ski Resort, which was just starting to gear up for the winter season.

For the moment, though, the skies were clear, the wind sharp. The Rocky Mountains were a dark blur on the horizon, well beyond the huge wilderness of Bear Claw Canyon State Park, which formed an unpopulated buffer between the city suburbs and the ARX Supermax prison.

Chelsea shivered involuntarily, though she couldn’t have said whether the chill came from the wind biting through the thin scrubs she wore over her casual slacks and shirt, or the thought of how little actually separated them from an enclosure housing two thousand or so of the worst criminals in the country.

She took Sara’s coat and drew it over her shoulders. “Thanks.”

The garment was too long everywhere and she didn’t have a prayer of buttoning it across the front, mute testimony that Sara was tall and lean and willowy, whereas Chelsea was none of those things.

Five-five if she stretched it, tending way more toward curvy than willowy, Chelsea wore her dark, chestnut-highlighted hair in a sassy bob that brushed her chin, used a daily layer of mascara to emphasize the long eyelashes that framed her brown eyes, and considered her smile to be her best feature. If life were a movie, she would probably play the best friend’s supporting role to Sara’s elegant lead, and that was okay with her.

Some people were destined to do great things, others small ones. That was just the way it was.

Within the ME’s office, Chelsea was good at the small things. She was the best of them at dealing with the families of the dead, mainly because she genuinely liked people. She enjoyed meeting them and learning about them, and she liked knowing that the information she gave them often helped ease the passing of their loved ones. She might not be saving the world, but she was, she hoped, making the natural process of death a bit easier, one family at a time.

At the moment, though, she didn’t particularly care if the incoming bodies were tied to people who had loved them and wanted answers. As far as she was concerned, monsters like the four dead men didn’t deserve autopsies or answers. They deserved deep, unmarked graves and justice in the afterlife.

“I wish the prison had kept the bodies,” Sara grumbled, her thoughts paralleling Chelsea’s. Then she sighed, clearly not looking forward to the impromptu press conference. “Okay, I’ll go do the song and dance and leave you guys to the real work.”

The snippiness implied by her words was more selfdirected than anything—as the youngest chief medical examiner in city history, and a woman to boot, she’d found herself doing far more politicking and crisis management than she’d expected, when Chelsea knew she’d rather be in the morgue, doing the work she’d trained for.

The two women had only met the year before, when Sara had pulled Chelsea’s résumé out of a stack of better-qualified applicants because she’d been looking to build a young, cutting-edge team that combined empathy with hard science and innovation. That had been great until six months later, when the young, aggressive mayor who’d recruited Sara had stepped down in the wake of an embezzlement scandal, and his old-guard deputy mayor had taken over and promptly started undoing a large chunk of his predecessor’s work.

Acting Mayor Proudfoot hadn’t yet managed to disassemble the ME’s office, but he was trying. That had Sara, Chelsea and the others watching their backs at every turn these days.

“We’ve got this,” Chelsea assured her boss. “You go make us look good, okay?”

Sara shot her a grateful smile and headed inside. When the door shut at her back, Chelsea glanced at Jerry. She grinned at the sight of the assistant’s obvious discomfort in the sharp air. “Dude, your nose is turning blue.”

Dark-haired and brown-eyed, the twenty-something Florida native was having a tough time adjusting to his first cold snap, having moved to Bear Claw just that summer to be with his park-ranger girlfriend. But Jerry was a hard worker and an asset to the team. He didn’t accept her invitation to bitch about the cold, instead saying, “The van’s late. Wonder if the driver got lost or stuck in the media circus or something.”

Chelsea pulled out her cell and checked the time display, frowning when she saw that he was right, the transpo coming from the prison was a good fifteen minutes overdue. “Maybe I should call the prison dispatcher and see if there’s been a delay.”

“Never mind. I think I see them.”

Sure enough, a plain-looking van nosed its way into the alley, then spun away from them and started backing toward the cement loading dock, its brake lights flashing as the driver struggled to navigate the tight, unfamiliar alley, which was made even tighter by an obstacle course of trash bins and parked vehicles.

Unmarked and unremarkable, the van looked like nothing special on first glance, but a closer inspection revealed that it was reinforced throughout, with mesh on the small back windows.

Through the mesh, Chelsea could see one of the guards’ faces. His eyes were a clear, piercing blue, and a thin scar ran through one of his dark eyebrows, probably tangible evidence of the dangers that came from working within the ARX Supermax.

As the van’s rear bumper kissed the rubber-padded lip of the dock, the guard’s eyes locked on Chelsea and another shiver tried to work its way through her. This one didn’t come from the cold or unease about the prisoners’ bodies, though; it was a sensual tremor, one that tempted her to rethink the “career first” vow she’d made in the wake of yet another near-miss of a relationship.

The guard’s eyes hadn’t changed and he hadn’t moved, but suddenly her breath came thin in her lungs and she had to lock her legs against a wash of heat and weakness, and an almost overwhelming urge to see the rest of him. In private.

“Wow,” she said aloud. “Note to self: take Sara up on her offer to bring her brother around for a look-see.” Chelsea might’ve sworn off serious relationships, but there was no doubt her body was telling her that it was time for some recreational dating.

“’Scuse me?” asked Jerry, who looked confused.

“Just talking to myself,” Chelsea said as the van came to a stop and the guard disappeared from the window. She felt a little spurt of disappointment to have their shared look broken off, followed by a kick of nerves that she’d see the rest of him in a moment. Not that she was likely to follow up on the attraction, if it was even reciprocated. His direct, challenging stare warned that he’d probably be too intense for her, too unnerving.

She liked her guys the same way she preferred her Tex-Mex and curry: a little on the mild side, satisfying yet undemanding. She might be drawn to the other kind of guy, the tough, challenging sort she liked in her books and movies, but that was where her inner wimp kicked in. She didn’t want to date a guy she couldn’t keep up with.

And that was so not what she was supposed to be focusing on right now, she lectured herself as the driver killed the engine and emerged from the vehicle, carrying the requisite paperwork. Moments later, the back doors swung open and two other guys jumped down and started readying the body bags for transfer into the morgue. The men were wearing drab uniforms with weapon belts, and hats pulled low over their brows, making them blend into a certain sort of sameness…except for the blue-eyed guard, who Chelsea recognized immediately, even from the back.

He was maybe five-ten or so, with wide shoulders and ropy muscles that strained the fabric of his uniform, as though he’d bulked up recently and hadn’t yet replaced his clothes. His hips were narrow, his legs powerful, and though she’d never really gone for the uniform look before—she was surrounded by cops on a daily basis, so there wasn’t much novelty in it—the dark material of his pants did seriously interesting things to his backside when he bent over and fiddled with one of the gurneys, unlocking it from the fasteners that had kept it in place during transport.

As far as she could tell, two of the bodies were on gurneys, two on the floor of the van. Normally she would’ve been annoyed by the lack of respect for the dead. Not this time, though.

When the driver moved to hand the paperwork to Jerry, the assistant waved it off and pointed at Chelsea. “She’s in charge. I’m just the muscle.”

She tore herself away from ogling the guard to reach for the clipboard. “I’ll take the paperwork. Jerry can help you unload and show you where the bodies go.”

The driver frowned. “I thought a guy was supposed to sign off on the delivery. Rickey Charles.”

Chelsea flipped through the pages, nodding when everything looked good. Once all the bags were inside the morgue, she would open them up and inspect the bodies, making sure the info matched. Then, and only then, would she sign the papers indicating that she’d accepted the delivery, freeing the guards to make the return trip to the prison.

Not paying full attention to the driver, she said, “Rickey got held up this morning. I’m covering.”

Actually, her fellow medical examiner was in lockup, sleeping it off after being arrested on his third DUI, but she wasn’t about to advertise the fact. Sara had made a monumental mistake hiring the charismatic young pathologist in the first place, but he was related to one of her higher-ups, and he’d fit the “young and innovative” stamp she’d been trying to put on the ME’s office, so she’d given him a chance despite his less-than-stellar recommendations.

That’d come back to bite Sara, but Chelsea knew her friend would handle it quietly. There was no need to gossip.

Noticing that the driver had started to fidget, she said, “Don’t stress. It’ll just take a few minutes.”

He mumbled something, grabbed the clipboard and turned away, heading back for the van.

“Hey!” she called, starting after him. “I haven’t signed off yet.”

Just then, Jerry started pushing the first gurney toward the morgue, and she saw that he’d acquired a smear of red on the front of his scrubs.

“Jerry, stop,” Chelsea said quickly as a twist of worry locked in her stomach. She crossed to the blue-eyed guard, who was facing away from her, prepping the second bag for transport. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Weren’t these body bags surface-cleaned back at the prison?”

They certainly should’ve been. Not only was it standard protocol, but it was also doubly important in this case, given that they didn’t yet know why or how the prisoners had died.

Her guard turned—that was how she found herself thinking of him, as “her guard,” though that was silly—and she got the full-on gut punch of his charisma. His features were lean, his skin drawn and pale, and he didn’t look like he smiled much. And those eyes…up close they were even more magnetic than she’d thought them from afar, ice blue and arresting, and holding a level of intensity that reached inside her and grabbed on, kindling a curl of heat in her belly.

He looked more like a grown-up than most of the thirty-somethings she knew. He looked like a leader, like someone who would take charge of any situation.

“We’re just the transporters,” he said, his voice a rough rasp that slid along her nerve endings and left tiny shivers behind. “We’re running late, so it’d be best if you signed off on the delivery so we can be on our way.” Something moved in his expression, there and gone so quickly she almost missed it, but leaving the impression that his words were more an order than a suggestion.

Nerves fired through her, warning that something wasn’t right.

Not liking the feeling, or the strange effect the guard had on her, Chelsea backpedaled a step. But she stuck to operating procedures, saying, “I’m not signing anything if there’s blood on the bags. You have no idea what killed these men. For all we know, it could be an infectious agent.” She gestured for Jerry to step away from the gurney, and reached for her cell phone. “Leave everything right where it is. I’m calling my boss.”

This is so not what Sara needs right now, she thought, but protocol was protocol, and if the medical staff at the ARX Supermax had been so sloppy as to allow the bodies to be shipped without the bags being disinfected first, who knew what other safety precaution they might’ve skipped?

“Wait,” the blue-eyed guard said, holding up a hand. At that same moment, the guard behind him spun and grabbed for something on his belt. A gun.

Chelsea’s eyes locked on the weapon, and she froze.

Jerry’s head jerked up and his mouth went slack, his eyes locking on the other guard. “Hey, aren’t you—”

The man shot him where he stood.

Jerry jerked spasmodically as blood bloomed in the center of his forehead. Then he went limp and fell, his eyes glazing as he dropped, his mouth open in an “O” of surprise.

To Chelsea, the world seemed to slow down, his body collapsing at half-speed. She sucked in a breath to scream, but before she could make a sound, something slammed into her temple, dazing her.

She staggered, only just beginning to realize that the guards weren’t guards at all. They were convicts wearing the clothing of the guards who were no doubt filling the body bags in the van. Somehow the prisoners had played dead and then pulled a switch en route.

Heart drumming as her consciousness dimmed, Chelsea fumbled for her phone, and watched it spin out of her grasp and clatter to the ground, which pitched and heaved beneath her. The blue-eyed guard caught her as she fell, supporting her in his strong, steady arms, in a grip that shouldn’t have felt as good as it did.

The last thing she comprehended before she passed out was a piercing sense of disappointment that somehow existed alongside the terror. Of course he was trouble; she’d never been truly attracted to any other kind of man. Sara had even joked one time that Chelsea’s taste in men was going to be the death of her.

What if she’d been right?

Chapter Two

Jonah Fairfax hadn’t touched a woman in nearly nine months, and this was not how he’d pictured ending the drought.

When Fax had imagined his reintroduction to feminine companionship from the sterile gloom of his six-by-ten cell, he’d figured on candlelight, good food and soft music, and either a paid escort or a sympathetic friend of a friend. Or, hell, even his handler and sometimes lover, who called herself Jane Doe even in bed.

The woman’s identity hadn’t been particularly important to his sexual fantasy. What had mattered were the trappings of civilization, the colors and smells, and the textures of real life.

However, that fantasy most definitely hadn’t involved a prison meat wagon backed up to the morgue where they’d been stood up by Rickey Charles, the contact who was the key to the next stage in their getaway. And it definitely hadn’t starred a pistol-whipped woman hanging limply in his arms…and three seriously nasty terrorists glaring at him like they already regretted involving him in their jailbreak.

Not that they’d had a choice. He’d made damn sure of that, with help from Jane and some of the other agents working underneath her. She headed up a national security agency so secret it didn’t even have a name, one that was organized along the lines of the very terror networks it hunted, with each agent functioning as a separate cell, not knowing who else might be involved, or how.

For this particular op, Jane had gotten Fax arrested for murder, constructing such a deep, seamless cover that even his mother and brothers had written him off. That had been the only way to make him useful to al-Jihad, just as orchestrating an escape had been the only way they could come up with to flush out the high-level terrorist’s suspected contacts within Homeland Security itself.

The deaths of the prison guards and the morgue attendant were regrettable, but Jane had chosen Fax for the op because she knew he could function in the bloodiest situations and deal with an acceptable level of collateral damage—and innocent lives lost—if it meant getting the job done. It was cold, yes, but necessary.

Jane had honed that level of detachment, perhaps, but he could thank his wife, Abby, for setting him on the path. She’d been dead five years now, and he thought she would’ve hated what he’d become. No way she would’ve accepted the part her betrayal had played—she’d never been big on personal accountability. But even as he thought that, Fax was mildly surprised to realize it’d been some time since he’d last thought of the woman who’d been his high-school sweetheart, and later his wife. In the past, her memory had driven him, haunted him, made him into the bloodless man he’d become, the one Jane had needed and wanted.

Now, it seemed, even the warmth of anger was fading, leaving him colder still.

“You gonna kill the bitch or dance with her first?” Lee Mawadi asked, nodding to the woman in Fax’s arms with a sneer.

Then again, Lee seemed to do pretty much everything with a sneer. Fax was pretty sure it covered some major insecurities.

Fax didn’t know any of his fellow escapees well, because the 24/7 solitary confinement at the ARX Supermax tended to cut down on social discourse. He’d met the three terrorists in person for the first time just an hour earlier, when they’d awoken from the drugs Jane had smuggled to him, which had mimicked death close enough to pass inspection for twelve hours.

Almost immediately upon awakening, Fax had pegged the thirtysomething, blond Lee Mawadi as a wannabe, a follower. Lee had grown up a rich, pampered American, but had developed a love of violence along the way, a desire to kill, and be part of a killing squad. He’d hooked up with al-Jihad and had found the leader he’d been seeking. He’d played the part of a businessman, married a photographer and lived the American dream, all while working as a member of al-Jihad’s crew, following orders without question.

Lee was a lemming, but Fax suspected he was a nasty critter, the sort that would bite you before it ran off the cliff in pursuit of its leader.

“No need to kill her,” Fax said in answer to Lee’s question. “She’s out cold.” He shifted the woman’s deadweight, figuring on dumping her off to the side, out of harm’s way. The younger, male morgue attendant was beyond help, but if Fax played it right, he could probably leave the woman alive without attracting too much suspicion. Motioning to the van with his chin, he raised his voice and called to the other members of the small group, “Let’s get out of here. Our cover’s blown to hell thanks to Lee’s itchy trigger finger.”

As planned, they’d come out of the coma-inducing meds mid-transpo. Fax had suffered a moment of atavistic terror at finding himself zipped inside a body bag, but al-Jihad had come through as promised. The bag was taped shut rather than zippered, and one of the four guards had distracted the others long enough for the prisoners to emerge from their bags and get into position. Then they’d killed all four guards—including their accomplice, whom al-Jihad didn’t trust to stay bought—by breaking their necks, so as to keep their uniforms unbloodied. Then they’d switched places, four for four. Fax didn’t know what the death-mimicking meds had contained, but they’d left him with a nasty hangover and occasional double vision. That didn’t matter, though. He was still alive, his cover intact. His job was to keep it that way until he figured out who al-Jihad was working with, and what they planned to do next.

With fanatical monsters like him it wasn’t a case of if; it was a case of when and where.

“Hey!” Slow to catch the insult, Lee spun in the midst of dragging the younger man’s body into the van. “The guy recognized me. I had no choice!”

“Maybe,” Fax retorted, propping the woman up against the cold cement wall, partially hidden behind a Dumpster. “Maybe not.”

Knowing he was pushing it, he slid a look at the other two men, who as far as he was concerned were far more dangerous than Lee Mawadi.

Muhammad Feyd’s dossier pegged the dark-eyed, dark-haired man at thirty-eight, a fanatic among fanatics who’d left al Qaeda in search of a more proactive group of anti-Western terrorists. He’d found exactly that in the man seated in the passenger’s seat of the prison transpo van…a man known simply as al-Jihad.

The terrorist leader’s dossier was thin, devoid of any information predating the new millennium. He’d appeared on the world stage just before the September 11th terror attacks, had slipped out of the country immediately thereafter, and had played tag with Homeland Security for the next several years. Federal law enforcement suspected that he’d been the mastermind behind numerous bombings and other atrocities, but had never managed to concretely tie him to any of the attacks until he’d finally been tried and convicted for the Santa Bombings that had occurred in several major Colorado cities a few years earlier.

Targeting six shopping malls all owned by the American Mall group, the bombings had been planned to coincide with the ceremonial arrival of the mall Santas to their decorated thrones. All six of the Santas had died…along with the parents and children who’d been lined up, eagerly awaiting the kickoff to the holiday season.

It had been terrorism at its most horrible, and local and federal law enforcement had worked around the clock to indict and convict al-Jihad and his henchmen. They had succeeded, but the evidence had been more circumstantial than proof-positive. The terrorists’ high-powered defense attorney had lodged appeal after appeal, but the filings had wound up logjammed in the legal system, which Fax figured was no accident. The courts had no love of terrorists.

The delay had given Jane time to formulate Fax’s cover and arrange to have him locked up in the same prison as the terrorist leader and his two lieutenants. She’d turned Fax’s honorable military discharge into a dishonorable ousting, cast him in the role of anarchist, invoked the USA PATRIOT Act and held him without trial, making him that much more attractive to an anti-American bastard like al-Jihad.

And thus, an unholy alliance had been born, right on schedule.

In person, the terrorist leader was tall, thin and angular, and graceful enough in his movements that he almost appeared effete…except for his eyes, which were those of a killer.

From reading the available reports, Fax had known that al-Jihad would be a smart, driven, dangerous man. Meeting him in the flesh had reinforced that impression and added a new realization: the bastard wasn’t just dangerous; he was completely without a conscience when it came to killing Americans. Worse, he enjoyed the hell out of it.

That put Fax in an even more tenuous position than he’d anticipated, making it a seriously bad idea to draw attention. Yet that was just what he was risking if he fought too hard to save the pretty medical examiner from becoming part of the collateral damage.

“Boss?” Lee said plaintively, looking at the passenger’s seat of the van, where al-Jihad sat silent and square-shouldered.

The terrorist leader sent his follower a dark look that all but said “get a spine,” yet he said nothing.

Muhammad aimed a kick at Lee and growled, “Get in the damn van.” He jerked his chin at Fax. “You, too. And bring the woman. We’ll need a hostage if things get sticky on the way out.”

The original plan had been for Rickey Charles—whom al-Jihad had somehow contacted and bribed—to cover the switch for as long as possible, giving them time to get well away. In the absence of that help, their window of opportunity to escape cleanly was closing fast.

“But—” Fax bit off the protest, knowing he was already on tenuous footing with the terrorists.

The only reason he was there at all was because he’d developed the contact for the death-mimicking drugs they’d needed to get on the meat wagon. He’d contacted al-Jihad through a Byzantine trail of notes hidden in the few common areas the prisoners were given access to, one at a time. He’d offered the drug in exchange for a place within al-Jihad’s terror cell, and the plan had been born.

Frankly, he was somewhat surprised they hadn’t tried to kill him yet, now that they were outside the prison walls. That they hadn’t tried to off him indicated that they still had some use for him, but he had a feeling that amnesty wouldn’t last long if he started arguing orders.

She’s acceptable collateral damage, he told himself, and went back for the woman.

Damned if she didn’t stir a little and curl into him when he picked her up and held her against his chest. Surprised, he looked down.

She had dark, chestnut-highlighted hair and faint freckles visible through a fading summer tan. Her cheeks and lips were full, her chin softly rounded, and her nose turned up slightly at the end, giving her an almost childlike, vulnerable air. But there was nothing childlike about the curves that pressed against him, and there was sure as hell nothing juvenile about the unexpected surge of lust that slammed into him when she shifted and turned her face into his neck, so her hair tickled the edge of his ear and feathered across the sensitive skin beneath his jaw.

“Move your ass,” Lee snapped from inside the van.

Muhammad finished disabling the vehicle’s state-issued GPS locator and got in the driver’s seat, then gunned the engine to warn Fax that he was running out of time.

Sometimes it’s necessary to sacrifice a few to save the rest, Fax reminded himself. Still, his stomach twisted in a sick ball as he slung the woman through the side door of the vehicle, so she landed near her dead friend, whose corpse was stacked with two of the guards’ bodies. The other two bodies were still on the gurneys, one of which was jammed in at an angle where Lee had shoved it in after their escape plan had blown up in their faces.

Even without Rickey Charles, they might’ve bluffed their way through the body transfer and talked the woman into signing off without confirming the identities of the corpses, but once Lee killed the morgue attendant, even that slim chance had disappeared.

Their escape could get real messy real quick, Fax knew. Problem was, he needed them to get free so the terrorists would reach out to their contacts and plan their next move.

Which meant the woman’s life—and his own, for that matter—were expendable in the grand scheme of things.

Hating the necessity more than he would’ve expected to, he jumped into the van and rolled the side door closed just as Muhammad hit the gas and the van peeled away from the ME’s office.

The four men braced to hear the alarm raised any second, to see pursuit behind them. But there was no alarm, no pursuit as al-Jihad’s second in command navigated the city streets of Bear Claw.

Fax noted that they were heading roughly northward, back in the direction of the prison rather than away, but he didn’t ask why, didn’t even let on that he’d noticed or even cared. He simply filed the information, and hoped like hell he’d have a chance to get it to Jane before al-Jihad and the others decided he’d outlived his usefulness.

Maybe five miles outside the city limits, well down a deserted road that wound through the state forest, Muhammad pulled off into a small parking lot that served a trailhead leading into the wilderness.

Al-Jihad, who was still riding shotgun, turned to Lee and Fax, and said in his dead, inflectionless voice, “Kill the woman and dump all of the bodies in the canyon. We won’t need them where we’re going.”

Which is where? Fax wanted to ask but didn’t because he knew the game too well. The more he followed orders without question, the longer he would live, and the more information he’d gain about the structure of al-Jihad’s network inside the U.S.

So instead of asking the questions he wanted answered, he nodded and rolled open the side door, then waited while Lee climbed out. When the other man turned back, Fax shoved one of the body bags at him.

Lee caught the dead guard and nearly went down. “Watch it!” he snapped, glaring at Fax.

“Sorry,” Fax said with little remorse, having already figured out that al-Jihad and Muhammad liked the fact that he didn’t let the lemming push him around. Jerking his chin in the direction of the trailhead, he said, “I’ll be right behind you.”

Lee muttered something under his breath, but slung the body bag over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and headed off into the woods, struggling only slightly under his burden.

Hyperaware of the scrutiny he was receiving from the two men in the front of the van, Fax reached down for the woman, his mind spinning as he desperately tried to figure out a way to keep her alive while protecting his cover.

He didn’t know her name, but somehow she’d become the symbol of all the warm, civilized things he’d dreamed of from the confines of his cell, all the beauty and laughter he lived in the darkness to protect.

Jane might be his boss and sometimes lover, but the pretty medical examiner was a real person, one who belonged in the sunlight, not the shadows.

Hefting her over his shoulder, he turned and headed into the forest in Lee’s wake. Once he was out of earshot, he said under his breath, “I know you’re awake. Don’t do anything stupid and you might live to see our backs.”

CHELSEA STIFFENED at the sound of his voice, but was too terrified to process his words. The only reason she wasn’t already screaming was because she was too damn scared to breathe. That, and she was pretty sure there was nobody nearby to hear except the escaped convicts, who would probably enjoy her terror. So she kept the panic inside, save for the tears that leaked from beneath her screwed-shut eyelids.

She couldn’t believe she’d been kidnapped, couldn’t believe that the blue-eyed guard—or rather, the blue-eyed escaped convict—she’d been ogling on the loading dock was carrying her into the state forest, acting on a terrorist’s orders to kill her and dump her in Bear Claw Canyon.

Things like that just didn’t happen to small-scale people like her.

She would’ve thought it was all a dream, a nightmare, except that the sensations were too real: her head pounded from the blow that’d knocked her unconscious, her tears were cool on her cheeks, and the man’s shoulder dug into her belly as he carried her along the path. Opening her eyes, she saw that what she’d figured were signs of recent muscle gain were actually places where his uniform didn’t fit; the material gapped at the small of his back, where he’d tucked the guard’s weapon into his belt.

WWJBD? She knew she should struggle, she should try to escape, but when? Now or after they reached their destination? What were the chances she could grab that gun and turn the tables?

“Don’t,” he warned in a low voice.

Before she could respond, or act, or do anything, really, she heard another man’s voice from up ahead, saying, “I found a cave. Dump her and put a bullet in her. I’ll go get another load.”

The man’s voice was casual, careless, like he was talking about things rather than people. But to him she and the others were things, she realized. They were Americans. The enemy. Yet the speaker was blond, and his voice carried a trace of a Boston accent. She would’ve passed him on the street and never once thought to wonder about him.

Vaguely, she remembered a snippet of newscast that’d said one of the three escapees, Lee Mawadi, was a homegrown terrorist who’d hooked up with al-Jihad for the Santa Bombings.

Back then, sitting safe in her living room, terrorism had been an abstract concept, something she saw on TV and exclaimed over while secretly thinking that such things would never happen to her. She hadn’t even been in Colorado during the Santa Bombings; she’d been finishing a nice, safe rotation in a private practice outside Chicago, reveling in the early stages of a relationship she’d thought was The One, but had turned out to be another Not Quite.

Now, though, she was all alone, with terror her only companion.

“Sounds good to me,” the man carrying her said, his voice easy as he agreed to the plan of shooting her and dumping her in the cave.

But his touch, while firm, was disconcertingly gentle and he’d hinted at the possibility that she might live. Did that mean he had a soft spot for her because of their shared look out by the loading dock? Would he somehow prove to be an ally?

Get a grip, her inner voice of practicality snapped. He’s a murderer.

If the other speaker was Lee Mawadi, then the blue-eyed man she’d shared a long look with must be Jonah Fairfax. That meant he hadn’t been part of the Santa Bombings, but it didn’t make him innocent or safe. The ARX Supermax didn’t cater to white-collar criminals, and Fairfax had been jailed for torturing and murdering two of the FBI agents sent to infiltrate the anarchist camp he’d been a member of.

Yet he’d made it sound like he wanted to save her somehow. It made no sense.

When footsteps warned that the other man—Lee Mawadi—was passing them on the trail, Chelsea screwed her eyes shut. Moments later, the sunlight beyond her eyelids cut to black and the echoes told her that they’d entered the cave he’d spoken of.

The blue-eyed man—Fairfax—flipped her off his shoulder without warning, then caught her before she could slam to the ground. She kept her eyes shut as he lowered her so she was half propped up against a rock wall. She could feel him crouch over her, leaning close and blocking any hope of escape.

“I need you to stop playing dead and listen very carefully,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “I think I can get you out of this, but you’re going to have to trust me.”

She opened her eyes at that, and nearly screamed when she saw that he’d put her down right next to one of the body bags. Worse, it was open, revealing one of the dead guards, shirtless, his eyes open and staring in death.

She held in the scream, but plastered herself against the rock wall, her quick, panicked breaths rattling in her lungs.

“Look at me.” The blue-eyed man touched her chin and turned her head toward him. “Don’t scream and don’t move. Lee is going to be back in a minute, so we’ve got to work fast.” He paused as though gauging her. “I need to get something out of my shoe. Can I trust you not to try to run?”

She nodded quickly, though she didn’t mean it. The second an opportunity presented, she was so out of there.

He gave her another, longer look. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” As though he’d read her mind, he stayed between her and the mouth of the cave, which was little more than a crevice in the rock, probably part of the canyon that’d been pushed up and over ground level by a long-ago glacier or earth shift, or maybe even one of the recent landslides.

Fairfax worked at his right shoe for a moment and came up with a small ampoule of pale yellow liquid. He crowded close to her, leaving no room for retreat or escape. “This is going to knock you out and depress your vitals so far that it’ll look like you’re dead, but you won’t be. You’ll come around in twelve hours or so, and we’ll be long gone.”

Then, before she could react, before she could protest, or scream, or any of the other things she knew she damn well ought to do, he’d broken off the tip of the ampoule, jammed the needle-point end into her upper arm, and squeezed the yellow liquid into her.

Pain flared at the injection site, hard and hot.

She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. She struggled to stand up and run, but her legs wouldn’t obey. Her muscles turned to gelatin and she started sliding sideways, and this time Fairfax didn’t catch her or break her fall.

She heard him stand, heard a weapon’s action being racked in preparation for firing. Then there was a single gunshot.

Then nothing.

FAX KNEW HE didn’t have much time, if any. He went to his knees beside the body bag containing the dead guard, whom he’d just shot. Pressing his hand against the wound, he got as much cool blood as he could from the dead man, and slathered it across the unconscious woman’s face, concentrating on the hair above her temple.

When he heard footsteps at the entrance to the cave, he readjusted the body bag and wiped off his hands on part of the woman’s coat, then tucked the stained section beneath her before he stood.

Feigning nonchalance, he put the safety on his gun and stuck the weapon in his waistband before he turned toward Lee, hoping like hell the lemming wouldn’t notice that the blood on the woman wasn’t exactly fresh.

Only the newcomer wasn’t Lee. It was al-Jihad himself.

The terrorist leader stood silhouetted at the cave mouth, a lean, dark figure whose presence was significantly larger than his physical self.

A shiver tried to crawl down the back of Fax’s neck but he held it off, determined to brazen out the situation and keep himself in the killer’s good graces. Gesturing casually toward the woman, he said, “She’s all set. Want me to go help Lee with the other guards?”

Al-Jihad moved past him without a word, gliding almost silently, seeming incorporeal, like the demon he was. Crouching down beside the woman’s motionless, blood-spattered body, he touched her cheek, then her throat, checking for a pulse.

Fax forced himself not to tense up, reminded himself to breathe, to act like the cold, jaded killer Abby’s betrayal had made him into. Only the thing was, something had changed inside him. He’d been playing the role of convict for so long it’d become second nature to hold the persona within the prison, but he found he was in danger of slipping now that they were outside those too-familiar walls.

Hell, face it; he’d already slipped. There was no rational reason for him to jeopardize his position by faking the woman’s murder. The ampoule of the death-mimicking meds he’d tucked into a false, X-ray-safe compartment inside one of his not-quite-prison-issue shoes was supposed to be a safety net, a way for him to fake his own death if the need arose. Similarly, the GPS homing device he’d activated and placed in her coat pocket was supposed to be used only if he thought he was in imminent danger of being killed, and wanted to make sure Jane could find his body.

Sure, he’d also planted a message on the woman, information he needed to get to Jane. But he could’ve gotten the info to her in other ways, ones that wouldn’t have used up so much of his dwindling bag of tricks.

So why had he gone all out to save a woman whose name he knew only because he’d palmed the ID tag off her scrubs?

Reaching into his pocket to touch the plastic tag, which read Chelsea Swan—a lovely name for a lovely woman—he thought he knew why he’d endangered himself and his mission for her. It was the freckles. Abby had had freckles like that, back when they’d been high-school sweethearts, before he’d done his stint in the military, blithely assuming things would stay the same while he was gone.

Back when Abby’d had freckles, their biggest problems had been arguments over which movie to see, or which radio station to play as they’d tooled around town in his beat-up Wrangler with the soft top down. Eventually, though, she’d outgrown her freckles…and him.

Chelsea Swan reminded him of those earlier times. Good times. Times that might as well have happened to someone else. But because they hadn’t, and because she looked like the sort of person who ought to have more good times ahead of her, he’d dabbed blood over her scalp and face to simulate a head wound, and he’d used his meds to make her body play dead.

Question was, would it be enough to save her?

Al-Jihad stood without a word, and gestured for Fax to return to the vehicle. “Go help Lee.”

Fax stayed tense as he followed orders, fearing that al-Jihad was playing him, that the bastard knew what he’d done and was teasing him with the illusion of success. But the terrorist leader returned to the van a few minutes later, and on Fax’s next trip into the cave, he saw that Chelsea remained just as he’d left her.

He and Lee finished unloading the other bodies, opening up each of the bags so the scent would attract scavengers, in hopes that they’d deface the bodies, further complicating forensic analysis when the dump site was eventually found. At least that was the terrorists’ theory. In reality, the homing beacon would have Jane’s people on-site in a few hours.

Once the job was done, Fax hung back in the cave.

“Move it,” Lee snapped when they both heard an impatient horn beep from the direction of the road. “The cops’ll get the roadblocks up soon.”

“I’m right behind you,” Fax said. But as the other man hustled down the trail, Fax stayed put.

Moving fast, he pulled the jacket and heavy sweatshirt off the dead morgue attendant, and packed them around Chelsea’s limp body. When that didn’t look like it’d be enough, he whispered, “Sorry,” and pulled the attendant’s still-warm corpse over her as added insulation. It was too cold and her vitals were too depressed for him to worry about niceties. If Jane took too long to respond, Chelsea could freeze to death.

Hopefully, though, Jane would send someone right away. The responding agent could then administer the counteragent to the death-mimicking drug, collect the GPS beacon and info pellet Fax had planted on Chelsea, and phone in an untraceable tip that would lead the locals to the location. The agent would undoubtedly also reset the scene, making it look as though her survival had been accidental rather than intentional.

With no way of knowing where al-Jihad had eyes and ears, they had to be careful not to make it obvious that the terrorist had a traitor among his small crew.

“Just hang on for a few hours, Chelsea,” Fax said quietly, his words echoing in the cave. “Help should be on its way soon.”

Then, knowing he’d done the best he could for her, he paused at the cave mouth and looked back at the six bloodied bodies, five of which weren’t going to wake up ever again.

“Collateral damage,” he murmured. Uncharacteristically, he found himself regretting that he couldn’t have saved the others, hadn’t even tried. And, as he walked into the sunlight, he found himself wishing that he believed he was going to live long enough to see pretty Chelsea Swan again, under better circumstances.

But as soon as he caught himself thinking along those lines, he squelched the emotions.

There was no room for softness around men like al-Jihad, and Fax had a job to do. That took priority, period.

Chapter Three

“She’s coming around.” Chelsea felt a couple of light taps on her face, and heard a babble of voices close by, but she couldn’t quite grasp what any of it meant.

Reality and recognition were distant strangers. Cocooned in a warm lassitude, she felt too lazy to move, too tired to care that moving was impossible.

“Are you sure none of this is her blood?” a second voice asked, this one female.

“Positive,” the first voice answered. “She doesn’t have a single laceration on her, just the bump on the back of her head.”

“Then where’d the blood come from?”

“From one of the others, looks like.” Another series of taps on her face. “Chelsea? Can you hear me?”

She moaned and swatted at the hand that was gently slapping her. At least she tried to swat. She failed, though, because her arms didn’t move.

“Here she comes,” the first voice said, sounding pleased. “Okay, kiddo. I need you to open your eyes now. Can you do that for me?”

Chelsea did as she was told, squinting into the fading light of dusk, which showed that she was inside a cave of sorts. The details were lost to the shadows and the glare of handheld lights, but she was aware of numerous people inside the small space, most of them cops.

A paramedic was crouched over her. Behind a plastic face shield, his brown eyes were dark with concern. It wasn’t the concern that confused her though; it was her sudden, utter conviction that his eyes were the wrong color. They weren’t supposed to be brown; they were supposed to be…

Blue, she remembered. Ice-cold blue.

The memory of the man’s eyes unlocked a flood of other recollections. She gasped as the memories swamped her, slapping her with terror and confusion, and the unbelievable realization that Jonah Fairfax, double murderer, had done exactly as he’d promised. He’d saved her.

But as the pieces lined up in her brain—sort of—they didn’t click. He’d said the drug would take twelve hours to wear off, and she’d been abducted near lunchtime, yet she could see dusk outside.

“What day is it?” she asked, her voice cracking from disuse and whatever drug he’d stuck in her system.

The paramedic said, “Tuesday. Why?”

Which meant she’d only been out for a few hours. “How did you find me?”

“Anonymous tip,” he said, looking past her to confer with someone outside her line of vision.

Her brain jammed on the information, which didn’t make sense. Fairfax had said something about the escapees being well away by the time she came around, but she’d only been out for a few hours. Had he changed his mind and made the call himself? Had—

The spiraling questions bounced off each other inside her throbbing skull and logjammed, and a sudden shiver wracked her body. “I’m f-freezing,” she managed between chattering teeth.

“We’re working on that,” the paramedic replied. “We’ll have you out of here in a jiff.”

It wasn’t until he and his partner lifted her that she realized she was on a stretcher, swathed in blankets and strapped down, which explained the feeling of immobility.

She was aware of commotion around her as she was carried out of the cave and back along the wooded trail. She caught glimpses of concerned faces, many of them belonging to cops she saw in the ME’s office on a regular basis. She wanted to stop and talk to them, wanted to tell them what had happened to her, but her lips didn’t work right and the light was all funny, going from the blue of dusk to a strange grayish-brown and back again.

When they reached the ambulance, Sara was there waiting, tears coursing down her cheeks when she saw Chelsea. Her lips moved; the words didn’t make any sense but Chelsea knew her friend well enough to guess Sara was apologizing for leaving her out on the loading dock.

It wasn’t your fault, Chelsea tried to say. Don’t blame yourself. I’ll be okay—Fairfax saved me. But the words didn’t come out. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything but let the world slip away as the paramedics loaded her into the waiting ambulance.

Everything faded to the gray-brown of unconsciousness.

She surfaced a few times after that—once as she was being wheeled through the hospital corridors, the fluorescent lights flashing brightly overhead, and once again during some sort of exam, when she heard doctors’ and nurses’ voices saying things like, “That doesn’t make any sense” and “Check it again.”

She didn’t come around fully until early the next morning. She knew it was morning because of the way the light of dawn bled pale lavender through the slatted blinds that covered the room’s single window, and the way her body was suddenly clamoring for breakfast and coffee, not necessarily in that order.

A quick look around confirmed that she was, indeed, in the hospital, and added the information that homicide detective Tucker McDermott was fast asleep in the chair beside her bed.

The realization warmed her with the knowledge that her friends had closed ranks around her already.

She knew Tucker through the ME’s office, and more importantly through his wife, Alyssa, who was a good friend. Alyssa, a forensics specialist within the BCCPD, was quick-tempered and always on the go. In contrast, Tucker was a rock, steady and dependable. He might’ve had a flighty playboy’s reputation a few years back, but marriage had settled him to the point that he’d become the go-to guy in their circle, the one who was always level in a crisis, always ready to listen or offer a shoulder to lean on.

He made her wimpy side feel safe.

She must’ve moved or made some sound indicating that she’d awakened, because he opened his eyes, blinked a couple of times, then smiled. “Hey. How are you feeling?”

“I’m—” She paused, confused. “That’s weird. I feel fine. Better than fine, actually. I feel really good.” Energy coursed through her alongside the gnawing hunger, but there were none of the lingering aches she would’ve expected from her ordeal. Lifting a hand, which didn’t bear an IV or any monitoring lines, she probed the back of her head and found a bruised lump, but little residual pain. Oddly, though, she didn’t feel the brain fuzz of prescription-strength painkillers. “What did the doctors give me?”

Tucker shook his head. “Nothing. By the time you arrived, your core temp was coming back up and your vitals were stabilizing. They decided to let you sleep it off and see how you felt when you woke up.”

“I’m okay,” she said weakly, her brain churning. “Okay” wasn’t entirely accurate, though, because the more she thought about her ordeal the more scared and confused she became, as terrifying images mixed with the memory of the convict who’d saved her life, and the coworker who’d lost his.

“Jerry’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked softly.

She remembered the gunshot, remembered him falling, even remembered him lying in the van, limp in death, but a piece of her didn’t want to accept that he was gone. She wanted to believe he’d been stunned like she’d been. Not dead. Not Jerry, with his cold nose and ski-bunny girlfriend.

But Tucker shook his head, expression full of remorse. “I’m sorry.”

Chelsea closed her eyes, grief beating at her alongside guilt. She should’ve done something different. If she hadn’t been staring at Fairfax, she might’ve been quicker to recognize that there was a problem with the delivery. She might’ve been able to—

“Don’t,” Tucker said. “You’ll only make yourself crazy trying to ‘what if’ this. If you’d done something different, they probably would’ve killed you, too.”

“They did, sort of,” Chelsea whispered, her breath burning her throat with unshed tears.

Tucker shifted, pulled out his handheld, which acted as both computer and cell phone. “You okay if I record this?”

She nodded. “Of course.” No doubt she’d have to go through her statement over and over again with a variety of cops and agents, but this first time she’d rather talk to Tucker than anyone else.

Haltingly at first, she told him what had happened, her words coming easier once she got started, then flowing torrentlike when she described waking up in the van and realizing she’d been kidnapped by the escapees, followed by Fairfax’s strange actions. She kept it facts only, reporting what he’d done and said, and figuring she’d leave it to Tucker and the others to draw their own conclusions.

When she was done, she glanced at Tucker and was unsurprised to see a concerned frown on his face.

“That sounds…”

“Bizarre,” she filled in for him. “Like something from a not-very-believable action movie. I know. But that’s what happened.”

He nodded, but she could tell he didn’t believe her. Or rather, he probably believed that she believed what she was saying, but thought her so-called memories were more along the lines of drug-induced hallucinations shaped by her penchant for spy movies that always included at least one double agent and a couple of twists.

Then again, she thought with a start, what if he was right? She felt terrible that she’d been paying more attention to Fairfax’s butt than to her job and the potential security risks, opening the way for Jerry’s murder. What if her subconscious had taken that guilt and woven a fantasy that cast the object of her attraction as a hero, making her lapse, if not acceptable, then at least less reprehensible?

“Maybe I’m not remembering correctly,” she said after a moment.

“The info about Rickey Charles fits,” Tucker said, though he still sounded pretty dubious. “He was found dead in his holding cell this morning.”

Chelsea sat up so fast her head spun. “He what?”

Tucker winced. “I should’ve phrased that better. Sorry, I went into cop-talking-to-ME mode and forgot you knew him.”

“What did he—” Chelsea broke off, not sure how she was supposed to feel. She hadn’t cared for Rickey and couldn’t forgive that he’d apparently made some sort of deal with the escapees, but she wouldn’t have wished him dead under any circumstance.

“It was murder concocted to look like a suicide,” Tucker said succinctly. “I guess, based on what you just told me about what the driver said to you out on the loading dock, that Rickey was supposed to have signed off on the bodies, delaying discovery of the switch. When he turned up in the holding cell instead, someone working for al-Jihad killed him either to punish him or to shut him up, or both.”

Which would mean that someone in the PD—or at least someone with access to the overnight holding cells—was on the terrorists’ payroll, Chelsea thought. She didn’t say it aloud, though, because the possibility was too awful to speak.

Tucker nodded, though. “Yeah. Big problem. That’s why I’m here.”

He hadn’t stayed with her strictly to keep her company, she realized. He’d stayed because the BCCPD had figured it might not be a coincidence that the ME who’d missed his shift that morning had wound up dead. Tucker’s bosses—and her own—thought she might be at risk, that whoever had killed Rickey might go after her next, looking to silence her before she told the cops anything that might help lead them to the escapees.

Except she didn’t know anything that would help, did she?

“Don’t worry,” Tucker said, correctly interpreting her fears. “We’re keeping the story as quiet as possible, and letting the media think you’re dead, too. If the escapees are following the news, they have no reason to think you’re alive.”

Unless Fairfax had told them for some reason. But why would he, when he’d been the one to save her?

She didn’t know who to trust, or what to believe, and the confusion made her head spin.

She sank back against the thin hospital pillow, noticing for the first time that she was wearing nothing but a hospital johnnie and a layer of bedclothes. “Can I—” she faltered as the world she knew seemed to skew beneath her, tilting precariously. “Can I get dressed and get out of here?”

His expression went sympathetic. “Yeah, you’re cleared…medically, anyway. Since your purse was still at the office, Sara used your key to grab clothes, shoes and a jacket for you, along with a few toiletries.” He gestured. “They’re in the bathroom, along with your purse. The keys are in it.”

He didn’t offer to help her, which told her it was a test: if she couldn’t make it to the bathroom and get herself dressed unassisted, she was staying in the hospital until she could.

She’d been telling the truth, though. She felt fantastic—physically, anyway—and was able to make it to the small restroom and get dressed without any trouble.

In the midst of pulling on her shirt, she paused and frowned in confusion when she saw that there wasn’t any discernible mark where the injection had gone into her arm. He’d jammed the tip of that ampoule in hard enough that it should’ve left a mark. Did that mean it hadn’t happened the way she remembered?

It didn’t take too many minutes of staring at her own reflection in the mirror for her to conclude that she didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to figure it out standing in a hospital bathroom. She emerged to find Tucker waiting for her, with his cell phone pressed to his ear.

“You shouldn’t be on that thing in here,” she said automatically, her med-school training kicking in even though the actual risk was relatively minor.

“I’m off,” he said, flipping the phone shut and dropping it in his pocket. “You ready to go?” He indicated the door with a sweep of his hand.

He didn’t offer to let her in on the phone call that’d been so important he’d broken hospital rules to take it, but his eyes suggested it was something about her, or the escapees.

Have you caught them? she wanted to ask, but didn’t because she feared it would come out sounding as though she hoped the men were still at large. Not that she did—her terrifying ordeal had more than convinced her that al-Jihad, Muhammad Feyd and Lee Mawadi were monsters who didn’t even deserve the benefit of an autopsy.

“The man who helped me, or who I think helped me, anyway…that was Jonah Fairfax, right?” she couldn’t help asking.

She hadn’t wanted to say too much about him, lest Tucker read too much into her words. But it wasn’t like she was going to be able to ask anyone else either.

After a long moment, he inclined his head. “Yeah. The description fits.”

“Have they been caught yet?”

“No.” Tucker paused. “Maybe it’d be better for you to stay in the hospital a little longer, for observation.”

Translation: I think you should go upstairs to the psych ward and have a nice chat with a professional about the definition of Stockholm syndrome.

“That’s not necessary,” she said quickly. “I’m feeling fine. Hungry, but otherwise fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, summoning a smile. “I’m not confused about Fairfax, and I’m ready to do the debriefing thing. I figure I might as well get it over with.” She took a deep breath and beat back her nerves. “I promise I’ll hold it together.”

And she did. She held it together while they returned to the BCCPD by way of a breakfast sandwich to soothe her hunger pangs. Once she was at the PD, she held it together through several more rounds of questioning. The worst of it came from Romo Sampson, a dark-haired, dark-eyed suit from the Internal Affairs Department, but she stayed strong and answered his questions fully on everything except the way her heart had bumped when she first saw Fairfax. That much she kept to herself.

After the questioning, Chelsea also held it together—more or less—through a tearful reunion with Sara and her other coworkers, and a trip down to the morgue to say goodbye to Jerry. She held it together through a phone call to Jerry’s devastated girlfriend, and then through calls to her own parents and sister. Each person she spoke to or saw was cautioned to pretend they hadn’t heard from her if asked; her survival was being kept very quiet because the escapees—three of them, anyway—thought she was dead. The fourth was still an enigma.

Once she was off the phone with her mother, Chelsea thought about calling her father, but didn’t. Despite her mother’s best efforts to keep the family together, her parents had divorced when she was in her early teens. Her boat-captain father, a charismatic man with a wandering heart, had called and visited a few times a year for the first few years after the divorce, but that had dwindled and eventually stopped. Last Chelsea had heard, he was living with a woman twenty years his junior, running charters off the Florida Keys. He didn’t have a TV, and if he happened to hear about the escape, he probably wouldn’t even remember she lived in Bear Claw.

Besides, she figured he’d lost the right to worry about her, in the process teaching her a valuable lesson that had only been reinforced in the years since: men who seemed larger than life usually cared more about that life than they did the people around them.

Chelsea, on the other hand, cared very deeply about her mother and sister, and the friends who had become her extended family in Bear Claw.

Just because she cared, though, didn’t mean she was going to let them run her life; she stood her ground when it was time for her to go home, and each of her friends had a different theory on where she should stay, none of the answers being “at home,” which was where she wanted to be.

Mindful that Tucker was still watching her for signs of collapse—or Stockholm syndrome—she held it together through the arguments that ensued when she insisted on going home that night, and refused to let any of her friends stay over.

She loved them, she really did, but her self-control was starting to wear seriously thin. She just wanted some alone time, some space to fall apart. Permission to be a wimp.

“Seriously,” Sara persisted, “I don’t mind.”

You might not, but I do, Chelsea thought, her temper starting to fray. She just wanted to go home and cry. “I’ll be fine,” she said, pulling on her coat. “I’ll be under police protection, for heaven’s sake.” Tucker had arranged to have a patrol car watch from out front of her place, just in case. She shook her head and said, “Honestly, what can you do that the cops can’t?” Like her, Sara was an ME. They didn’t carry guns, didn’t live in the line of fire.

Not usually, anyway.

“I’ll listen if you want to talk,” Sara said softly, quick hurt flashing in her eyes.

“I’m all talked out,” Chelsea said firmly. But she leaned forward and pressed her cheek to Sara’s. “I’ll call you if that changes, I promise.”

She held her spine straight as she marched out of the ME’s office, and made herself stay strong as she drove home in her cute little VW Bug, hyperaware of the Crown Vic following close behind her, carrying the surveillance team.

After an uneventful commute, made unusual only by the fact that she couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing some mention of the jailbreak and her own supposed death, she pulled her cherry-red Bug into her driveway.

The small, cottagelike house faced a side road and had large-lot neighbors on either side, with a finger of Bear Claw Canyon State Park stretching across her back boundary. The rent was on the high side, but she liked the feeling of space and isolation. At least she usually liked it. Given the events of the day, she wondered whether she might’ve been better off in a hotel for the night.

No, she decided. She wanted to be in her own space, surrounded by familiar things. Besides, she’d be safe. The cops would see to it.

The Crown Vic pulled in behind her car and two officers got out; one stayed with her while the other went into the house first and looked around to make sure she was safe and alone.

Wrapping her arms around herself, she waited, shivering slightly even though the car’s heater was going full blast. Then again, why shouldn’t she shiver? She’d been kidnapped and nearly killed, and had gotten away only by the grace of God and the unexpected help she’d received from the fourth escapee. Or so she thought.

Fairfax was as much of a monster as the others he’d been caged with, Tucker had told her pointedly earlier in the day, and Chelsea knew he was right. She also knew he’d been warning her not to romanticize, as though he’d picked up on the fact that she kept thinking about the man who’d protected her, even though she knew she shouldn’t.

Fairfax’s angular face was fixed in her mind, and the sound of his voice reverberated in her bones. She couldn’t help thinking that if they’d met under different circumstances she would’ve found him handsome. Heck, even under the current circumstances, she was having serious trouble reconciling the facts with her perception of the man.

Then again, she’d never had very good instincts when it came to guys. Or rather, her instincts were okay; she just tended to ignore them. She’d seen what her mother had gone through with her father. And she’d been through a couple of near-miss relationships that had only reconfirmed that she needed to find herself a guy who might not be all that exciting, but was loyal and relationship-focused.

Yet here she was, practically fantasizing about an escaped double murderer. Maybe she should be checking out the hospital’s psych ward.

The cop who’d stood guard by her car knocked on the window, making Chelsea jump.

“Sorry,” he said when she opened the door, “didn’t mean to startle you.”

She shook her head. “It’s not your fault. I was spacing out.” She glanced at the front door, and saw his partner waiting there. “The house is all clear?”

“I’ll walk you up.” He escorted her to the front door, where he and his partner turned down her offers of coffee, food or a restroom, and then left her to return to their vehicle, where they would spend the night, making regular patrols to ensure that the escapees didn’t try to contact her, or worse.

When the cops were gone, Chelsea shut the front door, and locked and deadbolted it for good measure.

Then she turned, leaned back against the panel, and burst into tears.

She’d held it together like she’d promised Tucker she would. Now that she was alone, she gave herself permission to fall apart.

Sinking down until she was sitting on the floor with her spine pressed up against the entryway wall, she cried for Jerry and his girlfriend, and for Rickey, even though he didn’t deserve her tears. She cried for the four dead guards laid out in the morgue, two of whom had been a father and son working together. And she cried for herself—for the fear and confusion of being abducted and then rescued by a man she’d been attracted to, a man who’d been called a monster by people she trusted.

Above all, she cried because when it came down to it, she’d frozen. She hadn’t struggled or fought, had only survived because of a series of events she didn’t understand. She hadn’t saved herself. She’d just curled into a little ball and let bad things happen.

It didn’t matter what 007 or any of the others would’ve done. She’d done nothing.

A long time passed before her tears dried up, but eventually they did.

When that happened she swiped her hands across her eyes and drew a deep breath. “You’re okay,” she told herself. “You’re going to be okay.”

Thinking things might look a little less grim if she ate something—the breakfast sandwich she’d had seemed aeons in the past—she stood and headed for the kitchen.

She was almost there when a man stepped into the kitchen doorway. She saw his silhouette first, big and muscular, then his dark hair, the lines that cut beside his mouth, and piercing blue eyes that seemed to bore into hers. He was wearing tough-looking black cargo pants and heavy boots, along with a thick sweater and scarred leather jacket, rather than the guard’s uniform from before, but she recognized him instantly.

Fairfax.

Heart jolting into her throat, Chelsea screamed. At least she tried to. But he moved too quickly, getting an arm across her collarbones and pressing lightly on her throat while he clapped a hand across her mouth, holding her body motionless as effectively as he trapped the scream in her lungs.

“Don’t,” he ordered. “I won’t hurt you.”

Rationality said she should fight, but she hesitated instead, still caught up inside her own skull, torn between attraction and logic, between gratitude and fear.

When she stilled, his grip loosened a fraction. “Good girl,” he said, which was patronizing yet somehow soothed her, for reasons she promised herself she’d analyze later. “You going to behave if I let you go?”

She nodded as her pulse hammered in her veins.

“Okay. Here goes.” He let his hands fall away, and stepped back.

Chelsea bolted for the front door, screaming, “Help! Help me!”

She heard his bitter curse, heard his footsteps too close behind as she grabbed the knob and twisted. Before she could get the door open, she found herself hanging midair, suspended by her belt and the back of her shirt.

“Damn it.” He half hauled, half carried her into the living room, where he tossed her on the sofa. Then he loomed over her, cold blue eyes snapping with temper. “I said I’m not going to hurt you. Settle down!”

She glared back. “Why should I do anything you say?”

“I—” He snapped his jaw shut and exhaled. “Because you owe me one. I saved your life.”

Of all the things for her to feel at that moment, disappointment probably wasn’t the most logical. But that was what flooded through her, alongside a flare of anger and disillusionment at the realization that he was no different from the others, after all. He hadn’t saved her because she’d aroused some soft emotion in him. He’d saved her so he could use her.

“You want me to help you escape,” she said, voice flat with anger.

“I managed that one on my own, thanks.”

“Then what—” She thought of Rickey’s body and shuddered. “You’re going to kill me after all.”

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