Deadly Christmas Secrets Page 5

  She eased the truck off the driveway and parked it in tangled weeds, waiting as a police officer approached. He motioned for her to roll down the window, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat.

  “Ma’am, you’re going to have to turn around,” he said.

  “I’m here for a friend of mine,” she responded. “Logan Fitzgerald?”

  “You’re going to have to turn around,” he repeated. “No entry to the property by anyone. It’s a crime scene.”

  “I know, but—”

  “That’s fine, officer,” Stella cut in. “Mind if we wait at the mouth of the driveway? Logan was being questioned by Sheriff Hunter, but he’s finished now, and we’d like to get him home.”

  The officer eyed Stella for a moment, then nodded. “Fine by me, but if I catch either of you out of the vehicle, I’ll arrest you.”

  “No worries. I’m in no mood to spend the night in jail,” Stella responded.

  That seemed to satisfy the officer.

  He walked back to his car, climbed into the vehicle.

  “I’m thinking you’d better do what he said,” Stella said. “My boss gets any inkling that we’re bothering the local PD, and he won’t be happy.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to lose your job because of my actions,” Harper replied as she backed toward the end of the driveway.

  Stella laughed. “Please. Chance wouldn’t fire me. He’s not that kind of guy. He would lecture me and assign me to desk duty for a month. A fate way worse than being fired, if you ask me.” She pulled out her cell phone and texted something. “That should get Logan moving. He’s not going to like that we’re just sitting here waiting for trouble to find us.”

  “There are police everywhere,” Harper pointed out. She could see them—flashlights moving along the ground, shadowy forms bobbing through the lingering snow.

  “And?”

  “Whoever killed that guy would be a fool to try something this close to all these officers.”

  “I’d say most criminals are fools. Smart, but fools nonetheless. They think they’re too intelligent to be caught, too savvy to ever be found out. So they make mistakes. Stupid ones. Like trying to kill a woman who’s sitting a few hundred yards from a police cruiser.”

  “You’re assuming whoever did it is still around.”

  “Statistically speaking, the likelihood that the perp is hanging around watching all the action is pretty high.”

  Not a pleasant thought.

  Harper tried to tell herself that Stella was wrong, that the likelihood was slim to none, but Stella had been at this kind of work for a lot longer than Harper had been shaping clay. It was obvious from the way she moved, the way she spoke, her gritty rough edge that had just a bit of softness beneath it.

  Stella knew what she was talking about, and maybe the criminal wasn’t the only one who was a fool. Harper had been on her own for a long time. She wasn’t used to taking other people’s advice. She wasn’t really used to being around other people.

  She’d been social before, but not eager to have the kind of close and intimate relationships most people longed for. She’d tried it with Daniel, because it had seemed like the thing to do, and because he’d been charming and funny and made her feel like a million bucks.

  When that hadn’t worked out, she’d been more upset with herself than heartbroken.

  She knew how bad her family was at relationships.

  She knew how easily fooled they were, how easily taken advantage of, and so she’d made it her goal to be dependent on no one but herself. She hadn’t wanted to end up like her mother—wandering from one bad relationship to another. She hadn’t wanted to be like Lydia—settling for someone because she was afraid of having no one, of having to do it all alone, provide for everything herself.

  She’d wanted something different from that, and she’d gotten it.

  Only it hadn’t been quite as wonderful as she’d thought it would be. It hadn’t been nearly as fulfilling as she’d thought it should be. Maybe if Lydia hadn’t died, Harper would have changed her tune, made a few deep connections, spent a little more time building relationships and friendships.

  She would have liked to believe that was what would have happened. She’d realized after her sister’s death that those things were a lot more important than she’d thought.

  It would have helped to have them when she’d been going through the murder investigation. When she’d been the prime suspect in her sister’s and niece’s murders.

  She shuddered, pulling her coat a little tighter.

  She had the heat turned up high. It wasn’t cold in the truck cab, but she was cold, all the memories that she’d tucked away, all the things she tried really hard not to think about suddenly right there at the forefront of her mind.

  Something tapped on her window, near her head, and she screamed so loudly, she thought the truck shook with it. Then she realized she was the one shaking.

  She turned, expecting...

  She didn’t know what.

  A masked killer, maybe?

  A bogeyman come to life?

  Instead, she met Logan’s eyes. They were black in the darkness, his hair wet from snow. A few flakes shone white against his hair and coat.

  “You going to let me in?” he asked, tapping again.

  “Right. Sure,” she said, her voice trembling as she unlocked the door and scooted to the center of the seat.

  Frigid air filled the truck as he climbed in beside her. He looked tired, and he looked angry.

  He also looked...good.

  She glanced away, uncomfortable with the direction of her thoughts.

  She had enough to worry about without adding someone like Logan to the mix.

  “How’d everything go?” Stella asked, her voice breaking through the tension.

  “About as well as can be expected when the prime suspect is dead,” Logan muttered.

  “No need to be waspish,” Stella replied.

  “Waspish?” Logan laughed, the sound gruff and a little hard. “Who uses that word?”

  “I do,” Stella responded. “Now, how about you tell me what the police found? Evidence? Any clue as to who is responsible?”

  “If they’d found that, I wouldn’t be sitting in this truck. I’d be out looking for the guy.”

  “So we’re right back where we were a few hours ago,” Stella murmured. “No suspects and no working theory as to who might be responsible.”

  “Exactly. Although, if I had to guess, I’d say the place we should be looking is in DC.”

  “You think Gabe is involved?” Harper asked, her throat so dry, she barely got the words out.

  She didn’t want to believe her brother-in-law had killed her sister, but she’d never been able to discount the idea. There’d always been a tiny seed of suspicion. Gabe wasn’t afraid to shove people out of his way to achieve his goals. He was aggressive, determined and decisive. If he wanted something, he went after it.

  He’d wanted freedom from his marriage.

  At least, that was what Lydia had told Harper a few weeks before she’d died—Gabe asked for a divorce. He said he can’t do us anymore.

  She’d laughed when she’d said it, as if the entire thing were a joke. Typical Lydia. She’d never been able to believe that someone could be done with her. She certainly hadn’t been done with Gabe. She’d liked his money, his community status, his beautiful home, and she’d had no intention of ever giving that up. Had that gotten her killed?

  Had Gabe been desperate enough, frustrated enough, done enough to kill her?

  FIVE

  Bad to worse.

  That was the way things had gone, and Logan wasn’t happy about it.

  He also wasn’t happy about the fact that Harper had left the r
elative safety of her cabin to give him a ride back to her place. A ride he hadn’t needed or wanted. A man was dead. Someone had killed him. The person was still at large. It seemed to Logan that the safe thing to do, the smart thing, would have been for Harper to stay behind closed and locked doors until the murderer was found.

  Obviously Harper had other ideas.

  He glanced at her. She had a beautiful face, an austere profile and a will of steel. The last might be a problem when it came to keeping her safe.

  She leaned forward, opening the truck’s vents so more warm air poured out. He caught a hint of the outdoors and of something flowery and feminine. That sweet and delicate scent surprised him, because Harper seemed anything but sweet or delicate. She seemed tough and determined, her wiry frame built for running or hiking or lifting buckets of clay and carrying them through the woods.

  “You need to warm up,” she murmured, shifting in her seat and grabbing a blanket from the truck’s extended cab. “A person can get hypothermia quickly out here. Even when the temperature is above freezing.”

  She tossed the blanket around his shoulders, tugging it into place, her knuckles brushing the underside of his jaw. He felt rough skin and calluses and caught a hint of that scent again.

  “I’m fine.” He nudged her hands away, ignoring Stella’s smirk. “But you might not be if the murderer decides to take a shot at us on the way back to your place.”

  “I didn’t realize there was a murderer when I decided to come out here,” she said, a hint of discomfort in her voice. Her gaze jumped from Logan to the window beside him, the darkness beyond it, the night sprinkled with glittering snowflakes. He could almost see her mind working, calculating the risk, estimating the possibility of someone lurking in the shadows, ready to strike. “If I had,” she continued, “I probably would have come anyway. I’m a little stubborn like that,” she admitted, and something about the way she said it made him smile.

  “Admitting it is the first step in recovery,” he replied, and she laughed, the shaky sound filling the truck cab.

  “Recovery would imply I had a problem that needed to be fixed,” she said. “But stubbornness is a strength when you live out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “You’re a braver woman than I am,” Stella cut in. “There’s no way that I’d live like you do.”

  She spoke casually, but Logan knew she had an agenda. Stella usually did.

  “It’s not that scary out here,” Harper said, fiddling with the heating vent again. Opening it. Closing it. Opening it.

  He touched her hand, stilling the almost frantic movement.

  “Depends on your definition of scary,” Stella said breezily. “Your cabin is nice, but it’s not effective when it comes to staying safe. Too small, for one thing. If someone decided to set it on fire like what happened to that barn, your place would go up in minutes. Then there are the doors and windows. How about we discuss how flimsy they are?”

  There it was. Stella’s agenda. She wanted Harper out of the cabin and in a safer location. She could join the club. Logan wanted the same thing.

  “How about we don’t?” Harper replied, but Stella was on a roll. She’d assessed the situation, and she’d come up with a plan to deal with it.

  “I could easily kick the front door in. One well-placed foot, and the door would be lying on the floor while you stood there struggling to load your shotgun.”

  “I have a handgun in my room,” Harper said, her voice stiff and tight.

  “Let me guess,” Stella responded. “It’s locked in a box. The clip is locked in a separate box in the office or down in the living room or in one of the kitchen cabinets.”

  Harper didn’t say a word.

  Obviously, Stella had hit the nail on the head with that one.

  “Do you know how to use the handgun?” Logan asked as he put the truck in drive and pulled onto the slushy road.

  “Yes,” she muttered. “I know how to use the handgun. I also know how to load the shotgun very quickly. If it’s necessary, I can hit a target at twenty yards.”

  “I’d like to see that,” Stella scoffed. She had the least amount of skill with firearms on a team filled with former military and former law enforcement. She was the lone wolf, the only female. She’d earned her right to be there, though. She was a nurse, had trained as a medic in the navy. She knew how to triage patients, how to keep them alive until help arrived. She could hit a moving target if she had to, but there wasn’t a person on the team who didn’t know how much she’d have hated that.

  “And I’d like to see you kick my front door in with one well-placed foot,” Harper retorted.

  Stella laughed, pulling out her cell phone and texting someone. Their boss wasn’t happy with the newest development. He’d been expecting trouble, but Logan didn’t think he’d been expecting this much of it.

  “You contacting Chance?” he asked, and she snorted.

  “Please! The boss has sent me twenty texts asking for updates. I answered one of them.”

  Great. Those two were on the outs. Again.

  They’d dated for about five seconds a few years back, something that had surprised everyone on the team. Logan suspected that it had surprised Stella, because she’d broken things off pretty quickly.

  Fear was a powerful motivator, and there’d been plenty of discussion around the office about just how afraid she was. She’d watched her husband die, and that seemed to affect every relationship she had.

  Her business. Logan had asked her about it once and she’d nearly cut him off at the knees.

  Not a topic he’d broach again. Not because he was afraid of her, but because he was afraid for her. It was her Achilles’ heel, and there were times when he wondered if it was going to destroy her.

  “Chance will be fit to be tied,” he responded, keeping his tone neutral. He didn’t like the games Stella played, but he liked her. He also liked Chance. As long as they were civil to each other, he kept his mouth shut.

  “Chance is going to be just fine. Knowing him, he’s already got a few guys lined up to come out here and help us. Plus, I’m filling Jackson in on things. He’ll pass the information to Chance. They’re brothers after all. Nearly attached at the hip.”

  “Not even close, and you know it. Jackson is as likely to tell Chance things as you are.”

  She shrugged, fluffing her hair as if she couldn’t have cared less.

  “Don’t play games, Stella,” he finally said, because he wasn’t going to get in the middle of his boss and his coworker, but he couldn’t let either of them slow down progress on a case.

  “No games, Logan,” she said wearily. “I’m just avoiding conflict. Chance and I are like oil and water. We don’t mix well, so it’s best to keep us separate. He knows it, and he’s not going to blow a gasket because I pass information on to Jackson. He’s probably already working on getting backup out here, and he’s probably already in discussion with the local PD and the DC police.”

  She glanced at her phone. “Jackson says Chance is sending someone out to escort us back to DC. I told you that Chance would be on top of things.”

  Logan didn’t miss the note of admiration in her voice.

  She could say what she wanted, act any way she wanted, but there was no doubt that she had a lot of respect for their boss.

  He didn’t point it out.

  She’d have denied it, and it wasn’t his business or his right to argue with her version of the truth.

  “Did Chance say who’s coming?”

  “No. Doesn’t matter. Everyone on the team will be an asset.”

  “What’s the ETA?” he asked.

  “Four hours.” She glanced at her watch. “Should be here a little after midnight.”

  “They have a safe house ready?” he asked, and Harper tensed.

&n
bsp; “I hope,” she said quietly, “that you’re not thinking I’m going into hiding.”

  “What we’re thinking,” he responded, turning onto the gravel road that led to her cabin, “is that you want to stay alive.”

  “Most people do,” she retorted.

  “You’re not going to do it out here. Not with someone gunning for you. We can protect you from a direct threat—keep intruders out of the house and away from you—but that’s not going to do much good if someone tosses a bomb at the cabin or sets fire to the woods surrounding it.”

  “That would be a major effort in this kind of weather,” she said, but the defiance was gone from her voice.

  “And it didn’t take a major effort to have someone follow Logan to your place?” Stella asked. “To send them gunning for you? It didn’t take a major effort to send one of them back to finish the job?”

  “You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Harper murmured. “It’s possible—”

  “Anything is possible,” he cut in. “But that doesn’t make it probable or even reasonable. You’ve been living out here for four years, right?”

  “I’m sure that you know I have,” she responded, a twinge of bitterness in her voice. “A company like yours doesn’t just walk into something unprepared.”

  “True,” he agreed. “We do our homework. You’ve been living out here for four years without incident. You attend Snowy Vista Community Church every Sunday, and everyone there likes you.”

  “What’d you do? Spend time in town and ask people about me?” she demanded.

  “I spent the night at Dora’s place. She’s a wealth of information.”

  “She’s the church pianist,” Harper said. “And she knows everything she needs to know about everyone in town. Or she thinks she does.”

  “That was the impression I got.” He’d also gotten the impression that Dora was a certified cat lady. A half dozen kittens had been sitting in a basket in his room, and he’d seen another five or six full-grown cats scurrying for cover every time he walked through the hallway.