Lady Killer. Kathleen Creighton
room that had twin-size beds before—in the Cactus Country Inn. He punched a number on his cell phone speed dial and while he listened to it ring, imagined it ringing in a room far away, in South Carolina, on the shores of a small lake. It rang four times before a machine picked up.
“Hello. You’ve reached Sam and Cory’s place. We’re both away from home right now. Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you.…”
He disconnected and sat for a moment with the phone in his hand, thinking. Then he pulled the laptop that lay open on the bed closer to him, found the page he was looking for, scrolled down the list of phone numbers on it until he came to the one he wanted. Dialed it.
Several minutes and several different numbers later, he’d learned several things. One, his employer was on assignment in the Sudan, and there was no way in hell to reach him. Two, his employer’s wife was also on assignment; only God—and the CIA—knew where.
Three, he was on his own.
Holt Kincaid didn’t often feel frustrated, but he did now. Here he’d finally managed to get a line on one of his client’s missing twin sisters, and there wasn’t anybody he could break the news to.
News that wasn’t good.
And he was very much afraid that if he waited for the clients to return from their various assignments, it might be too late. So, he hesitated for another second, maybe, then scrolled on down to the bottom of the list of phone numbers on his computer screen, to the first one listed under the heading In Case of Emergency. He was pretty sure Sam and Cory would agree that finding the subject of their years-long search about to be locked up for murder would qualify as an emergency.
He punched the number into his cell phone and hit the call button.
Tony Whitehall was sitting on his mother’s patio, watching his numerous nieces and nephews engaged in mayhem disguised as a game of touch football. The game was probably more fraught with violence than it might have been, due to the fact that it was being played on hard bare dirt, since his mother, being more than half Apache and a native not only of America but the great desert Southwest, had better sense than to try to get a lawn to grow on it. His mother did like flowers, though, which she grew in pots near her front doorsteps, where she could water them with a plastic gallon jug. The rest of her landscaping consisted mostly of native plants—junipers and ocotillos and barrel cactus and tamarisks for windbreaks and some stubborn cottonwoods and willows along the creek bed, where for two months or so in the spring a trickle of water actually flowed.
For shade, there was the colorful striped fabric of the umbrellas and awnings, which mostly covered the patio that Tony was enjoying, along with a cold beer, when his cell phone rang. That surprised him, first, because cell phone service out here in the wilds of Arizona wasn’t all that reliable, and second, because most of the people who had his private cell number were already here.
He fumbled around and managed to get the phone out of his pocket and opened up and the right button pushed before the thing went to voice mail. “Yeah,” he said, then remembered to add, “Uh…Tony Whitehall.”
Then he had to stick a finger in his ear to hear the person on the other end, because a gaggle of his sisters were at that moment gathered around their mother on the other side of the patio and were exhorting her loudly and passionately about losing some weight. This was an argument they were bound to lose, since Rosetta Whitehall was quite content with herself just as she was and was countering her daughters’ concerns as she always did by pointing out certain facts: “The women in my family have always been big, and we’ve always been happy, and we make our men happy, too!”
At the moment, Tony was just happy to have his sisters’ attention focused for a few minutes on something else besides him and his persistent state of bachelorhood. The poking and prying and teasing and nagging was something he’d been putting up with since he’d reached the age of puberty, but lately it had begun to grate on his nerves.
The voice in his ear was still an unintelligible mumble, so he said, “Hold on, I can’t hear you,” and got up and walked across the patio and made his way around the corner of the house, where he’d be out of vocal range of both the football game and the sisters. “Yeah…okay. So who did you say this is?”
“Sorry. My name is Holt Kincaid. I’m a private investigator. I’m working for a friend of yours—Cory Pearson—tracking down his brothers and sisters, who got separated from him when he was a kid.”
“Oh yeah…yeah, I knew about that. Found his brothers already, I heard. Fantastic. That’s great. So why are you—”
“Cory gave me your name and number, told me to call you if anything came up while he was on assignment and I couldn’t reach either him or Sam—his wife. So…they’re both on assignment, and…something’s come up. So, I’m calling.”
“Wow. So…what? You find the baby sisters?”
“Well, yeah, one of them, but—”
“Hey, no kidding? That’s great, man!”
“Yeah, well, maybe not. There’s…a problem.”
“Oh, yeah? What kind of problem?”
“It’s a little complicated to explain over the phone, and this is a terrible connection, anyway. How fast can you get to Colton, Texas?”
Gazing off across the dirt yard to where the football game was still in noisy progress, Tony could hear that the voices of his sisters around the corner on the patio had died to a frustrated mutter. Which meant they’d be turning their attention back to him the minute he showed his face again.
“Colton—whereabouts in Texas is that?”
“Uh…roughly southwest of Austin and northeast of nowhere. Hill Country.”
“Okay, how’s about tonight? Say around dinnertime.”
“What? Where in hell are you?”
“At the moment I’m in Arizona, at my mom’s. It’s her birthday. Talk about northeast of nowhere. Otherwise I’d be there sooner.”
“Are you crazy? That’s gotta be eight or nine hundred miles.”
“What? You think I’m gonna drive it? Across West Texas? Now, that would be crazy. Hey, do me a favor, okay? Check and see if this town you’re in has a general-aviation airfield. Failing that, any kind of level airstrip %h; piece of road—hell, even a cow pasture without too many rocks.”
“I can tell you right now, that’s not gonna happen,” the voice on the other end of the phone said dryly. “But I’ll look into the airfield and get back to you.”
“Cool. I’m on my way.”
Tony disconnected the phone and stuck it back in his pocket, then took a breath and summoned the courage to go and break the news to his mother that he was going to be leaving her birthday party a little sooner than expected.
Brooke’s lawyer was an old-school Texan, a grandfatherly sort named Sam Houston Henderson, from her father’s old law firm in Austin. He drove her home after the bail hearing and left her surrounded by a welcoming committee consisting of Daniel; Pastor Steven Farley and his wife, Myra; Rocky and Isabel Miranda, her neighbors from across the road who’d been looking after the animals in her absence; and of course, Hilda, who almost knocked them all flat in her exuberant joy at having the missing members of her “flock” all together and back under her protection again. Brooke was glad to be back, too, of course, but her relief was tempered by what the lawyer had told her in the car on the way home.
“Now, Brooke, honey, you know just because the judge granted you bail doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods on this thing. You got bail because you’ve got sole responsibility for your boy and your animals, and because pretty much everything you own is tied up in your place and in that trust your daddy set up for you. So it’s not likely you’d be goin’ anywhere. And it’s also not likely you’d be a further danger to society,