A Fortune's Children's Christmas (20 page)

And he liked that about her. There was something about a gutsy woman that he’d always found appealing. But how could he help her? He had his hands full
just trying to get Fortune Construction off the ground. There were times in the past two months when he still didn’t know if Kate had blessed him or cursed him when she’d bought the failing company, changed the name and handed it over to him to run. But come hell or high water, he was going to make it work. That meant keeping his nose to the grindstone and making sure his crew did the same.

They were half finished with a fast-food restaurant on the eastern edge of the reservation, and just yesterday, he learned he’d gotten the bid for a new clinic in Cheyenne. He’d bid both projects just barely over cost because he needed the business to reestablish the company’s reputation, and that meant there was no room for error. Or time to put either project on hold. Deadlines were tight, and both projects were too important to the future of the company to leave in the hands of a foreman while he took off to look for Laura Windsong.

But even as he opened his mouth to tell Naomi that he couldn’t do it, he knew he couldn’t let her go off by herself to look for her daughter. She was just angry enough, just desperate enough, to try it, and if she wasn’t careful, she could end up in real trouble. Most of the county was still unsettled and wild, and even though her heritage appeared to be the same as his own, Naomi Windsong looked like a city girl who had never roughed it a day in her life. She’d be in over her head within the first hour. And then there was James Barker himself. Any man who would kidnap
his own a child just to get back at her mother was capable of anything.

And the bastard wasn’t going to get away with it. He wouldn’t let him. He’d had a knack for tracking ever since he was a kid, a sixth sense that never failed him. In his travels over the years, he’d volunteered his services whenever anyone was lost. If James Barker was out there, he’d find him.

“You don’t have to take off on your own,” he told her grimly. “Just give me time to line someone up to take over for me here, and I’ll help you find your daughter.”

L
ight-headed with relief that she’d finally found someone to
do
something, Naomi expected Hunter to talk to the police, then immediately start tracking James from the spot where he’d abandoned his car. Instead, he asked for the name and address of Laura’s day care. Surprised, she frowned. “Why? The police have already talked to Laura’s teacher. She couldn’t tell them anything except that James had taken her.”

“I realize that, but I’d like to talk to her, just the same. That was the last place Laura was seen, so that’s where I start tracking. So what’s the name and address?”

“Little Dear Day Care. It’s at First and Main. But I still don’t see why you want to waste time talking to Sarah Rivers,” she said in growing frustration as she followed him out of his office. “She told the police everything she knows, and the longer you waste time talking to her, the more time James has to get away. Don’t you think you should—”

Stopping in his tracks, he pivoted to face her, his brown eyes razor sharp as they locked with hers. “Let’s get something straight right here, Ms. Windsong. I know you’re sick with worry, and all you want to do is rush right out and find your kid. It’s a natural
instinct, but that’s not the way I operate. I do things my way, at my own pace, or I don’t do them. So if you’ve got a problem with that, then you’d better say so right now, and I’ll give you the name of another tracker who might be able to help you.”

Her gaze clashing with his in a battle of wills, Naomi didn’t doubt for a second that he meant every word. Everything about him was hard as stone—the cut of his jaw, his finely chiseled mouth, his blade of a nose. And then there were his eyes. Brutally direct and confident, they warned her that if she didn’t let him run the show, she was on her own.

And for a span of ten seconds, she hated him for that. Laura was her daughter, damn him!
Hers!
And if he thought she was going to stand around like some meek little woman and hold her tongue while he dragged his feet finding her, he was in for a rude awakening. She would say whatever she liked, do whatever she had to to light a fire under him if that’s what it took to get him to move. And if he didn’t like it, that was just too damn bad.

But if she did, she could start looking for someone else to help her. And Lucas said he was the best.

Frustrated, resenting his dispassion when her nerves were wound tighter than a broken clock spring, she reminded herself that finding Laura was what was important here, not proving a point to Hunter Fortune. If he was as good as Lucas said he was—and she had every reason to believe that he was—then she had to trust him to know what he was doing.

Still, it wasn’t easy for her to back down from a
challenge, and she was less than gracious when she said grudgingly, “I don’t want another tracker. Lucas said you were the best, so do what you have to do. Just find Laura.”

“I wouldn’t have agreed to look for her if I didn’t think I could find her,” he said simply, and had no idea how his quiet confidence reassured her. “Now that we’ve got that settled, let’s head on over to the day care. We’re burning daylight.”

Sarah Rivers, Laura’s day care teacher, was a middle-aged woman with a kind smile and gentle ways, but she was nobody’s fool. “Mr. Barker told me he had Naomi’s permission to take Laura shopping for her birthday, but I didn’t believe him for a second,” she said tartly. “There was just something about the way he was acting. You know…kind of jumpy? He just looked like he was up to no good. That’s why I told him I had to call Naomi first. Then, when I was on the phone, he took her. I’ll never forgive myself for that. I should have known better!”

“Please don’t beat yourself up over this, Sarah,” Naomi told her, giving her a hug. “You had no way of knowing what James was capable of. As well as I know him, I never thought he would do something like this, so don’t blame yourself. You’re not the only one he fooled.”

“What else did you notice about him, Mrs. Rivers?” Hunter asked. “You said he looked like he was up to no good. What do you mean by that? How did he look?”

“Like he was going hunting or something. It was weird. He said he was going shopping, but he was wearing all this outdoor gear. You know—snow boots and a big down parka, the whole nine yards. If he was planning to walk through the mall in that getup, he was going to burn up.”

His gaze shifting to the wide windows of the day care that overlooked the school’s playground, Hunter frowned thoughtfully. The calendar might say March, but winter still appeared to have a firm grip on the countryside. The snow on the ground showed no sign of melting anytime soon, and they hadn’t seen the last of the winter storms. Still, the first faint hints of spring were definitely in the air, and temperatures weren’t nearly as brutal as they had been in January. The only people who went around in the kind of heavy gear Sarah Rivers described were those who planned to spend an extensive amount of time outdoors.

And that wasn’t something you would expect a man to do when he had a three-year-old in tow.

“What about Laura?” he asked. “How was she dressed?”

“In a pair of corduroy overalls and a turtleneck,” Naomi answered for the teacher. “And tennis shoes.”

“What about a jacket? Did Barker take time to put a jacket on her before he rushed out with her?”

Startled, Sarah Rivers gasped softly. “Oh, I don’t see how he could have. There wasn’t time. I’d hardly left the foyer to use the phone in my office before he was racing away. Of course, he could have had some
thing in the car or stopped and bought her something.”

Hunter didn’t comment one way or the other, but he doubted that Barker stopped for anything once he got Laura in his clutches. It would have just been too risky. Considering the way he was dressed and the speed with which he had moved, it didn’t sound like the abduction was a spur-of-the-moment thing but rather something he’d planned for some time, so he’d probably had a stash of clothes for the little girl in his car. The question now was where had Barker taken Laura after he’d abandoned his car. And what did he hope to gain from all this? If he was hoping to convince Naomi that they were made for each other, he couldn’t have picked a worse way to do it.

There was little else that Sarah Rivers could tell them, so after thanking her for her help, they headed out to Elk Canyon and the place where Barker had abandoned his car. Hunter took one look at the snow-covered spot where the car had been nearly concealed behind a rocky outcrop and started to scowl. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.

“This doesn’t smell right,” he muttered to himself as he inspected the area. “Why would Barker drive all the way back into the canyon just to switch vehicles?”

“Maybe because it’s isolated,” Naomi suggested. “Only a few people live back here, so the chances of anyone seeing him had to be pretty slim.”

“True,” he agreed, “the cutoff for the canyon isn’t that far from the day care. But once he grabbed Laura
he had to know that Mrs Rivers would call the police immediately, and that in all likelihood they would cordon off all roads in the area leading out of town. Even if he did change cars, the canyon’s a dead end. He had to go out the same way he came in, and once he did that, the odds were pretty good he was going to run into a roadblock once he hit the main road.”

“So you’re saying if he did switch cars, he should have done it closer to the day care?”

“That’s what I’d have done. The closer the better. Preferably right around the corner.”

“But wouldn’t it be more likely that someone would see him right in town?”

“Possibly. But if I was going to kidnap a kid, I’d have taken that risk. Think about it. You snatch the kid, drive right around the corner to another car, make the switch even as the kidnapping is being reported to the police and head straight for the middle of town. Everyone is expecting you to flee the state—no one’s going to think to look right in town. So you hole up somewhere and wait for things to calm down. Once the authorities figure you’re long gone across country, the roadblocks come down and you drive out of town without anyone even looking twice at you.”

“But James couldn’t have done that since he left his car here and the dragnet would have closed around him by the time he made it back to the main road. So why did he bring Laura to Elk Canyon?”

“I don’t know,” he said flatly. “But I mean to find out.”

The police had impounded James’s car and towed
it back to town after they’d searched the immediate vicinity. Even to the untrained eye, it was obvious the police had gone over the area with a fine-tooth comb. The snow-covered ground was littered with footprints, making it impossible to tell if any of them might have belonged to James Barker or his little girl.

Swearing roundly at the ignorance of men who should have known better, Hunter started at the spot where the car had been parked and slowly began working his way outward in ever-growing circles, looking for something, anything, the police might have missed. A broken branch, a mound of snow that had been inexplicably disturbed, a footprint that hadn’t, miraculously, been covered up by last night’s snowfall. There had to be something—in his gut, he knew it was there. He could feel it.

An icy wind howled down through the canyon, the lonely sound echoing through the pines that stood like sentinels in the snow. Naomi shivered and dug her hands deeper into the pockets of her down jacket, but Hunter hardly noticed. Totally focused on his search, he was a hundred yards from the last footprint left by the police and making his way up the steep side of the mountain when he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye. Stopping in his tracks, he snapped his head around and searched the stand of trees off to his right.

For a second he thought he might have surprised an elk, then he saw it again, a piece of green ribbon caught on the low branch of a fir and swaying in the wind. Forest green and the exact shade of the tree it
was caught on, it blended in so perfectly with the foliage that he never would have seen it if the wind hadn’t set it gently flapping.

When he brought it to Naomi, who’d stayed by the car to make sure she didn’t destroy any evidence, she took one look at it and blanched. “Oh, God,” she whispered, clutching it to her breast. “It’s Laura’s. I tied it in her hair right before I dropped her off at day care yesterday. Where did you find it?”

“Up there,” he said, nodding toward the trees that had concealed him from her once he’d left the road. “The wind’s always swirling in this canyon, and there’s a possibility that if Barker did change cars here, the ribbon could have somehow fallen out of Laura’s hair and got swept up into the trees. Or she was up in the trees for some reason and the ribbon snagged on a branch and pulled free.”

“But there’s no way out of the canyon up there,” she said in alarm. “That only leads up into the mountains. Why would James take her up there?”

Hunter couldn’t tell her that, at least not yet. But the answer was there, somewhere in that canyon. He just had to find it.

Ten minutes later he came across snowmobile tracks fifty yards from where he’d found Laura’s hair ribbon. The tracks should have been buried under yesterday’s snowfall, but the thick tree branches overhead had caught most of that, preserving the tracks. Studying them, Hunter knew there was no way to tell who had made them. The canyon was isolated, but it wasn’t completely deserted, and anyone could have been up
there recently. He didn’t even know if Barker knew how to operate a snowmobile, but his gut told him he did. And his gut was very seldom wrong.

With his mouth pressed flat into a hard, grim line, he made his way back down the side of the mountain to where Naomi patiently waited for him. She took one look at his face and stiffened. “You found something.”

He nodded. “Snowmobile tracks. They cut through the trees and head farther up into the mountains.”

“And you think James made them?”

“If I was a betting man, I’d say, yeah. I think he’s holed up somewhere in a line cabin while you worry yourself sick about your daughter. But then again,” he added, “I don’t know the man. Anybody who goes up into the mountains on his own in the winter damn sure better know what he’s doing, or he’s going to find himself in a hell of a lot of trouble. You think he’s got the skills to make it up there?”

Stricken, she lifted widened eyes to the snowy mountains that seemed to tower threateningly over them. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but snow and trees and wilderness. And somewhere up there, James could be hiding with her baby.

Horrified, she said hoarsely, “He likes to think he’s a survivalist. He read all these books and stuff about living in the wild and used to think that he could do it. But he hasn’t had any training—he doesn’t even know how to build a fire without charcoal and lighter fluid!”

Hunter swore, his narrowed eyes, like hers, trained
on the rugged terrain that rose all around them in deadly majestic splendor. “Then he’s in over his head,” he said coldly. “The mountains don’t like amateurs.”

“But why?” she cried. “Why is he doing this? Why is he putting his own daughter in danger? Doesn’t he realize that they could both die up there and no one would find them until the snow melts?”

“My guess is he’s not even thinking about Laura. His only concern right now is making you sweat. And he’s doing a damn good job of it.”

Naomi couldn’t deny it. Just thinking about Laura out there in the wilderness, possibly without even a decent jacket, was enough to make her want to run screaming into the trees to search for her. She was out there—she could feel her—so close that she could almost reach out and touch her. Did she know that she was coming for her? That she would move heaven and earth if she had to just to get her back? Was that why James was doing this? Laura was just window dressing? Was it really her he wanted to get his hands on and Laura was just the bait?

Appalled at the thought, she started to ask Hunter if he thought she might be right, when she saw him stiffen like a wolf that suddenly caught the scent of its prey. “What is it?” she asked in alarm when he stared at a particular rocky ridge high above them. “What do you see?”