Cold Dawn (6 page)

"I didn't know you could quilt."

"I imagine there are a lot of things you don't know about me," she said. "Winter fest will run all weekend. It's as much for the town as for the guests. Vice President Neal and his family want to come if they can. They were all here two weeks ago."

"So I heard," Nick said.

"They were quite taken with the old sugar shack. They cross-country skied out to it. It's just in the woods across the meadow. It was built around 1900, but it's in great shape. Lauren and I are trying to get it up and running and trees tapped in time for this year's sugaring season."

"Starts soon, doesn't it?"

"As soon as the temperature warms up a bit. We need freezing nights and above-freezing days."

Nick smiled at the prospect of maple sugaring. "Sounds romantic."

She smiled back at him. "It's fun work. I've been trying to do more here at the lodge, but Lauren's in charge of winter fest. I just do what she says."

"The Secret Service doesn't object to the Neals coming?"

"Not enough to stop them, at least not right now."

"Do you believe that all of Lowell Whittaker's contract killers have been accounted for?"

Rose's smile vanished, her eyes distant, cool again. "You get talking about sleigh rides and such, then spring that on me. You're testing my reaction. Nice, Nick."

He shrugged. "What's the answer?"

"The answer is no. No, I don't believe all of Lowell's killers are either dead or in custody. I don't think anyone does. It would be reckless to assume otherwise."

A.J. joined them, giving no indication he noticed the tension between his sister and guest. "I know better than to ask how you are--you'll just say you're fine, no matter what." He pulled out a chair and sat down, but clearly had no intention of lingering. "You can't stay up in that house tonight by yourself. Listen to me, Rose. You can't."

"I feel safe there."

"I'll come up--"

"You can't leave your family, A.J. You know I won't let you do that."

"We'll all come. The kids would love it."

Rose shook her head. "I don't feel unsafe, A.J. If Derek was murdered, his killer had every opportunity to attack me, too."

"Maybe Nick here scared off the killer," her brother said.

Nick picked up his whiskey but didn't drink any. "I don't think anyone was lurking in the woods when I arrived, but it's possible."

A.J. glanced at him but made no comment.

Rose sighed and took a healthy swallow of her martini. "The police will have checked for prints in the snow, tire tracks. If they believe Derek's death wasn't an accident or suicide and I'm in danger, they'll tell me. I don't take undue risks, but I'm not one to panic, either. But tonight," she added, "for your sake, A.J., Ranger and I will stay here at the lodge." She gave her eldest brother a faint smile. "I anticipated this and brought my things."

"You always were the smart one," A.J. said with a grin.

Rose waited for him to leave before she picked up her drink glass. "This means I can have another martini, this time with pomegranate juice." She gave Nick an enigmatic smile. "I like my martinis a little on the sweet side."

The radiator in Nick's room clanked as if just to remind him he was out of his element, on Cameron turf. He didn't have a radiator at home in Beverly Hills.

After dinner, Rose had ventured off to another part of the lodge with Ranger, his dog dishes and a backpack. Nick kicked off his shoes and called Sean. "Where are you?"

"Out by the pool. It's sunny and warm today."

"Go to hell."

"Okay," Sean said. "I'm in my car, stuck in traffic, looking at smog on the horizon."

Nick grinned. "That's better. I had dinner with your sister. She's had to deal with dead bodies in her work. That part she can handle, but this time she knew the victim."

"Training Ranger is repetitive and requires a lot of discipline. She loves it, but the Whittaker place was probably a welcome change of scenery. She's always felt safe in Black Falls."

"Feeling safe's an attitude. Anything can happen anytime, anywhere. How well did you know this guy Derek?"

"Not well."

Curt answer. Nick looked out the window with the full moon casting shadows on the snow. He could make out groomed cross-country ski tracks. Black Falls Lodge seemed less dark and isolated tonight. Maybe he was seeing the nuances Lauren had implied he would if he looked. Or maybe he was experiencing the effects of jet lag, whiskey and Rose Cameron.

"The bar fight last March," he said. "What kinds of insults did Cutshaw and his friends hurl at Hannah?"

"The personal kind," Sean said. "Her mother waited tables at O'Rourke's before her death seven years ago, and Hannah hasn't had it easy, working herself through college, raising her two younger brothers on her own."

"So the insults were all about her?"

"As far as I know."

That left a fair amount of wiggle room, Nick thought.

Sean added, "Hannah hasn't seen Derek since he, Robert Feehan and Brett Griffin stopped by the cafe last March to apologize for their behavior."

"Telling me to back off, Sean?"

His friend sighed heavily, less defensive. "Derek said some fairly nasty things before Bowie O'Rourke intervened and prevented him from saying more."

"He wasn't just talking about Hannah, was he?"

Sean clearly didn't want to answer, but he said, "That's my guess."

Nick contemplated the moonlit landscape. "Hannah knows," he said finally, certain he was right.

"She and Rose have been friends for a long time. Hannah was in Black Falls all last year after Pop's death while I was out here in California." Sean let it go at that. "She's here now. I'll talk to her."

"If anything went on between Derek Cutshaw and Rose, this Bowie character knows, too."

"Bowie was willing to get into a fight and end up on probation to shut Derek up."

"I'll keep that in mind," Nick said.

The comment went right over Sean's head. "Bowie wasn't just defending Hannah's honor, or Rose's if you're right. He has a hot temper. He likes a good fight."

"Used to be a bar was the perfect place for a good fight."

"Now you sound like my father," Sean said, almost amused.

"What about the two guys with Cutshaw that night?"

"Robert Feehan said a few things. Brett Griffin was mostly quiet. They're not local guys. I didn't have anything to do with them after the fight. I doubt A.J. did, either. Elijah was on leave. He headed back the next day."

"Your father?"

"He died a few weeks later. We never talked about the insults. You can ask A.J. He might know."

"You ask him."

"You managed to piss him off already?"

"Scared to," Nick said with a short laugh. He stepped back from the window, feeling his fatigue for the first time since he'd looked at the clock at four-thirty that morning. "Feehan and Cutshaw rented a house for the ski season up by Killington. Griffin's in town--right up the road."

"You've been doing your homework."

Nick figured there was no point beating around the bush. "You and your brothers are in close touch. Maybe think about including Rose, too. Even with you three, she still seems isolated."

"Her choice," Sean said.

"Doesn't matter. Sean, a fire killed this guy today."

"Lowell Whittaker could have turned a kerosene lamp into one of his homemade bombs."

"And investigators missed it?"

"They might not have thought twice about seeing an old lamp in a shed."

"Where did Whittaker learn how to make bombs?"

Sean didn't respond. Lowell Whittaker had placed a crude pipe bomb in Hannah Shay's heap of a car. She narrowly escaped when it exploded, then warned Bowie O'Rourke, who was with Vivian Whittaker at the farmhouse, that they were next.

There was also the bomb Whittaker had used to kill Melanie Kendall, one of his hired assassins in November, as well as the unexplained fire at Myrtle Smith's house in Washington.

Nick sank onto the edge of his four-poster bed, the charm of the room bypassing him. "If Jasper was right, his firebug is still out there. What if he decided to get paid for his work and hooked up with Whittaker?"

"So that's why you're in Vermont," Sean said quietly. "I should have known. It doesn't mean this match-happy idiot killed Derek Cutshaw."

"I show up and someone dies in a fire? That's too much of a coincidence for me."

Nick had observed his friend under stress countless times on the fire line. Sean was levelheaded, committed, careful--not a reckless, glory-seeking yahoo. That didn't work in the wildland fires they fought or the business they were in. It got people killed. Nick was more likely to leap without looking, but he'd learned to rely on his training and experience and to calculate and mitigate his risk-taking nature.

Eliminating risks altogether wasn't possible.

If he thought his presence wasn't a coincidence, the police would be thinking the same thing. Nick had answered their questions and provided them with contact information. They could find him if they wanted to talk to him again.

"Yeah," Sean said finally. "For me, too. I'll talk to Hannah."

He disconnected, and Nick tossed his phone onto the side table.

The radiator again clanked loudly as heat surged into the room.

It'd be a long night. He checked the room service menu. He could order hot cocoa for two and go find Rose's room.

He raked a hand through his hair.

"No, you moron," he muttered. "Are you out of your damn mind?"

No hot cocoa for two, and definitely no finding Rose's room.

Instead Nick stripped to his shorts, dropped onto the sunflower carpet and burned off his energy and frustration with a hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups.

Six

Washington, D.C.

R
yan "Grit" Taylor had dreamed about tupelo honey, which he didn't think was crazy or anything, since that was his family's business. Still, it had been a long time since he'd dreamed about honey, or growing up on the Florida Panhandle. He sat up in his bed in Myrtle Smith's first-floor guest room at her home just off Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.

Less than a year ago, he'd been a Navy SEAL searching for enemy weapon caches in Afghanistan. Now he was waking up under a fluffy peach-colored blanket and watching sunlight stream through lacy shear panels on a tall window overlooking a dormant flower garden.

Myrtle's house was more traditional and girly than Grit would have expected. She'd probably threaten something untoward if she knew what he was thinking, but he hadn't seen her in a few weeks. She was still up in Vermont, bitching about the cold and snow and baking cookies and scones and such. The front of her house--especially her office--had burned in a suspicious fire in November, but the back was in good shape.

Grit went through his routine to put on his prosthesis, a new one, his left leg having adapted and adjusted to the mechanics of prosthetic use. The procedure was automatic now, at least most days. He seldom experienced phantom pain anymore, either. The nerves in his residual limb were learning a new way to communicate to his brain.

Not that he'd forgotten he'd had his left leg amputated below the knee in a remote Afghan mountain pass, after he'd been shot in an ambush.

A Special Forces master sergeant who'd been with him that day was camped out down the hall in Myrtle's second guest room. Elijah Cameron had taken a near-fatal gunshot wound to the femoral artery and nearly bled out. Only his own quick action to tie a belt around his thigh, creating a tourniquet, had saved him. He was now fully recovered.

Grit didn't know why things had worked out the way they did.

He put on his service uniform and headed to the kitchen. Elijah was at the little round table with his size-twelve feet up on the rattan-seated chair across from him as he cradled a flowered mug of coffee. He nodded out the French doors at the patio. "Do you think we ought to fill Myrtle's bird feeders?"

"They're the wrong kind. She's only feeding squirrels with those things." Grit got down another flowered mug and poured himself coffee. The kitchen had dark cherry cabinets and a collection of delicate china teacups and saucers--more flowers--displayed on a shelf. "A badass Washington reporter like Myrtle and look at this place. Reminds me of my grandmother's house by the Apalachicola River. Myrtle even knows what tupelo honey is."

"So do I," Elijah said.

"No, you don't."

"I do. You told me after we were shot up. In the helicopter. White tupelo trees. Bees. Only honey that doesn't crystallize."

"No kidding. I said all that? You remember?"

Elijah shrugged. "It was something else to think about."

Besides dying. Besides the dead.

Grit sat with his coffee. "Moose's widow sent me a picture of the baby. You get one?"

"Yeah." Elijah kept staring at the half-dozen empty feeders. "Cute kid. Ryan Cameron Ferrerra. I didn't even know Moose that well. I couldn't keep him alive. I get why his wife named a baby after you. Not after me."

"We were with him when the Grim Reaper came for him."

Elijah nodded. "We were."

"I remember the two of you talking about why he was called Moose but grew up in Arizona and had never seen a moose, and you this Vermont mountain man."

Grit glanced out the window, no sign of spring yet out in Myrtle's backyard. He half expected Michael "Moose" Ferrerra to be on the patio. Moose had liked to joke about wanting to go back to Southern California and grill hot dogs on his patio. Instead he'd died in Afghanistan, doing the job he'd trained to do, made the commitment to do.

Half to himself, Grit said, "Doesn't seem like almost a year."

"Nope," Elijah said, "seems like ten years."

Grit almost laughed as he turned back to his friend. "What're you up to today?"

"Painting Myrtle's woodwork."

"She won't say so, but she's afraid to come back here. She almost got her butt burned up in her own damn house. If I hadn't come along and saved her, who knows."

"That's not her version," Elijah said.

"She's a reporter. You trust her version?"

"She says she'd have saved herself."

"Ha." But if that was what she needed to believe, Grit didn't care. "It'd help if we knew who set the fire. You know my theory. Myrtle was onto Whittaker's network. He ordered her house torched but he didn't strike the match himself."

"It was an electrical fire. No match."

"I was speaking metaphorically."

Elijah grinned. "'Metaphorically'?"

Grit nodded out the window. "Look, pansies. See them? They must have reseeded. We didn't plant them. I like pansies. They're like little smiling faces."

"Grit, you worry me."

"Projection. You worry yourself. What's on your mind? Jo?"

"Jo's fine. She won't stay here and won't let me stay with her until she gets herself straightened out with her job."

"You two--"

"She's at work now. What about you? You going in?"

"The Pentagon and Admiral Jenkins await. You want me to corral some general, get you a job?"

Elijah dropped his feet to the floor. "No need. I've been called in to do some intel work and analysis."

"Ah. Involve toting a gun?"

"A.J.'s talked about having me back at the lodge."

It wasn't a direct answer, but Elijah would know that. Grit let it go. "With Jo down here working for the Secret Service?"

"She doesn't have to stay in Washington." A twitch of a smile from Elijah. "She and Myrtle could open a quilt shop in Black Falls."

It was a ray of humor from Elijah, anyway. Grit wasn't a contemplative sort. "The dead guy in Vermont's on your mind. He would be even if your sister and this Nick Martini hadn't found him. It was a kerosene lamp fire. Do those happen much up there?"

"We have electricity in Vermont, Grit."

"Was it Lowell Whittaker's lamp?"

"I don't know." That thought clearly didn't sit well with Elijah. "Lowell might not be stupid, but I can see him putting the wrong fuel in the lamp. This guy sees it and figures he doesn't need to waste his flashlight batteries."

"Strike a match, and
poof
."

Elijah stood up. He was tall, but Jo Harper liked to say she could take him in a fair fight. Grit wasn't sure how she defined fair. She was another native Vermonter, in love with Elijah since high school--but he was the bad boy and she was the police chief's daughter. Grit had spent enough time in Vermont in recent months to work out who was who in little Black Falls.

"At least it wasn't the woodstove," Grit said. "I hate woodstoves."

"What's to hate?"

"Wood boxes, smoke, ashes. Every time I ran out of wood in my cabin up there, it was icy and snowy out."

"It's winter, Grit. What did you expect?" Elijah walked over to the sink and rinsed out his mug. "Rose didn't need this."

Grit turned from the pansies and bird feeders. "She picks through rubble for survivors of disasters. She finds lost little kids. She can handle herself."

Elijah gave Grit a hard-assed Cameron look. "You aren't thinking about asking her out, are you?"

"No. She's like a sister to me."

"She
is
my sister."

"That's why you don't see her as one of you."

Elijah frowned. "Grit, that makes no sense."

"It makes perfect sense. What's with this Nick Martini character?"

"I've met him a few times out in California, but I don't know him well. Sean trusts him."

"Vivian Whittaker trusted her husband, and turned out he was running a network of paid assassins out of their study for fun and profit. You'll talk to Sean between coats of paint?"

"Yeah."

Grit started for the utility room, which led to Myrtle's tidy garage. "Say hi to Jo for me. You know, three's a crowd. If I stayed at her apartment in Georgetown and she stayed here--"

"Won't work that way."

Grit didn't pursue the subject, because he had a feeling if he did, Elijah would shoot him--not to kill, just to wing him and shut him up.

Or maybe to kill him, after all. Elijah and Jo had reunited under stressful conditions, and fast. They had stuff to work out. Not the big stuff. The little stuff that could eat away at a relationship.

Not, Grit thought, that he knew from experience. He'd never found anyone he'd been tempted to marry. He wasn't sure now he ever would, not specifically because he was missing his lower left leg--it had more to do with the ambush, watching a friend die. He'd watched himself become more and more distanced from everyone he knew. He realized what was happening, but as can-do as he was, he couldn't seem to do anything about it.

He went out to the garage and got into Myrtle's second car, a 1989 Buick that she'd inherited from some dead uncle in South Carolina. The interior smelled faintly of cigars.

Grit was almost at Massachusetts Avenue when his cell phone jingled next to him on the passenger's seat. He picked up.

"Where are you?"

He recognized the voice of Charlie Neal, the sixteen-year-old son of the vice president of the United States. "Stop sign," Grit said. "I'm driving. I threw caution to the wind and answered the phone. Aren't you in school?"

"On my way. I have a calculus test today. So boring."

"You aren't taking one for your coconspirator cousin Conor, are you?"

"Conor took a test for me. I didn't take one for him. He did terrible."

The two look-alike cousins had done prince-and-the-pauper switches so that Charlie could get out from under his Secret Service detail. They both were in trouble with their parents, the Secret Service, Elijah Cameron and Grit Taylor.

Grit pulled over into the shade. He wasn't that used to driving again, and he'd learned to give any conversation with Charlie and his 180-IQ his full attention. "What do you want, Charlie?"

"Our arsonist is back."

Grit wasn't that surprised by Charlie's comment. Cars zipped past him on the residential street that ran perpendicular to the one he was on. The Buick was warm, the morning temperature almost springlike, but he didn't roll down his window. The car wasn't bugged--he'd checked. The Secret Service was onto his friendship with Charlie Neal. Jo Harper didn't like it, but Charlie's dad, the vice president, had decided Grit was someone the incorrigible teenager would listen to.

A positive influence, Grit thought. Him.

Preston Neal probably hadn't thought Grit and Charlie would be talking pyromaniacs again. Charlie had figured out a network of paid killers was at work back in November, before anyone else. He didn't need such nice-ties as evidence. He remained convinced a serial arsonist had been one of Lowell Whittaker's contract killers and was still on the loose.

"Whose phone are you on?" Grit asked him.

"A friend's."

Defensive, vague. Grit knew better than to try to get specifics out of him. Charlie would be ten questions ahead by now. Being direct with the kid was his only chance. "The Secret Service know?"

"I have to be in class in one minute forty-eight seconds."

"Any candidates for who this firebug is?" Grit asked.

"I have a list of names."

Charlie would. Grit regretted his question. "'Firebug' can mean anything."

"Serial arsonist, then."

"Go take your calculus test."

"I told you my sister Marissa has an ex-boyfriend in L.A., right? An actor. He writes screenplays, too. He dumped Marissa when Dad was tapped as veep."

Marissa Neal was the eldest of Charlie's four sisters and a history teacher at his northern Virginia private high school. She was also beautiful, and she didn't think Grit was such a positive influence on her brother.

"The only connection--and I use the word loosely--between your sister and this guy is an ex-boyfriend in California?"

Charlie was undeterred. "Jasper Vanderhorn was a California arson investigator."

"Do you know how many millions of people there are in California?"

"He was based in Los Angeles County. The ex-boyfriend's in Beverly Hills. Well, maybe not quite. On the border. Close."

"You're a genius, Charlie. Do the math on the odds--"

"Nick Martini is a smoke jumper, and he was with Rose Cameron when she found the victim of yesterday morning's fire in Black Falls."

"Charlie."

"I asked Jo about it. She wasn't that nice."

"Good."

"You're missing the nuances."

Grit felt the sun hot on the back of his neck. "I'm not good with nuances."

"The ex-boyfriend and Marissa broke up eighteen months ago. Last June, Jasper Vanderhorn, the arson investigator, died in a suspicious wildland canyon fire north of Los Angeles. Sean Cameron and Nick Martini tried to get to him but they were too late. At the same time, Rose Cameron was nearby, searching for an eleven-year-old boy who'd wandered off when his family had to evacuate."

"So? I'm not connecting the dots here, Charlie."

Charlie ignored him. "Jo was assigned to protect Marissa then."

"Special Agent Harper," Grit said, not letting it go this time.

"Right. Special Agent Harper. Then last October, Marissa was almost killed when a gas stove blew up at a place she rented with friends in the Shenandoah Mountains. Jo--Agent Harper--saved her." When Grit didn't respond, Charlie took a breath. "Then in November, we had the fire at Myrtle's."

"Miss Smith or Ms. Smith."

"She said I could call her Myrtle."

Grit was silent.

"Miss Smith could have been killed. The same day as that fire, we had the improvised explosive device in Vermont that killed Melanie Kendall. Then in January, we had the two IEDs that almost killed Hannah Shay, Sean Cameron and Bowie O'Rourke--and Vivian Whittaker, too, but I'm not sure I want to count her. Awful woman."

Grit tried not to let himself get sidetracked by Charlie's pinball-machine of a mind. "We don't know who set Myrtle's house on fire, but the bombs were Lowell Whittaker's doing."