Storm Born Read online

  It seemed the man was canny enough to use cash, which meant that tracking him down would be more difficult. Not impossible, of course, but it would have been much easier if he’d left a paper trail of credit card transactions in his wake.

  But apparently, he wasn’t quite that much of an amateur. Once again, Lenz wondered just who the hell he was, and how he’d managed to appear out of nowhere at exactly the wrong moment.

  Those mysteries would be cleared up at some point. For now, it was far more important to get moving before the trail turned too cold.

  He went outside to his black Ford Taurus. All he had was the one duffle bag, which contained toiletries and several clean shirts and changes of underwear, and he tossed it in the trunk before sliding behind the wheel.

  It felt good to get out of Kanab. He hadn’t liked staying there, since it kept reminding him of his failure to collect Adara Grant, but leaving hadn’t been an option, either, not when she might still be somewhere in the area. True, she’d disappeared nearly twenty-four hours earlier, and yet he refused to accept defeat. She might not have gone all that far.

  He hoped.

  The drive took longer than he would have liked, mostly because the highway dipped to the south before turning north toward St. George. However, within the hour he was pulling into the outskirts of the community, which was also flanked by reddish sandstone formations, although the landscape felt more bleak there than it had back in Kanab, which had a surprising amount of greenery for a desert town.

  He pulled into the parking lot of the Shell station, which was located only a block or so from I-15. It seemed fairly busy, and he hoped the clerk who’d been on duty would remember enough about that particular pair of customers that he would be able to offer a few tidbits of valuable information.

  Someone was at the counter, paying for a couple of sodas, so Lenz waited off to one side until the transaction had been completed. Once the woman had collected her drinks and gone back outside, he approached the clerk. A quick flick of his I.D., and he said, “I’m with Homeland Security. Do you recall seeing this woman?”

  He held up his phone, where he’d stored a screen grab from the surveillance video. It showed Adara Grant glancing over at her companion as she set a pair of sunglasses down on the counter.

  “Oh, yeah,” the clerk replied. He was in his mid-twenties, with short-cropped reddish-blond hair and the sort of ruddy complexion that the desert sun hadn’t been very kind to. “She came in yesterday afternoon. Had some guy with her.”

  The appreciative gleam in the clerk’s eyes told Lenz that the man probably remembered her because she was pretty and around his own age. “Did she say anything?”

  “No. She seemed worried about something, or maybe upset…I don’t know. The guy did all the talking.”

  “What did he say?”

  The clerk reached up to scratch the back of his neck. “He wasn’t exactly talkative, either. Bought some sunglasses in addition to the gas, thanked me, and then left.”

  It had probably been too much to hope that someone on the run from federal agents would pause to engage in idle chitchat with a convenience store clerk. “Did you see what he was driving?”

  That question elicited another gleam in the man’s pale blue eyes, although for a completely different reason. “Oh, yeah. It was one of those new Jeep trucks. Black. Sweet ride.”

  The note of envy in the clerk’s tone was obvious. Although Randall Lenz didn’t make a habit of assessing the cost of every new vehicle that came on the market, he guessed that someone working minimum wage in St. George, Utah, probably couldn’t afford the kind of truck he’d just described. Not that he cared. What he cared about was that he now had a valuable piece of information about the two fugitives.

  “Did you notice the license plates?”

  “Nope. They parked at the far pumps, and you can’t really see something like that from this angle.”

  It had been a long shot, but Lenz couldn’t quite prevent a stab of disappointment from going through him. “Did you see which way they headed when they left?” he asked.

  “They turned left onto 100 North, but that makes sense if they were heading back to the highway,” the man replied. “But I couldn’t tell you where they went after that.”

  Meaning they could have either headed north on I-15, going deeper into Utah, or turned south toward Nevada. Lenz supposed that depended on their final destination…if they’d even had one in mind when they stopped for gas. They could have just been doing their best to put as many miles between them and Kanab as possible.

  However, while Adara Grant was probably inexperienced about a great many things, he hadn’t gotten the impression that she was a fool. He knew if he’d been on the run, he would have headed someplace where he could lose himself among the population, a location where he’d be inconspicuous. And the vehicle the clerk had described sounded like it was anything but inconspicuous. It would have stuck out like a sore thumb on a Utah highway.

  But not too far away was a place where a truck like that probably wouldn’t merit a second glance. It was just a hunch, but his hunches very rarely failed him.

  He thanked the clerk and went back out to his car, then sat behind the wheel as he got out his phone and made a call.

  “Dawson,” his assistant said. “Did you find something, sir?”

  “Possibly,” he replied. “Start pulling traffic footage in Las Vegas, Nevada. We’re looking for a late-model black Jeep Gladiator.”

  “Plates?”

  “Unknown. You’ll have to do what you can with the information I’ve provided.”

  “Working. I’ll get back to you when I have something.”

  “Got it. I’m going to head to Vegas.”

  Randall Lenz ended the call and slid the phone into his pocket before touching his finger to the ignition button. As he pulled back onto the road in front of the gas station and pointed the Taurus toward I-15, he found himself smiling slightly.

  Las Vegas was a big town…but he didn’t think it would be big enough to hide Adara Grant.

  9

  Jake had explained to me that he was going to take the back way into Jerome…but I hadn’t realized just how “back” that route actually was until we left the southern edge of Williams, a small town about twenty miles west of Flagstaff, and headed off into the trackless wilderness.

  All right, it wasn’t completely trackless. We were following a dirt road, one that seemed to be fairly well-traveled. However, since I’d never gone four-wheeling in my life, it definitely felt like we were out in the middle of nowhere.

  “This route is really going to take us to Jerome?” I asked as we bounced along. In the back seat, Jake’s little red-brown dog with the extravagant ears was sliding around on the leather surface every time we hit a particularly nasty bump, but, judging by the doggy grin she wore on her pointy face, she was having the time of her life.

  “Yes,” he said. “This road has been here since the town’s mining days. I guess they used to transport livestock and lumber along here. And it keeps us from having to cut through Sedona, which can be a real mess on the weekend.”

  I thought I’d vaguely heard of Sedona but couldn’t remember much about the place. “It’s a tourist destination?”

  A chuckle. “To put it mildly. And it’s really beautiful — lots of red rock formations, super picturesque. But it’s a lot less beautiful when you’re crawling down 89A at roughly two miles an hour. Traffic can back up halfway through Oak Creek Canyon during peak tourist season.”

  That didn’t sound fun at all. No wonder Jake had decided to take this decidedly off-the-beaten-track approach to get to Jerome. Not that I really had any idea where Jerome was located — my knowledge of Arizona geography had been pretty much limited to knowing how to find Phoenix on a map. I reflected then that it was interesting how my mother had avoided coming back to the state, even in all our wanderings. Had she been worried that she might somehow bump into Jackson Wilcox again, that he,
with all his money and power, might try to take her daughter away from her?

  I supposed it had been a reasonable fear. She couldn’t have known that my father had passed away while I was still a tiny child. How old had he been? Not that old…I sort of doubted my mother would have hooked up with someone old enough to be her grandfather. As with so many other things, she hadn’t gone into a lot of detail, had only told me he’d been older but very good-looking. And I read between the lines to guess that she’d been caught up in the excitement of a fling with someone attractive and successful and worldly, and had been all too willing to lose herself in their whirlwind courtship.

  And while it might have been easy to blame her for being careless, she claimed that she’d been on the pill at the time, and had thought it would be perfectly safe to be with him. All my life, I’d thought I was just one of those “accidents,” the little statistical blips that arose from the three percent of a medication that was supposed to be ninety-seven-percent effective. Now, though, I had to wonder whether there had been other forces at work. Supposedly, my father was a very strong warlock. Had he done something to make sure the pill would fail my mother?

  I couldn’t know. The man in question had been dead for more than twenty years, and he’d taken his secrets with him to the grave. Possibly, Connor might have some answers for me, but I wouldn’t let myself count on that.

  Jake’s glance slid toward me, as if he expected some sort of response to his comment about Sedona’s traffic, so I made a noncommittal sound as I clung to the “Jesus handle” above my head and hoped the road wouldn’t be a rutted mess all the way to Jerome. And it wasn’t, really — we encountered sections that were almost smooth, including a bridge that crossed over a slow-moving river, its banks thick with the bright green of cottonwood trees.

  The last leg of the journey was actually the worst, because there we crawled along a gravel road that was cut into the side of a cliff face, a lane so narrow that we had to hug the rock wall whenever another vehicle came from the opposite direction. Through the swirling dust, I thought I saw a red rock formation far off in the distance to the east.

  Jake must have caught the direction I was looking, because he said, “That’s Sedona — or part of it, anyway.”

  “It’s beautiful.” And it was. Even from miles and miles away, the red rocks fairly glowed against the bright blue sky. No wonder the town’s streets were choked with people wanting to get closer to that beauty.

  “Then we’ll go sometime…on a weekday,” he added with a smile.

  I smiled back at him, even though I could feel my expression start to falter. It felt beyond weird to be making plans for a future sightseeing trip when my life had fallen into ruins just the day before. Shouldn’t I be mourning my mother?

  And yet…I knew I was. The ache of her loss was like a heavy weight in the pit of my stomach. It hurt, and hurt all the worse because I knew there really wasn’t anything I could do about it except hope the passage of time might begin to ease that ache. At the same time, I hoped she would want me to go on, to try to put my life back together in this new and strange place.

  If that meant spending time with the man who sat in the driver’s seat and expertly piloted his four-wheel-drive truck along the narrow and treacherous road…well, I thought I might be okay with that.

  Eventually, we came down out of the switchbacks, and a mile or so later, the dirt road gave way to asphalt. It still wasn’t in the greatest shape, but far better than the unpaved surfaces we’d been traveling on for the past twenty miles or so. We passed a place that advertised itself as a “ghost town” but mostly looked like a hodgepodge of abandoned farm vehicles and other odds and ends, passed a large parking lot that Jake explained was overflow for the times when Jerome was packed with its own tourists, and then came out past an old-fashioned building that proclaimed itself to be the Jerome Volunteer Fire Department. Up another steep hill crowded on either side with buildings that had to have been there since the late 1800s, and then down a street with large Victorian-style homes, some of which actually had lots big enough for real yards.

  We parked in front of one of those, an imposing home with a wide porch and stained glass panels flanking the front door. “This is where Connor lives?” I asked.

  “One of the places where he lives,” Jake replied. “I guess this was the home of all the McAllister primas, and so Angela inherited it when she became prima. They live here part of the year and then spend the other half of the year up in Flagstaff at a house they bought when they got engaged. Usually they’d be up in Flag already — they tend to bail out of Jerome when the weather gets hot — but it sounds like Connor’s been busy with the vineyard and that’s why they haven’t gotten around to moving the family.”

  Yet another revelation I hadn’t been expecting. “Connor owns a vineyard?”

  “Yeah, he bought it about five or six years ago. He manages it with a guy who’s married to Angela’s best friend.”

  Sounded cozy. Or at least, I thought it might be nice to be such close friends with people that you were willing to go into business with them. Apparently, the arrangement was working out, or I doubted the partnership would still be active some five years or more after they’d gotten started. Wondering about the situation made me experience a little pang, one I thought might actually be jealousy. No, it wasn’t that I wanted to run a vineyard or anything, but simply the idea of having close friends like that, people who’d been part of your life for years and years. I’d never had anyone I could call a really good friend…well, unless you counted my mother.

  I shouldn’t have let the thought cross my mind, though, because out of nowhere, my eyes stung with tears. Blinking, I pretended to be fussing with my seatbelt, but I obviously wasn’t doing too good a job of hiding my emotions, because Jake spoke then in an entirely different tone.

  “It’s going to be okay, Addie. I know this is rough, but…you’ve got family here.”

  “I know,” I replied, using my knuckles to wipe the tears away. There probably wasn’t any point in trying to explain what had really made me mist up right then, so I pulled in a breath and added, “It’s okay. I just…I suppose sitting here and looking at this house just made it all real suddenly.”

  In the back seat, Taffy let out a faint, inquiring whine, as if she’d picked up on my mood. I leaned back and patted her on the head, doing my best to let her know it was okay. When I turned to face forward again, Jake reached over and touched my shoulder briefly. “I get it,” he said. “We can sit here as long as you like.”

  For some reason, those words made me want to cry all over again. Why was he so damn nice? I supposed there wasn’t any reason why he shouldn’t be, but on the other hand, I hadn’t run up against a lot of nice in my life. People mostly had seemed indifferent, wrapped up in their own problems. And then there had been uncaring bosses and downright mean landlords — and let’s not forget about the lecher in Tucumcari who tried to get my mother to sleep with him, then directed his attentions toward me when she turned him down — and gossipy girls who made snotty comments about my thrift-store wardrobe, and basically, a whole world that didn’t seem to have a lot of room in it for someone like me.

  “I’m okay,” I said, giving Jake a wan smile. “It’s going to look weird if we stay parked here and don’t go inside.”

  His brown eyes met mine, worried. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  That almost sounded convincing. Not totally, but it would have to do.

  We got out of the truck, pausing so Jake could clip on Taffy’s leash and help her down from the back seat. Then he went over to the gate in the honest-to-God white picket fence and opened it for me, following a pace or so behind in order to let the dog smell around a bit. The yard was very neat, with a manicured green lawn and beds of roses bordering the brick walkway that led to the front porch.

  At the foot of the porch steps, he caught up with me so we could walk the rest of the way next to one anot
her, Taffy dancing along on his other side. We paused at the front door, as if Jake knew I needed a moment to gather myself. I noticed that the stained glass panels that flanked the door were even more beautiful up close, shimmering in shades of blue and green and red and amber.

  After taking a quick glance at me, Jake leaned over and pressed the doorbell. The Westminster chimes sequence echoed somewhere deep within the house, and a minute later, the door opened.

  The man standing there was tall, around Jake’s height, and probably in his mid-thirties, with the same near-black hair, although the stranger’s hair was much longer, pulled back into a ponytail away from his handsome, cleanly chiseled features. But even though he was extremely attractive, it wasn’t his overall looks that caught my attention. No, instead my gaze was caught by his eyes, a translucent gray-green, seeming to shift from one color to the other even as I stared at him.

  My eyes.

  From the startled flash in those eyes, I got the impression that he’d realized pretty much the same thing at almost the same moment. Then he seemed to recover himself, and extended a hand, saying, “Hi, Addie. I’m Connor.”

  “Hi,” I said, knowing how awkward that one limp syllable sounded. On the other hand, I was sort of glad he hadn’t pulled me into a hug the way Laurel had. That would have been even more uncomfortable.

  “Come in,” he said next, then stepped out of the way so Jake and I could enter the house, the dog tagging gamely along. I hadn’t missed the way Connor had glanced down at Taffy, but apparently he’d decided not to comment on her presence.

  The interior of the house was just about as impressive as the exterior, although not as fussily Victorian. I didn’t know a lot about interior decorating, but it was pretty obvious that the place had been redone in the not-so-distant past, maybe when Angela took over as prima. Connor guided us into the living room, which was furnished with oversized leather couches and several burnished-wood accent tables that looked as though they’d come from local artisans. The same with the paintings that hung on the walls — they were all originals, and probably from locals, if the subject matter of juniper trees and golden landscapes and Sedona red rocks was any indication. Taffy looked around, nose twitching, but she seemed to understand that she needed to be on her best behavior, because she went over by the hearth and plunked down on the rug there, her chin on her front paws as she gravely watched the rest of us.