Cold Pursuit - Carla Neggers [87]
She started her search downstairs with a back bedroom and bath, which he obviously used, then charged through the small kitchen and headed up the spiral stairs to two unfinished bedrooms and a shared bath. She didn’t do a thorough job. She did just enough to prove her point, although she wasn’t sure just what her point was. That she could give as good as she got? That Drew Cameron had been an old man filled with fears and regrets when he’d come to see her, and his talk of the children she and Elijah had never had was just that—talk? Not a premonition. Not some unfulfilled promise of something that had been meant to be.
When she finished looking around, she returned to the front room, a little out of breath. Elijah picked up a box of wooden matches and opened up the woodstove. Jo pointed toward the back of the house. “You didn’t make your bed this morning.”
“I don’t make it most mornings.”
“And your windows need washing. There are fingerprints all over them.”
“A.J.’s kids were here raising hell the day before you showed up in town. I figured I’d worry about keeping them alive and never mind the windows.”
She smiled, imagining little Baylee and Jim Cameron racing through the sturdy house and running circles around their Green Beret uncle. “Probably a good idea, seeing how they’re Camerons.”
Elijah struck a match and set the flame to the edge of a rolled-up newspaper. “They’re a couple of live wires.”
“Elijah…” She dropped onto the edge of a sectional sofa and pulled herself together. “I don’t want to screw up your life. If I’d known you were here—”
“You’d have bought a plane ticket to Paris?”
“New Zealand,” she admitted. “Maybe Australia while I was at it.”
He shut the stove lid, and behind the glass front the kindling quickly caught fire, sparking, crackling. “Maybe Nora wishes her father was marrying you instead of his fiancée, and she’s staged this little drama to throw the two of you together.”
“That’s not what’s going on.”
“I don’t like Rigby,” Elijah said.
“Neither do I, but Thomas is self-protective. I can see he might want someone up here who answers only to him. I have conflicts that someone private doesn’t.”
“I think you should stay here tonight.”
“Why, are you afraid to be here alone?”
“Shaking in my boots, if that’s what it’ll take. I know you’re a tough federal agent and all that, but I still don’t like the idea of you being alone out here.”
Jo settled into the sofa and glanced around at the comfortable room. It would have good views of the trees and lake during daylight, a perfect spot for a man fresh back from war—for Elijah, who’d always loved Black Falls.
He adjusted the dampers on the stove. “Fetch your toothbrush, Jo. You’re not staying alone, and this place has better heat than your cabin. I’m not into freezing body parts.”
She studied him, noting the serious—even professional—look that had come over him, reminding her that he wasn’t an aimless nineteen-year-old any longer. For most of the past fifteen years, he’d been doing the important, multifaceted work of a Special Forces soldier.
Finally she said, “There’s more, something you’re not telling me.” She watched him lift a log from his rustic woodbox. “Elijah, has Charlie Neal called again?”
He set the log upright on the brick hearth in front of the stove. “He has names.”
“Names—” Jo stopped herself. “I can’t hear this.”
Elijah ignored her. “Charlie combed the Internet for unsolved homicides that appear to be out-of-the-blue hits with no obvious motive. Two names struck him as being of particular interest. An arson investigator in southern California named Jasper Vanderhorn was killed in a fire in June. In August, a Russian diplomat named Andrei Petrov was poisoned in London.”
Jo gritted her teeth. Charlie, Charlie.
“Charlie says he has other names pending. The victims aren’t connected that he’s been able to figure out so far—it’s the manner of their deaths that got them on his list.”
“That’s not enough to suggest there’s an assassination network involved.