Cold River - Carla Neggers [59]
“I’m not a hero,” Grit said.
“Eye of the beholder.”
“What do you want me to do?”
She lifted a small birch log and set it on the burning kindling. “You sweep this place for listening devices? Jo Harper’s still Secret Service. She knows how to bug an old cabin. She’ll throw both our butts in jail if she—”
“Cabin’s not bugged.”
“So you did sweep for bugs. Damn, Grit. All right. I have a phone number.” She handed him a piece of paper. “Call it.”
“We’re playing with fire, Myrtle.”
She picked one last wood chip off a glove. “At least it’s warm.”
Being a bold type, Grit dialed the number Myrtle gave him from a big icy boulder on the steep trail up to the lodge. He had a view of the lake and Elijah’s house. That meant Jo Harper could look out the kitchen window and see her cabin guest up there with a cell phone and wonder who the hell he was calling in the cold.
Grit didn’t know for sure, but he had a feeling who it was.
Special Agent Harper would go berserk if he was right and she found out.
Someone picked up on the other end. “Is this Petty Officer Taylor?”
Grit recognized the boyish voice of the sixteen-year-old son of the vice president of the United States. If Jo had her Secret Service listening devices in Elijah’s house, or if Elijah had his Special Forces listening devices in his house, and one or both could hear Charlie Neal on the other end of the connection, Grit knew he’d be hauled off his icy rock.
“It is,” Grit said. “Do you have a Secret Service detail with you, Charlie?”
“Sort of. My cousin and I are in the control room in our school auditorium.”
“Aren’t you on break for the holidays?”
“Yes, sir, but we’re dismantling the lighting we did for the freshman Christmas play. It’s a private school. We can have a Christmas play.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ I work for a living. You’re both there? You and Conor?”
“That’s right.”
Then the two teenagers hadn’t done one of their prince-and-the-pauper switches.
“Listen,” Charlie said, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Scary when you start thinking with that one-eighty IQ.”
Charlie brushed him off. “We need to expand our view of this group of killers and not just focus on Melanie Kendall and Kyle Rigby.”
“We? You aren’t on this investigation, and neither am I. I’m filling time between PT appointments. You’re in high school. You’re under Secret Service protection.”
“We know that Rigby was the senior partner,” Charlie said as if Grit hadn’t spoken. “Kendall was newer. I think Rigby knew or was in contact with at least one other killer.”
The kid was relentless.
Grit realized he should hang up, march down to Jo Harper and rat out Charlie Neal, but instead he played devil’s advocate. “What if they were the only killers? Rigby and the woman. What if there’s no network? They found their own clients and pretended there was a middleman.”
“Why would they do that?”
“To keep their clients comfortable in their anonymity.”
“Ah. To mislead people.” Charlie was thoughtful. “Nah. Doesn’t work. Then who blew up Kendall’s car?”
“Some friend of Rigby’s. A one-time deal. ‘I get killed, you blow her ass up.’ Like that.”
“Still doesn’t work,” Charlie said, as if, of course, he knew better.
“You wanted me to call you so you could theorize? You can do that with your cousin and your Secret Service detail.”
“You sound as if you’re in pain, Petty Officer Taylor. How’s the leg?”
“Which one?”
“The one that got blown off. What’s left of it. That one.”
Grit gave the kid credit for not backing down. “I don’t like the cold, and I don’t like the son of the vice president of the United States talking to me about killers. Think about something else.”
“I am. My mind can work on different tracks all at once. I get bored easily.”
“Don’t we all.”
“And I didn’t just set up this call to theorize.”
Anyone else, and Grit would have thought—okay, the kid feels bad. Hurt at being dismissed. Not with Charlie Neal. “Why did you set up this call, Charlie?”
“Sean Cameron and his business partner, Nick Martini, met each other