Chapter Six
Patrick woke from restless sleep, aroused and all-too-aware of the woman nestled against him. Though Stacy was fully dressed, the soft fullness of her breast pressed against his side, and her hand, palm down, lay on his stomach, tantalizingly close to the erection that all but begged for her attention.
A lesser man—one who didn’t have the job of protecting a witness in a federal case and tracking down her missing child—might have taken advantage of the situation. He could have rolled over and pulled her close and sought comfort and release for both of them in the act of lovemaking.
But even if Stacy Giardino had been open to the idea of sex with him—and considering her wariness of him the day before, that was doubtful—she was off-limits to him. She was his responsibility and his duty, not a potential lover.
Reminding himself of this didn’t do a lot to quell his desire, but it enabled him to ease himself away from her and out of bed. He pulled on his shirt, then checked his phone on the way to the bathroom. A text from his office informed him a four-wheel-drive Jeep had been left for him in the parking lot, the keys under the driver’s-side floor mat. Someone had picked up his other car from its parking place two blocks over, along with the sample of mud from Stacy’s hotel room that he’d left on the backseat.
A second text informed him that Nathan Forest had died before regaining consciousness. So far nothing new had surfaced about his identity or his connections.
The bedsprings creaked as he stepped out of the bathroom and Stacy let out a soft moan. He moved to the side of the bed. “Stacy?” he asked softly.
She blinked up at him, confusion quickly replaced by the pain of remembering all that had happened. He tensed, prepared for her to break down, but she pulled herself together and shoved herself into a sitting position. “Have you heard any news?” she asked.
“We have a new car and Nathan Forest is dead. Nothing more.”
She covered her eyes with one hand. The gash on her forehead was bruised around the edges, but it didn’t look infected. She probably should have had stitches to prevent a scar, but it was too late for that now. The cuts on her neck glowed pink against the pale skin. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Everything hurts.” She uncovered her eyes and looked around the room. “Is there coffee?”
A two-cup coffeemaker and supplies sat on a tray by the television. “I’ll make some,” he said. “Why don’t you take a shower?”
“Good idea.” She moved past him to the bathroom and a few seconds later he heard the water running. He started the coffee, then slipped out to the car.
The Jeep was several years old, the red paint faded and the leather seats worn. But it was equipped with a new GPS and good tires. And in the backseat he found two plastic shopping bags filled with toiletries, snacks and a change of clothes for each of them. Somebody at headquarters deserved a commendation for that.
He carried the bags inside and tapped on the bathroom door. “Stacy, I’ve got a bag here with some clothes and other things for you,” he said.
No answer. Maybe she couldn’t hear him for the shower.
He tried the knob. The door wasn’t locked. He eased the door open, keeping his eyes averted from the steaming shower, and set the bag just inside the door, then went to pour himself a cup of coffee and wait.
When she emerged from the bathroom half an hour later, damp hair curling around her face and smelling of floral soap, he was seated on the end of the bed, the television on and turned to the local news. “I’ve never been so grateful for clean underwear and toothpaste in my life,” she said. “Where did they come from?”
“The agent who delivered the new car left them.”
“Well, he—or she—deserves a raise.” She smoothed a hand over the pink-and-white hoodie and matching yoga pants. “I’m betting it’s a woman with good taste. She even thought to include a little face powder and lipstick. I feel almost human again.”
She definitely looked like she was feeling better. The dark circles beneath her eyes had faded some, and she’d combed her hair to hide most of the gash on her forehead. In the casual clothing, with the lighter makeup, she looked younger and more vulnerable than she had when he’d first questioned her the day before.
He stood and rubbed his hand across the bristles on his chin. “I think I’ll shower and shave,” he said. “There are some snacks in that other bag there. Help yourself to breakfast.”
She glanced at the television. “Any news?”
“Nothing of interest to us.”
After a shower and shave, he dressed in the Nordic sweater and jeans he found in the bag and returned to the bedroom. The casual clothing made him and Stacy look more like tourists, or even locals. Stacy sat cross-legged on the end of the bed, eating peanut-butter crackers and staring at the television. “They just did a promo about a shootout at a Durango hotel last night,” she said. “I think that’s us.”
He sat beside her and waited through commercials for a used-car dealer, life insurance and dish detergent. Then a somber-faced reporter came on to report on an exclusive break in the story of a shooting at a local hotel. “Though the incident was at first reported to be a random mugging, we’ve since learned information that ties this killing to organized crime. The woman assaulted, who has since disappeared, was Stacy Giardino, daughter-in-law of fugitive Sam Giardino, head of one of the country’s deadliest organized crime families, who was gunned down at a vacation home near Telluride yesterday morning. Ms. Giardino was accompanied by a man who identified himself as a U.S. Marshal. The two left the hotel shortly after the shooting before local police could question them. If you see either Ms. Giardino or her companion, please contact police immediately.”
The reporter described Patrick as two inches shorter than his true height, with brown hair. The screen then flashed a photograph of Stacy that had been taken at her wedding, almost five years before. She’d worn her hair long then and looked all of sixteen, swallowed up in yards of billowing tulle and satin.
Patrick punched the remote to turn off the television. “I don’t think we have to worry about anyone tracking us down based on that description, but we shouldn’t take any chances.”
“How did they figure out who we are?” she asked. “I registered at the hotel under a fake name.”
“I used my real name,” Patrick said. “And I showed the clerk my U.S. Marshal’s ID. He probably gave that information to police and someone made the connection to Sam Giardino. Nothing is really secret anymore.”
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“Keep moving and try not to attract attention.”
“I’m ready to leave now.” She stood and brushed crumbs from her lap. “You said we were going to Uncle Abel’s ranch?”
“That’s the plan. Do you know where it is?”
She shook her head. “Just Crested Butte. I don’t think the town’s that big. Maybe we could ask?”
“We could, but we’ll have to be careful. We don’t want to let them know we’re on their trail, if they have Carlo.”
“Do you think they do?”
“I don’t know. But it’s the only direction I can think to go at the moment. I asked my office to look for an Abel Giardino in Crested Butte, but they haven’t turned up anything yet.”
“Maybe he’s using another name. The family story was always that he didn’t want anything to do with the business.”
“That could be. I think the best thing for us to do now is to go to the town and see what we can find out.”
“How long will it take us to get there?” she asked.
“About five hours, if the weather cooperates.”
She glanced out the window. “It’s gray out there, but it’s not actually snowing.”
“We should be fine. Come on.”
They carried the supplies and their dirty clothes with them, not wanting to leave behind anything the authorities—or their enemies—could use to track them. Though not as comfortable as his Rover, the Jeep ran well, and the heater worked, blasting out heat to cut the frigid outside temperature.
They soon reached the outskirts of town and drove past empty snow-covered fields and expanses of evergreen woods and rocky outcroppings. Occasionally one or two houses sat back from the road, or small herds of horses or cattle gathered around hay that had been spread for them. “How do people live out here?” Stacy asked. “It’s so remote.”
“It is, but maybe you and I think that because we’re city people.”
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“New York. I grew up in Queens, just like you.”
She hugged her arms across her chest. “I don’t know if I like that you know so much about me. I’m not a criminal, you know. I’ve never had so much as a parking ticket.”
“I know.” At least, she hadn’t actively participated in any crimes that he knew of. “But you married into a criminal family.”
“So that makes me guilty by association?”
“In a way, it does.” Innocent, law-abiding people didn’t have intimate connections to mob criminals, in his experience.
“Was that why you followed me to Durango? Because you thought I was going to commit a crime?”
“I wondered why you were running away from the protection we offered. I wanted to see what you would do.”
“You call it protection—I call it another form of prison.” She looked away. “I’ve had enough of that, thank you.”
“Are you saying you were a prisoner of the Giardinos?”
“I might as well have been. I promised ’til death do us part, and Sammy made it clear I had to keep that promise.”
“You told me your father and his father arranged the marriage, but you never told me why you agreed to it.”
“My father owed Sam Giardino some kind of debt. I don’t know what it was, but he made it clear that I had to marry Sammy in order to save his life.”
So a wife for Sammy was the price for George Franklin’s safety? From what Patrick knew of Sam Giardino, this kind of twisted plan was his specialty. “How old were you?”
“I was nineteen. I had a dead-end job at a boutique in the mall, but I wanted to go to college. I knew the Giardinos had money. I figured I’d marry Sammy, save my dad, go to school on Sammy’s dime and divorce him after a few years. But it didn’t work out that way.”
The regret in her voice pulled at him. “No divorce.”
“And no school. Sam thought educating women was a waste of money and what he said was the law. So Sammy went to law school and I read his books and wrote his papers.”
“And you had Carlo.”
“Yes.” She picked at imaginary lint on her pants. “I love him more than anything, and I’m so glad I have him now, but I wasn’t thrilled about becoming pregnant so quickly. Of course, by then I’d figured out that even without a kid, the Giardinos weren’t going to let me leave. Once Carlo came along, I was really stuck.”
“What will you do now that Sammy is dead?”
“I’d like to go back to school, if I can scrape up the money. I’ll get a job, find a place to live. I figure after helping Sammy through law school getting my own law degree won’t be too hard.”
Simple dreams. Not the plans of a criminal mind. Of course, some criminals were very good actors. They could make people believe what they wanted them to. But he didn’t think Stacy fell into that category. “What kind of law?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to do something to help women and children.”
“You’d make a good lawyer.”
“You really think so?”
“You’re calm under pressure. You’re smart and you know how to think on your feet.”
“Thanks. I really fooled you, because I don’t feel calm.” She twisted her hands together. “Do you think we’ll find Carlo?”
“We’ll find him.” He tightened his fingers around the steering wheel. He would get the boy back to his mother if it was the last thing he did.
The strains of an Alicia Keys song drifted up from the floorboards. Stacy stared at him, the color drained from her face. “My phone.”
“Answer it.” He pulled over to the side of the road, but left the engine running.
She fumbled in her purse and pulled out the phone. “Hello?”
“Put it on speaker,” he said.
She did so, and a woman’s soft, deep voice filled the Jeep. “Hello, Stacy.”
“Who is this?”
“That’s not important. But unless you want your son’s death on your hands, you’ll turn around now and go back to Durango or New York or Timbuktu, for all I care. Do that, and we’ll let you both live. Keep on the course you’re on and we’ll kill the boy and then come after you again. And this time, you won’t escape.”
“Who are you? What have you done with my son?” She raised her voice. “Carlo, are you there? Can you hear me? It’s Mommy.”
“Mommy! Mommy, where are you? I’m scared. Mommy!”
The phone went dead. Stacy covered her mouth with one hand and stared at the phone.
Patrick gently pried the phone from her hand and scrolled back to the history. “Unknown number,” he said. “I could try to have someone trace it, but they were probably smart enough to make the call from a throwaway phone, or even a pay phone. There’s still a few of those around.”
“What are we going to do?” Her voice shook, but she was holding it together. After hearing her son’s voice in distress, that took a lot of guts. His job was to stay calm and make it as easy as he could for her.
“First, we get rid of the phone.” He slid the cover off the back and popped out the SIM chip, dropped it to the floor of the Jeep and smashed it with his heel. Then he broke the rest of the phone into as many pieces as he could and tossed them out the window.
“You can’t just throw them out the window,” she protested.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t risk keeping the phone when someone can use it to trace you.”
“No, I mean, you’re littering.”
She looked so genuinely distressed, he bit back his laughter. “I’ll write myself a ticket later. Come on. We have to get out of here.” He put the Jeep in gear and made a U-turn, headed back the way they’d come.
* * *
STILL REELING FROM hearing Carlo crying for her, Stacy struggled to understand what was happening. “What are you doing?” she asked Patrick. “Where are you going?” Surely he wasn’t giving up the plan to go to Crested Butte.
“That was in case anyone was watching. I want them to think we’re acting on their threat and retreating. I looked at the map while you were in the shower this morning and we can get to Crested Butte another way, using back roads.”
She sat back, though truly relaxing was impossible. Carlo had sounded so upset.... She swallowed a knot of tears. She couldn’t break down now. She had to keep it together, for her little boy’s sake.
Patrick patted her arm—though whether this was a gesture of reassurance or merely to get her attention, she wasn’t sure. “Did you recognize the woman’s voice?” he asked.
“No.” There had been nothing familiar about the voice at all.
“Is Abel married?”
“He wasn’t the last time I saw him, but that was five years ago.”
“He was living with his mother then.”
“Yes. And she didn’t sound like that. She was old.”
“How old?”
“Seventies? Abel is fifty, at least. Maybe we’re on the wrong track.” This new idea increased her agitation. “Maybe Abel doesn’t have anything to do with this and we’re wasting time, while whoever does have Carlo gets farther and farther away.”
“That’s possible. But whoever has him knew—probably from your phone—that we’d left Durango and were headed toward Crested Butte. And they wanted you to go away. That tells me we’re headed in exactly the right direction.”
“What if they do have someone watching us and he—or she—figures out we didn’t really turn around?” She looked around, as if expecting to see someone spying on them. “They might hurt Carlo.”
“I don’t think so. They took the boy on purpose, for a specific reason. If they’d wanted to kill him, they could have done away with both of you in your hotel room before either of you woke up. They’re making these threats to scare you and keep you away, but I think they want the boy alive.”
“But why would they want him? He’s just a baby.” Her voice trembled on these last words, but she sucked in a deep breath and continued. “He can’t tell them anything or give them anything.”
“What about Sam Giardino’s will? Does Carlo inherit anything now that Sammy is dead, too?”
“You’d know the answer to that better than I do. Doesn’t the government confiscate ill-gotten gains?”
“If they can prove a link to a crime, yes.”
“It’s not as if Sammy had tons of cash and money in bank accounts. He lived well, but most of his money was in the business. And Elizabeth is still alive. She’s bound to inherit something.”
“But the majority would go to his son, or his son’s son, I would think.”
“Yeah. Sam was a chauvinist, all right. Though he’d have said he was following tradition.” Women didn’t rate as high as the family dog in the Giardino household. “But even if Sam had decided to leave his money to Carlo, he wouldn’t just hand everything over to a three-year-old,” she said. “There’d be a trust or something to tie the money up until Carlo was old enough to take control.”
“Then maybe money isn’t the driving force here. What else?”
“I can’t think of any reason why anyone would want to take Carlo.” He was her baby. No one loved him or cared for him more than she did—why would anyone else even notice him?
“I think this is our turnoff up here,” he said, indicating a road that branched to the left. “It goes around the lake and doesn’t get much use this time of year, but it’s usually kept plowed.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” she said.
The two-lane road was paved for the first mile, and then blacktop gave way to gravel. A thin layer of snow covered the rock, and banks of snow had been pushed up on either side. He had to slow his speed to about thirty around the many curves; no doubt it would take even longer to get to Crested Butte. She struggled to avoid fidgeting with impatience.
“I still can’t believe anyone would want anything from Carlo,” she said after half an hour of silence. Talking was better than letting her thoughts range out of control, and for a guy, Patrick was a decent listener. He didn’t discount her ideas with every breath.
“Maybe we’re looking at this wrong,” Patrick said. “Maybe Carlo isn’t the target at all—maybe it’s you.”
“Me?”
“If someone wanted to hurt you, what better way to do that than to take away the one person who matters most to you?”
She wrapped her arms across her stomach, his words like a physical blow. “If Sammy was still alive, I might believe he’d do something like this. He hated me enough.”
“Why did he hate you?”
She’d spent most of her marriage trying to figure out the answer to that question. “I was one more thing his father forced on him. Left to his own devices, he’d have chosen a tall, long-legged, busty model type. Someone he could dress up and show off, who’d cling to his arm and look at him adoringly and pretend not to have a brain in her head.”
“It’s not as if you aren’t attractive.”
She winced. Did he feel sorry for her? Why else would he be handing out compliments? “He called me ‘troll.’” Saying the hated nickname out loud still hurt. “And he said I was too smart for my own good.” Though at least she was smart enough not to feel insulted by his acknowledgment of her brains.
Patrick’s knuckles on the steering wheel whitened. “You’re not a troll,” he said. “And I’d rather be with a smart woman than ten supermodels who play dumb.”
“I don’t guess you get many chances to guard supermodels,” she said. “You might change your mind if you did.”
She didn’t give him a chance to hand out more false compliments. She sat forward and peered at the road ahead. “Are you sure we’re headed the right way? This doesn’t look like much of a road.”
The graveled two-track had narrowed further, trees closing in on either side. They’d seen no sign of houses or other traffic in miles. “The map showed this as an alternate route.” He glanced at the screen on the GPS unit mounted on the dash. “And the GPS shows we’re headed in the right direction.”
“It just doesn’t look as if anyone has traveled this way in a while.”
“That’s good. Whoever is threatening you won’t think to check this route.”
“Maybe not.” But her expression remained clouded.
They rounded a curve and he had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a tree. The huge pine lay across the road, branches filling their field of vision, the needles almost black against the white snow. Patrick shifted into Park and stared at the tree. It completely blocked both lanes.
“What do we do now?” Stacy asked.
He slipped his gun from his holster, making sure it was loaded and ready to fire, then grasped the door handle. “Stay here while I check things out,” he said. “If anyone starts shooting, stay down.”