Chapter 16 #2
The Special Agent didn’t raise his voice, but then he didn’t have to. “Sit down, Ms. Lake, or I will haul you in for obstruction of justice. Sit!”
She sat and folded her hands on the table to keep them from trembling. “There is no way Jack Prescott could do something like that.”
He didn’t even answer, simply stared at her out of his cold eyes.
“Have you been watching the news over the weekend?”
What she’d been doing over the weekend was no business of his. “I fail to see—”
“Answer the question, Ms. Lake,” he interrupted in a hard voice, “or I will take you into the Seattle office and have you questioned there, which would be much less pleasant for you. Would you like that? Your choice.”
“I—no, um, to answer your question, I haven’t been watching the news over the Christmas holiday.
” She’d been too busy with Jack and besides—now that she thought of it—both her radio and her TV sets had been on the blink.
It was only then that it occurred to her how unusual it was for both the radio and the TV to die on the same weekend.
“I don’t really see what that has to do with anything. ”
“It’s been all over TV,” Sanders said, leaning forward. “I don’t know how you could have missed it.”
The FBI agent shot Sanders a look that had Sanders lifting his hands—sorry—and sitting back. The agent turned back to her. Caroline kept herself from shivering by force of will. The man had the coldest eyes she’d ever seen.
“Ms. Lake, it appears you are unaware of the fact that five days ago, four US military contractors who worked for a US private security company called ENP Security massacred a village of women and children in Sierra Leone and made off with a fortune in uncut diamonds. Sierra Leonean soldiers appeared at the end and killed three of the military contractors. One escaped with the diamonds.”
What a horrible story. Maybe her TV and the radio had died out of compassion, deciding to spare her this news. “I’m sorry. What does that have to do with me?”
“The man who escaped was Vincent Deaver. You know him as Jack Prescott. He’s a very dangerous man and we need your help in bringing him in.”
A sudden gust of gelid air burst into the shop as a customer walked in.
Caroline heard the ping of the bell as if from a great distance.
Laurel Holly, the mayor’s wife. She had to do something, get up, go to Laurel, get away from this terrible man.
She placed her hands flat on the table, but somehow, she couldn’t. Something was wrong with her legs.
Sanders got up immediately and went to Laurel. Caroline heard them murmuring, then Laurel left and Sanders turned the OPEN sign around to CLOSED and walked back, never taking his eyes from her face. “No one will bother us now.”
He had the most awful look—triumphant and self-satisfied. Happy. Happy at the thought that she might have been sleeping with a mass murderer.
If there had been a tiny little something inside her, a little softness for Sanders, for old time’s sake, it died right then and there. He wanted Jack to be a monster, a war criminal. It made him happy.
Well, too bad, because she didn’t believe it, not for a moment.
Jack—a mass murderer? Jack? A man who’d kill for diamonds? It wasn’t possible. She refused to believe it. Her body didn’t.
The man who’d held her so gently, so self-controlled he constantly reined himself in so he wouldn’t hurt her, not even inadvertently, in the throes of passion. That man wasn’t a murderer.
Of course, he was a soldier. Undoubtedly, he’d killed, time and again, in the line of duty.
Caroline shivered violently, as if her heart had suddenly frozen. The taste of the breakfast she’d choked down this morning was in her mouth. She clamped her jaw shut as bile tickled her throat.
Never mind that she’d had her doubts about Jack. They’d been more along the lines of how he knew her home so well, not whether he might be a monster.
She looked the Special Agent straight in the face. “That’s insane. Jack’s not a mass murderer! And he wasn’t in Africa, he was in Pakistan this winter. You’ve got the wrong man.”
Agent Butler slid another photograph across the table.
Caroline crossed her arms, body language rejecting what she was seeing in the photograph and stared straight ahead.
The agent was a good starer, better than she was.
His gaze was steady and unrelenting and with a shudder and a sigh, Caroline gave in and dropped her eyes to the photograph.
Just a flicker of a gaze, but it was enough.
The photograph was very clear.
Jack, with several days’ growth of beard, in camouflage, holding a big black gun. Dense, blindingly green foliage in the background, a line of wooden huts with tin roofs, African children playing in the dust, African soldiers standing guard.
There was a time stamp in white at the bottom. 11:21 am, December 21st.
“That’s not Pakistan,” the FBI agent said.
“No,” Caroline whispered. “It’s not.”
She wanted to pull the photograph closer for a better look, but she couldn’t. She was hugging herself, deeply chilled in the core of her being.
“That was shot by a UNOMSIL soldier on the outskirts of Freeport, six days ago, just before Deaver headed into the hinterland for a village called Obuja, where there were rumors swirling around about a sack full of diamonds. He caught a pirogue going upriver to Obuja. Twenty four hours after that photograph was taken, everyone in Obuja was dead and he had found the diamonds. The UN is still looking for him there, but we’d got word that he’d flown back to the States. ”
Caroline had to cough to loosen her throat. She licked dry lips as she counted the days. “But—but that would mean that he flew from Africa directly here.” She stopped, her throat hurting. “But …why. Why come here? It’s halfway around the world. It doesn’t make sense. Why here?”
“To see you,” Agent Harris said.
The quiet words seemed to fill the room, bounce around the walls, echo in her head. It took her several minutes to process the words. He didn’t hurry her, just watched her closely.
The tea she’d just had threatened to come up and Caroline swallowed heavily.
“I—I’m afraid I don’t understand. He flew straight back from Africa to see me? Jack Prescott didn’t know me. I met him for the first time on Christmas Eve. He can’t possibly have flown something like ten thousand miles for me.”
This time there were two photocopies slid across the table. Caroline didn’t look at them. Didn’t want to look at them. Special Agent Butler tapped first one, then the other.
“He knew you all right. These photographs were found in his backpack, which he abandoned at the village. They were faxed to me by an UNOMSIL sergeant. Look at them, please, Ms. Lake. He came here for you.”
Caroline held his eyes, completely unable to read them. Finally, with a feeling that nothing would ever be the same, she looked down, then looked away immediately. A cold fist gripped her heart and squeezed.
“You found those in Africa?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Caroline hugged herself more tightly—cold, miserable, stomach roiling. She heard a vague whistling sound in her ears and wondered whether she was going to faint.
“Do you recognize these photographs, Ms. Lake?”
Caroline couldn’t speak. She could barely breathe.
“Ms. Lake?”
Sanders leaned forward. “Caroline, that’s your high school photo, don’t you recognize it? And the other one—”
Special Agent Butler spoke without turning his head or taking his eyes from hers.
“Shut up. Sir.” His gaze was fierce and unblinking, focused tightly on her.
“Ms. Lake, I’m asking you for the second time—do you recognize those photographs?
And don’t even try lying because I can drag you to the Seattle office and make you swear all of this under oath, and you know what the penalty for lying under oath is. ”
Caroline nodded jerkily. “Yes,” she whispered. “I do.”
“So what are those photographs of?”
“Me.” Her voice came out thin and reedy, almost a wheeze. “One is my sophomore high school portrait. The other is—is a photograph cut out of a local newspaper. Of me at a piano recital. I must have been—what? Sixteen? How on earth could those photographs be in Jack Prescott’s possession?”
“That’s precisely what I want to know from you,” he said grimly. “Maybe the two of you were in it together?”
“What?” Caroline whispered, shocked.
Special Agent Harris nodded. “You could be a great alibi. Deaver couldn’t have killed the villagers, stolen the diamonds, because he was with his lady love over the Christmas holiday.
It makes a crazy kind of sense, because he traveled under a fake name.
If we didn’t have that photograph and the time stamp, well then, he could just say that he was curled up in his love nest and who’d be the wiser? ”
“Damn right,” Sanders said. “Caroline, you barely escaped. Why when I think of what could have happened to you if the FBI hadn’t been on this guy’s trail…
God knows he’s violent enough to really hurt you.
Even murder you, if he had to.” He didn’t look unhappy at that notion.
The darker the picture of Jack, the brighter his star shone.
Caroline looked from Sanders’ smug face to the bleak, cold features of the FBI agent. She felt trapped, as if the walls of her shop were closing in on her. Cold sweat beaded on her forehead, her head swirled, her chest felt tight.
A younger, happier her looked up at her from the tabletop, a mocking reminder of life’s cruelties.
She reached out a shaking finger to touch first Jack’s photograph then her high school portrait, trying to make the connection between the sunny high schooler and the dark, dangerous-looking man in the jungle fatigues.
Sanders laid his hand over hers and squeezed. She whisked her hand out from under his.
It was the last straw.
Don’t touch me! The words were there in her throat and she had to clamp her jaw closed to keep them in.