Chapter 43
HAWK
I was only half-listening to the walk down memory lane, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t taking it in. I’d been trained to listen during interrogations and interviews, and my brain filed it all away while I stared out the window, my eyes on the trees around the house.
I’d thought I’d seen movement in the shadows, but I couldn’t be sure, and I forced myself to stare into the understory, willing myself to see anything that didn’t belong.
It came a moment later: an almost imperceptible orange glow, there one second and gone the next.
A cigarette.
I caught Vigo’s eye and tipped my head toward the front of the house.
He set down his tea — gratefully, I thought — and followed me to the door.
“Is something wrong?” Anna called after us.
“Just left something in the car,” I said, pulling open the door.
As soon as it was open I sprinted for the tree line, Vigo at my back.
Trees crashed up ahead, branches cracking underfoot as someone ran away from the house.
“On it,” Vigo said, bounding into the woods.
Fuck that.
I ran after him, jumping over fallen logs and ducking low-hanging branches, following the sound of Vigo’s footsteps and the flashes I got of his shirt, the more distant sound of someone else crashing through the forest in front of Vigo.
“Stream!” Vigo called out.
I spotted it a moment later and leapt over it after him.
We scrambled up a leafy bank, slipping and sliding, and emerged onto a hill, the woods stretched out below us.
We froze, listening for the sound of the footsteps, breathing, anything that might point us is in the direction of the person who’d been casing Anna’s house.
It was quiet, nothing but the wind, birds in the trees, and the gurgle of the stream behind us.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
Vigo braced his hands on his knees and tried to catch his breath. “I think I need more fucking exercise.”
He sounded surprised.
We retraced our steps, sliding back down the leafy hill and jumping over the water, then hiking back toward Anna’s house.
“Think they followed us here?” Vigo huffed.
“Either that or they were already casing the place.”
“Maybe it was a neighbor?” Vigo asked.
“Would a neighbor run like the devil just because he’d been caught smoking a cigarette on someone else’s property?”
“Probably not,” Vigo said as we returned to the tree line where we’d taken off running.
I looked around, searching for any sign of the man — because it was almost surely a man — who’d been casing Anna’s house. I’d been sure we weren’t followed, and I heard Anna’s words when she’d opened the door to us: the damage is done.
Something caught my eye on a bed of fallen leaves at our feet, and I crouched, touching my hand to the dried leaves to investigate.
A cigarette butt.
It was still warm, and I picked it up and rose to my feet, then held it up for Vigo to see.
“Fucking-A,” he said.
I pocketed the cigarette butt and stared into the trees.
Exactly how deep were Braden and Catherine Montgomery into this shit?
How deep were we?