Safeguarding the Witness (Deadly Inheritance #1)

Chapter One

“Hello. Anybody home?”

Her voice echoed through the small two-bedroom bungalow.

Nobody answered, which meant her father hadn’t returned from the unexplained trip he started ten days ago.

Yesterday, he texted that he’d be in touch with good news.

About time! She could use some relief from constant isolation.

Apart from her father, she had no one. She was tired of hiding, keeping the doors locked and the windows closed.

On this cloudless June day, the interior of her Denver rental house felt as hot and dry as a closed convection oven, baking all day while she worked at the garden shop and tree nursery.

She trudged across the front room into the skimpy kitchen, where she opened the door to the fridge and allowed the cooled air to gust over her bare arms and legs.

Heavy knocking rattled the front door in its frame. She looked over her shoulder. Anything could be out there, anyone. Curtains on the picture window in the front room were drawn, as always, so nobody could see in. The downside: She couldn’t see out.

On tiptoe, she crept toward the flat pine door, cringing at every creak from the worn hardwood floor.

Two paces from the peephole, she realized she hadn’t locked up when she entered.

Distracted, worried about Dad, she’d made a possibly fatal mistake.

She lunged for the deadbolt. Too late. The handle turned, and the door swung wide.

A stranger crossed her threshold, lowered his sunglasses and asked, “Are you Mollie Harper?”

Startled, she took a step back. Who the hell is this guy? His dark hair was trimmed. He wore a suit and necktie like the DOJ officers who sometimes visited, which didn’t mean she could count on him. He knows my name, my real name. Her father’s alarmist warnings were coming true.

“Mollie Harper?”

She looked out the doorway, past his shoulder, and saw a scrawny man in a baseball cap and a black mask. Standing at the curb, he raised a handgun and aimed at her. Acting on instinct, she shoved the man in the suit and yelled, “Look out!”

The ear-splitting blast from a semiautomatic shattered the air. Bullets slammed against the front of her house. Mollie froze, momentarily paralyzed by panic. Would somebody call the cops? Not likely. In this neighborhood, gunshots were not uncommon, and people didn’t go looking for trouble.

The Suit slammed the door behind him. He drew his own weapon—looked like a Beretta from a shoulder holster and grabbed her hand. “Come with me.”

In a show of belated resistance, she dug in her heels. For all she knew, he was worse than the guy outside. “Get your hands off me.”

“Tillamook.” He spoke the secret password from her father. “Come on, Mollie. I say ‘Tillamook’ and you say…”

“Easy, breezy.”

“And I say, ‘Very cheesy.’”

Stupid code word. Dad must have sent him. She had to cooperate. “I need my gun.”

“We don’t have time.” He towed her through the bungalow as if he knew where he was headed.

Things were moving too fast for her to make considered decisions about what to do and where to go, but she was always poised to run.

They burst through the back door into the late afternoon heat.

Legs churning, they charged across the parched backyard and into the alley.

She heard gunfire behind her as she ran hard and fast. The soles of her sneakers pounded on dusty asphalt. In high school and college, she’d been on the track team but not as a sprinter. She was a distance runner, better at stamina than speed.

He dived behind a dumpster and pulled her along with him.

Struggling for breath, she leaned against the cinder block wall of the corner laundromat.

Tension squeezed her lungs. Breathe, dammit.

She gulped down air as she slid down the wall into a squat, trying to be invisible by melting into the graffiti scrawls that claimed this territory for some gang or another.

Though she’d lived here for almost a year, she hadn’t bothered learning their names.

All were enemies. Drug merchants. Thieves.

Killers. Everybody was to be suspected, even this guy who had dragged her away from danger.

Or into it? Even though he knew the code, she didn’t trust him.

Still struggling to catch her breath, she started to stand, preparing to flee on shaky legs.

He pushed her back. “Stay down, Mollie.”

“Why…” Words squeezed out between gasps. “…do you think…that’s my name?”

“You fit the stats. Five foot eight, a hundred and twenty-five pounds, blue eyes. Your hair is sometimes brown, sometimes red, and right now blond. Close to your natural color. You have a mole on your right cheek just below the corner of your eye.”

“Coincidence.”

“Don’t believe in them.”

“Nor do I,” she said.

“You have a tattoo of a four-leaf clover on your leg.” Crouched beside her, he pointed at the tat above her ankle-high sock. “Right here.”

The touch of his forefinger against her skin gave her an electric jolt that caused her to look him over again. How could she possibly be feeling an attraction to this stranger while being pursued by a gunman? She must be more desperately lonely than she’d realized. “Why are you here?”

“To find you,” he said as if stating an obvious fact. “We need to get away from here before this guy scores a hit.”

Not a lot of other options. She was unarmed, except for her tiny canister of pepper spray and a four-inch ceramic pocketknife. In the pockets of her wide-legged Bermuda shorts, she carried only her wallet and a cell phone. “What if I don’t want to go with you?”

“You still don’t believe me.”

“Why should I?”

“How’s this for proof?” When he smiled, he had dimples in both cheeks. His green eyes stood out against his tan. A faint scar bisected his left eyebrow. “Today, Mollie Harper, is your birthday. You’re turning twenty-six but look younger.”

She hadn’t forgotten, but she’d put the date out of her head.

When she and her twin were kids, birthdays had been glorious.

Their horoscope sign was Leo, and they fit the profile for a couple of tawny lion cubs.

With Madison gone, Mollie never felt like celebrating.

She glared at the stranger and pulled herself together.

He was her best bet for getting to safety. “Do you have a car?”

“I parked two blocks away.”

“Why?”

“So I could check out your neighborhood without being noticed.”

She scoffed. “In that gray linen suit with the silk tie, you don’t exactly blend.”

“I spotted the guy in a parked car watching your house. Didn’t know he was armed until he started shooting.”

“What’s your name, Suit?”

“Spencer Cameron, but everybody calls me Spence. I’m a lawyer from Cloverdell, Oregon. My grandfather is Oliver.”

Mollie had never met Spence, but Oliver Cameron was a close family friend. Cloverdell was her hometown, a place she both loved and hated. Her great-aunt Irma Winchell still lived there. “Is that why you’re here? Something to do with my family?”

“It is,” he admitted. “Follow me.”

They eased around the corner of the laundromat and walked fast along busted sidewalks. She heard dogs barking, kids playing, music thumping. Nobody paid much attention to them.

Spence dodged into another alley and started sprinting again.

She did the same. After another blast of gunfire behind them, he jumped a four-foot chain link fence into a backyard.

He turned to give her a hand, but she didn’t need his help.

Mollie dug her sneaker-clad toe into the fence and slung her leg over.

They rushed toward the house and exited through the gate onto a broken-down driveway where three equally broken-down cars parked end to end.

On the street, she spotted a different armed man coming from the opposite direction of the shooter in the alley. She and Spence were trapped. She pulled her cell phone from her pocket.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Calling for backup.” She had an emergency number for the US Marshals Service. They weren’t always speedy, but they actually did respond.

“Not yet,” he said.

Truth be told, she’d rather not summon the marshals.

Calling in the cavalry would get her picked up and moved to a different city.

She’d lose her autonomy and be forced to follow the rules for a protected witness.

Their rules. Avoiding involvement from the marshals or the feds might be worth the risk. “What next, Spence?”

She silently watched as he approached a group of young men gathered on the porch steps of the house next door.

A neighborhood gang. Four or five of them, jiggly and nervous.

Obviously, they were reacting to the sound of gunfire.

Equally obvious was their natural hostility to the man dressed in a suit and tie, though Spence had holstered his weapon.

He opened his wallet. Mollie didn’t know what he said, but the gang pocketed his wad of cash and set out toward the armed man who wore baggy jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt.

Both of his arms were covered in angry-looking tats.

He carried a big, impressive, old-fashioned-looking revolver.

Calling out threats to the intruder, the gang approached him.

Their behavior provided enough of a distraction for Spence to drag Mollie in a different direction.

They ran up one street and down another until they reached his car and ducked inside.

He pulled away from the curb, not driving fast enough to call attention to his sleek, clean, black SUV.

Not a typical vehicle for the neighborhood unless you were a drug lord or a pimp.

Spence navigated through side streets until he reached Eighth Avenue heading east. At Colorado Boulevard, he turned right onto Sixth Avenue Parkway, where tall, leafy trees formed a canopy over the split road.

The air-conditioning kicked in, and she reveled in the cool caress that dried the sheen of perspiration on her body and left her feeling renewed. She asked, “Where are we going?”

“Centennial Airfield, south of town.”

“If you think I’m going to get on a plane with you, you’re sadly mistaken.”

He pulled onto a cross street by the wide center median, stopped the car and put it in Park.

Spence turned in his seat to face her. “I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Mollie.”

No stranger to tragedy, she braced herself. This bad news had to be about Dad. The people who wanted to kill him might have finally succeeded. “Tell me.”

“Your great-aunt Irma passed away.”

Relief that her father hadn’t been murdered—not yet anyway—mingled with a fresh jolt of grief and a vivid memory of Irma Winchell with her dyed red hair, raucous laugh and the scent of chocolate chip cookies that always surrounded her.

Aunt Irma had taken care of Mollie and her twin sister, Madison, when they were thirteen and their mother died.

Irma had done her best to protect them until Dad’s testimony against a drug cartel forced him into the Witness Protection Program—WITSEC.

She and her sister were also encouraged to disappear. Mollie resisted as long as possible.

She tucked her sorrow into the overflowing supply that suffocated her heart. Given that Aunt Irma was in her nineties, her death didn’t come as a total shock. “When did it happen?”

“Ten days ago,” he said.

Which mirrored the time when Dad took off on his trip. Her suspicions flared. Another coincidence? “How well did you know her?”

“My grandpa has been her family attorney since before her husband died twenty-seven years ago. As you know, Irma never had children of her own and never remarried. She turned her energy toward business and finance, and she did better than anyone expected. Her estate is considerable. You’re one of her heirs, Mollie.

She left everything to you and her other two great-nieces. ”

“Bethany and Erin.” When they were growing up in Cloverdell and all lived with Aunt Irma, they’d been best of friends. Three leaves of the four-leaf clover tattoo. The fourth was Madison.

“There’s a catch,” he said. “You need to appear in person to claim your inheritance.”

“And you think it might be dangerous for me to show my face in Cloverdell, right? That’s why you have a gun.”

“Right.”

A chance to go home again was tempting, but how could she say yes?

She couldn’t desert her father. When she first joined him in WITSEC, she’d been twenty and naive.

He had to take care of her and protect her from the cartel that was responsible for Madison’s death.

During the past five years, she’d assumed the major responsibilities for both of them.

She doubted he could survive on his own. However…

If she came into a lot of money, their lives would drastically improve.

She could afford to hire private security and shape her own future.

No more living in WITSEC houses in sketchy neighborhoods.

No more struggling with car payments, other debts and student loans, none of which had been forgiven even though Dad heroically testified against a drug cartel.

A great big juicy windfall meant she could actually plan for the future or go back to college or open a flower shop of her own.

Not that she’d ever wanted to grow up to be a florist, but she’d learned about plants and cultivation at Aunt Irma’s hazelnut orchards.

Might as well put that knowledge to use.

“That’s why you came to Denver,” she said. “You want to take me back to Oregon.”

“I have a chartered jet waiting at Centennial.”

“Just to be clear, how much money are we talking about?”

“I can’t reveal the exact amount of cash or property until the reading of the will,” he said, “but I can tell you that your share is well over two million dollars.”

She swallowed hard and frankly stared at the man in the driver’s seat. Had she heard correctly? Did he say two million?

He flashed his dimples and said, “That’s million as in six zeroes. Ready to come home to Cloverdell?”

It wasn’t every day that a golden-eyed stranger turned up on her doorstep offering a huge inheritance. How could she possibly say no?