Larson drove his Explorer down a perfectly straight farm road. Less than forty minutes west of St. Louis, the McMansion suburban developments finally stopped sprawling and the flat expanse of generational farms took over, the small white houses and silos surrounded by brown tilled ground, rail fence, and pasture. The almost geometrical landscape looked familiar to both passengers. Six years earlier, Larson had sequestered protected witness Hope Stevens in the same Marshals Service safe house-the Orchard House-that now was his destination.
The closer they drew to the final turn, across a wooden bridge and up the hill, the more those memories weighed on him. It was at the farmhouse where they’d first found each other-and had last seen each other.
For six years he’d avoided reliving such moments, no great fan of nostalgia and unwilling to be one of those people who lived constantly with one foot in the past. But now, with her finally in the seat beside him, something allowed him to revisit another time in this same place, and he gave in to it willingly.
Larson had run the protection squad back then, and the rotation of assignments had conveniently left him inside the farmhouse with her, while Stubblefield and Hampton had perimeter patrol. He later wondered whether he’d been set up, whether Hamp and Stubby had felt the chemistry between them and arranged this one night for them. But he wasn’t thinking such things at the time. He was thanking his stars.
The two-story, hundred-year-old farmhouse had not been restored since the thirties and remained in a state of neglect. It sagged, with wandering cracks, like lightning bolts, in the green-painted plaster walls and white ceilings, gaping chips drawn by gravity out of the dining room’s elaborate ceiling molding, swollen black fingers of cigarette and cigar burns at the edges of much of the furniture, especially the dining room table where witnesses and their deputies had whiled away the hours with games of poker and scotch. The house had been shown little respect since its incorporation into the Marshals Service. The exterior, once a fashionable gray, was now peeling paint, curling away from the western sun and sloughing off like reptilian scales.
What had once been a proper and formal staircase led up to a narrow second-floor hallway off of which were two small bedrooms and a narrow bath wedged between them, probably originally a linen closet or nursery. Another, smaller corridor, added hastily years before and without the care given the original construction, led over a study below and into two oddly shaped bedrooms connected one to the other through an ill-fitted communicating door. A foul-smelling, twisting set of back stairs led from the added bedrooms down to the small kitchen below. Because of these additions the house had a wandering, cut-up, and unpredictable feel to it, seeming larger than it actually was.
She’d called him upstairs. “Lars?”
And he knew before arriving that despite other nights of comforting, of intimacy, that this was their moment of consummation. He knew what she had in mind not from anything said but by the pent-up energy that had been forced to simmer between them while in the company of others. He couldn’t identify the moment between them that accounted for the way he felt, nor had she directly communicated to him her own emotions or desires, and yet he knew. He knew this was wrong, against all regulations, and he knew this was going to happen. Knew they wouldn’t have long.
All windows in the house had been retrofitted with removable blackout cloth that Velcroed into place. The two exterior doors had blackout blankets that tied to the side by day but hung as light barriers by night. The fixtures in the house, and all lamps, burned compact fluorescents, the government’s idea of how to save on energy costs; the resulting light, slightly blue or oddly yellow on the eyes, never looking quite right.
Her bedroom had one jaundiced bedside lamp aglow. The house, closed and shuttered as it was, and without air-conditioning of any kind, sweltered in the late-summer heat, with only ineffective and noisy floor fans left to stir the turgid air. One such beast was at work in the corner, grinding and clapping as its paddles scraped the wire protection meant to defend fingers from accidents. It forced a mechanical rhythm into the room, clippity-clippity-clapping and then whining asthmatically before starting the pattern again.
Hope stood just in front of the lamp, casting herself in a dark shadow. She’d shed the pale-violet blouse, one of two such shirts she alternated day to day, revealing the low-cut, sleeveless saffron tank top that held to her loosely, her egret’s neck and strong arms glistening in the bedroom’s heat.
“Close the door,” she commanded.
The idea of locking the air in the room went against all logic. It had to be for privacy.
He pushed the door shut with a click.
“Does it lock?”
Larson’s heart responded in his chest. “I don’t think so.”
“Will they come in the house?”
“Not until shift change.”
“What if they need to use the facilities?”
She’d clearly deliberated on the obstacles that faced them.
Larson’s heart continued to race. “No, I seriously doubt it.” The fact was they’d piss into bushes if need be, but he didn’t want to get crude at such a moment. Furthermore, both his men would keep well away from the farmhouse in an effort to not place motion near it, not bring any attention to it.
She unfastened her belt, unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, leaving them hanging on the width of her sumptuous hips, her purple underwear showing. “I want to take a bath,” she said. “Warm, not hot. To cool off, if that’s possible.”
Standing just inside the shut door, Larson walked toward her.
“I’ve slept in my clothes the past several nights. We all have, haven’t we? I’m sick of sponge baths.”
He took another step closer. “I’m not sure I know where you’re going with this.”
“Oh, I think you do,” she said as she dragged the jeans lower, tugged them over her hips and down her legs. She leaned over to step out of them and her tank top fell away, offering a flash of round, pale skin and the white from her bra. She added, “Am I the only one who’s been thinking about this?”
“No.”
Another step closer.
“There’s something about taking my clothes off, undressing. It’s a moment of extreme… vulnerability. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Hope… I…”
“If you’re ever asked about this, questioned… I know you, Lars. You’d never lie about it. I know you could lose your job, and I know how much it means to you, how good you are at it. All those things. So you see… there’s only one way this can happen. Between us, I mean. I’m usually not the forward type,” she said, pulling off her top and standing now in bra and underwear. “Not at all.” She reached behind her back and deftly unclipped the bra. “This doesn’t come easy for me.” As the back strap came loose it slipped half off her breasts, the shoulder straps sliding lower on her arms. “But it has to be that I seduced you. It has to be all me, all my doing. That I came up with some lame excuse about being afraid to undress in the room alone-it was all I could come up with on short notice,” she said. “That I came on to you in a moment of weakness.”
“It’s supposed to be me protecting you,” he said hoarsely, his throat gone dry, “not the other way around.”
“We’ll look after each other then,” she said. She allowed the bra to fall. Her breasts rode high on her chest, her nipples and areolas far darker than her complexion suggested. She climbed out of the bikini briefs, and he could feel her embarrassed determination to continue. She wore only a thin silver necklace now-something he hadn’t yet told her would have to go before enrollment in the program.
She stepped forward and melted into him, her arms between them, her hands already working on his shirt buttons.
He reached around to embrace her and she chided, “No… No… No…” Looking up at him, she suppressed a grin as she explained, “I want it to be entirely my doing, Lars.” She mocked a response to her being interrogated about this. “He stood there stoically. He was in the room as I undressed. I asked him to be. I can’t explain that, but I couldn’t take off my clothes without someone there and Deputy Larson was the one guarding me that night. And, well…” She continued working his shirt open. She moved on to his belt and khakis. “I suppose I felt vulnerable, or in need of company, safety, security, but I found myself not heading for the bath, as I’d suggested, but instead, one thing led to another and I found myself flirting with him.” In her regular voice, she said, “Flirting’s far too soft a word. Not the right word at all. I’ll have to come up with something better.”
“Hope…”
“You be quiet, Deputy. We need the record clean. We need our story… straight.” With that she had his pants open and him firmly in hand. She brought his fingers up to her chest and whispered, “This once, the first time between us, it has to be all me.”
Her nipple firmed and grew puckered under his touch.
She undressed him, saying, “You’re going to lie down on the bed and do your best to resist me.” Again, Larson reached to embrace her, having had enough of the game, but she held him off, saying, “Please,” and he understood from her tone that she was serious. Perhaps she couldn’t confront true lovemaking. Perhaps it was too soon for her. Perhaps this was more born of a primal urge to dominate after days-weeks-of having her every movement controlled and coordinated by others. And all of them men, always men.
“My turn,” she said, confirming his thoughts.
She lay him back on the bed and climbed atop him, dragging her warm spot against him, drawing something abstract with her soft paintbrush. She climbed over him and lowered a breast and nipple to his lips, and as he kissed her there, as his tongue raced circles, she reached back and touched him and he shuddered head to toe. She alternated breasts to his lips as her fingers explored him.
She pulled her breast free of him and raised up on extended arms and locked elbows, hovering over him on raised toes like doing a push-up, and slowly lowered herself to where it was the heat from her skin he felt first. Then her breasts lit up his skin and she slowly eased her full weight down onto him, melting down into him to where arm matched arm, belly matched belly, and thigh matched thigh. Then she rocked her hips, opened her legs and reached down there, taking hold, sliding lower along his chest, and with this motion joined them with barely any effort.
She lay there quietly, Larson fully inside her now, not a motion between them beside the drumming of their pulses, their conflicting heartbeats. She held him like a clenched fist. He tried to initiate a rhythm and she pinned down his hips and said hotly into his ear, “You’re all mine.”
And he was.
He grew delirious in the heat of the room. He lost track of time but never of her. They melded into this single, humming entity. A lone moth worked along the ceiling, dancing with its shadow. They must have lain absolutely still for ten minutes or more-it was like nothing he’d ever experienced. At the first sense of him losing his erection she moved one full, glorious stroke, lifting herself up to sitting, and driving him back into her, filling her, completing her, before stretching out prone and lowering herself incrementally again in that same dizzying fashion as before. Now she lay fully atop, their bodies meeting together again, both of them murmuring.
“I’ve wanted this for so long,” she whispered into his ear. “I didn’t want to waste it.”
She sat up then, pulled his hands to her breasts, and began her musical rising and falling.
“Look at me,” he said, and she did, and it felt like days later before her eyes rolled back into her head and the world exploded through him and into her in a perfectly timed choreography of contractions and sharp cries of satisfaction.
He awoke to the sound through the wall of her bath running, and might have believed it all a dream had not that paddle fan been grinding its way through the chorus of that same grating song.
Rolling swales of bleached and dying field grass gave way to slate ponds stitched together by meandering streams the color of old steel. A pair of mallards rose and crossed the road, their wings beating so fast they seemed to fly without them, veering away from the Explorer and up into a guncotton sky.
Hope sat stone-faced in the passenger seat, a knot of concern worn on her brow like a birthmark. “How do we know that will work?”
“Because we’ve done it before,” Larson answered.
“But it hasn’t rung.”
“It will.” He’d call-forwarded her cell phone to his secure BlackBerry, and had then shut her cell phone off, to prevent any chance of her phone being triangulated, a sophisticated method of radio telemetry. If Penny had been kidnapped, and if her captors called, if an effort was made to negotiate, Larson believed it would only be to hold her on the line long enough to electronically track her location. He dared not underestimate the reach of the Romeros. If they could corrupt the federal court system-and some said they already had-then cell phones weren’t going to inhibit them.
“This drive is bringing back all sorts of stuff for me,” she said.
“Yup. Good stuff.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“What’s her name?” Hope asked, out of the blue.
“There is no ‘her.’ There’s a friend, Linda. It got heavy for a couple months, a long time ago, but it’s friends now, and that’s good.” He said, “You?”
“No.” She offered a mocking smile. “Not even close.”
She’d overheard Larson’s call to Linda, suggesting she stay with her mother for a day or two. The incident at the hospital and the kidnapping had rattled him. It seemed unlikely the Romeros would connect him to Hope, then his dog to Linda, but he’d never forgive himself should anything happen to her because of him.
Unsurprisingly, Linda had reacted calmly, her primary concern that he make sure he was taking all necessary precautions for himself.
“Did you come to St. Louis looking for me?” Larson asked. Why he couldn’t bring himself to ask the real question, about Penny, he wasn’t sure. The moment he’d heard the child’s age, he’d known. So why the indirect questioning?
She almost smiled. “Yeah, I did. Had no clue there’d be no way to find you once I got here. You’re not in information, not in any phone books. Nothing on the Internet. You’re worse than I was in protection.” She hesitated, as if ashamed to admit it. “I even sat outside the Federal building a couple different days looking for you. How’s that for sick?”
“Not at all.” He thought a moment. “Much Ado About Nothing? Was that your laugh I heard?”
“Don’t miss the turn,” she said, indicating the left.
As if he would have.
“Are you sure there’s no way they can detect that I’ve call-forwarded my number? Why haven’t I heard from someone?”
Good job changing the subject, he thought. But at that very moment Larson’s BlackBerry chirped at his side to save them both.
Rather than answer himself, he pulled over sharply and caught a quick look at the caller ID: OUT OF AREA. Calls from anyone inside the Service came up PRIVATE on caller ID. Believing this could be intended for her, he passed her his phone, still ringing. He switched off the car as she cradled the BlackBerry awkwardly and pressed it to her ear.
“Hello?” Her eyes darted first to Larson, then out toward the landscape.
Larson leaned across to listen in and for a moment their heads touched and he felt that same sense of burning he had felt all those years ago. He withdrew quickly but now it was she who angled toward him, and again, he leaned to meet her.
“You are missing a package,” the voice said. “A very pretty little package.”
But the way the words were drawn out and strung together convinced Larson that the call was nothing but a ruse to buy time to trace Hope’s location. Larson’s BlackBerry was untraceable; and though it housed a GPS chip, that chip had to be switched on manually.
“You leave her out of this!” Hope blurted out, contrary to what she knew was required of her.
“Oh… but it’s a little late for that now, don’t you think? I wonder what Social Services would have said about you locking her out like that?”
Tracing calls worked both directions. The Romeros had to know that the full technological might and power of the Marshals Service would be summoned to locate this girl. So why play so loose with time? Caller ID was nearly instantaneous, whether the caller believed the line blocked or not. This caller had already stayed on much too long. Larson suspected that a reverse trace was under way: The caller had been advised to keep Hope engaged for as long as possible. But by remaining on the line, the caller was in fact leaving his own foot squarely in the bear trap.
Larson drew a fast circle in the air, indicating she should keep the caller talking.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“It’s not about what they-what we,” the male voice immediately corrected, “want. If you want to recover the missing package, I suggest you keep your phone close by your side. Instructions to follow.” The line cleared.
Larson found the caller’s slipup telling-from “they” to “we”-and the choice of language intriguing. It sounded as if the man had been reading from a script at the beginning and end but had improvised in between.
He took back the phone, expecting to hear from the Clayton office within minutes. The call had lasted plenty long enough for them to trace, even if some kind of switching device were involved. Sitting upright behind the wheel again, Larson turned the key.
Hope’s face was streaked with tears, her arms now crossed so tightly he wondered if she could breathe.
“Don’t,” he cautioned. “Don’t let them win. They want this kind of reaction from you.”
“Shut up!” she said, ratcheting her head away from him, gazing out at the patch-quilt geometry of some farmer’s labors.
“It helps them.”
“Leave it,” she told the tilled fields. After a moment she asked, “What now?”
“They think if you leave your phone on they’ll find you, and that will end it. But, we won this round. We’ll trace them. Maybe they know that, maybe they don’t.”
“So, what now?” she repeated.
“We’ll get you settled in at the farm. Normally a couple of our guys would join me, but Rotem and I think that’s too risky right now. Soon enough. Until then, basically, you’re missing and I’m AWOL. My boss has to plug a leak. Until then, you and I remain on our own. It’s best. I have some stuff to work through once you’re okay.”
“I am okay,” she said.
He had the car going again. “There’s a psychology to this-to abductions. I’m not expecting you to be able to detach. Of course not. But their plan is to play with you-to manipulate you into making a mistake and offering them a chance to kill you. That’s all they want. They don’t care about Penny the way we do,” a slip he covered by talking more quickly now, “and nothing they say one way or the other about her is the truth. What we know-what we absolutely know-is how important she is to them right now. She’s their passport to you. That’s all that matters, all there is. She’s a means to an end, and as long as we, I, the Service, keep them from getting you, Penny retains her value. Do you understand? It’s important you understand this. You don’t do anything without me knowing it. Nothing. I don’t know how, but they’re going to try to push you into something-we don’t know what it is yet-but what I need you to keep in mind is that denying them is the key.”
“Sounds like there’s a lot you don’t know. Not very reassuring.”
“As long as they don’t have you, Penny’s safe.” God, how he hoped he was right. “And whatever you do that they ask will only ensure that both of you are killed.”
The Explorer complained as it climbed a long twisting hill, revealing pumpkin patches and apple orchards and unexpected colors brought on by early frosts that had yet to reach the city. The leaves were changing here, a swirling mix of maturing oranges, reds, and browns. Paint by number. PICK YUR OWN-3 MILES AHEAD. The Orchard House was just around the next bend. Her body stiffened once again, telling Larson that she recognized it, too.