Operation Reunion (8 page)

“Help you?”

“I’m Quinn Foxworth,” Quinn said, holding out a hand. Somewhat to Kayla’s surprise, the man reached out and grasped it without hesitation, and the handshake was welcoming and hearty.

“I’m Colin Brown. You’re the folks who helped Henry Shigeta,” the man said. “He told me you’d be coming.”

“Yes.”

“What you did, that did my heart good,” the man said. “They’d been fighting that bastard Inskip for a long time. Always thought he was crooked as the day is long.”

“And you were right,” Quinn said.

“Damn straight. Taking bribes, letting his ‘friends’ build whatever they wanted wherever, but keeping good people like Henry and his wife from building the home they’d planned their whole lives on their own property. Not sure three years in jail is enough, though.”

“I was more concerned that he never have power over people again,” Quinn said. “And I think we took care of that.”

The man smiled widely. “That you did. Now,” he said briskly, “you’re here about that picture Henry showed me?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been studying it, and the more I looked the more familiar he looked. So I went around and talked to Dustin.” He glanced at their little group. “He’s a kid who’s always hanging out here. He knows all the regulars, so when a stranger comes in, he notices. So I showed him the picture.”

“Did he know him?” Hayley asked.

Colin nodded. “He recognized him right off. ‘That’s that Chad guy,’ he said.”

Kayla’s heart took a little jump in her chest and her knees went a little wobbly. In the same instant she felt Dane’s arm around her, supporting her.

That’s that Chad guy.

If Dane hadn’t been holding her, she might well have sunk to her knees on the floor.

Chad.

At last.

Chapter 12

“I
t was still three months ago,” Hayley said.

Dane watched as Kayla nodded. She hadn’t said much since they’d left the game store. They were sitting now in a booth in the town’s only restaurant, a small place built to resemble a railroad dining car. It looked old, but Dane noticed a small alcove at one end that appeared to be an internet set-up with a single computer, and he’d seen a sign in the window indicating free Wi-Fi. They were the only people here now, and he wondered if the place got busier later on or in the evenings.

Quinn and Teague had left them here while they went on what Teague called a recon. They would get the lay of the land, Quinn had said, then they’d all decide what to do.

“But it fits,” Hayley was saying now. “The time frame is about right, given when he mailed the note from Redding, which is only thirty miles from here.”

Dane realized then that Hayley was probably here to babysit them while Quinn went and did...whatever it was he did in cases like this. If Kayla had taken Quinn’s advice and stayed home, it probably would have been just Quinn and Teague making this trip, or maybe even just Quinn himself. In this small town where everybody seemed to know everyone and everyone’s business, Dane was guessing Quinn would have little trouble getting people to cooperate. After what they’d done for the Shigetas, he wasn’t surprised that the Foxworth reputation obviously preceded the man with the name.

Dane had been a little surprised that Foxworth had become involved in such a small, relatively insignificant local case as the Shigeta’s fight with the county government. That they had only improved his opinion of them.

They were, he thought, genuine champions of lost causes, just as they said. He liked that.

He just wasn’t sure he liked what had just happened. If Mr. Brown and the kid he’d spoken to were right, and Dane had no reason to think they weren’t, the lead was still three months old. Yet Kayla was as wound up and excited as if they’d walked into the game shop five minutes after Chad had walked out.

“It’s just the closest I’ve been,” Kayla said, fiddling with the salt shaker on the table, spinning it with restless fingers. He’d never seen her completely still for long while awake—it just wasn’t her nature.

“I understand,” Hayley said. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up too high, when we don’t know if this will really lead to anything. It could—”

She broke off, and Dane knew before she looked that Quinn must be approaching; he could see it in the look in Hayley’s eyes. Did he look like that when he saw Kayla after even a short time apart? He was willing to bet he did.

And then Quinn was there, sliding onto the booth bench beside Hayley, kissing her cheek before he turned to face them.

“He was hitchhiking,” Quinn said without preamble.

Dane heard Kayla’s breath catch.

“How’d you find that out?” Dane asked.

“Guy at the hardware store said I should catch up with the postal carrier. Said she’d been on this route for fifteen years and knew damn near everything about everyone. And that if there’d been a stranger around, chances are she’d know more about him than anyone.”

“I gather you found her?” Dane asked.

“Yeah.” Quinn’s gaze shifted to Kayla. “She recognized Chad.”

Dane felt her tense beside him. But she said only “And?”

“He was out on the highway. She said it was raining, and he looked pretty wet and miserable, but she’s prohibited from picking up hitchhikers.”

“But he was all right?”

Kayla’s voice was so full of worry that Dane felt a jab of guilt. She loved her brother and he was the only immediate family she had left, and if he really was innocent as she believed, then he was a victim second only to their parents. He shouldn’t have made it so hard on her.

“She thought so. He wasn’t hurt or anything.”

Kayla let out a relieved sigh as the waitress, a young, bored-looking woman who refilled their coffee, added a mug for Quinn, then vanished anew into the back, probably thinking they weren’t worth her time because they weren’t ordering lunch.

After she left, Quinn continued.

“She said he was only a few blocks from the senior center, so she sent him there. Said she knew they’d take him in, dry him off and feed him.”

“We should go there,” Kayla said, making as if to rise immediately.

“Teague’s already there. He was on that side of town, so I called him and gave him the info. He should be here soon with whatever he finds.”

“Oh.” She sank back down. “Thank you.”

“We’ll find what’s here to be found,” Quinn assured her, then, in an almost warning tone, added, “But as I said from the beginning, I can’t promise you’ll like it.”

“I have to know,” Kayla said. “But I hate just sitting here. I feel like I should be doing something. Anything.”

“You have been,” Dane said quietly. “For ten years you have been.”

She turned to look at him. “But I’ve never been this close,” she said, eagerness building in her voice. “Surely you see that now. This is real, this is a chance finally to really find my brother and bring him home!”

Several things hit Dane at once. First was the fact that, until now, he’d never really thought she’d find him, so he’d never considered what would happen if she did. Bring him home? He could only imagine what that would be like. And he didn’t like the feel of it at all.

Kayla’s expression changed as she watched him. “Aren’t you even a little happy about it?”

No. No, I’m not.

He didn’t speak it because he was afraid if he did he’d sound like a spoiled child who’d just been told another baby was on the way. It didn’t matter; she read him anyway.

“Fine,” she snapped. “Why did you even come if that’s how you feel?”

That the usually private Kayla was dragging this out in front of Quinn and Hayley told Dane volumes. He looked at her, at the set of her mouth, the rekindled resolve in her expression.

She was as determined as ever. And he felt a slow, creeping chill overtake him as he finally admitted to himself she would keep this up to the ends of the Earth if she had to.

She was lost to him.

Even as he thought it she turned away. “What do we do next?” she asked eagerly.

“We wait and see what Teague found out,” Quinn said with a nod toward the window. Dane looked and saw the pilot headed for them at a brisk pace. He looked like a man who had something to say.

He could feel the renewed energy fairly radiating from Kayla as Teague joined them.

“What did you find?” she asked before he’d even sat down.

Teague glanced at Quinn. Something seemed to be communicated between the two men in the moment before Quinn nodded.

“She wants to know it all,” he said.

Teague nodded, but his usual friendly smile was missing when he spoke. “They remember him, all right.”

Kayla leaned forward eagerly. “They do? Did he say where he was going?”

Teague hesitated for about three seconds, and Dane got the sense he was trying to find a better way to say what he had to say. And he found himself, despite it all, waiting uneasily for what was coming.

“They remember him,” Teague said at last, “because he cleaned them out when he left.”

Quinn leaned back. Hayley sighed. Kayla frowned. “What?” she asked, clearly puzzled.

“He emptied the Bingo box.” Teague’s tone was remarkably level, but his sentiments on the action were still obvious. “Two hundred and fifty dollars. Stole every last penny.”

Chapter 13

“A
re they sure it was him?”

Kayla sounded doubtful, and it dug at the raw spot inside Dane that knew they were over for good. The knowledge hadn’t reached his heart and gut yet, but his intellect knew in that cold, dispassionate way that was the beginning of the human mind learning to accept the unacceptable.

“Oh, please,” Dane said, unable to hold back. “Don’t defend him. Why would a guy who stole the money his eight-year-old sister saved up for a bike feel a qualm about stealing from senior citizens?”

Color flared in Kayla’s cheeks. “I wasn’t defending him. I was just asking if they were sure.”

“They were,” Teague said, his voice more sympathetic now, as if, although he despised what her brother had done, he felt sorry for Kayla. Whether it was for having to deal with this news, or for just having a jerk of a brother, Dane wasn’t sure.

Hell, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. The brief interlude when it had seemed they might make it, when she’d been ready and willing to put all this on the shelf where it belonged and go on with their lives, had apparently been only that, an interlude. A precious, beautiful, intimate interlude, destined to end.

Chad Tucker had stolen something much more valuable than the contents of that money box from him and left him with only the sad remnants, memories of the life he’d thought was going to be forever. He’d always assumed they’d get married, had even figured her twenty-fifth birthday would be the day he’d formally ask her. He wanted her to have a chance to live enough to be sure, although he’d been sure for years. But by the time that birthday had rolled around, he’d been so tired of all things Chad, he hadn’t proposed after all.

“There was a witness who saw him take it and run for the back door,” Teague was saying. “By the time the local sheriff got there, he was long gone.”

“Did you talk to the sheriff’s office?”

“Yes. They looked up the report for me. Nothing much there except the usual conflicting eyewitness descriptions. But I talked to several people who were there that day. They all agreed the guy in our image was him, but there was nothing that helps figure out where he is now.”

“Anything else?” Quinn asked.

Teague’s mouth quirked. “I felt kind of bad, bringing it up again. Apparently there’s an ongoing disagreement between the folks who wanted him hunted down and arrested before he spent it all on drugs, and the ones who thought if he needed the money that badly they should have just given it to him. It was getting kind of heated when I left.”

Dane winced inwardly. That sounded a little too close to the arguments he and Kayla had had over her brother. Maybe there really was no middle ground, anywhere.

To her credit, Kayla didn’t try to defend Chad once she’d heard Teague’s story. She sat silently, looking troubled. His instinct was to comfort, as it always had been with her, but he quashed the urge. It was going to be a long, hard battle to kill the habits of more than a decade, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

But he was starting to accept that it was going to be necessary.

“It’s your call, Kayla,” Quinn said. “Do we keep going?”

“I...” She hesitated, flicked a glance at Dane. He said nothing. He already knew what she was going to say.

It’s not your business anymore,
he told himself. And that alone jabbed at him sharply. Disengaging was going to be a painful process.

“I can’t quit now, not this close.”

And there it was, Dane thought.

“Kayla,” Hayley began.

“I know,” Kayla said. “It could come to nothing, but it’s still the most definite information I’ve had in all this time. Every other time, nobody remembered him, not even at the post office where he mailed the notes.”

“This all would have been easier if he’d used email to contact you,” Quinn said. “We could have tracked that, found an IP, and Tyler would have had it nailed down in a hurry.”

“He could have. He obviously looked at her support group’s website to get the P.O. Box, and the email address is right there. But he didn’t,” Dane said, beyond caring now that he sounded as bleak as he felt. “Because he doesn’t want to be found. Not even by Kayla. Maybe especially not by her.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, clearly stung.

He told himself it didn’t matter. That he didn’t care anymore. And while even as he thought it he knew the latter wasn’t true, he was afraid the former was.

“He’s been toying with you for ten years,” he said, letting out some of his frustration. “Just when you start to get past it, another one of those damn notes comes. Never enough for you to find him, just enough to remind you he’s out there. To make sure you never forget.”

“I don’t want to forget!”

“You think he doesn’t know that?”

Dane was aware that Hayley was staring out the window, clearly trying to ignore them. Quinn, however, was listening to every word, not in the manner of someone who enjoyed hearing other people’s disputes but more like someone who wanted every tiny bit of data in case it might help.

Dane wondered what Quinn would get out of this exchange. And it was a measure of the devastation he was feeling inside that he didn’t really care.

“What do you want me to do?” Kayla demanded. “Just pretend he’s not out there? Maybe stay home, spend his half of the insurance money? Maybe you’d like that, is that it?”

Under normal circumstances, Dane would have laughed that ridiculous accusation off, but nothing was normal about how he was feeling right now.

“What if you did find him?” he asked. Now that it had occurred to him, he wondered if she had ever thought beyond the immediate goal herself. “You talked about bringing him home. Did you ever think what that would mean? That the first people waiting to welcome him would be the police?”

Kayla’s eyes widened, and the color drained from her cheeks. She was too smart for it not to have occurred to her, but her expression told him she’d put this in the “deal with it when it happens” category.

“Did you think that because they didn’t have the manpower and resources to go on an out-of-state manhunt that they’d just forget about him?”

Kayla turned to look at Quinn. “But...you’ll help me prove he didn’t do it, right?”

“We’ll help you find the truth,” Quinn said gently but firmly. “I warned you from the beginning you might not like what we find.”

Kayla lowered her eyes to her coffee mug, as if the last bit of dark liquid held the answers she wanted to hear.

“And you agreed to accept what they found,” Dane reminded her.

“I know that.” There was a snap in her voice.

“But you won’t, will you?” Dane said wearily. “You’ll just go on and on, throwing your life away, throwing our lives away.”

Her head came up sharply. “That’s not true.”

“How long are you going to live in complete denial, Kayla?”

“I’m not in denial. You think I don’t know we may never find him, may never be able to prove he’s innocent?”

“No. I think you’ll never face the real truth.” Dane knew he was headed into no-return territory, that if he continued he’d be looking at nothing but ashes. But wasn’t he anyway?

“And what truth might that be?” Quinn’s voice came from across the table, sounding calm and merely interested. Dane never took his eyes off Kayla. She was glaring at him, and in that moment he let go of the last, tiny shred of hope.

“That Chad did it,” he said flatly.