That way lay madness, though. She’d lived far too long with madness, knew exactly where that led. It led to death.
There was no life in here. Just sadness and despair. She closed the door quietly and walked back downstairs.
What else would she need? Documents. She hesitated in front of the study door, then pushed it open. It had been her father’s refuge. Later, it became a place of torment as she tried to jam the square peg of their penury into the round hole of her father’s endless needs. She swallowed and walked inside.
During her childhood she’d loved coming here. The room always smelled of books and lemon polish and the flowers Mrs. Gooding cut from the garden. Now it smelled of mildew and dust.
She checked for the thousandth time their bank account. There was only a couple hundred dollars in the account, free and clear now that the funeral was paid for. And there was the mortgage. Three years ago she’d had to get a mortgage on the house as her father’s medical needs ballooned. The bank director—whose son Daddy had helped keep out of trouble with some minor drug dealing charges—had been very difficult to deal with. She’d gotten the mortgage at ruinous terms and was deep underwater. The mortgage was worth much more than the house.
The house was falling down and needed new plumbing, a new roof, and a new boiler. A new everything, really.
Well, the bank could keep the house. She would simply walk away. Others had done it and she would too.
She needed some form of ID, but what? She’d never gotten her driver’s license and had never been abroad, so she had no passport. Rooting through the drawer she touched a small box and brought it out. Her mother’s documents. Her mother’s passport, driver’s license, and Kansas ID. All expired, but still. She looked exactly like her mother. Many people had commented on it. The driver’s license photo was from when her mother was thirty-five and Elle studied the photo. Her mother had actually looked younger at thirty-five than she did at twenty.
Her mother had been a lawyer. As a professional, she’d kept her maiden name.
Laura Elle Connolly.
It was doable.
She could even keep her name, say she used her middle name. That’s who she would become. Her mother. She’d become Laura Elle Connolly, known as Elle.
The wind rattled the windows and she shivered. It felt like she’d been cold for years. Wherever she went, she wanted the sea and warmth. Either Florida or California. There was a quarter on the desk and she held it in her fist until it warmed up.
Heads, Florida.
Tails, California.
She flipped it, watching it spin end over end until she caught it and opened her fist.
Tails.
California it was.
Two years ago, she’d taken down one of her father’s favorite books, a first edition collection of Oscar Wilde’s poems. Inside she’d found two crisp new hundred-dollar bills. She’d kept them in the volume, vowing to use them only in the direst possible emergency. Well, that emergency was here. The money went into the backpack.
She hoisted the backpack over her shoulders, walked out the front door, down the sidewalk to the street, and left the keys in the mailbox. The Greyhound bus station was ten blocks away. She’d checked and a bus was leaving for San Francisco at eight P.M., and the fare was more or less half of what she had.
Laura Elle Connolly, known as Elle, walked out of her old house and her old life, turned right, and began the long walk to the bus station and to her new life.
Chapter 5
Fort Bragg
Fayetteville, North Carolina
Three months later
He was wired again, at last.
As Nick Ross limped out of the debriefing room, his cell was slapped into his hand. SpecOps soldiers aren’t likely to give away sensitive intel on their cells to their buddies—but just in case any soldier went temporarily bat-shit insane, their personal cells were taken from them before a big op and returned to them after it was over.
He had his connection to the world back now.
It had been a long nightmare of a mission. Three months in the jungle on an Indonesian island waiting for a specific Tango to show up. The Tango was delayed, so for three long, miserable months he and his three teammates lived in trees and camouflaged pup tents, eating cold MREs and taking dumps behind a huge tree root until the MREs got them too gummed up for any kind of bowel movement at all.
They ate badly, slept badly, and lived like wretches, completely cut off from the rest of the world except for the daily encrypted burst that always bore the same message: nothing.
Until three days ago when the Indonesian sky practically lit up with the Gotcha! sign as Abu al-Wahishi, promoting his candidacy to replace Osama Bin Laden as King of the Shitheads, continued his worldwide recruiting tour. They’d missed him in Yemen and they’d missed him by an hour in Somalia, but they didn’t miss him on Bandar Island. His features were burned into every single team members’ brain cells, right down to the inch-long scar down his right cheek, courtesy of a bomb that went off too soon and barely scratched him, and the slightly crooked nose.
Nick had been at the end of his eight-hour stint up a mangrove tree when a ZiL truck drove up and there he was, Mr. Bad Guy himself. Nick had the immense pleasure of watching al-Wahishi through his crosshairs as he got out of the passenger side of the ZiL, stretched and then dropped like a sack of meat where he stood, courtesy of a 7.62 mm cartridge forged in the good old US of A.
One of the reasons they’d been so uncomfortable was that they never made camp. They were prepared at all times to exfiltrate on a second’s notice, and after Nick shot the fuckhead right through the bridge of his nose, his pus-filled brain exiting rapidly from the back of his head, they broke camp immediately and made their way to the coast two clicks away.
But not before the guards surrounding al-Wahishi got off several bursts from their AK-47s. Nick’s shot had been silenced so the guards weren’t firing at any target they could see. They just fired at random, and damned if one bullet didn’t tear a chunk of Nick’s right thigh away, missing the bone and missing the femoral artery but hurting like hell all the way to the coast, and nearly causing him to pass out from the pain in the Zodiac racing over choppy seas to where a helo waited in international waters to pick them up.
Luckily, he was injected with enough morphine on the helo to make the pain go away and make him a very happy man until he woke up seventeen hours later in the hospital.
He woke up with a heavy bandage around his thigh and in great pain again, but he was told he wasn’t going to get any more painkillers until he was debriefed. Well, now they’d been debriefed and he had been offered pain relief, but he had other things to do.
Something he’d been wanting to do for three months, two days, and seventeen hours.
Call Elle.
He was perfectly within his rights as long as he didn’t talk about where he’d been or what he’d seen or what he’d done, which was cool. You don’t want to tell a woman you care about that, Oh, I haven’t called but I’ve been living in a tree waiting to shoot a man’s brains out.
But Elle was smart. She’d made him for a soldier, and she’d understand that he couldn’t talk about it. What difference did it make anyway? There were plenty of things for them to talk about and, well, he didn’t really plan on talking much. Not for the first couple of days, anyway.
He planned to walk in, take Elle to bed, and stay there until they were both too sore to walk, the spell in bed broken only by eating and sleeping. Oh yeah. The thought of that—of taking Elle to bed and staying there for a long, long time—had sustained him over the past truly awful three months.
He was slated to become Delta. Not many Delta Force operators had girlfriends. Most, like him, had fuck buddies who didn’t mind if the men drifted in and out of their lives, leaving without a word and showing up again with no advance notice. But some had girlfriends. A couple were even married.
Nick had had no desire for a steady girlfri
end but Elle—Elle was different. He didn’t know how they’d make it work, but they would. Maybe he could convince her to move down here. There was a state university. Elle had always been an A student, she’d breeze through it, in whatever degree she wanted to get. And Nick could see her every time he came off an op.
That whole coming and going thing—he had to put a little Vaseline on the lens of his imagination because not too many women were happy at the thought of just sitting there waiting for their man to come back, in the hope that he didn’t come back in a pine box. But he could convince Elle. Elle cared for him. He’d seen it in her eyes, in her touch.
Oh God. Don’t think of her touch. Those three months slapping away bugs and sucking MREs, he hadn’t dared think of her because he’d get a woodie and he didn’t want to do that on the op. He was living with three other men, elbow to elbow, and he couldn’t do something about it without them knowing. Nick had got himself off any number of times with other guys around. They all did. Sexual release was a known stress reliever. But whacking off to thoughts of Elle while the other guys listened and cracked jokes. Nope. Couldn’t do it.
But now he wasn’t on an op and he was going to see Elle real soon. With any luck he could coax her down here, because the idea of driving the fourteen hours to Lawrence made his leg hurt just thinking of it. But he’d do it if he had to. Or he’d fly to the Kansas City airport, then rent a car to Lawrence.
However it was going to work, he was going to be with her before the sun set.
Oh yeah.
He’d memorized her home number and cell number. He tried home first and got the first of a number of shocks.
This number has been discontinued.
That freaked him. Had her phone been cut off because she couldn’t afford to pay the bill? Fuck! He hadn’t had time to dump money in her account before leaving on the op.
Then he went to DefCon I when he found out her cell was cut off too. Number nonexistent.
He Googled her from his cell and nearly passed out from relief when nothing came up. So she hadn’t been in an accident. She wasn’t—he swallowed around the dry boulder that had suddenly appeared in his throat—dead.
But she would certainly be hurting for money. He’d been planning to do this and was sorry it was so freaking late. Who knew he’d be sent on the longest op of his life? He was going to transfer the contents of his bank account to hers. He didn’t need money. It just sat there, this lump in his account. Let her have it.
First, check to see what she had in the bank.
He knew her bank account number. It was a local bank and their firewalls were pathetic. He easily hacked past them and then stared at his display.
Elle had closed her account. Three fucking months ago.
Now he was scared. A quick check showed that the power had been cut off three months ago. Jesus. On a hunch he checked the property rolls and stared. The bank owned her home. It had foreclosed on the mortgage that had been placed on the house three years ago. It hadn’t occurred to him that she’d have placed a mortgage on the house, but it made sense if she’d been having money problems dealing with the judge.
He winced when he saw the amount. Over a hundred thou. Well, they’d manage.
Or not. Because Elle hadn’t been making payments. The home technically belonged to the bank now. Lots of people still lived in foreclosed homes, but not without electricity. Not in the middle of winter. His skin itched with anxiety.
If this were an op he could send a drone over the house, look for signs of life. A tended garden, smoke from the chimney. A drone at night with IR and thermal imaging could see if someone was living there. It could even discern candlelight.
Shit. Not an image he wanted in his head. Elle, huddling in a cold, dark house lit only by candlelight.
There was no question of not going to Lawrence. He had to get there and fast. A quick check and he discovered he could hitch a series of helo rides from here to Kansas City and rent a car from there. He could be in Lawrence by 1700.
The rides were uncomfortable and hurt his leg, but he didn’t notice. He just sank into himself as he was carried northwest, running over and over through the same set of facts that made no sense. Or made awful sense, depending.
Because, well, there was another scenario buzzing in his head so loudly he had trouble thinking about anything else. The house and everything connected to it had been abandoned three months ago, exactly when Nick had abandoned her. He hadn’t abandoned her, not really, he’d had every intention of coming back, and he’d even left her an illegal note, but the fact of the matter was, he’d left. And though the note was already too much, it didn’t exactly give a lot of info.
Abandoned on the lowest day of her life. Left alone in a cold empty house the day after she buried her father. Looked at it that way—well, it wasn’t pretty. Because lots of bad things could happen to people felled by a blow when they were already low.
He hadn’t been worried about her the entire op. The only thing he’d been really worried about was his usual—a) get the mission done and b) come home alive. Elle had been there like a lollipop he was going to give himself when he’d done his job right.
He’d willed himself into making sure they got their mission done and he could bring his ass home safely, and he knew that as soon as he got the chance, he was going back to Lawrence.
But there was another scenario possible. And in that scenario, Nick leaving was just too much for her to bear and she—
Don’t go there.
But he went there anyway.
Because what was burning inside him—so much that he leaned forward in the helos as if he could make them fly faster, and he drove almost double the speed limit once he was on the ground—was a very clear image of what might be in that house that wouldn’t show up on IR.
A corpse.
It was nearly dark when he raced up the driveway, stumbled out of the car forgetting to close the car door, and limped as fast as he could to the front door. Nobody answered the bell. At that point, he wasn’t expecting anyone to. The front door lock was a joke. Inside of a minute, he was walking into the atrium.
He stepped inside on full alert, every sense alive. There was, of course, no light. Just to be thorough he tried the switches, but of course nothing worked. It was okay. He’d brought some of his kit and part of that kit was a military issue flashlight that lit everything up just fine. Not that there was anything to see. But there was something he smelled. Something awful. Something . . . dead.
Oh God. He’d smelled death before and this smell, thick and rancid, was one of the worst. He followed his nose into the kitchen, heart thundering, and stood on the threshold, flashlight panning over the room.
Not Elle. Not dead. The smell was that of meat that had rotted for three months. Spread out on the floor was box after box of groceries bearing the logo of the supermarket he’d stopped at. A couple of boxes were opened but as far as he could tell, nothing had been put away and certainly nothing had been eaten.
He checked room after room, his feet leaving tracks in the otherwise untouched dust, everything in exactly the place it had been three months before.
The desk in what had been the judge’s study showed a neat pile of bills with a checkbook on top. The stubs of the checkbook matched the bills.
The huge standalone safe’s door was open. Inside it was completely empty. The judge used to keep significant amounts of cash there. He remembered the time the safe had been emptied because the judge had given him everything in it. At the time, beside the cash, there had been a few gold ingots and stiff engraved documents—stocks and bonds. Now there was nothing.
He checked the rest of the study, but it was totally void of clues.
The stairs were hard for his leg and he climbed like old people did, one stair at a time. He ignored the pain and lifted his head and flared his nostrils, pulling in air, dreading the thought of smelling a cadaver up here. Nothing horrified him the way the thought of smelling Elle’s cor
pse did.
But there was nothing. Just cold, dead, empty air. He checked every room, leaving Elle’s room for last. Finally, he pushed open her bedroom door, heart knocking against his ribs, barely able to cross the threshold.
It was exactly as he left it, down to the unmade bed. He flared his nostrils again and thought he could smell those long-ago smells of Elle and sex, though that was crazy, of course.
There was nothing here. Here was where he fully accepted that Elle was gone. She’d always been so neat, and the fact that the room was a mess, hadn’t been cleaned up, was like the final nail hammered into a coffin.
He checked the closet, wincing at how few clothes she had. She’d once had the wardrobe of a princess. He used to tease her about her clothes and she’d laughed him off. She’d been young and pretty and rich. Of course she liked clothes. Now her wardrobe was whittled down to a few cheap everyday items and that was it.
He had no way of knowing if she’d packed a bag, no way of knowing what was missing. No way of knowing if she had walked away empty-handed.
There was utter despair here, he could feel it, could smell it over the faint smell of rotten meat coming from downstairs. There’d been brief joy here when they’d had sex, but it had been replaced by hopelessness. Nick could almost see Elle roaming the empty house looking for him.
Not finding him.
He touched the unmade bed, walked around it—and that was when he found his note. On the ground—facedown. Had she seen it? Whether she had or not, she’d let it flutter to the ground, left it behind. Whatever. She hadn’t waited for him.
His leg buckled, it simply couldn’t hold him up anymore.
He made it to the bed and collapsed.
Elle had no relatives. Nick knew that. No aunts and uncles, no cousins. It had just been the judge and her. He’d got it that the judge’s illness had separated her from the rest of the world. If she had friends to bolt to, he had no idea who they were. Her laptop was gone. From what he could tell, it was basically the only thing she’d taken with her.