Suspect Witness

Chapter Three

Flames shot in the air as Josh closed the space between him and the fireball that had once been a vehicle. Black smoke billowed through the flames, and the smell of gas and burning metal filled the parking lot. And there was a hint of something else, the putrid sweet scent of burning flesh.

No.

He shielded his eyes from the intense glare and grimaced at the sight of the blackened hulk behind the wheel. He watched silently, aware of two things in that instant—that the corpse was too big to be her and that the outlaw biker gang, the Anarchists, had found her. He backed up and returned to the shelter of a canopy of pepper vines that fronted the edge of the school and provided a leafy shelter. He had no qualms about moving out of sight now that he knew the victim was beyond his help. His attention settled briefly on the burning vehicle. Chaos erupted from the building as children yelled and shrieked. The sharp commands of authority cut through the mass of voices as two female teachers attempted to control a mob of children. He hovered at the corner of the building, away from the main crush, out of sight of curious eyes.

He edged forward. The children milled excitedly, some cupping their hands over their eyes to get a better view. An older, gray-haired woman in a suit jacket and skirt was hurling orders and pointing inside. When one boy headed for the steps, she yanked him back by the collar of his navy blue school uniform. Josh’s gaze went to the other exit.

“Where are you?” He pushed the knit cap back from his forehead and glanced at the car and the fire that continued to burn bright and hot. He turned his attention back to the school and debated rounding the building and entering through the back. But that would serve no purpose. He was well aware that a face-to-face encounter, especially now, would have her running. He’d come too far to lose her.

“Come on,” he encouraged his absent quarry. He wondered how she’d managed to survive as long as she had. From what he could see she had only a rudimentary knowledge of the art of disappearing and a bucket of pure luck. That was about to change.

“Daniel!”

It was a woman’s voice, clear with a sweet edge despite the shock that so obviously laced through the words.

“There you are,” he said under his breath. She had changed her name, her nationality and her look, but he would know her anywhere. Her hair was now a pallid blond contained in an elegant updo that he recognized as an attempt to add years to her youthful face. But even at a distance he would recognize those eyes and those cheekbones. He’d studied that face for hours, memorized it as he did for every job. Except this time he had wanted to know so many other things, such as what her voice sounded like. Now he knew.

Her gaze seemed to fix on the scene. He inched closer.

A movement out of the corner of his eye had him turning, and as he did he saw that one of the children had broken from the cluster and was moving much too close to the vehicle.

“Damn it,” he swore. The flames were licking at the vehicle and there was no way of knowing if the gas tank had gone with the first explosion. He moved fast, forgetting about keeping to the fringes or keeping his head low. He grabbed the child and rolled with him, sideways and away from the hot, still-popping metal.

The boy squirmed, and Josh pinned the youngster with one hand. “It might explode again. Stay back unless you want to die.” He repeated the command in Malay for good measure.

The boy nodded. Josh let the boy up and watched as he rushed back to his friends, who were all huddled a safe distance away. There was a look of hero worship in the group as the boys gathered around him. The boy was obviously considered a hero for undertaking such a risky business as getting close to the car or possibly being tackled by a strange man, or maybe a combination of the two. The adults were moving out of synch. One woman corralled another group of boys while another was frantically talking on her cell. Near the entrance of the school he could see two others, but all of their attention was focused on the vehicle, and all of them seemed to be moving in a disjointed fashion or not at all.

Josh diverted his attention back to the vehicle. The smoke curled thick and black, and in the distance he could hear the wailing sirens. The canopy of a lone rain tree threw shadows over the shrinking fire in the parking lot, its arthritic trunk standing thick and knotted, a silent silhouette. Across the street a woman clutched the handles of her pedal-powered pushcart, the vibrant pink, yellow and red flowers muted in the gathering smoke. On the main street cars continued to move in a steady stream as if smoke and fire were a normal part of their daily commute.

He scowled. He’d been so close. It had been gut instinct to check the primary schools in Georgetown, suspecting she would hunker down, consider herself safe again for a time. On Sunday, with the help of a local investigator that he’d met on a previous assignment, he’d acquired access to and checked the records of every school in the city that taught in English and that had acquired a foreign female teacher in the past few months.

He’d gone to her apartment just as school would be beginning for the day. While he was fairly certain that they’d located her, he’d hoped to find something that might prove that the woman they’d found in school records was her. He’d jimmied the building’s back door. Fortunately the building was old and unalarmed, but who he suspected was the building’s owner had found him just as he left her apartment. In fact, he had just closed and locked the door, leaving it as he had found it including the small piece of tissue tucked in the latch, meant to alert her to an intruder. It had taken a bit of acting to back out of that situation, but he’d had what he wanted—confirmation that she was the teacher he was seeking and—what he’d thought at the time was an interesting tidbit of information—that she was the owner of a new Naza Sutera.

In the distance, the Penang hills cast a sinister shadow as they cradled one against the other, their dark protrusions muted by distance. His gaze cruised across the bystanders, did a mental calculation of faces, numbers, positions. Nothing.

Josh gritted his teeth over the expletive that wouldn’t change the reality.

She was gone.

Chapter Four

Erin was fighting for breath as she rounded the corner and stood out of sight of the school. A lorry swished past belching exhaust as a convoy of motorcyclists followed close behind. It seemed as though they were all fighting for space as a truck jammed in behind the cyclists and the loud red of Coca-Cola overlaid it all as a delivery truck squeezed into the street. A horn honked and a bicyclist swerved as pedestrians weaved their way through the intersection’s traffic snarl.

Her jaw was clenched so tight it ached, and her hand worried the strap of the bag as her eyes strained for a cab to flag. One broke with the traffic and pulled to the curb. She rushed to meet it, throwing open the door and flinging herself inside.

“Focus,” she muttered. She fired off her address in panicked words that she had to repeat when the driver turned around with a puzzled look.

Behind her, flames still punctured the otherwise quiet late-morning sky as sirens wailed and trouble inched closer.

“Daniel,” she whispered. She dashed a tear away and unclenched her hands. She looked out the window as sun glared through the windscreen. A motorcycle pulled up beside the cab, a chopper. The driver’s legs were propped up as he sat back on the low-slung seat. He turned, a dusty-brown beard covering much of his swarthy face, and smiled. The smile was not one of friendship. It was a leer, maybe, or worse. She hit the door lock.

She swallowed and clenched her free hand so tight that her nails dug into her palm. Her throat closed and her eyes burned with unshed tears.

She’d hated to run but she didn’t have a choice. The conversation with Mike Olesk had made that fact clear. A retired police officer who had been a friend of her father’s and a man she hadn’t seen in years, Mike had been the only person she could think of whom she could trust and who might help her sort out her options. The conversation that ensued was one she would never forget, for it had changed her life.

He tapped ashes into a glass ashtray, the Hollywood emblem once sharply emblazoned on it now blurred with ashes. “I know how these things go down. The authorities make promises. But face it, on this one we’re talking local police up against the Anarchists. They don’t stand a chance. If it were the feds it would be a different matter.”

“Why isn’t it?” Her stomach turned over, anticipating what he would say.

“It will be soon. The local authorities will be calling you in for questioning, unless you come forward first. I suspect you maybe have a day, maybe less.”

“No,” she said shortly. “I can’t. I won’t answer their questions.”

“You know you don’t have a choice. Why are you balking at this, Erin?”

She shook her head.

“It would be for the best. They could charge you with obstruction of justice.”

“I’d go to jail?” There’d be safety in jail.

“Maybe, maybe not.” He coughed, the sound deep and achy in the silence between them. “Word’s out that the Anarchists will do anything to ensure their leader, Derrick Reese, doesn’t serve time. Maybe if I put in a word with the sheriff’s office we could have this thing escalated to a federal level. We could live with that.”

“I can’t.”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb. “If we don’t do that, if you run, that only makes you guilty of a crime.”

“I can’t. I’ll run. Can you help me?”

“Erin. Are you out of your mind? Did you hear what I just told you? If I can get to the feds, if you admit everything, they can keep you safe.”

“They’ll want me to testify,” she repeated, her heart thumping.

“Of course.”

“Under oath?”

“Under oath,” he agreed. “Erin, what is this all about? Who are you protecting?”

Silence hung between them.

“Who was it, Mike? Who turned me in?”

He took a long drag on a hand-rolled cigarette, his thick brows drawing down over narrow eyes.

“Word has it that only this morning that no-good boyfriend of yours squealed louder than a pig facing a luau.”

“Steven,” she whispered. And despite everything, the betrayal still hurt. She couldn’t trust anyone, not with the truth, not with who was really the witness.

Smoke curled around them and her nose tickled. She wanted to sneeze but instead she coughed.

“Mike, I can’t give you details. Just trust me. I have to run. I need to disappear.”

“Erin?”

“Mike. Please, can you help me? It’s life or death. Please, just trust me.”

He stood there looking at her for a long time before he nodded. “For how long?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “As long as it takes.”

“Come.” He motioned with one hand. She followed him and together they worked out a plan.

She shuddered. She ached to go home, to where it all began—San Diego. And she knew she might never go home again.

She opened her eyes and for a moment she froze, thoughts of home driven from her mind.

“The children,” she murmured. She would have stayed for them, if it had been necessary. But the children were safe. She’d made sure of that. The principal had corralled many of them before they’d exited the building. The ones who had managed to slip outside were under the watchful eyes of two senior teachers.

She’d miss them, even the troublesome ones. Her life had become one of loss, of regret—it was what she hadn’t expected of a life on the run, or more aptly what she hadn’t thought of until the reality hit.

Focus, she reminded herself as the cab swung onto the congested street that she called home. Overhead, signs advertising products of the East and West vied for attention as the cab pushed farther into the crowded streets, and she wondered if this had been an error in judgment. Should she have gone directly to the airport? Were they on her trail even now? Or did they think her dead?

They.

She had been running from the faceless they for too long.

She could see the Victorian elegance of a former British mansion, the timeless beauty of its stone exterior a sign that she was almost home. She took courage from the familiar sight as the building pushed its stately presence into a world that seemed to be fighting for space. It was as if it refused to relinquish the hold it once had had, standing rock solid as the world around it changed.

The cab swung around the corner and the landscape changed again. If there was anything she loved about Georgetown it was how the old laced its presence through the new, how British traditions merged with Malay. She had purposely taken an apartment relatively close to the school within the hustle and bustle of daily life in Georgetown. Her apartment was a low-slung building in a cluttered section of the city where shops and open-air stalls dotted the landscape and fronted the more traditional brick-and-mortar buildings behind them. She’d loved this area from the first moment she’d laid eyes on it.

Not today.

Today, even under the brilliant afternoon sun, it seemed flush with shadows. On the sidewalk a man walked in a djellaba as his leather sandals skimmed easily across the concrete. His wife walked by his side in her traditional burka, her face and her thoughts hidden from the world by a layer of cloth and a veil. It wasn’t an uncommon sight in Georgetown. Yet today, despite the fact that he held her hand—it all seemed to take on a sinister edge. Erin turned away to look out the opposite window.

The cab pulled over, and as she opened the door, the scent of curry intermingled with the smell of sewer. It was familiar and had begun to remind her of home, of here. After two months Georgetown felt comfortable, safe. Had, she thought with regret.

“Could you wait, please?” she requested as she stepped out of the cab.

Inside the apartment building, the narrow hallway with its faded morning glory wallpaper was empty. Only the chatter of a television set coming through one door and the clunking of the ancient washing machine down the hall broke the quiet. She stopped at the dark wood door at the end of the hallway. For a minute it was as if she wasn’t here, as if this nightmare had never happened.

Daniel, she thought, and a sob hitched deep inside her and threatened her control. She took a deep breath. She needed to focus on running, but she could only think of Daniel. He was one of the few friends she’d made in Georgetown, and he’d still be alive if she hadn’t loaned him her car. He hadn’t asked to borrow it any more than he’d asked to die. It had all been her fault.

Her fault. Those two words kept reeling through her mind.

Stop it, she told herself. Just stop it. Now wasn’t the time for recriminations or even grieving. She had to get out before she jeopardized someone else’s life.

Erin reached for the knob and hesitated. She ran her tongue along her bottom lip. She looked down at the key in her hand. This time when she reached she touched the heavy brass knob, but then dropped her hand and took a step back. A small knot of white tissue lay on the floor. She worried her fingers against her palms, staring at that tiny piece of tissue.

“Erin.”

She jumped, bit back a shriek and swung around.

“Yong, you scared me.”

“There was someone asking for you earlier today. Did they find you?” the apartment owner asked. His face was downcast, and his slight shoulders slouched as they always did. “I’m sorry. After he left I opened your door just to do a check. We’ve had to replace some of the locks in the building.” He shrugged. “I didn’t go in, but I wanted to make sure your lock was working, that it couldn’t be easily compromised. Besides, I’m sorry if he was a friend of yours, but I didn’t like the look of him. And a double check is never a bad idea.”

She unclenched her hand and took a step back. “I thought someone had been here.”

“I thought you might.” He smiled. “The old tissue in the door frame trick. Not a bad idea for a single woman. Not that we have much trouble with break-ins but you never know.” He cleared his throat, the sound raspy and raw in the narrow hallway. “Just glad you haven’t needed it.”

“Thanks, Yong. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“No trouble,” Yong said, but his eyes narrowed and he took a step closer. “You’re all right?”

“Fine. Thank you.” She turned the key over in her hand.

“That doesn’t sound fine to me. Remember, like I’ve said, you need anything. I have daughters your age. But you know that. You met one of them.” He hesitated. “You’re sure nothing’s wrong?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” he said and turned away, jingling keys in his hand.

“Yong.”

“Yeah.” He stopped.

“What did he look like? The man, I mean.” She fumbled with words and struggled to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“A big guy, six feet, maybe more. Hard to tell from my view down here.” He chuckled. “I don’t know. Not bad-looking.” He paused. “Why? You think you might know him?”

“Was he Malay?” she asked.

“Don’t think so. Had an accent, not Aussie or anything. Something else.”

“Thanks.” She hadn’t asked his hair color or his race or... Did it matter? She knew he wasn’t Malay. If he got close enough for her to see him, did she stand a chance? She had to get out of here and fast. But she needed to know. She had to ask at least one of those questions. “What color was his hair?”

“Don’t know. He was wearing one of those knitted caps.”

He jangled his keys, his sneaker-clad feet almost twitching as he answered her. “Look, I don’t think he’ll be back. And I’ll be keeping a closer eye on things.”

Her hand shook as it went to the door frame.

“No worries,” he said over his shoulder as he headed down the hallway and to his own apartment.

“No worries,” she repeated.

She turned the key in the lock with fingers that still shook. She stood in the doorway for a minute, then two. She pushed the door open wider. Her eyes darted back and forth, taking in micro snapshots of the room. Behind her a door slammed, and she jumped.

Hesitantly, she leaned one hand against the door frame as if that would ground her, make everything normal or turn back the clock. But nothing changed. The cot folded down from the wall, the kitchenette was jammed against the opposite wall, the tiny television in the far corner. Through the narrow window that faced the street, she could see the cab waiting.

“This is it,” she murmured. “This is goodbye.” She wiped the back of her hands across both eyes. She took a breath and then another, pulled out a tissue and blew her nose.

She grabbed her bag from the top shelf of the closet, tore clothes from hangers and emptied her drawers. Within a few minutes she was packed.

She never looked back as she closed the door behind her, as if this was just another day, and hurried out the door and into the waiting cab.

“The airport, please,” she said. Her hand knotted around the straps of her knapsack and a small bag that carried her few personal items as she perched on the edge of her seat. She pressed her free hand to her temple as if that would still the headache that was beginning to beat dully and then dropped it to clutch the seat in front of her.

* * *

JOSH SLIPPED OUT the back entrance of the school and tucked the brochure he’d stolen from her classroom into his pocket. He would disappear as silently as he had arrived, leaving the retreating flames and tamped-down chaos to the authorities. He glanced at his watch, which functioned as a GPS as well as registered the time among other things. He hadn’t expected the car bomb. As a precaution, he’d planned to mount a small tracking device on her car that would have followed her anywhere she went.

The victim—collateral damage. It was the only way to think of such things without losing it. He’d seen a number of breakdowns in the field from either mental or emotional stress; he didn’t plan to become one of them.

Collateral damage.

School caretaker. That information hadn’t been too hard to obtain. He’d overheard the hysterical words of a female teacher, confirmed that the car was his target’s and that she’d lent it out, confirmed that Erin Argon was still alive.

Would she flee by land or air? Where? He considered the trajectory of her five-month flight. She’d begun her flight fueled by fear and misguided advice rather than immediate danger. Lucky and wily, her changed name and Canadian passport had kept her hidden until these past few weeks when he had been assigned the case. Still, she was damn lucky, and he knew he had little time to find her before the Anarchists beat him to it.

Luck aside it was amazing what she had accomplished and how easily she had slipped out of sight. So far she had crossed no fewer than ten international borders. Other than the weeks in Singapore, this had been the only place where she had settled. So where would a woman go who had crossed continents and countries, who had thought she was safe and who now had to come up with an alternate plan?

He was under her skin. An inkling of doubt rose at that thought. Doubt that maybe it was the other way around. He shrugged it off. She was an assignment, nothing more. He’d studied her, he knew her. She was tired. She’d go somewhere to regroup, to come up with a plan and another place to hide, because this time she had run, more than likely, without a plan. Where would she go? He touched the brochure in his pocket and wondered if it could be as easy as that.

“It’s a risk,” he muttered and smiled. There wasn’t anything better than a risk; throw in one of his infamous hunches and he was betting that he was bang on right. After all, who else would know that she was fascinated by Malaysia’s bat caves in Gunung Mulu National Park? He was guessing she had kept that information to herself. He certainly wouldn’t have suspected it if she hadn’t left her canvas satchel and run, taking nothing from her classroom but her purse. And if he hadn’t snuck into her classroom before he left he would never have known, either, for he would never have found her brochure on the Mulu Caves and literally stumbled on to where he was now sure she planned to go next.

He jumped in a cab and gave the driver the order for the airport even as his mind churned through the options. She was panicked. Would she take the slow route out of here or just hop a plane? He suspected the latter. If she were smart, and so far she’d proven she was, a few transfers around the country and her trail would become a little grayer, a little more difficult to follow. Keep on doing that and she could disappear. He needed to get to the airport to confirm he was right and get a ticket on that same plane. He leaned back.

“Damn,” he muttered as his thoughts went back to the one man she’d reached out to, the man who had been the catalyst to send Erin Kelley Argon on her five-month flight.

“Mike Olesk, we finally meet.”

He held out his hand.

“I don’t have time for this,” the grizzle-faced burnout said.

“You used to be a city cop,” Josh said.

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m with the CIA.” He held out his identification.

“And you want to know about Erin.”

Josh’s lips tightened. “I didn’t expect it would be this easy,” he said drily. He seriously hadn’t thought the man would admit to knowing her, never mind that he would just blurt out her name.

“That’s about all I’m going to tell you,” he said with a surly edge to his voice.

“She’s in danger,” Josh said. “And you have the power to help me find her.”

“How do I know you are who you say you are?”

“I could get a warrant,” he said, but it was only a mild threat.

“You don’t have time now, do you? The trial begins in a little more than a month. They need Erin, and the Anarchists need her dead. She’s the witness that can put them all away.” Mike shook his head.