Special Agent's Perfect Cover

To a stranger from the outside, it looked like a pretty little, idyllic town.

To her, Cold Plains had become a town filled with puppets—and Samuel Grayson was the smiling, grand puppeteer. A puppeteer whose every dictate was slavishly followed. His call for modesty had all the women who belonged to his sect wearing dresses that would have been more at home on the bodies of performers reenacting the late 1950s.

Maybe her skepticism was because she’d grown up listening to her late father’s promises, none of which he’d ever kept. Promises that, for the most part, he didn’t even recall making once a little time had gone by.

Whatever the reason, she didn’t trust Samuel Grayson any further than she could throw him. And he was a large, powerful-looking man.

Her sense of survival was urgently prompting her to leave before something went wrong—before she couldn’t leave.

But no matter what she felt about Cold Plains’s transformation and no matter what her sense of survival dictated, she was not about to leave town without her sister. And Mia had flatly refused to budge, declaring instead her intentions of staying.

She was, Carly caught herself thinking again, between the proverbial rock and hard place.

Common sense might prod her to make a run for it, but she had never put her own well-being above someone else’s, especially that of a loved one.

That was why she’d lied to Hawk to make him leave Cold Plains and why she was still here now, doing her best to pretend to be one of Samuel’s most recent converts even though the very thought made her sick to her stomach.

In her opinion, Samuel Grayson, once merely a very slick motivational speaker, was now orchestrating a utopian-like environment where allegiance to him was the prime directive and where, by instituting a society of blindly obedient, non-thinking robots, he was setting the cause of civilization back over fifty years.

Women in Samuel’s society were nothing more than subservient, second-class citizens whose main function, Carly strongly suspected, was to bear children and populate Grayson’s new world.

She’d heard, although hadn’t quite managed to confirm, that Samuel was even having these devoted women “branded.” Horrified, she’d looked into it and discovered that they were being tattooed with the small letter D, for devotee, on their right hips. That alone made the man a crazed megalomaniac.

Although it sickened her, Carly knew she had to play up to Samuel in order to get her sister to trust her enough so that she could eventually abduct her and get her away from this awful place. Nothing short of that was going to work—and even that might not—but she had no other options open to her.

Hoping that Samuel would eventually grow tired of his little game—or that someone would get sick of his playing the not-so-benevolent dictator—and send him on his way was akin to waiting for Godot. It just wasn’t going to happen.

So she’d gone to Samuel and insisted that she was qualified to fill the teaching position that had suddenly opened up at the Cold Plains Day Care Center. A smile that she could only describe as reptilian had spread over Samuel’s handsome, tanned face. Steepling his long, aristocratic fingers together, he fixed his gaze intently on her face.

He paused dramatically for effect as the moment sank in, then said, “Yes, my dear, I am sure that you are more than qualified to fill that position, and may I say how very happy I am that you have come around and decided to come join us.” He’d taken her hand between his and though his smile had never wavered, it had sent chills through her. Chills she wasn’t quite sure how to dodge. She’d never felt more of a sense of imprisonment than she had at that moment.

“You will be a most welcomed addition,” he had assured her.

She remembered thinking, Over my dead body, and she had meant it.

The problem was she was fairly certain that the coda, although silently said, would not be a deterrent to Grayson. He was a man who allowed nothing to stand in the way of his plans. To that end, he was perfectly capable of cutting out a person’s heart without missing a beat.

She had to get Mia away from here. And she would, even if it wound up being the last thing she ever did.

Chapter 2

“Hi, Doc. This is going to have to be quick. I’ve only got a few minutes to spare,” Hawk said by way of a greeting as he walked into the county coroner’s office.

In reality, since Micah hadn’t shown up for their appointed meeting, he should have skipped coming here altogether and gone on straight to Cold Plains. But the coroner had called, saying there was something that he needed to tell him. And if he was being honest and had his choice in the matter, he would have gladly stalled and remained here indefinitely, at this temporary FBI outpost. But he didn’t have a choice, and he could only spare a few minutes.

At this point, he would have welcomed being sidetracked by anything, and this included an earthquake, a tornado or a tsunami, none of which ever occurred in this rough-and-tumble region of Wyoming. But although he would rather do anything than go on to Cold Plains to investigate exactly how these five murdered women were connected, Hawk was first and foremost a dedicated FBI agent, and he wasn’t about to let any of his past personal feelings get in the way of his trying to solve this case.

Not bothering to shrug out of his jacket, Hawk crossed over to the coroner. He’d only met the man a few days before but the coroner took his job very seriously.

“Why did you call me?” Hawk asked. “Did you find out anything new?”

“Not exactly,” Dr. Hermann Keegan replied, measuring his words out slowly, as if he wanted to be sure they were absolutely right before he uttered them. He looked at Hawk over the tops of his rimless reading glasses. “Actually, what I found was something old.”

His mind on the ordeal that lay ahead of him, Hawk had very little patience with what sounded like a riddle. “Come again?”

“Once the fact that they were all connected came to light, I pulled the autopsy records of the other four victims,” he explained. “Were you aware of the fact that the ‘tattoo’ the deputy coroner found on victim number two’s right hip washed off when he was cleaning the body?”

Victim number two was the only female they hadn’t been able to identify yet. All the others had names, but this one was still referred to as Jane Doe four years after she’d been discovered. The woman’s DNA and fingerprints turned out not to be a match for anyone currently in any of the FBI databases.

“Tattoos don’t wash off,” Hawk pointed out.

Doc Keegan smiled, making his spherical, moonlike face appear even rounder. “Exactly. According to the notes, the letter, a d, appeared to have been drawn in with some kind of permanent, black laundry marker or maybe a Sharpie.” He raised his eyes to Hawk’s. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Hawk answered crisply. “Either this woman had a penchant for marking up her body—or she wasn’t really one of the cult’s followers but was pretending to be for some reason.” Being a law enforcement agent, the first thing that struck him was that Jane Doe might have been one, as well. “She might have been undercover,” he concluded.

Keegan’s head bobbed up and down. “My money’s on that.”

Hawk looked at the five manila folders that were fanned out on top of the coroner’s extremely cluttered desk. Each was labeled with the name of a different victim. Besides Jane Doe, there was Shelby Jackson who had been found first in Gulley, Wyoming, five years ago, Laurel Pierce, found in Cheyenne three years ago, Abby Michaels, discovered in the woods outside of Laramie last year and Johanna Tate, found in Eden last week.

Johanna Tate.

Micah’s former girlfriend, Hawk suddenly remembered. The name had been nagging at him ever since he’d heard the news. Was that why Micah had called him? Because of Johanna?

Did Micah know more than he’d alluded to? Had he decided to take matters into his own hands? Going outside the law had become a way of life for him, and he would have thought nothing of avenging Johanna’s murder. Had it backfired on him because he’d let his emotions get in the way?

Damn it, he needed answers, Hawk thought, frustrated. Nodding toward the folders, he asked, “Mind if I take those with me?”

Stepping away from Joanna Tate’s lifeless body he’d finished sewing together, Keegan scrubbed and then pushed the files together into one pile. “Be my guest,” he told Hawk. “I’ve already made copies of them for you.”

Hawk scooped up the files. Already familiar with all the victims, he wanted to review the files in depth and was grateful to the coroner for making copies for him. Still stumped, he needed all the input he could get his hands on.

“You’re pretty thorough,” Hawk commented.

Keegan raised his slopping shoulders and let them fall again. “I’ve got the time to be. This is the most amount of action this office has seen in a very long while.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?” Hawk asked, curious what occupied the man’s time when he wasn’t conducting an autopsy. He sincerely doubted that Wyoming was a hotbed of homicides.

Keegan’s answer surprised him.

“I’m a vet,” the older man replied. “Technically,” he explained as a look of disbelief came over the special agent’s face, “I don’t even have to be a doctor of any kind in order to become a coroner. I just have to be unusually observant and display a high tolerance when it comes to the dissection of dead bodies. Like this one.” He nodded at the draped body on his steel table.

“Good to know,” Hawk quipped. Holding the files to his chest, he crossed to the door. “Thanks again for these.”

“My pleasure,” Keegan answered, adding, “so to speak.”

Closing the door behind him, Hawk blew out a breath. “Yeah,” he muttered to himself in a low voice. “So to speak,” he echoed.

He squared his shoulders and made his way out of the building and back to his car. He was all out of excuses and reasons to delay his departure. He’d already gotten in contact with his team and told them to temporarily set up a “satellite FBI office” in a cabin several miles out of town.

They were probably already there, he thought. Now it was his turn. Hawk turned his key in the ignition and listened to his car come to life.

Next up: Cold Plains.

Ready or not, here I come.

Carly was standing outside the school where she had so recently taken a position, supervising the children as they made the most of their afternoon recess.

That was where she was when she first saw him. First saw the ghost from her past.

That was what she initially thought she was seeing, a ghost, a figment of her wandering imagination. A momentary hallucination on her part, brought on by a combination of stress and anger and the overwhelming need to have someone to lean on—just for a little while.

For her, the only one she had ever had to lean on had been Hawk, but that had been a very long time ago. At least ten years in her past, she judged.

Maybe even more.

The bottom line was that there was absolutely no reason for her to see Hawk Bledsoe getting out of a relatively new, black sedan. The vehicle had just pulled up before the pristine edifice which housed The Grayson Community Center as well as the living quarters of several of Samuel Grayson’s top people.

Or, as she was wont to think of them in the privacy of her own mind, Grayson’s henchmen.

Her mind was playing tricks on her, Carly silently insisted. Any second now, this person she had conjured up would fade away or take on the features of someone else, someone who she knew from town. Someone she was accustomed to seeing day in, day out.

She waited, not daring to breathe.

He wasn’t fading. Wasn’t changing.

Suddenly feeling very light-headed, Carly sucked a huge breath into her lungs.

Ordinarily, fresh air helped clear her head. But it wasn’t her head that needed clearing, it was her eyes, because she was still seeing him.

Or at least a version of him.

The boyish look she’d known—and loved—was gone, replaced by a face that, aside from being incredibly handsome, was thinner and far more somber looking. Otherwise, it was still him, still Hawk. He was still tall, still muscular—the navy windbreaker he wore did nothing to hide that fact. And he still had sandy-blond hair, even though it was cut shorter now than it had been the last time she had laid eyes on him.

And when he made eye contact with her from across the street, she saw that the apparition with Hawk’s face had the same deep, warm, brown eyes that Hawk had had.

Eyes that could melt her soul.

She felt her pulse accelerating, her heart hammering as if it was recreating a refrain from The Anvil Chorus in double time.

Why wasn’t this image, this apparition, this ghost from the depths of her mind fading? Why was it coming toward her?

Carly’s breath caught in her throat, all but solidifying and threatening to choke her. Even so, for the life of her, Carly just couldn’t make herself look away.

She was still waiting for the image to break up—or for the world to end, whichever was more doable—as the distance between them continued to lessen.

When Hawk had first driven slowly through the town, heading for its center, its “heart,” Hawk had to admit that he was rather stunned. The town appeared to have gone through an incredible amount of changes.

When he had left, Cold Plains looked to be on the verge of simply drying up and blowing away, a dying town abandoned by all but the very hopeless. Those who were devoid of ambition and who couldn’t make a go of it anywhere else had chosen to remain here and die along with the town.

There was no sign of that town here.

This was more of a town that could take center stage in a children’s storybook. All around him, there were new buildings. The ones that looked remotely familiar had all been restored, revitalized, given not just a new coat of paint but a new purpose.

The streets were repaired and clean. Actually clean, he marveled, remembering how filthy everything had appeared to be when he was growing up here.

The smell of fertilizer was missing, he suddenly realized. Cold Plains now seemed like a town on its way to becoming a city rather than a hovel disintegrating into a ghost town.

For a moment he thought that he was in the wrong place, that he had somehow gotten turned around while coming here and had managed to drive to another town. A brighter, newer town.

But then he saw a few faces he recognized, people he’d known growing up. That told him that this was Cold Plains. At the same time, he began to take note of not just the newly constructed buildings but the people, as well. Briskly moving people. People who seemed to have a purpose.

He saw several parents holding on to their children’s hands, heading for what appeared to be a playground.

He did a mental double take. A playground? Since when was that part of the landscape? Or an ice cream parlor, for that matter?

“Excuse me, young man, didn’t mean to almost walk into you.” An older man laughed, sidestepping around him at the last moment. Hawk couldn’t help staring at the white-haired man. He wore color-coordinated sweats, fancy, high-end sneakers—running shoes?—and he was holding navy-blue-colored weights in his hand that looked to be about a pound each.

He was power walking, Hawk realized.

Had everyone lost their minds?

He looked around again. All the people who were out and about appeared to be smiling. Every last one of them. It was almost eerie. And then he looked closer at the women who were passing him. Smiling, as well, they were all modestly dressed. No jeans, no scruffy cutoffs or overalls. Each and every one of them, young or old, children or adults, they were all wearing dresses.

Dresses that came down past the middle of their calves.

Hell, they all looked like extras from a movie about Amish life, Hawk thought. All that was missing were those hats or bonnets or whatever those things that all but hid their hair were called—

Hawk froze.

A second ago, he’d been busy scanning the immediate area, trying to reconcile what he was seeing with the Cold Plains citizens he remembered from his past. Lost in thought, he’d forgotten to get himself prepared, and so he wasn’t.

Wasn’t prepared to have the sight of her, wearing one of those ridiculous, sexless dresses, slam into him like a runaway freight train sliding down a steep embankment. Plowing straight into his gut.

He had to concentrate in order to draw in half a breath.

Carly.

Carly Finn.

The woman who had led him on, then skewered his insides and left him without so much as a backward glance. Left him to live or die, no matter to her.

Why the hell hadn’t he realized that she would probably still be here? Still be living on the outskirts of Cold Plains?

This was where that stupid farm was, the one that meant so much more to her than he did, so of course she was still going to be here.

Still here and, despite the unbecoming, shapeless brown sack she wore, still as beautiful as she’d ever been.

More, he amended.

Even at this distance, he could see that Carly, with her long, blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, was even more beautiful than he remembered. Maybe that was because he’d been trying so hard to bury her image, to scrape it from his mind.

His hands were clenched at his sides. Fury raged through him, but there was no outlet. He couldn’t afford to allow himself one.

Damn it, he wished he could just walk away. This minute. Wished he could get into his car and just drive until he ran out of gas or purged her image from his mind, whichever happened first.

But he couldn’t, and he knew it, so there was no sense in wishing. He owed it to the Bureau to see this through, and he owed it to those five dead women to find their killer or killers. He wasn’t a kid anymore who could just think of himself. He had responsibilities, even if he no longer possessed a viable heart.

Incensed, stunned, angry and a whole vanguard of other emotions he couldn’t even begin to catalog yet, Hawk found himself striding straight for the woman clad in the unflattering brown dress.

When she saw him heading for her, Carly’s very first reaction was to want to bolt and run.

But she didn’t.

She had never run away from anything in her life and she was not about to start now—no matter how much she wanted to and how much easier it would have been than to wait for him to reach her.

Leaning for support against the white picket fence, which ran along the length of the school yard, Carly raised her chin, said a silent prayer that she wasn’t losing her mind and waited for the approaching man to turn into someone else.

He didn’t.

So much for the power of positive thinking.

Her thoughts did a complete one-eighty. Okay, so it was Hawk. What was he doing here? Of all the times she’d yearned for him to return, this was the worst possible one.

She couldn’t allow herself to forget what she was still doing here. She had to remember why she’d taken this job at the day care center and why she forced herself to smile at Samuel Grayson when she would rather just drive a stake through his heart, grab her sister’s hand and run.

“Carly?”

The second she heard his voice, a wave of heat, then cold, then heat again washed over her. For the tiniest split second, the world shrank down to a pinprick. Only sheer willpower on her part caused it to widen again, chasing away the blackness that threatened to swallow her up whole.

Taking another deep, calming breath, she responded, “Yes?”

“Carly,” Hawk repeated, his voice more somber this time, more forceful. His dark brown eyes all but bore into her. “It’s Hawk.”

She hadn’t wanted to run her tongue along her lips in order to moisten them, but if she didn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to utter another sound.

“Yes,” she answered quietly, praying he wouldn’t hear her heart pounding. “I know.”

A sixth sense she’d developed these past five years warned her that she was being observed. Observed by someone whose loyalty was strictly to Samuel and who in all likelihood reported everything he saw directly to the man. She had to be careful. Everything was riding on making Samuel believe that she, like all the other women in the sect, was under his spell as well as firmly under his thumb. It went against everything she was, everything she had ever stood for, but to save Mia, she was willing to play this part.

That meant that she had to seem almost indifferent to the man she’d once loved above all else.

A man she still loved.

Carly swallowed as unobtrusively as she could and then forced a bright, mindless smile to her lips as she asked cheerfully, “So what brings you back to Cold Plains after all this time?”

Chapter 3

It looked like Carly. Even in that ridiculous, shapeless sack of a dress, it still looked like a slightly older, but definitely a heart-stoppingly beautiful version of Carly.

But it didn’t sound like Carly.

Oh, it was her voice all right. He would have recognized her voice anywhere, under any circumstances. There were times he still heard her voice in his dreams, dreams that had their roots in a different, far less complicated time. And then, when he’d wake up in the dark and alone, he would upbraid himself for being so weak as to yearn for her. An emptiness would come over him, hollowing out what had once been his heart.

Yes, it was her voice all right. But there was a decided lack of spirit evident in it, a lack of the feisty, independent essence that made Carly who she was. That made her Carly.

The bright, chipper, vapid question she’d just asked sounded as if it had come from a Carly who had been lobotomized.

Which was, he now realized, exactly the way he could have described the expressions on the faces of several of the men and women he’d just watched walk by. It really looked to him as if nothing was behind the smiles on their faces. Granted they were moving about with what appeared to be a sense of purpose, but they all came across as being only two-dimensional—as if they had been cut out of cardboard and mounted on sticks.

Damn it, talk, Hawk, Carly thought. Say something so I can go on with this charade. You will never, never know how much I’ve missed you, how many times I’d lie awake, wondering where you were and what you were doing. Wondering if you missed me even just a little.

Carly had never allowed herself to regret sending him away. It had been the right thing to do. The right thing for him. But oh, how she regretted not being with Hawk when he had left town.

And now he was here, standing before her, larger than life—and she couldn’t tell him anything. Not how she felt, not why she was going through the motions of being one of Samuel Grayson’s devoted followers.

“So?” Carly prodded, still keeping the same wide, vacant smile on her lips. Her facial muscles began to cramp up. Playing mindless was a lot harder than it looked. “What brings you back?” she asked him again.

Carly knew it couldn’t be a family matter that had caused him to return. His mother was dead—she had been the only thing keeping him here in the first place—and he never got along with his father who, although kinder in spirit than hers, had the very same romance going with any bottle of liquor he could find, just as her late father had had.

“You’re about the very last person I would have ever expected to see coming back to Cold Plains.” That much, at least, was truthful.