Deadly Christmas Secrets

Harper scrambled over the seat, the scents of gasoline and smoke getting stronger. She didn’t see flames, but she was sure the interior of the SUV was growing hotter.

She reached the door and jerked at the handle. She scrambled for the lock, her fingers shaking as she tried to find it.

“Calm down,” Stella barked so close to her ear, she jumped. “Panicking gets people nowhere really fast.”

She reached past Harper and unlocked the vehicle.

“Let’s go,” she urged, pressing close as Harper stepped into the scratchy embrace of a spruce. The scent of evergreen needles mixed with gasoline and smoke, and she gagged, pushing deeper into the trees, the blackness nearly complete there.

She knew the woods like the back of her hand, knew every inch of her property, but they’d gone beyond that, traveling a few miles down the gravel road. She thought she was heading toward the creek. Branches scratched at her face, pulled at her hair and ripped at her clothes, but she kept a steady pace, heading deeper into the woods, and hopefully farther away from the danger.

She thought she heard the creek up ahead and was heading for that when something crashed through the brush beside her, the sound bringing to life every nightmare she’d ever had, every secret fear.

Stella said something, but she didn’t hear. She was too busy running, sprinting through the woods as if it was an open field, everything inside telling her to go and keep going.

She slammed into something.

Not a tree. A man. His chest hard, his body tall and firm.

She tried to jump back, but strong arms wrapped around her, pulling her in. She struggled against the hold, tore at the arms, used every fighting tactic she’d learned as a kid growing up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in DC, because she wasn’t going to die in the woods. Not before she found out the truth about Amelia.

* * *

“Calm down,” Logan said, grabbing Harper’s fist just before it connected with his jaw. “It’s me.”

“Logan?” She stilled, her arms dropping to her sides, her eyes wide in the darkness.

She’d come barreling out of the woods as if a couple of bears were chasing after her, but he couldn’t hear anything but the quiet burble of the creek and the soft rasp of her breath.

“You nearly scared the life out me,” she said, stepping away from him, her voice a little shaky.

“Where’s Stella?” he asked, because there was no way his coworker had left Harper to fend for herself. Not if she were capable of anything else.

“Right here,” Stella responded, stepping through the thick trees to his right. “With the dog. If the perp is still around, I haven’t seen him. Not since he destroyed my brand-new car.”

“I took a shot at him after he hit your fuel line. I was a little out of range, but I think I might have hit him.”

“That explains why he didn’t wait around for us to get out of the SUV,” Stella responded drily.

“He’s heading east. Straight toward the highway.”

“That’s five miles away,” Harper commented, her hand on Picasso’s head. She looked smaller in the darkness, her body diminished by the vast forest surrounding them.

“Five miles isn’t all that far,” Stella responded. “Not for someone who’s desperate, and he is. He sticks around here and the police are going to catch him. Or one of us will.”

“One of us is planning to,” Logan said, pulling a Maglite from his coat pocket. He hadn’t used it before, but now that the perp was on the run, he’d take every advantage he could to hunt the guy down before he made it to the highway.

“Are you going to try to track him?” Stella asked. She’d let him take the lead on this. That was the way Stella was. No fuss. No muss. If it wasn’t her assignment, she took a backseat, followed orders, made herself as much of an asset to the team as she could.

“He’s heading for his escape vehicle. I want to get to him before he reaches it.”

“The police could do the job as easily,” she remarked. No judgment in the words. Just a statement of fact. “And you know how Chance is—he likes to let the local PD handle their problems.”

“This isn’t their problem. This is my problem. I was hired to—”

“Find Harper. Which you’ve done.”

True, but finding Harper had put her in danger. He felt responsible for that, which made him responsible for her. Whether Chance thought so or not. And whether Harper did or not.

And he didn’t think she did.

She hadn’t wanted twenty-four-hour protection, had seemed determined to go on the way she had before he’d showed up with a gunman on his tail. She’d finally conceded when Stella had mentioned her niece.

Amelia seemed to be the key to all of this, and she seemed to be the key to getting Harper to accept protection and help.

“I’m right here,” Harper muttered. “I’ve been found.” She sounded tired, and he wondered what it must feel like to go from a peaceful and quiet existence to chaos and trouble.

“And now you’re in danger.”

“Not because of you,” she responded. “So let’s all go back to my place and wait for the police. They can do what they need to, and we can decide the best way to proceed.”

That wasn’t going to happen.

He wanted this guy, and if he waited for the police to show up, he wasn’t going to get him.

He glanced at Stella. “I’ll meet you back at the cabin. Can you call the sheriff? Ask him to have someone on the road, searching for the perp? He might want to notify the local hospital, too.”

“But—”

“No sense arguing,” Stella said, cutting off Harper’s protest. “He’s stubborn as a mule.” She grabbed Harper’s arm and dragged her back the way they’d come.

Picasso followed, silent for once. The dog probably sensed the tension in the air, the danger that seemed to lurk just out of sight.

Logan flashed his light on the ground, studying the leaves and foliage for signs that someone had passed that way. Minutes went by, the forest coming to life—small animals scurrying through underbrush, an owl calling from a nearby tree. Thick flakes of snow tumbled through the tree canopy, dancing in the beam of his light. If he didn’t hurry, the trail would be lost, the guy gone.

In the distance, sirens were screaming, the police racing in. Hopefully with their K-9 team. The dogs had come up empty earlier, but the scent would be easier to find this time, the area they’d be searching a lot smaller.

His light bounced across the ground, glowing on dead leaves, moist earth and a slick wet splotch halfway hidden by pine needles.

He moved closer and studied the spot.

Blood for sure. A drop that was just beginning to dry. The guy wasn’t that far ahead. Maybe the injury was slowing him down, keeping him from escaping to the road.

Or maybe he wasn’t running.

Maybe he was waiting in the underbrush, hoping for another chance to strike.

FOUR

Forty-five minutes. A long time to walk through swirling snow and gusting wind. Logan had done worse—hiking desolate regions of Afghanistan in the middle of the night, scaling rock faces and climbing mountains in search of enemy strongholds. He’d been a scout sniper, trained in night operations. He’d probably still be that if his parents hadn’t died. He’d loved the work, the adrenaline rush, the high-stakes play.

He’d traded it all for a two-thousand-acre soy farm in North Carolina, which three generations of his family had owned and operated. He hadn’t done it because he’d wanted to farm. He’d done it because his father was dead, his mother was missing and his brothers needed him. Five years in the military hadn’t prepared him for finishing up the job of raising three teenage boys. They’d had a couple of rocky years, but he’d managed to get them through college and into life without much of a problem. Colton ran the farm now and had turned it into an organic venture that was making way more money than their father had probably ever thought was possible. Trent was the town sheriff. Gavin was pastor of the church they’d attended when they were kids. They were all productive citizens doing what they thought God was calling them to. Their parents would have been proud. Logan was proud. And he was going back for Christmas.

His brothers had begged him. When that hadn’t worked, they’d had Andrea call. Colton’s wife had a way of convincing anyone of anything, and when she’d mentioned how long it had been since Logan’s nieces had seen him, he’d agreed to spend his ten-day Christmas vacation in Rushers, North Carolina.

Those plans weren’t going to work out if he died, so he ignored the snow and the wind, the cold that seemed to burrow deep into his bones. He focused on the trail, on the stillness of the forest around him, the dogs coming up behind him.

The perp had to know the police were on his trail, and he had to be panicked. Panicked people made dangerous decisions. Anything was possible. The guy could be just up ahead, waiting to ambush his pursuers. He could be running for the highway. He could be hunkering down, hoping that the snow would wash his scent away.

Logan was prepared for any of those things as he crested a hill and caught sight of the highway—just lights flashing through trees. He moved toward them, the dense foliage thinning as he drew closer to the interstate. The trees were sparser here, snow layering the ground, providing a thick cushion to Logan’s footsteps. He searched the ground and found what looked like footprints pressed into fresh snow. The perp had veered off course, heading south rather than east. If Logan were going to venture a guess, he’d say there was a structure of some sort nearby, a place where hiding a vehicle would be easy. A gas station, maybe. Or a rest stop.

He moved cautiously, the sound of interstate traffic mixing with the rustling of leaves and the swish of the wind.

The trees opened into a field of rotting cornstalks. Beyond that, a house jutted up toward the cloud-laden sky. An old farmhouse of some sort. No lights. No sign that the place was occupied. The footprints disappeared into the field, the old husks and tangled plants making it impossible for Logan to find them again.

He followed his gut, heading across the field and straight to the house. An old porch sagged along the front and sides of it, the boarded-up windows and doors speaking of neglect and abandonment. Someone had loved the house once. Now it was simply a place that had once been a home.

Snow blanketed the porch. No footprints there. Logan bypassed the building, moving around to the back of the structure and into an overgrown yard. Still no sign of a vehicle. No footprints. Nothing that would indicate the perp had been there, but Logan could sense something out of place.

He ducked back into the cornfield, crouching low as he moved toward a group of outbuildings clustered near the back of the property. Looked like a couple of sheds and a barn, but it was hard to see through the falling snow. There’d been a driveway once—he could see that—the crumbled asphalt just a few feet from the edge of the field.

It didn’t look as if it had been used. No tire tracks in the weeds and grass that tangled around chunks of blacktop. Logan wasn’t taking any chances, though. He stayed low, stayed hidden, sliding through the darkness the way he’d done dozens of times on dozens of other cases. Set back from the interstate, the property seemed cut off from the world, the hushed tones of the winter storm and the whisper of distant traffic the only sounds.

If he looked, he could find the lights of cars traveling the highway, but he was focused on the mission. The cold, the snow, the wind, all of it ceased to exist as he moved toward the outbuildings.

At first, it was just a hint of something in the air, a chemical scent that brought Logan to a complete stop. He’d nearly been taken out by improvised explosive devices on several occasions, and he recognized the acrid smell of burning electrical wires. He inhaled cold, crisp air and caught a whiff of it again.

He scanned the property and saw a black column of smoke billowing up from the barn. No flames that he could see, but the place was burning.

A distraction of some sort?

Didn’t matter. Logan had to check it out, make sure that no one was trapped inside the wooden structure. It would go up in minutes, the entire thing devoured by the fire. Someone inside would have limited time to escape.

He pulled out his firearm as he crossed the clearing that separated the field from the barn. At one point, there’d been fencing. Now the old posts lay in piles on the ground.

He moved around to the back of the barn, searching for a window he could climb through. The wide front door would have opened easily, but he didn’t plan to be ambushed as he stepped into the structure.

Flames lapped the back corner of the building, the falling snow adding just enough moisture to the old wood to keep the entire wall from being consumed. It would happen eventually. If he was going to enter the building, he needed to move quickly.

He rounded the corner, found a broken window and climbed through. Mice scurried through the rotten hay beneath his feet. A cat yowled from somewhere deeper in the barn. He’d rescue it if he could. After he made sure the perp wasn’t hiding in one of the stalls.

His light illuminated bridles and harnesses, old tools, all of it hanging from hooks on the walls. Smoke drifted listlessly through the empty stalls, the open and broken windows sucking it out as quickly as it entered. Whoever had set fire to the barn hadn’t poured accelerant inside. A mistake. On a dryer day, the place would already be consumed. Tonight, though, the fire was taking its time. But once it entered the building, it would have plenty of fuel—dry hay, dry walls, dry boards that lay abandoned on the floor.

He stepped over a few, moving toward the front of the barn and the double doors that he could use to escape. His light flashed on piles of hay, bags of food, glowing eyes...

He moved toward whatever was crouched in the corner and saw the kitten that had been yowling. Ugly as sin, its black fur long and matted, one of its ears missing a chunk. He’d seen plenty of barn cats when he was growing up. This one wasn’t more than three months old. He expected it to run, but it approached instead, mewing pitifully as it wove through his legs.

He scooped it up and tucked it into the pocket of his coat. His light glanced off more feed bags, a water barrel, a foot. Leg. Body. Nearly hidden by the water barrel and the feed bags. Not a hint of movement. Not a breath.

Dead.

He knew it before he approached, was certain of it before his light flashed across the prone body, the vacant eyes. Shot in the head. Point-blank from the look of things.

Blood stained the guy’s jacket, and Logan pulled back the fabric, revealing another bullet wound. This one to the left of the collarbone. A nice, neat little hole, a gunshot wound the guy would have survived. Had survived. The guy’s boots were covered in dirt, his pant cuffs wet from snow. Pine needles were stuck in his hair and jutting out of his coat hood.

The perp.

No doubt about it.

He’d made it to what he thought was safety.

And then he’d been killed.

* * *

“This does not make me happy,” Stella said for what seemed like the hundredth time since they’d left the cabin.

Harper ignored her, her gaze focused on the slushy road, the headlights of her pickup truck splashing across gravel, dirt and snow.

“I know you heard me,” Stella pressed, her voice tight with frustration. She wasn’t happy with Harper’s plan, but short of tying her up and locking her in a closet, there hadn’t been a whole lot she could do about it.

Except come along for the ride.

Which she had.

A shame, because Harper would have preferred solitude to Stella’s griping complaints.

“It would be difficult not to hear you, seeing as how you’ve said it a hundred times,” she muttered, and Stella laughed.

“I do have a tendency to repeat myself when I feel as if I’m not being heard. It comes from working with an entire team of men.”

“You’re the only female HEART member?” she asked as she finally reached the main road, pulled onto asphalt and headed toward the old Dillon place. That was where Logan was. Just waiting for Sheriff Hunter to give him a ride back. He’d called Stella to let her know, and Harper had overheard.

She hadn’t seen any reason to make him wait. She had a vehicle, and she knew where the Dillon place was. She also knew that the guy Logan had been tracking was dead. She’d gotten that information from one of the deputy sheriffs who had been collecting evidence at the cabin.

“For now,” Stella said. “My boss has a sister who wants to join the team. If she can convince her brothers to let her do it, she’ll make a good team member.”

“That’ll be nice for you,” Harper said, her gaze fixed on the snowy road and the flakes that drifted lazily in the headlights. The storm had lost most of its strength. If the meteorologist was correct, there’d be rain by morning and just enough warmth to melt whatever remained of the snow.

“We’ll see.”

“You don’t like her?”

“I like Emma fine. I’m just not sure she’s cut out for the work. It’s a tough job, a dangerous one. She’s still a kid.”

“A teenager?”

“Twenty-four.”

“And you’re what? Twenty-five?”

“I’ll be thirty in the spring, but I’ve had a lot of jobs, done a lot of things. Seen a lot. Emma has been...protected. A lot.”

“So maybe it’s time for her not to be. A person can’t grow up if she’s never given the opportunity.”

“A great philosophy in theory, Harper, but letting her grow up in the kind of work HEART does is a quick way to get her killed. Kind of like you, wandering around when a killer is on the loose.”

“The guy is dead, Stella.”

“And someone killed him.”

“Someone? Logan shot him,” she responded, not quite sure what Stella was getting at.

“Not every gunshot wound is fatal. Logan fired a shot that struck the guy, but it wasn’t the shot that killed him. Logan said there were two bullet wounds. The second one was point-blank to the perpetrator’s head.”

Harper hadn’t known that, hadn’t really taken the time to ask much after she’d heard the guy was dead. She’d assumed that Logan’s shot had killed him, and she’d thought the danger was past, that the threat had ended with the man’s death.

“You’re quiet,” Stella said.

“I didn’t realize the gunman was murdered.”

“He was,” Stella said simply. “If you’d asked, maybe you wouldn’t have decided you needed to drive out into a storm to rescue someone who doesn’t need it.”

“Logan was out in the woods for over an hour. He probably does need rescuing,” she responded.

“You’re ignoring my point.”

“Which is?” Harper asked even though she knew exactly what Stella was implying.

“Next time, ask questions so you can have enough information to make a good decision.”

“Going to get someone who’s nearly frozen is a good decision.”

“Not if you’re going to die while you’re doing it.”

“Whoever killed that man is long gone.”

“Says the woman who knows nothing about any of this,” Stella muttered.

“I know that I’m not going to sit around waiting for other people to fight my battles for me,” she replied.

“Great. Good. Wonderful. I just hope that philosophy doesn’t get you killed.”

“Why would it? No one has any reason to want me dead.”

“And yet, people keep trying to kill you.”

Truer than Harper wanted to admit.

She needed to find out what was going on. The only way to do that was to talk to Gabe. He had to know more than she did. Why else would he send someone to find her?

He still hadn’t called.

She’d have to go see him, visit his house in DC with all its fancy furniture and girlie decorations. Lydia had had a field day buying things for the house. She’d had her hand in every room except for Gabe’s office, and it had showed—gaudy and funky and a little over-the-top.

Just like Lydia.

The thought made her eyes burn and her throat tighten.

She and Lydia had been as different as any two sisters could be, but they’d loved each other.

She sniffed back tears that she wasn’t going to let fall, pinched the bridge of her nose, tried hard to think of something other than her sister.

“Things could be worse,” Stella said, speaking into the sudden silence, her voice softer than it had been.

“What?”

“They could be worse, Harper. Always, so we just have to make the best of whatever situation we find ourselves in. Like this one.” She waved toward the snowy road and the flakes still drifting through the darkness. “We’re on the road, probably making ourselves bait for a murderer—”

“That’s comforting.”

“If you wanted comfort, you should have fired up that wood-burning stove of yours, huddled under one of those nice quilts you have and read a good book,” she responded.

“That probably would have been a better plan,” she admitted.

“Too late now,” Stella responded cheerfully. “You wanted this. You got it, so we’ll just enjoy the snow and hope for the best.”

Right. Sounded perfect to Harper.

Up ahead, she could see the entrance to the Dillon property—the old gateposts still sticking out of the ground. No gate. Not anymore. It had come down decades ago. At least, that was what she’d heard from people at church. People in Snowy Vista had long memories, and they remembered the way Arthur Dillon had worked the land, sold his produce at local markets, made a good living for himself and his family.

Then he’d died, and his son Matthew had taken over, run the farm into the ground and then left it for greener pastures. No one knew where he’d gone. The old farmhouse had stood empty for two decades, and then a for-sale sign had appeared in the overgrown yard, jutting up from the corner of the crumbling driveway.

That had been two years ago.

As far as Harper knew, the place hadn’t even had one showing.

She turned onto the driveway, the truck bumping over deep ruts. She got about a tenth of a mile from the house before she had to stop, a police cruiser blocking her from driving farther. Not from the local sheriff’s department. This cruiser was a state police car. Jeb must have called them in. Snowy Vista had a very small police force, and murder wasn’t something Harper thought they’d had to deal with much during the history of the town.

She eased the truck off the driveway and parked it in tangled weeds, waiting as a police officer approached. He motioned for her to roll down the window, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat.

“Ma’am, you’re going to have to turn around,” he said.

“I’m here for a friend of mine,” she responded. “Logan Fitzgerald?”

“You’re going to have to turn around,” he repeated. “No entry to the property by anyone. It’s a crime scene.”

“I know, but—”

“That’s fine, officer,” Stella cut in. “Mind if we wait at the mouth of the driveway? Logan was being questioned by Sheriff Hunter, but he’s finished now, and we’d like to get him home.”

The officer eyed Stella for a moment, then nodded. “Fine by me, but if I catch either of you out of the vehicle, I’ll arrest you.”

“No worries. I’m in no mood to spend the night in jail,” Stella responded.

That seemed to satisfy the officer.

He walked back to his car, climbed into the vehicle.

“I’m thinking you’d better do what he said,” Stella said. “My boss gets any inkling that we’re bothering the local PD, and he won’t be happy.”

“I wouldn’t want you to lose your job because of my actions,” Harper replied as she backed toward the end of the driveway.

Stella laughed. “Please. Chance wouldn’t fire me. He’s not that kind of guy. He would lecture me and assign me to desk duty for a month. A fate way worse than being fired, if you ask me.” She pulled out her cell phone and texted something. “That should get Logan moving. He’s not going to like that we’re just sitting here waiting for trouble to find us.”