Gayle Wilson - Rafe Sinclair's Revenge

He had almost reached it when Rafe’s voice stopped him.

“If I’m wrong about your motives, I apologize. I’m not wrong about the other. Jorgensen is dead. You can tell Steiner that I guarantee it. Tell him that whoever this is was probably a protégé. An admirer perhaps. Imitation is still the sincerest form of flattery.”

“There have been a couple of sightings,” Griff said without turning. “One in Bern. Another in Prague.”

“There are always sightings. How many times has someone reported that they’ve seen Mengele?”

It was an apt analogy, given the death and destruction Gunther Jorgensen had been responsible for.

“I thought you should know,” Griff said again. “For what it’s worth.”

He took another step, the next to the last that would carry him out from under the artificial light of the workshop and into the daylight. Automatically, the force of habit too deeply ingrained to deny, his eyes surveyed the panorama spread out before him. Somewhere in the distance a thrush sang. There were no other sounds.

“You ever get the urge to say ‘I told you so’?” the man behind him asked.

“Occasionally. I try to resist.”

“I’m not sure I’d be able to,” Rafe said. And then he added, the mockery wiped from his tone, “Thanks for coming.”

There was another long beat of silence.

“Do you know where she is?” Griff asked, and then wished he hadn’t.

“Of course,” Sinclair said simply.

Unconsciously, Cabot nodded, the movement subtle enough that the man behind him was probably unaware of it. He took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway and out into the slant of late-afternoon sunshine.

He walked to the car he had rented at the Charlotte airport and climbed in without looking back. He was aware almost subliminally as he turned the wheel to pull onto the unpaved drive that Sinclair was standing in the doorway of the workshop, watching him.

And he knew, because they had once been as close as brothers, that the far-seeing gaze of those blue eyes would follow his car until it had disappeared into the twilight haze that gathered over these ancient mountains.

Some things never change.

The woman known as Beth Anderson lifted her hand from the key she’d just inserted into the ignition to adjust the rearview mirror of the SUV, pretending to check her makeup. As an added bit of play-acting, she touched her index finger to the small indention in the center of her top lip as if wiping away a smudge of lipstick.

Not that she could see her lip, since the mirror was focused on the line of cars behind her in the grocery store parking lot. And there was nothing suspicious about any of them. No one suspicious.

With the late-afternoon heat, there was almost no one in the parking lot at all, which made her feel more than a little foolish. It was a feeling she was becoming accustomed to.

She reached up and readjusted the mirror, putting it back into driving position. Old habits die hard, she thought. In this case, it was more like a resurrected habit. Resurrected from a life that was long dead.

She couldn’t remember making such a conscious effort to be aware of her surroundings in years. All week long, however, she’d had the sensation that someone was watching her. Maybe even following her.

In the quiet, summer sombulance of Magnolia Grove, Mississippi, that was patently ridiculous. And that was exactly what she’d been telling herself since the first flutter of that “eyes on the back of her neck” feeling had drifted along her spine.

She’d been out of the game too long for anyone to be interested in her. Her current position as the junior partner in a two-person law firm had once or twice evoked an angry response from someone she’d gone after in court. No one, including Elizabeth herself, could believe that any of her current cases might generate enough heat to cause someone to trail her around.

The whole thing was ridiculous. There wasn’t a single, solitary reason under the sun for anyone to be remotely interested in her daily routine.

Routine. The word reverberated in her consciousness, producing a nagging sense of guilt.

That was one of the first things you were taught. Never establish a routine. Vary your route to and from work. Vary the times you travel it. Vary everything in your existence so that no one can know where you’ll be or what you’ll be doing at any given moment of the day or night.

She was a little amused at the clarity of her memory. The problem with following those instructions, even if there had been any legitimate reason for doing so, was that there was only one route from her office to the bungalow she’d bought here three years ago. And she didn’t exactly set her own hours. She could vary the time she headed home, as she had today, but she was the one who opened the office every morning, promptly at nine o’clock.

She didn’t live her life by a routine, she thought, as she released the mirror to turn the key. She had slipped past routine and straight into rut. Small-town rut.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, she told herself determinedly, backing quickly out of the parking place. She had had enough excitement to last her a lifetime. All she wanted now was peace and quiet.

Not exactly all, she admitted with a touch of bitterness as she guided the car out onto the two-lane. Because after all, peace and quiet Magnolia Grove offered in abundance. As for the other…

What was it that Paul Newman had said? Why settle for hamburger when you have steak waiting at home? The analogy didn’t quite fit her situation, but she hadn’t met anyone in Magnolia Grove remotely interesting enough to compete with her memories.

And that’s a hell of a note, she acknowledged.

Maybe that’s why she’d been imagining someone following her. Loneliness. Routine. Rut. Boredom.

All of which were why she was here, she reminded herself. This place ranked at the top in the all-time boredom ratings. That’s exactly why she had chosen it. Just because she was now having some kind of midlife crisis—

Midlife? Her eyes left the road, lifting to the mirror. Although she had to shift her position in order to accomplish it, this time they examined the reflection of her face, which was reassuringly the same.

Slightly crooked nose, hazel eyes, faint chicken pox scar on her left cheekbone. And, she assessed critically, only a few more lines around her eyes than had ever been there before.

Thirty-four was hardly “midlife.” Even if this peculiar sensation of being watched was the product of some sort of dissatisfaction with her present existence, she couldn’t legitimately put it down to middle-age angst, thank God.

Her gaze returned to the blacktop stretching before her. Heat waves rose from the asphalt to shimmer and distort the horizon. There wasn’t another car in sight. A quick glance in the rearview mirror revealed there was no traffic behind her either.

Nobody was following her. Nobody was the least bit interested in anything she was doing. The idea that someone might be was probably just wishful thinking.

And that’s pretty pathetic.

Her mother used to say, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.” She had wanted peace and quiet and security. And now that she had it…

Pretty damn pathetic, she thought again, pressing her foot down on the gas pedal to take advantage of the long, deserted straightaway that stretched in front of her.

SOMETHING WAS SUBTLY different about the house. She had known it as soon as she opened the back door. Certainly by the time she’d set the groceries she’d picked up on the way home down on the counter.

Her eyes sought the light on the answering machine first, but there were no messages. Even if there had been, that wouldn’t have triggered whatever she was feeling.