Karen Harper - The Hiding Place

With another sigh, Tara filed the folder in the Inactive/Resolved section of the drawer and hoped the case would remain that way.

She took out the folder of a new case, a fascinating one. The left-behind, Myra Gavin, was convinced her ex had not only abducted their fourteen-year-old son, Ryan—Tara didn’t take cases where the child was eighteen or older—but that her ex had faked his own death. His car had gone over a cliff into a swollen river, and though there was no body found, the police believed the body had washed downstream, just as they believed Ryan, who had been a troubled kid, had run away. Myra wanted Tara to prove a case not of suicide but of pseudocide, as the lawyer who had hired her had called faking one’s own death. And, of course, to locate Ryan so he could come home.

Though Tara took any case where she thought she could help, she liked working for law firms rather than for emotional, distraught individuals directly. Like Claire’s mother, they could get in the way of ultimate success. Lawyers remained calm and controlled, mostly, and she knew she’d get paid. If Laird had not left her a decent financial settlement—as Jen had hinted this morning—Tara could not have afforded to take on some cases where she knew she’d get little or nothing for her efforts.

The other case she needed to review today concerned a biological dad, Jeff Rivers, who had kidnapped his own nine-year-old son from a couple who had adopted the boy over eight years ago. Tara was working hard to locate the man. Usually, she wanted a biological parent to have a child, but in this case, the more she learned about the skip, the more she realized he was a horrible person. So far, she’d had no luck finding him.

But she’d had great successes from other difficult cases, which encouraged her to keep going. Carla Manning, one of her first clients, whom she’d known from her old neighborhood when she was single, had not only gotten her daughter from an abusive husband, but she’d gotten her life back. Carla had returned to college and was now an attorney and child-rights advocate in Seattle. Tara would love to visit her someday, except that’s where Laird had moved, and she couldn’t bring herself to even be near the same area.

Tara sucked in a big breath and got up to look out the window again. No Nick or Beamer in sight. It was as if the forest had swallowed them. She crossed her arms over her stomach, feeling it cramp. It was almost time for her period to begin, but she knew it was more than that. It wasn’t worry about Nick; if there was anyone who could take care of himself, it was him, though she still wasn’t convinced he could take care of Claire. No, this was because of what the doctor had said yesterday. And nerves about seeing another doctor for a second opinion—actually, a third, counting Jennifer’s—so soon.

Tara sat down so hard in her chair it rolled away from her desk. She had felt all uptight like this in the weeks before Clay killed Alex, almost as if she sensed something would go wrong with one of her cases. Did that mean she was sensing something like that now, or was she just getting paranoid because of how tracking Clay had ended up? No, too much was going on in her life right now, that was all.

But her stomachache had triggered a memory. A couple of weeks before her coma, she’d had what she thought was a virus, with nausea and cramping. She wasn’t due for a period then, not until a week later. On the Pill, she’d been so regular. Surely she could not have had morning sickness that week! She bent over her knees, agonized, feeling she’d be sick right now. She wanted to get what the doctor had said out of her head, but it kept coming back to haunt her. It would be hard not to blurt it out to Dr. Bauman today, and demand that he disprove it.

“Listen to yourself!” she scolded aloud and sat up. “You just have a stomachache. You certainly aren’t pregnant now, and you weren’t pregnant then!”

But what if? What if?

She reached for her cell phone. Though the last thing in the world she wanted to do was contact Laird’s family, she was going to call his mother, Veronica. If she had any chance of getting a straight answer from Laird’s family about whether she could have been pregnant during her coma, it would be from her.

Nick saw a web of paths through the brush and trees above his property. There had been animal trails up here for years. Most were made by mule deer and elk. He saw places on the trees where animals had rubbed off the bark to mark their territories. This was probably a wild-goose—that is, wild deer and elk—chase, but Beamer was tracking something.

As far as Nick was concerned, the alert, self-confident track-and-trail breeds of dogs were one of God’s great gifts to mankind. Most bloodhounds, beagles, German shepherds and Labrador retrievers could smell hundreds of different scents, sometimes from something as tiny as shed skin cells. Whereas people might enter a kitchen and smell vegetable soup cooking, tracker dogs could break that down into meat stock, celery, potatoes, even pepper or herbs. Beamer could sprint up to forty miles an hour. He had a wide range of vision, nearly one hundred eighty degrees, and could see something as small as a mouse from a football field away. He could swivel his ears in two separate directions to pick up diverse, muted sounds at a great distance. All that, and he was eager to give hours of exhausting nose time to search for anyone from lost kids to escaped criminals, just for a bit of praise and a scratch behind his ears.

Nick had no idea what trail Beamer was working so hard now, but he felt increasingly wary and on edge. The exertion at this altitude soon got him out of breath again. The Lab took him higher, slightly around the south side of the mountain toward a deserted hunting cabin he remembered. In the old days, people who lived in Denver would come up and stay in cabins on the weekends, but with better roads and vehicles, the small buildings were seldom slept in anymore. Derelict cabins were scattered throughout these mountains. He and Alex had played up here years ago in this one, pretending that the native Arapaho, Ute and Cheyenne tribes were still in the area and that the old place was their fort. He saw the cabin was still there, in more ramshackle shape than ever.

In his heart he envisioned Alex, as she used to look, with her face all smudged and a stick rifle in her hands. He bit his lower lip hard as he followed Beamer to the door. It stood ajar and askew.

Nick stopped so suddenly that he jerked Beamer’s lead. For one moment, he had pictured how careful the Delta boys were when they entered a cave. Buried bombs abounded, and the Taliban could be hunkered down in the shadows, guns ready to blaze destruction and death. Or the troops sometimes cornered someone hiding, like Sadam Hussein himself. But they’d never found the big quarry, Bin Laden, and that haunted him yet. And then there was that hellish moment when they’d lost lives…

Nick shook his head to clear it. Stop it! he told himself. No post-traumatic stress syndrome for him. He wouldn’t allow it. Duty had called, and he’d done his duty. It wasn’t reasonable to dwell on failure, so he would not. He had hold of his weak emotions, and he would do what he must to keep it that way.

His breath still coming hard and his heart pounding, he peered inside, even looking behind the door. He was surprised to see the floor was fairly clear, as if someone had swept out debris and leaves, even spiderwebs, at least with feet and hands if not with a limb-and-leaf broom. And a bed of fresh-looking moss had been brought inside and bore the slight imprint of a human form. The moss wouldn’t last long in here without sunlight or water, he thought. Yes, this had to be fairly new, but then it was a hunter’s cabin and it was hunting season.