U. S. Marshall: Night's Landing Part 30

She ignored him. "Is this the house where President Poe was raised?"

"It is."

"I guess you don't keep up this place, do you?"

"No, ma'am."

She rolled her eyes and climbed back into her car, giving a shudder of pain when the wheel brushed against her bruised rib. Brooker frowned at her through her open window, a spark of concern in his brown eyes. "You look like s.h.i.t, Deputy. Want me to drive you to the Dunnemores'?"

"That good ol' boy act comes and goes, doesn't it?"

He grinned at her. "Two minutes, you'll be talking to Deputy Winter."

"He's not going to tell me a posse's out looking for you, is he?"

"No, ma'am."

She thought he winked. She started the engine and pulled farther into the driveway to turn around. Brooker walked alongside her, toward the river. He was a buff gardener, that was for d.a.m.n sure. A danger-courting type, never mind the overalls.

He got close to her car and tapped the roof. "Hold on, Deputy." His voice was quiet, serious. "We've got a problem."

She'd seen it at the same moment he had. Two bodies were sprawled on the edge of the bluff above the river.

Juliet stopped the car and drew her weapon. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

Brooker didn't argue.

Ignoring her pain, she got out of the car and had him lead the way through the tall gra.s.s to the bodies.

Both were men. Obviously dead. White.

One blond, one dark haired.

Christ.

They were the two men who'd s.n.a.t.c.hed her on the Upper West Side that morning. The blond one was facedown in the gra.s.s, one foot hanging over the edge of the bluff, at least forty feet above the river. The dark-haired man-the one who'd stuck the gun in Juliet's gut and hit her when she didn't answer his questions right-was on his back, his chest covered in blood.

They must have dumped their car at LaGuardia, caught a flight just ahead of hers and arrived in Tennessee in time to get shot dead.

"You hear any shots fired?" she asked Brooker.

"No."

Neither had Nate and Rob in Central Park. "These two guys attacked me this morning in New York." d.a.m.n. "I'm going to pat you down."

"I've got a thirty-eight in an ankle holster. Right ankle."

"How convenient." She confiscated the weapon and finished patting him down. Hard body, lots of muscles. He must have worked his b.u.t.t off as a gardener. "We're going to the Dunnemore house. We'll call the police on the way. I'd better not find anymore dead people there." Nate. Sarah.

"I didn't kill these men."

She heard something stir in the brush behind her and started to swing around. The cool barrel of a gun touched her right ear. She could see it out of the corner of her eye and went still. "Drop your weapon now."

It was another southern male voice. A county sheriff who'd answered a local's call about the bodies?

"Look, I'm the good guy-"

"You're Deputy U.S. Marshal Juliet Longstreet. I knew you'd come."

She got it now. He wasn't a local sheriff.

"One more time," he said. "Drop your weapon-away from our Mr. Brooker, if you please."

She tossed it lightly to her right.

"Brooker's weapon," the man with the gun said.

She pulled out the thirty-eight and tossed it, too. She felt adrenaline surge through her, obliterating the pain from her injuries.

Brooker stood very still, again with that steely look that said he was thinking five steps ahead of what was going on. Juliet didn't know what to make of him.

"Don't be a hero, Deputy," the man behind her said. "You're in no condition to take me on and risk Brooker's life, not after what those idiots did to you this morning. Brooker, I'll kill her if you flinch."

Brooker hadn't so much as let an eye flicker. "Did you kill my wife?"

"No. The men I just killed did."

"Janssen's men?" he asked stonily.

"Indeed. They killed your wife on his orders." The man behind Juliet seemed almost charming, as if they were gossiping about a couple of locals. "He sent them down here to kill all of us. Clean things up."

"Your real name isn't Conroy Fontaine," Brooker said.

"It's Poe. John Wesley Poe." He spoke proudly, the gun moving a few millimeters just below Juliet's ear. His tone suggested he was just waiting for anyone to contradict him. "My mother gave me the same name as the women who stole my older brother gave him."

President Poe? This son of a b.i.t.c.h had just killed two men in the backyard of the house where the president was raised, and now he was saying they were related?

Ah, h.e.l.l.

Juliet felt a wave of dizziness. She couldn't breathe. She started to topple forward, tried to stop herself, then thought-why not? She went all the way, pretending to faint from her injuries, and fell against Brooker's knees. Fontaine. John Wesley Poe. Whoever he was, he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her off Brooker, throwing her aside. She landed hard on the gravel driveway, right on her road rash, and screamed out in pain, tried to yell to Brooker to duck.

But he'd gone over the edge of the bluff.

Who the h.e.l.l is this guy?

Her mind was all over the place. Her body was reeling from the fresh waves of pain. Her ribs, her head. The d.a.m.n road rash.

Fontaine jerked her to her feet. He looked awful. Her stomach lurched and she threw up on him, noticing that he had on green camouflage pants and jacket as she heaved. She was dizzy, reeling from pain.

He sneered in disgust. "I can kill you with my bare hands." There was no lilt to the accent now, no charm, however incongruous, to his tone. "Do you understand? I don't need a f.u.c.king gun."

Juliet nodded, then felt another wave of nausea and knew she really was pa.s.sing out.

Thirty-One.

S arah loaded up a big wooden tray with gla.s.ses, a bowl of ice, a sugar pot, spoons and a pitcher of tea-regular tea, not tea punch-and carried it out to the porch. She abandoned the ca.s.serole. She wasn't hungry. Whenever she was stressed out, she'd tackle one of her grandmother's recipes. It wasn't just the comfort food, it was the inevitable images that came with it of her grandmother chopping onions, rolling out biscuit dough, cutting ripe peaches-losing herself, perhaps, in the ordinariness, the simple necessity, of putting a meal on the table.

But Sarah couldn't have concentrated on another recipe. Not now.

Joe Collins had called from New York. Again, her parents hadn't made their flight. He'd sounded faintly annoyed, as if the Dunnemores might be sucking him into some kind of drama unrelated to his investigation. Clearly, he didn't see what role a rich tax evader, even if he was a fugitive, could possibly have played in the shooting in Central Park.

Despite his obvious doubts, Collins had a.s.sured Sarah that the FBI was leaving no stone unturned and promised to call the minute he heard anything.

Before his call, she'd found an inscription in her mother's freshman yearbook from Nicholas Janssen, telling her he would miss her and appreciated her for being his friend. Sarah had looked him up on the Internet and found the same picture Conroy Fontaine had-a wanted poster on the FBI Web site. But Janssen was just a tax evader, if a very wealthy one. He'd made his money in real estate and had homes in Virginia and south Florida. He was divorced with no children, the only child of a northern Virginia pharmacist and a homemaker. He was just eighteen when his father died-it was the reason he'd had to drop out of college.

Sarah doubted her mother had done anything illegal in talking with this guy at the Rijksmuseum. That he also knew Wes Poe had set off alarm bells, but nothing explained what had happened to her parents.

Where were they?

Nate came out onto the front porch. He'd taken a call on the living room phone. Sarah knew he was doing his own checking, with sources he had within the Marshals Service. That was where he got his sketchy information on Ethan. But he'd just finished with another call, and from his obvious impatience, she suspected the news wasn't good.

"Your pal Conroy needs to answer some questions. Looks like he might not be who he says he is. There's a real Memphis reporter named Conroy Fontaine, but he's sixty-four and just retired to Phoenix."

"Maybe the Conroy we know is his son? Why don't we just go over there and ask him?"

Nate leaned across the table and filled two gla.s.ses with ice, poured the tea, making his own attempt at normalcy, Sarah thought. She could see the b.u.t.t of his gun under his open jacket. "I'm not leaving you here alone," he said, "and I'm not taking you with me. Juliet's flight got in almost two hours ago. She'll be here soon."

Having another armed deputy here would give him more room to maneuver. He handed Sarah a gla.s.s of tea, but she just stared at it. "I hope this all turns out to have nothing to do with what happened to you and Rob. It smells like politics and journalistic shenanigans to me. My mother-"

"Don't jump ahead. We have no idea what your mother knew or didn't know about Janssen, why he approached her at the museum-"

"Do you think he had anything to do with the murder of Ethan's wife?"

"I'm not doing the thinking on this one, Sarah."

Maybe not officially, she thought. She tried the tea. "I looked up Nicholas Janssen on the Internet. I'm sure you all have a thick file on him, but-" She'd known nothing about her mother's former cla.s.smate. "His mother died over the winter while he was on the lam. It was unexpected-he couldn't go home for her funeral. That had to be hard. I wonder if it's part of the reason he sought out my mother. Maybe he was just lonely."

"People don't think things through when they take off."

"I suppose if he'd been in prison serving his sentence-well, it can't be easy to lose a parent under any circ.u.mstances." She immediately regretted her words, remembering his own childhood loss of both parents. "Not that I'd know."

But his attention wasn't on her-she wasn't even sure he'd heard her. He set his gla.s.s of tea back on the table and started for the steps, drawing his weapon. "Brooker! What's going on?"

Sarah dropped her gla.s.s on the floor as she jumped up, tea splashing on her feet, ice cubes skittering under the chairs and tables. Nate charged down the porch steps.

Ethan was staggering past his cottage, soaking wet, half-drowned and in obvious pain.

He collapsed onto his knees in the gra.s.s.

Nate got to him first, Sarah just behind him.

Ethan was shivering from the chilly water and the cool breeze on his soaked clothes. Blood dripped from a swollen gash on the side of his head. "Fontaine's got Longstreet. The only reason I'm alive is because she distracted him." He was breathing hard, a thin stream of blood winding down his left temple and along his jaw. "She fell into me, pretended to faint. I went into the river. He dragged her off. I couldn't-" He tried to get up. "I hit my head on my way over the bluff. There was nothing I could do."

Nate helped him to his feet. "Did you see which way they went?"

"Into the woods between here and the Poe house."

That left hundreds of acres in which to hide. Sarah pushed back a stab of fear, dread. "It was Conroy? You're sure?"

Ethan brushed angrily at blood that had trickled into his mouth. "The f.u.c.ker thinks he's the president's brother or something. He killed two of Janssen's men."

Nate swore under his breath. "Where?"

"Poe house. Maybe an hour ago. Longstreet and I spotted the bodies-she was on her way back here to make sure you two were okay when Fontaine ambushed us." His dark eyes settled on Nate. "She said they were the men who attacked her this morning."

Sarah slipped in the gra.s.s, heading for the back door to the cottage. "I'll get ice and the phone, call the police."

"Wait," Nate said.

But she was already inside and grabbed the portable phone, ran for the freezer. Her mind was racing. Janssen's men? What did that mean? She pulled out an ice tray, hit the 9 for 911.

A hand came down hard over her mouth, a gun to her right temple. "Not a sound or I'll kill you here on the spot. Understood?"

She nodded, but the hand and the gun stayed in place. There was nothing charming about Conroy Fontaine now.

He kept the gun on her and dropped his hand from her mouth, but she didn't scream, believed he'd kill her if she did. He wrapped his free arm around her middle and pushed her out the front door, moving fast, half dragging, half carrying her into the woods below the cottage, out of sight of Nate and Ethan.

"I warned you. I told you not to tell anyone." Vines and brush slapped at her face and legs as he concealed them within the thick undergrowth. "I told you to wait. I told you if I could get to your brother, I could get to you. Did you think I was joking?"

"I-"

"Don't talk! Now people will die because of you."

Her parents. Rob. Juliet. Sarah didn't breathe. It was as if she were in the treetops, watching what was taking place below her.

"You have one last chance to cooperate." His voice was low, his face close to hers. "Do exactly as I say and your parents might yet live."

Oh, G.o.d.

She landed hard back into reality.

Conroy Fontaine-whoever he was-had her parents.