It was night. A smattering of stars and a quarter moon offered little light and though there was a thin layer of clouds wafting over the black heavens, the temperature was simmering several degrees above eighty.
Stealthily, wearing black and carrying a backpack, he jogged through the back streets and overgrown lots, scaring a cat hiding in the shadows and causing a dog down the street to start barking its fool head off.
He cut through a couple of back alleys and around an old, abandoned rifle range until he came to a warped chain-link fence that surrounded the property next to hers. New NO TRESPASSING signs had been posted and he ignored them, rimming the fence line, moving within the night shadows to the far side where, he saw through a few scraggly oaks, warm light emanating from the windows of a house. Shannon Flannery’s property, where she trained search and rescue dogs.
He’d have to be careful.
Quiet.
Stay downwind.
He circled around the field until he was standing in a sparse copse of trees at the fence line. Less than a hundred feet away was the house. Her house. Hoisting himself over the fence, he landed lithely on the other side, then he crept along the shrubbery to the two-storied cottage. She was home, he heard her voice floating through an open window. But from his position, he could catch only parts of the conversation.
“…Telling you…I just don’t know…” she was saying emphatically, her voice low and calm.
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She paused as if listening to a response.
Then he saw her, walking past the window, a phone to her ear. He didn’t move a muscle.
“…Sorry…look, Mary Beth, Robert doesn’t tell me anything, you know that…” Another pause. She stopped dead in her tracks and walked to the window, her eyes searching the field where he stood. Her red hair shone in the illumination from an overhead light, her eyebrows drawn together in concentration, a frown pulling at her full lips.
His heart thudded, certain she would see him. Instead, using her free hand, she lifted the hair off her neck and nodded, as if the person on the other end of the line could see her.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea…Right…I can’t explain what’s going through his head. I think—” She closed her eyes, threw back her head and sighed. Her throat curved backward, a smoothly tanned column above the V of her blouse and just a hint of the hollow between her breasts.
His own throat tightened seeing the sweat that was drizzling down her neck and into that dusky cleft. For the first time since leaving Falls Crossing he realized how foolish he’d been, how he’d been grasping at straws. What could this woman possibly know about Dani? What were the chances that Dani had linked up with her…? What had he been thinking driving like a madman down here, certain that this woman was somehow behind his daughter’s disappearance?
His jaw slid to the side.
“…I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mary Beth. Listen, I know I’m not a good one to give advice, but—”
Again she was cut off and as it happened her eyes flew open, her head snapped up and she flushed scarlet. “That’s it. I don’t have to take this from you or anyone else. Good-bye!” She clicked the phone to OFF. Clenching her teeth for a moment, she muttered something under her breath and moved away from the window.
Travis let his breath out of his lungs.
Now what?
He ran a hand through his hair and was about to leave when he noticed something. A movement. Near the corner of her house.
A person or a shadow? He couldn’t tell.
He crouched, automatically hiding. Had she spotted him and slipped noiselessly outside? He reached into his bag for his night vision goggles, all the while his eyes trained on the spot where he’d thought he’d seen someone beneath the trees.
But the image was gone and as he unzipped his bag, pulled out his goggles and trained them on the area where he’d thought he’d spied a person, there was nothing, just a big water trough and a tall spigot.
Sweating, he moved the glasses over her small compound. The sound of crickets chirping nearly drowned out the soft hum of the freeway a few miles off and the rumble of a train on distant tracks.
He heard no footsteps, saw no one scuttling around the edges of the buildings or hiding in the trees.
Just his own case of nerves getting the better of him.
He took one more sweep through the goggles, then carefully put them into his bag. Rocking back on his heels, he wondered what his next step would be. Would he stake out her place, watch whoever came and went?
What if she wasn’t in the least connected to Dani? That was certainly possible. Just because she was his daughter’s birth mother and Dani had been interested in finding her natural parents, might not mean much. Maybe it had been a gigantic leap to think that Shannon Flannery had somehow lured and nabbed his daughter away, the leap of a desperate, impotent man.
Christ, he thought. Here he was, alone in a field, spying on a woman he didn’t know, a woman who was probably innocent. But what other option did he have? He’d called back to Falls Crossing six times since he’d left, talked to the authorities in charge of the investigation.