“Listen to me. You could compromise the investigation,” Shea insisted, again reaching for his pack of cigarettes only to leave it in his pocket. “I can’t let you talk to him.”
“I don’t see why not. I just want some simple answers, you know, like where the hell is my daughter? And since when do you go by the rules anyway? Since when does anyone in this family?”
He was standing in front of the door, the proverbial brick wall.
“Either you help me with this or I do it on my own,” she said, walking to the bedside table and the phone. “I’ll call Nate. I know he’s at the house taking care of the animals and I bet he’d come in an instant. Or I can call a cab. Or you can just drive me where I want to go.” She picked up the receiver and Shea threw up a hand.
“Shit! When did you get so damned hardheaded?”
“Flannery family trait,” she shot back. She didn’t bother explaining that from the moment she saw the fire in the shed she’d decided to take matters into her own hands. She now knew that the horses were safe, the dogs were fine and her house was still standing. But her daughter was missing. She couldn’t sit idly by.
“Fine. You win,” Shea growled. “I’ll start the paperwork to get out of here. I’ll put in my two cents’ worth, but you talk to the staff, get your instructions and prescriptions. After that, I’ll drive you to your place to get your things…some clean clothes and your purse. If you’re going to meet Settler, you may as well not do it in a hospital gown.”
“All right,” she agreed, silently admitting he was right. She didn’t want to go off half-cocked and look like a lunatic to boot.
Shea wasn’t finished. “Listen, I don’t know this guy and I don’t trust him. So I’m not dropping you off or anything like that. We’ll go together. That’s the deal.”
Shannon didn’t hesitate. She dropped the receiver. “I’ll take it.”
It was time she met Travis Settler face-to-face.
Chapter 11
Turning off all the lights in his small motel room, Travis fiddled with the blinds and looked out the window. Across the asphalt lot, past a row of minivans, sedans and SUVs, parked on the street was an unmarked police car. The same silver Ford Taurus he’d caught tailing him earlier in the day. So much for a covert operation, he thought, and scowled to himself. He closed the blinds, turned the air conditioner to MAX/COOL, flipped on the television, leaving it muted, then flopped onto the bed with its thin mattress and floral-print quilt.
What the hell had happened at Shannon Flannery’s place?
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that someone had not only torched the shed but had used the fire as a trap and a distraction. Shannon had been so busy trying to save her livestock that she’d almost gotten herself killed by an assailant.
She’d been set up.
The television, on an all-news channel, showed the president, smiling, holding up a hand to the press while his Secret Service bodyguards stood between him and the crowd of protestors.
Travis barely noticed. He swiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to make sense of the fire. Sure, the arsonist could have been intent on torching the place, a random act, and when Shannon stumbled upon him, he’d panicked and beaten her while trying to escape…But that didn’t fit, Travis thought. No…There was more to the story than met the eye.
What did he know about Shannon Flannery? First and foremost she was Dani’s birth mother. She’d never married the father and had given the baby up for adoption, a private adoption, through the law firm of Black, Rosen and Tallericco, which had dissolved over ten years ago.
He also knew that she’d been charged with her husband’s murder. According to all the records the marriage had been rocky and there had been a restraining order filed against Ryan Carlyle by his wife. There were rumors of affairs and some speculation that he’d been a criminal known as the “Stealth Torcher” because of a string of intentionally set fires that had not occurred again since his death.
Some people thought that Carlyle had been caught in his own trap. That he’d died in the forest fire that he’d set, slipped on a rock and broken his ankle as the fire had blazed around him.
Others thought his wife, fed up with being cheated on and beaten, had lured him into the woods, somehow disabled him and then set a fire. The ensuing blaze had not only killed him, reducing him to little more than ash but had also taken some five hundred acres of California wilderness with it and sent three firefighters to the emergency ward.
So what does the fire at Shannon Flannery’s house have to do with Dani?
Nothing!
Not one damned thing!
This had been a wild-goose chase.
Nothing more.
Stretching across the bed, he opened the minifridge that doubled as a nightstand and dragged out a beer that he’d picked up earlier along with a nine-dollar pizza that was eight dollars overpriced. The damned
thing had tasted like cardboard topped with too little burned mozzarella cheese.
Today, all the while he’d been running his errands including spending time at the offices of the newspaper, then hitting the library before picking up the six-pack of Coors and the bad pizza, the police had followed him in that dirty silver Taurus. Not that he blamed them, he supposed. After all, he had been at the fire, and though he had called 9-1-1, the call could have been his cover. His clothes had been smeared with her blood and she didn’t know who he was. Plus, all the damaging evidence they’d found in his truck.