“The FBI have a lot of experience too. And Kayla knows what she’s doing.”
Meeks didn’t seem convinced, but he wandered off, probably to find someone who was more excited about his news, and Jericho tried to calm his racing pulse. The feds’ lack of trust had been annoying when they had been poking around a suspected arson, but now there was a triple murder, from the sound of things, and Jericho wasn’t allowed to be involved.
The last time the feds had tried to shut him out, when he’d been helping Nikki find her kidnapped children, he’d just ignored them and charged on anyway. But that had been different; he’d had good reason to believe there were dirty feds involved in the crime, and he’d been on vacation from his own duties, so he hadn’t felt obliged to follow procedures.Andthe victims had been his family, however unfamiliar. Now, though, he had no real justification for getting involved. Nothing but his curiosity and pride, and he owed it to Kayla to keep those under control.
So he tried to ignore the activity outside his door, tried to focus on his work, tried not to think about Wade, cocky and uncontrolled and beautiful, somehow mixed up in whatever was going on. He tried. But after about fifteen minutes of staring at his computer screen, he slammed the mouse onto the desk and shoved his chair back so hard it bounced off the wall behind him. He couldn’t just sit around; he needed todosomething.
There was an address he’d been meaning to check out. The dirty feds had gotten a search warrant for the place six months earlier, but there was no evidence of the warrant ever being executed. And the wording on the warrant affidavit was so vague it would have been thrown out of court in LA. The property wasn’t a smoking gun, but an unexecuted warrant was strange enough that he should take a look at, and more importantly, it was an excuse to get the hell away from the station.
Garron had taken over from Deb at the front desk, so Jericho told the old deputy where he was going and headed off. The house was well out of town, halfway up the side of a mountain, and by the time he arrived he was wishing he’d taken the department’s four-wheel drive vehicle instead of the patrol car. But a bit of bouncing around had probably been a good distraction.
The house was old, almost certainly a settler cabin that had been updated with siding sometime quite a while ago and was then left to the elements. There was no sign of power or phone lines running into the place, so he wasn’t dealing with a meth shop or a grow op. The place just looked like a deserted homestead, at first glance.
But there had been tire ruts in the mud road leading to the cabin, and there was a path worn through the weeds to the front door. No signs of life right at the moment, but clearly someone was still using the place, at least occasionally.
Jericho peered down at his phone. No cell signal, but the GPS was working, and it showed that he was only a few miles from the Canadian border. No road crossings, not for a good distance in any direction, but it wouldn’t be hard for someone to just walk across the invisible line, carrying whatever he wanted in his pack. Whatever someoneelsewanted, and was willing to pay for.
Jericho had his Glock drawn as he stepped out of the car, and he took a moment to listen before he started moving. There were birds chirping, some crickets—all the sounds of a peaceful forest clearing. Nothing to set off any warnings. But the hair on the back of his neck was standing up anyway. Over the years, he’d learned to trust his instincts, and they were telling him there was something wrong about this place. He turned on his phone’s video recorder, then placed it in the breast pocket of his uniform, pointed so it would record roughly whatever he turned himself toward. Not ideal, but he felt better knowing there was a record of it all.
Which meant some part of him was doubtful that he’d be around totellpeople what happened.
He should get the hell out of there and call for backup, but he couldn’t stand the thought of sitting around waiting for someone to show up. Especially if it all turned out to be nothing, just his imagination playing tricks on him. They were busy with their triple murder back at the station; he could check this out himself.
He eased forward, pausing before every new step to check the angles and make sure no one was sneaking up on him. He was so focused on human threats that he almost missed the real danger. But some instinct, some buried vestige of his military training, made him glance down just as he was about to step right into the almost-invisible wire stretched across the pathway at shin-height.
Jericho froze, only his eyes moving as he traced the wire over to an old tire laid casually in the weeds. He tilted his head enough to see a glint of metal inside the rubber. Booby trap.
Yeah, he needed backup. Well, he needed a bomb squad, really. But now that he knew what he was looking for, surely he could just be careful and get a little closer?
He lifted his foot gingerly over the wire and shuffled another step toward the building. That was when he heard the distinctive clicks of a shotgun being cocked. It had come from somewhere inside the cabin, probably right by the front door. Jericho had his Glock pointed in that direction before the sound had fully registered in his brain, but there was no real target. He was completely out in the open, and the other person was under cover, sheltered by the shadows of the porch and the walls of the building. And he couldn’t take cover properly, not while he was worried about traps.
Damn it.He was a sitting duck. But the person inside the cabin hadn’t shot him yet. He thought for a moment, then stepped cautiously backward. Slow enough not to alarm anyone with an itchy trigger finger, foot high enough to clear the wire.
He didn’t turn around, not even when he got to the car and opened the door. Somewhere inside that beat-up cabin was a person with a shotgun, almost certainly pointed toward him, and if he was going to get shot, he wanted to see it coming. He wanted to see the movement that would tell him to dodge and give him a target to fire back at.
But nothing stirred in the house, and Jericho slid into the seat, Glock still aimed in what he hoped was the right direction, and he fumbled around to get the key in the ignition with his left hand. He probably looked like an idiot, but he wasn’t too worried about his dignity just then.
Once he had the car started, though, he was reluctant to leave. He tried the patrol’s two-way radio, but it had no more signal than his cell phone. He’d tipped off whomever was in the cabin; by the time he got far enough back to town for his cell or the radio to work,thenwaited for backup, the person in the cabin would have had plenty of time to clean things up and get away through the forest. This wasn’t LA; SWAT wasn’t on constant standby.
There was no alternative. He couldn’t just sit there, waiting. He couldn’t try to circle around, not with the person aware of his presence. So far, the suspect and Jericho seemed to have a truce. As long as Jericho left, he wouldn’t get shot. If he stuck around and tried to find another approach? The booby trap had showed that these people were dead serious about their security, and the person inside the cabin hadn’t cared enough about Jericho’s safety to warn him about the wire. It was tempting to think about driving a bit away and cutting back through the woods, but if there’d been a trip wire at the front door, there were probably others elsewhere, and even if he made it to the cabin, there’d still be whoever it was inside with a shotgun while he’d be outside with no cover and no backup.
So he backed out, turned around as soon as there was room, and then drove fast, his phone out in front of him the whole time, watching it for any indication that it was getting a signal. He tested the radio almost constantly too. He was ten minutes from the house but still on the single-track road, no intersections or branches, by the time he saw a bar on the phone display. He stopped the car and got out, dialed, and after too long a wait, heard Kayla’s voice cutting through the static.
He gave her a quick update, repeated the parts she hadn’t been able to hear, then repeated the whole thing again, keeping his eyes wide open and his gun drawn. He hadn’t seen a vehicle at the cabin, but there might have been something hidden away in the back. Or the person up there might have a satellite phone or a better radio transmitter than the one in the squad car and could have sent word to someone else to come take care of the intruder.
But if the person in the cabin had wanted him dead, he’d be lying in the dirt with a shotgun hole in his chest. Damn it, he needed more information.
“I’ll stay here and keep an eye on the road,” he told Kayla. “I can stop anyone from coming or going in a vehicle. But we’ll need bomb squad and whoever else you can think of to get us safely inside the building.”
“I’m on it,” she assured him. “But it’s going to take a while. Don’t get impatient, okay? Wait until we get there.”
“Yeah,” he reluctantly agreed.
So he waited. After about thirty minutes there was a helicopter buzzing around overhead, hopefully trying to track anyone who left the site, but no vehicles showed up for the better part of an hour. And when they finally did arrive, Jericho took one look at the first car in the convoy and wanted to shoot out its tires.
Hockley and Montgomery waved as they drove past him, and Kayla, in the car behind them, pulled over far enough that the other vehicles could get around her. Jericho jogged to her driver’s-side window and she said, “They’re taking charge,” in a flat, frustrated voice.
“Why’d you even tell them about it? Jesus, it’s an old search warrant, that’s all! A trip wire and a shotgun, and now suddenly it’s a DEA issue?”
