She nodded, feeling like such a fool. Such anaivefool. “But he would have needed the three-digit code.”
“Which would take him a few minutes to find on the back of your card when you left your purse around.”
Oh God, he was right.
“I suspect some bomb-making supplies were purchased with your card,” Dan said.
She’d reached the same conclusion on her own. “I was the patsy,” she said, her voice hollow with humiliation.
“Julien probably hoped it would never come to that.”
He was obviously trying to make her feel better. Which only made her feel worse.
Now she didn’t just feel sick; she felt like crying again. What a mess. It was bad enough being tangled up with an ecoterrorist plot, but a murder investigation? “What am I going to do?”
She hadn’t been expecting Dan to answer, but he did. “Don’t worry. We’ll get it straightened out. But not from jail.”
“How?”
He paused. “I have someone who I think can help. As soon as we get somewhere safe, I’ll call. They also may be able to get the police on the right track with Jean Paul.”
“Is it a lawyer? My stepfather is an attorney. He doesn’t practice law anymore, but he has tons of contacts.”
Dan gave one of those rare curves of the mouth that she took to be a smile. “It’s not a lawyer. If we need your stepfather, I’ll let you know, all right?”
She nodded. “Where are we going?”
He pointed to an island on the map just off the west coast of North Uist. “Here, to wait it out until dark. We are sitting ducks in the daylight like this. We’ll look for a cave or someplace else where we can hide the boat. At least it’s gray and not orange or red.”
“And then?”
“As soon as it’s dark we’ll make our way around here”—his finger traced a path around an island called Mingulay at the southern end of the Lewis chain of islands—“to one of the islands in the Inner Hebrides as far south as we can go. We should have enough fuel to reach Tiree.”
He pointed at a roughly triangular-shaped island due west of the Port of Oban on the mainland. He had great hands. Big and strong with blunted fingertips and enough scars to makeher think he probably worked in a shop of some kind. Although a couple of the scars looked like burn marks.
“Won’t they search there?”
“Eventually. But there are hundreds of islands in the Hebrides. We could spend months hopping between them, getting lost. It will take a while to check them all, and being this far south should give us some time.”
He’d obviously given this some thought. “Sounds like you have it all planned out.” She looked down at the bag he had by his feet. “I just hope you have a few more protein bars in there or it’s going to be a long day. I get cranky when I’m hungry.”
He winced. “I hope you aren’t one of those vegetarians who won’t eat fish.”
“You’re in luck.” She smiled, which seemed crazy under the circumstances. “I love fish.”
“Sushi?”
“My favorite.”
“Then I guess I know what I’m doing when we get there.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “I guess that means I get to make camp.”
He grinned and she felt that bump in her heart getting bigger.
“If it won’t offend your feminist sensibilities.”
“I think I can manage this once. But if you call me Bambi again, all bets are off.”
