Mercenary's Perfect Mission
“The cave was built a long time ago by an architect who went crazy and became an eccentric survivalist—decided to prepare for the end of the world. He was something of a genius when it came to using the natural resources accessible in the mountains. Rumor has it that he died when he’d finished construction and it was left to a distant relative of his. About five years ago, when we realized what was happening in Cold Plains, we knew we’d need a place of safety so we contacted the owner who told us to do whatever we wanted with it. We did a little refurbishing to make it once again livable and here we are,” June explained.
Olivia was aware of Micah’s dark gaze lingering on her, but she wasn’t finished getting answers from June. “So, this is about an investigation of some sort? Are you a police officer of some kind?”
June smiled. “Heavens no. I’m just a widow who, years ago, lost my family to a cult and now I’ve made it my life’s mission running safe houses for members who leave and need a place to hide and to be deprogrammed.”
“A cult? But Cold Plains is just a beautiful small town, a wonderful place to raise children. It’s a place of health and prosperity.” She frowned, recognizing she was parroting Samuel’s words.
She tried not to think about the fact that she’d planned on getting the D tattoo on her hip before she left Cold Plains and that she’d been completely devoted to Samuel Grayson—until that moment two nights ago when everything she’d believed about the man had exploded apart.
“It’s definitely a cult and it’s run by a very dangerous man,” Micah said.
“Your brother.”
He nodded and his green eyes transformed to a darker shade like the deepest forest shadows.
“You look a lot like him,” she replied.
“An unfortunate accident of genes. We’re fraternal twins. I’m here working with the FBI to bring down Samuel and all his cult enforcers.”
Olivia stared first at June and then back at Micah, trying to wrap her mind around the fact that the perfect little town she’d called home was actually run by a group of evil “cult” members. “It’s a beautiful town. Everything shines with prosperity and newness. They’re even drawing in celebrities and big investors. I lived in a charming little house and had a great job. My children were happy and had the best health care available.” Once again she was aware that she was saying what she’d been told, what had been almost a mantra of the townspeople who followed Samuel’s teachings.
Still, she didn’t need to be deprogrammed by anyone. Her break with anything to do with Samuel and his messages and his way of life had happened in a single heart-stopping instant.
“So, what are you doing here? Why were you hiding out in the woods looking for the safe house?” Micah asked.
Olivia’s heart began to beat an unsteady rhythm as she remembered what had happened, what she’d seen two nights before. “I worked at the Community Center as a secretary. That day Sam had been fussy so I’d kept him with me at work. Samuel never minded if I needed to have him with me. As usual Ethan, my three-year-old, had gone to the Cold Plains Day Care.”
She took a sip of her coffee, hoping the warmth would heat the icy chill that had suddenly gripped her heart. “I worked a little later than usual, so it was dark when I finally left the Community Center. The day care wasn’t far away and I took off walking, knowing that Ethan would be eager to see me and his little brother after such a long day.”
Emotion once again pressed tight in her chest, rising up the back of her throat, but she swallowed hard, needing to get through this before she allowed herself to completely fall apart.
She took another sip of the strong coffee as Micah and June waited patiently for her to continue. She set the cup back on the table, aware that her fingers were trembling.
“There was an alley adjacent to the street,” she continued. “I saw Samuel and another man standing there talking and I didn’t really think too much about it. They didn’t look angry or upset, but as the man turned to leave, Samuel pulled a gun and shot him in the back of his head. There was no sound. He must have used a silencer, but as the man fell to the ground, I ran.”
She had run like the wind, with panic stealing away all rational thought. Get away. Get away, that had been her only thought. She’d dashed away, praying that Samuel hadn’t seen her, fearing not just for her own life but for Sam’s life, too.
“Did Samuel see you?” Micah asked as he leaned forward.
A trembling began in the very center of her very soul. “I don’t know. I didn’t stick around to find out. I just ran, with no thought, with no particular plan in mind. I’d heard rumors that there was a safe house someplace up the mountain but I had no idea how difficult it might be to find. I went for Ethan, but the day care was dark, empty, and I didn’t have time to locate him. I was afraid that if Samuel had seen me, I’d never make it to my son. And I’d be putting Sam in danger, as well.”
“You need to give this information to Hawk,” Micah said. “An eyewitness account to murder is just what we need to get Samuel into custody.”
“Who is Hawk?” Olivia asked.
“Hawk Bledsoe. He’s a native from Cold Plains but he’s now an FBI agent working on the case.”
“And what exactly is the case?” Confusion coupled with exhaustion made everything difficult to comprehend for her at the moment.
“The main investigation is into the killing of five women. We believe Samuel is responsible for their murders.”
Olivia gasped and shot a hand to her head as an ache began to pound at her temples. She’d heard some vague rumors, but she hadn’t believed any of them. Still, as terrible as it sounded, at the moment she didn’t want to hear about murdered women. She didn’t want to hear about cults and Samuel.
She dropped her hand back to the table and looked Micah in his cold, dark green eyes. She raised her chin, refusing to be intimidated by him and firm in the decision she’d just made. “I’m not talking to anyone until I get my son back.”
And then to her horror she burst into tears.
Chapter 2
“Can we trust her?” Hawk asked Micah an hour after Micah had radioed for Hawk to see him. The two stood in their meeting place, a small rocky area next to the stream that eventually made its way into Cold Plains where it became Fog Creek. There was a tree nearby that had been scarred by a lightning strike at some point in the distant past.
Fog Creek was important to Samuel. His cohorts bottled the creek water and sold it to everyone who attended Samuel’s many seminars. It was rumored to have magical healing properties, but Micah knew the only thing it really did was line his brother’s pockets.
“She seems like the real deal,” Micah said as he thought of the pretty blonde. Once June had led her away from the kitchen to show her the shower facility and to find some clean clothes for her to wear, he’d taken off to meet Hawk and let him know this latest development.
Hawk’s brown eyes narrowed as he quickly raked a hand through his sandy-colored hair. “It would be just like him, you know—to use a woman and a child to try to find the whereabouts of the safe house.”
“Believe me, that thought crossed my mind,” Micah replied drily. “But her story had a ring of truth and she seemed genuinely traumatized.” He quickly told Micah what Olivia had told them about seeing Samuel shoot the man in the alley. “She freaked and she ran and, in her terror, she had to leave behind one of her kids who was no longer at day care.”
“A shot to the back of the man’s head.” Hawk leaned against the tree behind him. “Sound familiar?”
“Too damned familiar,” Micah replied darkly. They both knew that Samuel’s favorite form of murder was a bullet to the back of the head; clean, cold and efficient. Unfortunately, knowing it and proving it were two different things. And so far, Samuel had managed to evade all efforts to tie him personally to anything nefarious that was happening in the town.
“Is it possible Samuel kept one of her kids as leverage and then sent her out here to spy on us?” Hawk asked.
“You know with Samuel anything is possible,” Micah replied, his stomach churning at the possibility.
“I’ll check her out and if she is the real deal, then a statement from her would go a long way in helping us build our case against Samuel,” Hawk said.
“She already told me she isn’t talking to anyone official until she gets her other son back.”
“Are you sure there really is another son?” Hawk’s distrust was warranted. If there was one thing Micah had quickly learned in his brief time working with the FBI, it was that nobody in the town of Cold Plains could be trusted.
“The only thing I’m sure of at the moment is that she won’t be left alone until we’re sure we can trust her. June or one of the others won’t let her out of their sight,” Micah replied.
“I’ll do a little snooping around in town and see if I can definitely confirm her identity and her story,” Hawk replied as he shoved himself off the tree where he’d been leaning. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find out if the secretary for the Community Center has suddenly disappeared and left one of her kids behind, although it might be more difficult to identify who Samuel shot.”
“And it’s a sure bet that if Samuel didn’t know she saw what he did, he’ll definitely wonder what drove her away from town without Ethan and he’ll be frantic to find her.” Micah felt the muscles in his jaw tighten as he thought of his brother, who had grown more and more dangerous with each passing day, especially since feeling the pressure of the investigation.
If Olivia Conner was truly who and what she said she was, then if Samuel found her, she would probably wind up like the other five dead women … with a bullet in the back of her head.
Five murdered women and any number of other deaths, all attributed to Samuel and his cult henchmen. Devotees, that’s what Samuel called the people who followed him and his teachings like blind sheep. Some of them were simply deluded, others desperate to belong to something bigger than themselves, but there were a handful of Samuel’s closest followers who were simply evil at their very hearts and souls.
“I’ll check in with you in the morning, let you know what I’ve found out,” Hawk said and a moment later he’d disappeared into the darkness.
Micah remained where he stood, the memory of one particular woman filling his head. He rarely allowed himself to go back in time to when he’d been in high school and ridiculously in love with Johanna Tate.
Even now after all these years he could still remember the vanilla scent of her straight black hair and the long lashes that fringed her pale brown eyes. He still remembered the sound of her laughter, a melodious sound that had melted his heart the first time he’d heard it.
He’d loved her with all the lust and passion that a teenage boy could own. At the time he’d thought her the woman he’d marry and build a family with, the one who would be at his side throughout his life.
Unfortunately, she’d only been his for a brief period of time before Samuel had seduced her away from him. Even after all these years Micah still felt the pain, the rage, of what his brother had done.
He’d seduced her, brought her to Cold Plains where she had been rumored to be Samuel’s main girlfriend, and then she’d been killed with a bullet to the back of her head, her body found eighty miles away in Eden, Wyoming.
Despite the distance between Samuel and where her body had been found, Micah knew in his gut that his brother was responsible for her death.
He now headed back to the safe house, a burning in the pit of his stomach as he tried not to think about how many other lives his brother had destroyed.
As he drew closer to the house, his thoughts turned to another woman, one with eyes the color of the forest and hair like spun silk, a woman who had been prepared to attack him with a sharp stick as she’d huddled in the brush with her son.
Olivia Conner. Even with the dirt on her face and leaves in her hair, holding a baby in one arm and a makeshift weapon in the other, Micah had, on some base level, registered the fact that she was an extremely attractive woman. He was vaguely surprised that he’d even noticed. It had been a very long time since a woman had appeared on his radar in any fashion.
At the moment she was potentially an eyewitness to a murder that Samuel had committed. If he could convince her to talk to one of the FBI agents working the case, then her statement might prove invaluable in breaking everything wide open.
Samuel had always been so careful. It was rare for him to get his own hands dirty but, in Olivia Conner, he’d apparently unknowingly allowed an eyewitness to get away. Micah knew the more Samuel recognized a loss of control, the more dangerous he became.
The best thing for everyone was for Olivia to speak to the authorities and give them a statement, and then be spirited away from here and into some sort of protective custody far away from Cold Plains.
It was this thought that filled his head as he slipped back into the cave where June and two other women were seated at the rough-hewn table. Olivia wasn’t one of them.
“She took a shower and then went to bed,” June said before he could ask. “The poor thing was absolutely exhausted after being in the woods for two nights all alone with her baby.”
Micah poured himself a cup of coffee and then joined them at the table. “Hawk is planning on checking out her story. We want to make sure she really is who she says she is.”
“Her little boy is a doll. I peeked in on him when I heard they’d arrived,” Darcy Craven said.
As always when Micah looked at Darcy with her beautiful long, dark hair and blue eyes, he felt a strange sense of familiarity. Her eyes were those of a woman he’d known a long time ago in his hometown, but then again he couldn’t imagine what this young woman would have to do with anyone from his past.
He knew little about Darcy, only that she’d come to Cold Plains seeking news of a mother she’d never known and had developed a romance with Rafe Black, a new doctor in town.
Rafe had shown up in town because the fourth murder victim, Abby Michaels, an old girlfriend of his, had contacted him to tell him he was the father of her three-month-old baby boy. Abby’s body had been found in a wooded area in Laramie, fifty miles away from Cold Plains Day Care Center, where she’d worked as a teacher’s aide. The baby, now an almost nine-month-old named Devin, had been missing since her disappearance.
A month earlier a little boy had been found by police officer Ford McCall with a note stating that he was Devin Black and needed to be reunited with his father. According to what Micah had heard, Rafe believed he’d finally had a happy ending, not only with his son found but also with a romantic relationship with Darcy.
But, the happy ending had been short-lived. The baby boy had been kidnapped by a man claiming to be the real child’s father. A birthmark on the boy had confirmed it. He had said he’d been forced by Samuel and Bo Fargo, the chief of police and Samuel’s right-hand man, to give up the boy for the good of the community. He’d done what he’d been told, but couldn’t live with his actions.
He’d stolen the baby back from Rafe, leaving the doctor to wonder about the whereabouts of his own son. The man had refused to make any official statements indicting either Samuel or Bo Fargo in the scheme and had disappeared from town soon after.
Even though he and Darcy were still very much in love, Rafe had insisted Darcy go to the safe house until his son could be found again.
There were so many players in this deadly game, and both June and Hawk had spent a lot of time trying to fill Micah in on everything that had been happening both in the town of Cold Plains and in his brother’s life.
At night Micah’s head spun as he tried to put names with people and figure out who was on their side and who was one of Samuel’s Devotees. There were so many people in town that nobody knew exactly where they landed in the grand scheme of things—if they were Samuel’s people or not.
In the brief time he’d been in the safe house, Micah had recognized that it was basically a clearinghouse where June helped deprogram those who needed it and the FBI aided in relocating victims to new lives. The people were in transition and most didn’t stay too long, but rather were eager to get as far away from Samuel and Cold Plains, Wyoming, as quickly as possible.
He now leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his coffee, his thoughts on the newest members of the house. “If she’ll talk to Hawk and some of the other FBI agents, then we could potentially get an arrest warrant for Samuel for the murder she witnessed,” he said. “We’d have a reason to get inside his house, maybe find some real concrete evidence to put him away forever.”
“I wouldn’t push her too hard,” June warned. “She seemed pretty fragile.”
“This whole situation is fragile,” Micah replied drily. “We have five murdered woman that were all tied in one way or another to Cold Plains and Samuel. We have enough additional dead bodies to fill an entire cemetery.”
“And missing children and people with disabilities who seem to have vanished into midair,” Darcy added, her hauntingly blue eyes darkening.
Micah frowned and took a sip of his coffee. Aside from the murdered women, this was one of the most disturbing things about this case. The streets were filled with only attractive, robust people seemingly not only physically fit but mentally well. There was no sickness, no imperfections of any kind and those who showed signs of either disappeared and were never seen again.
“There are rumors that those people are held in secret rooms or basements, prisoners for the good of the town. The worst part is the children,” Darcy said. “I think we’ve all heard the rumors of children who are born with slight ‘defects’ or deemed unworthy in some way and are hidden away someplace in town and eventually adopted out.”
Her face displayed a myriad of emotions and Micah suspected she was thinking of Rafe Black’s missing son. Was he hidden in some secret location in town or had he already been adopted out by Samuel for a huge fee to a couple in another state, another country, desperate for a child?
“Of course, we don’t have to worry about anything now that the FBI have arrested some of Samuel’s henchmen and they’ve confessed to the murders of some of the women,” June said sarcastically.
Micah snorted. “They might have confessed to being the ones who actually pulled the triggers, but they still refuse to give up Samuel as the brains. Until we can cut off the head of the snake, nobody is safe and we’ll never know for sure who in town we can trust.” He knew that a man and a woman had been arrested by the FBI and had confessed to some of the murders of the women, but they’d refused to name the man who had given them the orders to commit the crimes.
Once again his thoughts turned to the pretty blonde now sleeping in the depths of the large cave. She was the key. She had the kind of solid information that could put Samuel behind bars.
All he had to do was figure out a way to force her to do the right thing.
Olivia awakened slowly, her brain fuzzy with residual dreams of her childhood. It had not been a particularly good upbringing and the dreams hadn’t been pleasant ones.
She’d grown up in a trailer park with her sickly mother who liked to drink. Olivia never knew if her mother was sick because she drank, or drank because she was sick. Her main memories of her youth were of too little food, too little heat and far too much responsibility.
Her mother died when she was twenty-two and Olivia had known two things: she wanted to get as far away from the trailer park as possible and she was desperate to build a different kind of life for herself.
Two children later, abandoned by her boyfriend on Main Street in Cold Plains, Olivia had embraced the town and thought she’d finally come home.
As she thought of that moment in the alley when she’d watched the man she’d believed was her salvation and mentor cold-bloodedly shoot the man in the alley, she had gasped and sat straight up, disoriented for a moment as she looked around.
The cave walls in this room were particularly smooth with a small outcropping of rock that made a natural stone bench against one wall. The small oil-burning lamp still flickered, creating a pool of illumination that allowed her to maneuver easily through the room.
Sam!
Thoughts of her youngest son shot her off the bed. She’d slept in the clothes June had graciously provided her, a pair of jeans, and a T-shirt that was a tad too small across her full breasts.
She knew her hair was probably in wild disarray, but the only thing that mattered at the moment was seeing Sam’s smiling face, assuring herself that he was okay.
She couldn’t even think about her three-year-old still someplace in Cold Plains. Ethan would probably be scared, needing his mommy and if she dwelled on that thought for too long she’d come completely undone. She had to keep it together, for Sam’s sake … for Ethan’s sake.
Racing into the room where she’d placed Sam in a crib the night before, she stopped short in the doorway as she saw that the crib was empty. She whirled around, running wildly down a corridor, wondering if perhaps she’d trusted the wrong people after all.
As she wound around corners and ran into blind passageways, her heart banged discordantly, making her half-breathless as she felt like Alice suddenly falling down a rabbit hole.
She whirled around one corner and slammed into a brick wall. The wall was Micah Grayson’s hard, muscled chest. “Whoa,” he said and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders.
“Where’s my son? Where’s Sam?” she asked.
He dropped his hands from her shoulders. “I just saw him in the kitchen eating some breakfast.”
A shudder of relief swept through her. “Where’s the kitchen? This place is like a maze.”
He pointed down the nearest passageway. “Go straight and take the left turn. You’ll be in the kitchen.”
As her panic ebbed, she once again noticed that Micah Grayson wasn’t just hard and dangerous looking, but also handsome and sexy in a way that might have affected her under different circumstances.
“Thanks,” she said and started to move past him, but he reached out and grabbed her arm before she could scurry away.
“I’d like to speak with you later … after you get some breakfast and settle in.” His hand was big … weighty on her forearm.
She frowned. She couldn’t imagine what he might want to talk to her about and, if she were perfectly honest with herself, she would admit that something about him unsettled her more than a little bit. All she really wanted to do was make sure Sam was safe and then figure out some sort of plan to return to Cold Plains and retrieve Ethan.
She wasn’t interested in whatever investigation they were conducting in the town. She just wanted to have her children safe and with her and then she’d go from there.
“Olivia?”
Her name sounded strange on his lips, reminding her that she knew nothing about this man, these people and the touch of his big hand on her arm felt too warm, oddly intimate.
She pulled away from him and took a step backward. “Obviously I’m not going anyplace but the kitchen for the time being. You can find me there after breakfast.”
This time when she turned to walk away he didn’t stop her although she imagined she could feel his piercing green eyes lingering on her back.
She breathed a sigh of relief as she entered the kitchen where June sat at the table with her coffee and Sam was locked into a high chair happily smooshing scrambled eggs into his mouth.
“Mama!” he exclaimed with a happy eggy grin as she entered the room.
“Sammy,” she replied and planted a kiss on the top of his forehead. She offered a tentative smile to June. “I had a moment of panic when I woke up and didn’t find him in his crib.”