Page 20 of Miles

9

Miles

The tensionin the room could be cut with a knife.

Mary sat behind her desk, tapping her fingers against the surface. When she lowered her glasses, allowing them to hang from the chain around her neck, the troubled look in her eyes startled me.

“I’m trying,” I said in an attempt to head her off. “Really. She’s speaking now, so that’s a positive development. Right?”

“Yes, that’s a positive development. I knew it was only a matter of time.” She exchanged a look with Gate, the only other person in the room with us.

“All right, then. What gives? What don’t I know about?”

“Sit down,” she instructed, pointing to a chair across from where she waited.

There were very few people in my sphere of acquaintance who could make an order like that and expect me to acquiesce without question.

She was one of them. I sat, as did my cousin, while she stood.

“There’s something we didn’t tell you about when Alan found the Jeep,” Gate explained. “Not that anyone deliberately tried to keep information from you, but it didn’t seem at the time like this could uncover anything serious.”

“I don’t understand. What did he find?”

She looked at me as though I had gone nutty. “The car’s license plate. We ran it through our system in the hopes of finding the girl’s name, an address, anything we might need. Don’t forget—while we’re protecting and caring for her, there could be people looking for her out there. People who love her and think she’s dead. If that were the case, I couldn’t harbor her here without at least letting them know she was still alive—and if there are extenuating circumstances which make it impossible or ill-advised for her to return home, I would be happy to provide protection. But there’s no way I could keep her here without knowing the first thing about her.”

“Fair enough,” I managed to reply through the ruckus in my head.

Neither of them looked happy at that moment. The news they’d found wasn’t good. “So? What did you find?”

“The car is registered to one Richard Davison,” she reported, handing me a thick file enclosed in a manila folder. “I realize you have no reason to be familiar with the name, but it’s a rather notorious one on the islands.”

My heart sank when I heard the way she said the name. As though she were giving voice to a curse she’d rather not speak aloud.

“I guess it would be too much to ask that he be infamous for doing great charitable works?” I asked, dreading what I would find inside.

“Just look at the file,” she asked, unamused.

I opened it, and the sight of a dead body greeted me. A man with half of his face blown off, in a black-and-white police photo. Another of a body in a garbage dumpster. Two bodies in a car, both of them shot through the head as they sat in the front seat. Another, and another, and more after that.

“This is the handiwork of Mr. Davison, then?” I asked, my stomach turning at the grisly images.

“If not his direct handiwork, definitely that of his close associates. Likely performed at his command,” Mary mused, leaning against her desk with her arms folded across her chest. “This is merely the tip of the iceberg. He has his hands in more illegal, violent, shady deals than even the most experienced members of the intelligence community are aware of. It’s his job to be discreet, after all—the crimes we’re aware of were mistakes, slip-ups.”

“And it was his Jeep which Alan found on the cliff.”

“Correct.”

It still didn’t add up for me. “What are you saying, then? That this girl stole his car? Or was she one of his associates?”

I couldn’t believe that. Not her. I’d told myself countless times since bringing her to the resort that she could be a violent criminal, but that didn’t mean I wanted to believe it. Was she capable of being part of his world? Was she—God forbid—his girlfriend?

I hadn’t seen a photo of him yet. He could be a young man, or she might be the type to cozy up to an older fellow for his money or connections. The thought nauseated me.

“You could use the word ‘associate,’ I suppose,” she replied with a grim smile. “He has a daughter, who by all accounts is twenty-five years old. Savannah.” She tapped the file. “There’s a photo of her in here.”

Damn. It was even worse than I thought. No wonder she didn’t want to say anything about herself.

I flipped through, hoping against hope for some sort of mistake but knowing Mary too well to believe any such thing to be true. She was thorough, if nothing else.

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