bought with the change from the money she’d left him to pay for their meal when she’d slipped from their booth to follow the Fed.
She hadn’t had the heart to scold him over his unauthorized purchase. The monsters in his young life were all too real. She could understand why a plastic one might bring comfort.
The same need to believe that monsters weren’t invincible was obviously why Joey was one of the Eye-Opener’s biggest fans. One of her biggest fans, rather, Tess corrected herself. Guilt flickered through her, as it had done more than once in the past two days. She didn’t know why she hadn’t told Joey the truth, since it was something he was going to find out sooner or later, anyway. But maybe it was better that he learn it himself, the way she’d had to.
Oh, not that monsters don’t exist, Joey, she silently assured the small sleeping figure in the rumpled bed. They do. They’re really real and I really went up against one, just like in those stories I write. Except I didn’t defeat it.
“It defeated me,” she said under her breath, her vision suddenly blurring. “I was your age, and the monster won. No one believed me, either.”
“How do you know? I might if you took the trouble to explain, lady.”
Startled, Tess jerked her attention to the handcuffed man across the room. She’d allowed him to remove his suit jacket before making him manacle his right wrist to the steel bracket, and even as she looked at him she saw the biceps of his secured arm flex. He gave her a thin smile.
“You want to give it a try?”
“Give what a try?”
She didn’t trust him, she thought edgily. She didn’t trust him and she didn’t like him—or, at least, she didn’t like what he represented, and that was close enough. He hadn’t spoken at all during the drive to this run-down motel, but she’d had the unsettling conviction that he’d been watching every move she’d made, hoping her attention would flag for just one second.
“Try telling me why you’re doing this.” He shrugged. “You seem to think no one would believe you, but you haven’t given me a chance to hear you out. In fact, you haven’t even told me your name.”
Feeling obscurely relieved that he’d evidently misheard her murmured words to the sleeping nine-year-old, Tess narrowed her gaze on him. “Going for the psychological approach, Agent? Trying to make me think we could be buddies? Don’t waste your breath. Your little ploy’s not going to lull me into uncuffing you and handing you back your gun.”
She shook her head. “Besides, you know darn well who I am. Even if you don’t think too highly of my work, you’ve obviously read an example of it, since you knew about the Bigfoot story.”
Dark eyebrows drew together in a frown. “You’re some kind of writer? Sorry, lady, I’m afraid I’ve never—”
“Oh, please,” she snapped. “If I believed everyone who told me they never buy the Eye-Opener, I’d figure we have a circulation of about twelve readers in the whole country. The most you’ll admit is that you might have glanced at it in a checkout line at the grocery store, right?”
“The Eye-Opener?”
He didn’t seem to realize he was matching his actions to his flatly phrased comment. The rest of the man was hard angles of bone and solid slabs of muscle, Tess noted incongruously, but his eyes were—
His eyes were beautiful, she thought a heartbeat later. They were a crystalline gray in the tan of his face, fringed with dark, spiky lashes any female would kill for.
She watched as they closed briefly, the lashes dipping to fan against hard ridges of cheekbone. When they opened again she was sure she saw wry humor light them just for a moment.
“You’re a tabloid reporter.” She hadn’t been wrong about the humor. A corner of his mouth quirked upward before it firmed into a straight line once again. “So there wasn’t any alien autopsy in Hangar 93?”
She glanced at a fast-asleep Joey before replying. “Hangar 61. But no, of course it wasn’t real.” She looked at him in confusion. “For heaven’s sake, do you think I’m some kind of—”
Belated comprehension flooded through her. “Dear God, you did, didn’t you? You thought I was a wacko, crazy enough to be working with whoever’s targeting Joey.”
She stared coldly at him. “Nice theory, Agent. Too bad it’s even less grounded in facts than the stories the National Eye-Opener runs every week.”
“Connor.” His tone was as clipped as hers. “And I don’t want to make you think we could be buddies, I’m just tired of being called Agent. Is Tess your real name or is that something else you’ve let Joey believe?”
“Tess is my real name.” When she was annoyed, her voice was raspier than normal, she knew. “Tess Smith. Connor what?”
“Connor’s my last name.” He grimaced. “These cuffs are cutting off my circulation. How about loosening them?”
“Let me suggest an Eye-Opener headline for that one,” she retorted. “FBI Discovers Woman Dumber Than Dirt—She Believed Me When I Said I Wouldn’t Try To Escape, Agent Says. The cuffs stay. What’s your first name?”
He looked away. “Virgil,” he muttered. “But I go by Connor.”
His comment a moment ago had stung. She arched an eyebrow. “You think I deliberately lied to Joey, don’t you, Virgil? You think I encouraged his hero-worship for my own ends. Is that how you figure it, Virge?”
The eyes she’d thought so beautiful took on a hard glitter. Restlessly Connor—no, Virgil, she told herself defiantly—shifted position on the hard wooden chair.
“I still figure you that way, lady. What your day job is doesn’t really change anything.” He exhaled, his gaze on hers.
“Did Rick Leroy tell you why Joey Begand was being held in an Agency safe house?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “It was because he witnessed a murder in an Albuquerque alleyway—the murder of a retired FBI agent, Dean Quayle. Quayle’s killer, a homeless man by the name of John MacLeish, was wounded during the encounter, but not badly enough to prevent him from escaping later that night from the hospital where he’d been taken after the police had arrived on the scene. The police found Joey hiding in a Dumpster, his memory of exactly what happened temporarily erased. The doctors say Joey’s amnesia won’t last.”
His tone hardened. “I don’t care what your relationship with Leroy is, except for the fact that you have to be working with him, since he handed Joey over to you. What I do want to know is, what was Leroy’s deal with Quayle’s killer, MacLeish?”
He’d already judged her and found her guilty, Tess thought. She’d gone into this realizing that no explanation she could give would be believed by the authorities. That was why she hadn’t bothered to present her side of the story to him during the drive here, and why even now she suspected it was going to be futile to try to make Agent Virgil Connor, a man who obviously lived and breathed his job, understand.
But for a split second she’d thought she’d glimpsed a very different man from the single-minded enforcer of the law he appeared to be. Wasn’t it possible that those crystal-gray eyes might see she’d had no other choice but to keep faith with Joey
