style="font-size:15px;"> Her parents and nearly everyone else who cared about her had encouraged Caitlyn to seek out a safer occupation. Not that they wanted her to quit writing, but they hoped she would leave the war zones to others. As if she’d be satisfied reporting on garden parties? Writing poetry about sunshine and lollipops?
She wasn’t made that way. She thrived on action.
Jack’s arrival at her doorstep might be fate. She hadn’t gone looking for danger, but here it was. She had armed thugs searching her cabin. If Jack Dalton had a story to tell, she wouldn’t turn away.
She jumped on the internet and started a search on the name of Jack’s supposed “friend,” Mark Santoro. Expertly, she sorted through news stories, mostly from the Chicago Tribune, and put together the basic facts.
As Jack had said, Mark Santoro was dead. He and four other members of the Santoro crime family had been killed in a shootout on a city street five months ago. One of the men had his hands cut off. Mark had been decapitated. A gruesome slaughter; it was intended to send a message.
Allegedly, the Santoro family handled narcotics distribution in the Midwest, and they had angered the powerful Rojas drug cartel—the suppliers of illegal drugs.
Agents from the DEA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were all over this incident. They arrested and charged several members of the Rojas cartel, including the top man, Tom Rojas. The federal murder trial was due to start on Tuesday, four days from now, at a district court in Chicago.
Reading between the lines, Caitlyn suspected that much of this story never made it to print. She used to date a reporter who worked at the Trib—a sweet guy who had taken her for that romantic sailboat ride on Lake Michigan and begged her to stay in the States. She’d refused to settle down, and he’d moved on. A typical pattern for her relationships. The last she’d heard, her former beau was happily married with an infant daughter. If she needed to find out more about the trial, she could contact him.
Rapid-fire, she typed in the names of the two thugs: Drew Kelso and Greg Reynolds. A quick search showed several people with those names, but nothing stood out. She wasn’t surprised. Drug lords and thugs don’t generally maintain websites.
Next, she searched for Tony Perez. After digging through a lot of worthless information, she tightened her search and linked it to Mark Santoro. In one of the articles about the shootings, Tony Perez was mentioned as a bodyguard for Santoro. Perez had been killed at the scene.
But Jack Dalton was very much alive.
Slowly, she closed her laptop. Though she hadn’t heard him enter the house or walk across the living room floor, she sensed Jack’s nearness. She knew that he was standing close, silently watching her.
A shiver prickled down her spine. She wasn’t afraid that he would physically harm her. There wasn’t a reason, and he was smart enough to avoid unnecessary violence. But she was apprehensive. Jack was pulling her toward a place she didn’t want to go.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.
She swiveled in her desk chair to face him. “You look pretty healthy for a dead man.”
He crossed the room and returned her rifle to the front closet. “I brought your gun back.”
The smart thing would be to send him on his way and forget she ever saw him. But finding the truth was a compulsion for her. “Those men were looking for Tony Perez. Is that your real name?”
“Tony’s dead. Call me Jack.”
“They said you stole a horse, and that you’re dangerous.”
“Half right.”
“Which half?”
“I didn’t steal the horse. I borrowed it.”
He approached her, braced his hands on each of the arms of her swivel chair and leaned down until his face was on a level with hers. “Those men are unpredictable. There’s no telling what they might do. I strongly advise that you stay with a friend for a couple of days.”
“What about you? Where are you going?”
“Not your problem.”
He was so close that she could see the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. She wanted to rest her hand against his black T-shirt, to feel the beating of his heart. Instead, she picked a piece of straw off his shoulder. “You were hiding in the barn. In the loft.”
“I couldn’t leave until I knew you were safe.”
“Who were those guys?” She searched his eyes for a truth he might never tell her. “They said their names were Drew Kelso and Greg Reynolds.”
“Not Reynolds. That was Gregorio Rojas.” He reached toward her desk and flipped her computer open. “You know the name. You were reading all about him and his pals.”
“And his brother, Tom. His murder trial starts in four days.”
He stepped away from her. “I have to go.”
“Not yet. I’m still putting the pieces together.” She left her chair and stood between him and the front door. “I’m asking myself why Rojas is after you. Something to do with his brother’s trial, right?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“But I do, Jack. I’m a reporter.” And she was damn good at her job. He’d thrown out just enough bread crumbs for her to follow this trail. “Let’s suppose that you are this Tony Perez and that you survived the attack on the street. That makes you a witness.”
“I told you before. Tony is—”
“Dead.” Yeah, sure. “I’m just supposing here. I can only think of one reason that an eyewitness to a crime in Chicago would be hiding in the Colorado mountains.
WitSec.”
The Witness Security Program provided protection for those who might be in danger before a trial. There must be a safe house in the area.
“Suppose you’re correct,” he said. “If a protected witness was attacked at a safe house, it must mean that he was betrayed by the marshals who were supposed to be looking out for him. They gave the location of the safe house to Rojas.”
She hated to acknowledge that law enforcement officials—in this case, U.S. Marshals—could be corrupted. But she knew it was possible. While embedded with the troops, she’d run across similar instances. Somebody taking a payoff. Somebody acting on a grudge instead of following orders.
With a shrug, she said, “It happens.”
“If it did happen that way, there’s nobody this witness can trust. Rojas is after him. And the marshals can’t let him report them. He has to go on the run and find his own way to make it to the trial in Chicago.”
“I can help you.”
“I don’t want your help.”
He stepped around her and went out the front
