toward the crowd, letting her gaze slide across the faces again as she pondered the obvious question nobody had yet asked.
Why would someone kidnap a fisherman and his wife? Was it the Cooper name? Was it the wife’s job at Cooper Security?
As she reached for her phone again to make a note to check into the wife’s open cases, her gaze snagged on a face in the crowd.
He stood near the back, a golden-skinned face in the middle of a sea of various skin colors. Dark hair worn longer than the fashion these days lay thick and wavy around his angular features. He had a full lower lip and deep brown eyes that, back in her foolish, romantic youth, she’d thought soulful.
Someone in front of him shifted, blocking him from her view. She edged sideways, impatient, but when the space opened again, he was gone.
The electric shock coursing through her body kept zinging, however, shooting quivers along her nerve endings and sprinkling chill bumps down her arms and legs. A tidal wave of images and memories swept through her brain, washing out all good sense and replacing it with a tumble of sensations and wishes and the time-worn detritus of shattered dreams.
It’s him, she thought, her heart racing like a startled deer.
Except it couldn’t be him. How could it be?
Sinclair Solano was very, very dead.
* * *
UNTIL THAT BRIEF, electric clash of gazes with the woman across the motel parking lot, Sinclair Solano had almost lost touch with what it meant to be alive. He’d forgotten that something other than caution or dread could animate his pulse or spark a flood of adrenaline into his system. That his skin could tingle with pleasurable anticipation and not just the fear of discovery.
But as soon as the sensation bloomed, he crushed it with ruthless intent. He had no time for anticipation. No room for pleasure. His sister, Alicia, had disappeared from her motel room earlier that day, and while Sinclair could offer no evidence to support his theory, he knew deep in his gut—where the worst of his regrets festered—that she’d been taken because of him.
Someone in Sanselmo had discovered the truth. He hadn’t died in Tesoro Harbor, as the world supposed.
And if he had not, then his former comrades would assume only one thing: he had been their enemy, not their friend.
And enemies were not allowed to live.
The crowd shifted, and he darted back toward the woods across the sheltered road, grateful that summer’s thick foliage hadn’t yet surrendered to the death throes of autumn. He’d dressed today, as he had since coming to these mountains, in olive drab and camouflage, an old habit from his days with the rebels in Sanselmo. Blending into his surroundings had become second nature to him long before his “death,” and nothing he’d experienced since that time had given him a reason to change.
Home these days was a lightweight weatherproof tent in the woods. He was able to pitch the tent in minutes and disassemble it as quickly as the need arose.
The only question now was: Had the need arisen again?
She’d seen him. But had she understood who she was seeing? When he’d known her, he hadn’t yet crossed the line. He’d been a young man adrift, not long out of college and on a mission to find himself. Twenty-five years old, possessing a law degree but no career, a steady supply of his parents’ money and a restless yearning to change the world, he’d bummed around the Caribbean for a while. Haiti for relief work. The Dominican Republic to teach English to eager young students.
The trip to Mariposa had been an oddity. A real vacation, downtime from the poverty and sadness he’d faced every day. And the pretty corn-fed college girl with her Kentucky drawl and pragmatic view of the world had seemed damned near as exotic as the Mariposan beauties.
They’d clicked, in the way opposites sometimes do, and though the smart, practical girl from Kentucky had at first been wary about being alone with a stranger on an island, they’d connected soon enough. It had been the best week of his life, a fact which had confounded him, since neither of them had done a damned thing high-minded or selfless.
Confounded him and made him feel guilty. Especially after talking to his parents one night and realizing, with dismay, that some of the things he’d found most charming about Ava had left his parents appalled and speechless.
It had been his father who’d told him about Luis Grijalva. Luis was doing amazing things in the Caribbean and South America, politically. Organizing workers, fighting for social justice, all the things that mattered to the Solano family.
The things that had mattered to Sinclair.
What was one last day with a college girl compared to meeting the great man himself and learning from his experiences?
He reached the tent, his heart still pounding, and zipped himself inside, wrapping his arms around himself to hold back the shivers. The day was mild, not cool, despite the coming storm, but he felt chilled from the inside out. He dug into the pockets of his trousers and pulled out his latest burner phone. There was a little juice left, but not much. If he didn’t run in to town in the next few days, he’d be completely cut off from even the hope of communication.
He stared at the dimmed display, wondering if it was time to make contact with Quinn again. Just a call. A couple of carefully memorized code words. He hadn’t tried it yet, but things had changed. Alicia was missing.
He hadn’t checked in with Alexander Quinn in almost eight months. He couldn’t trust that Adam Brand, the FBI agent who’d recognized him, would keep quiet. There were limits to even Quinn’s influence, and enemies more powerful and ruthless than the government who’d once listed him as one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives.
But Sinclair hadn’t left the mountains, either. He supposed, in a way, they were as close to a place to call home as he’d found in years of running from his past. He’d always lived in hilly places, from the rolling streets of San Francisco to the volcanic peaks of Sanselmo, the home of his heart. Even on the tiny Caribbean island of Mariposa, where he’d spent a couple of years before the call from Quinn, he’d gravitated to the mountain that filled the center of the island.
The Smoky Mountains were an alpine rainforest rather than a tropical one. But they’d felt like a place of refuge ever since he’d arrived.
Until now.
* * *
THOUGH SHE’D GROWN UP in the mountains, it had been a while since Ava had spent much time in the middle of unfettered nature. She’d been living in cities for several years now, where hiking meant leaving the Ford Focus at home instead of driving it downhill to the grocery store when she had a few things to pick up.
But she’d stayed fit, thanks to the demands of her job, and she found some of her old childhood skills coming back to her as she picked her way through the thickening forest.
The land sloped gently upward, making her calves burn as she hiked, but she shrugged the twinges away, concentrating instead on trying to follow the trail through the gloom. Rain had started to fall by the time she reached a fork in the forest trail, turning her hair to damp, frizzled curls beneath the hood of her jacket.
She should have been shocked that Landry hadn’t asked more questions about why she was heading into the woods, but based on her hours
