they weren’t blue at all. Fall was just starting to paint the rolling hillsides in splashes of gold and crimson, oranges and maroons that were rapidly overtaking the carpet of green.
“Wow. Pretty,” Sammie Jo commented at random.
He glanced over at her and was startled that she appeared to be studying him and not the scenery. It was hard to tell behind those dark sunglasses of hers. Had she just called him pretty? He chose to pretend she’d been referring to the scenery. “I’m told it’s spectacular when the colors peak around here.”
“Mmm. So why am I here?”
Direct, this woman. “I have no idea. Jeff Winston called me and said he needed my help figuring out what some local nut job is up to. Guy named Proctor. I assumed you would know what’s going on since you work for Jeff.”
“Nope. He didn’t tell me anything more than that. But Jeff never does anything randomly. He clearly wants you and me to have a look around the local area. Turn over a few rocks and see what we find.”
“That seems damned random of him.”
“Agreed.” She nodded. “There’s clearly something going on. He must want us to take an unbiased look at it.”
Frustration rattled through him. “Look. I have other responsibilities to get back to, and I don’t have time for chasing shadows and vague rumors.”
An eyebrow climbed above the upper rim of one tilting triangle of her sunglasses. “Like I do have time for games?” she demanded.
“Hey. He’s your boss. Take it up with Winston.”
They fell into silence and drove for some miles before he felt the least bit inclined to be civil again. Dammit, Jeff was his fraternity brother and had been a loyal friend through some rough times. He owed the guy at least a shot at making this investigation, or whatever it was, work.
Gray sighed and said, “Jeff rented us a motel room in a burg called Mapletop. It’s smack-dab in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone. Are you familiar with that?”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s an area encompassing 13,000 square miles and straddling the Virginia-West Virginia border. It was set aside in the 1950s to surround the world’s largest radio telescope, which is an incredibly sensitive instrument. Inside the Zone, only very limited radio emissions are allowed. There are no cell phones, no Wi-Fi and only a handful of low-power radio stations. All electronic emissions generated in this area have to be approved so they don’t interfere with the telescopes.”
She nodded as if she already knew all that.
“We’ll enter the NRQZ in a few miles, and your wireless devices will lose signal shortly thereafter. If you have any last-minute phone calls to make, email to check, or texts to send, now’s the time to do it.”
“No one to call,” she said grimly.
His finely honed intuition sensed a story, but he didn’t pry. She wasn’t here to overshare her personal life with him, and he didn’t want to know, anyway. He had a job to do—assuming he could figure out what the damned job was.
What had Jeff been thinking to send this woman, who was as clueless as him, out here? It wasn’t like she was going to blend in with the locals in the least. This region was about country music, log cabins and outdoor sports. Sammie Jo Jessup looked like a character from a science-fiction movie.
As they turned into the parking lot of the motel, his alien-wannabe companion broke the silence. “You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” she prodded. “Who are you?”
“I’m an old buddy of Jeff’s who owes the bastard a favor,” he retorted. “Why he chose to collect it like this is beyond me.”
He assumed she was looking at him. Her sunglasses were pointed at him, at least. “What kind of work do you do?” she asked.
Caution kicked in and he said carefully, “I work with computers.”
“Hmm. Why would Jeff bring you here, then, where you’re useless?”
He knew all too well the feeling of being useless. It had ripped out his soul, burned every last bit of the humanity out of him and left him the hull of a man he was today. But to be told he was useless by this impertinent female didn’t sit well with him.
Irritation flared in his gut. An errant urge to tell her the truth rose in the back of his throat. But the pain rose, too, and he wasn’t prepared to face the fire today. He pushed down the grief, pushed down the memories, pushed down any feeling at all.
He guided the Bronco into a parking spot in front of the two-bedroom motel bungalow Jeff had arranged for them. Gray’s manners were too deeply ingrained to ignore no matter how irritating this woman might be, so he went around the SUV to open her door for her. But of course, she’d already barged out of the car and stood beside it looking around.
“What?” she demanded as he frowned at her.
“I would’ve opened your door for you.”
She snorted. “I can get my own doors.”
“I’m sure you can. But that doesn’t mean I still shouldn’t open them for you.”
“Are you some kind of throwback to the olden days?”
He allowed himself a little smile. Wait till she got a load of how people lived in this region. The whole place was one giant throwback. “Something like that.”
He fetched her bag and headed for Home Sweet Home. The mint-green cinder-block structure had the metal roof so common in this region. Either that, or someone had gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to paint rust stains on the thing. Metal apparently helped shield the minor electrical emissions of small household appliances from the nearby telescopes.
He hurried his steps to reach the door first and opened it for her with a flourish. He couldn’t actually see if she rolled her eyes at him, but he sensed that she did. He smirked at her back in satisfaction as he followed her inside.
“Wow. This is … rustic,” she declared.
He snorted. “This is as modern as it gets this far inside the NRQZ.”
His gaze strayed to her delicious tush, cupped in that naughty black leather as she closed the vinyl-lined curtains over both living-room windows. She headed for the kitchenette’s tiny window, and he enjoyed the view as she bent over the rim of the sink to yank the curtains closed over the small, high window there. The cabin’s interior went dim. But oddly, she didn’t remove her sunglasses. Hangover from partying too hard the night before? Or maybe something more mundane like a migraine?
“Better,” she announced. She turned back toward him but stopped abruptly as she caught sight of the pictures spread out across the counter. He’d forgotten those were there. She stared at the surveillance photographs closely. “Who’s this guy?”
“His name is Luke Zimmer. Jeff sent me those and the kid’s dossier yesterday morning.”
“He’s cute.
