Read The Witness Online

Authors: Sandra Brown

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Suspense, #Thrillers

The Witness (30 page)

BOOK: The Witness
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"She's right, John," Pepperdyne said, guessing his friend's thought. "Her ass is dust if they or any of their cronies get close to her."

 

"So this isn't just a baby-sitting job."

 

"Far from it. The Burnwoods might be behind bars, but they've got long tentacles. Some maybe even most we might not know about yet."

 

"Jesus."

 

"You can't let her out of your sight. Suspect everybody."

 

A few minutes later the women rejoined them. Kendall took the baby from Pepperdyne. Marshal Fordham broke the news that changed the course of events. "Mrs. Burnwood can not get on another airplane until her ears have been checked by a doctor."

 

"I've recently had problems with allergies," Kendall explained. "An infection must have settled in my ears. The pressure in the cabin caused excruciating pain."

 

Pepperdyne dumped it on John: "It's your call."

 

McGrath turned to her, the first time they looked each other straight in the eye. He couldn't say why he had avoided looking at her closely before. Maybe for fear of what he might see and how it would affect him.

 

Lisa had split. While he was away on assignment, she had moved out, taking with her all her belongings and a number of his. She left no note, no phone number, no forwarding address. Nothing. Zip. He hadn't cared, except he wished he could let her know just how little she was missed. Since her departure, he had been enjoying his solitude. He had sworn off women for a while.

 

But there was something about this one . . .

 

She had looked directly at him, without flinching. That's when he first suspected that she was an accomplished liar. Her gaze was too steady to be entirely honest. Candor to that extent could only be achieved with many hours of practice.

 

He guessed that this alleged earache was a ruse to delay their trip. She might even try to escape, to elude them in the swarm of travelers at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.

 

However, on the outside chance that her discomfort was genuine, he had to take her to a medical facility and schedule them on a later flight.

 

Outside the terminal, Pepperdyne abandoned him. As he said goodbye, he slapped John on the back. "Have fun, pal."

 

"Fuck you," John muttered. His friend merely laughed and hailed the next taxi in line.

 

John was then crammed into a taxi with a nonEnglish speaking driver, two women, and a crying baby. Relying on a few key words and hand gestures, he communicated to the confused driver that they needed to be taken to the nearest emergency hospital.

 

When they arrived, Marshal Fordham stayed in the waiting lounge with the baby. John accompanied Kendall into the examination room. A nurse took her blood pressure and temperature, asked a few pertinent questions, then left them alone.

 

She sat on the padded examination table, her feet dangling over the side. John shoved his hands into his pants pockets and, keeping his back to her, studied a color diagram of the human circulatory system that was taped to the wall.

 

"Are you afraid I'll bolt?"

 

He came around. "Sorry?"

 

"Did you come in here with me because you think I might escape through the back door?" He said nothing, but he didn't have to. She laughed softly. "Do you think I would abandon my baby?"

 

"I don't know. Would you?"

 

Her pleasant expression turned wooden. "No," she said curtly.

 

"It's my job to protect you, Mrs. Burnwood."

 

"And then to deliver me to the authorities in South Carolina."

 

"That's right."

 

"Where I'll probably be killed. Don't you see the irony in that? You'll guard my life while returning me to the place where I'll be in the greatest danger?"

 

Actually, he could see the irony in that. But, hell, he was only doing his job. He wasn't paid to question the pros and cons of it. "While you're in my custody, I can't let you out of my sight," he said stiffly.

 

When the doctor came in, he looked at John curiously.

 

"You Mr. Burnwood?" he asked, referring to the form Kendall had filled out upon being admitted.

 

He showed the doctor his ID.

 

"U.S. marshal? Really? Is she your prisoner? What'd she do?"

 

"She got an earache on an airplane," John said with a distinct edge in his voice. "Are you going to examine her or what?"

 

The doctor listened to her chest, fingered the glands in her throat, and remarked that they were slightly swollen, then checked her ears, after which he confirmed that she had a nasty infection behind both eardrums.

 

"Can she fly?" John asked.

 

"Out of the question. Unless you want to risk having her eardrums burst."

 

He waited in the hall while a nurse administered an injection of antibiotics. Kendall emerged and, as they walked down the corridor to the waiting area, she surprised him by saying, "You thought I was lying, didn't you?"

 

"It crossed my mind."

 

"I wouldn't waste a lie on something that could be so easily disproved."

 

"Meaning that you'd save lying for when you were likely to get away with it."

 

She stopped and turned- to him. "Exactly, Mr. McGrath."

 

"It shouldn't be too bad."

 

"That's easy for you to say." John was in a foul mood and found Pepperdyne's banalities irritating. "You don't have to make the thousand-mile road trip."

 

After securing a motel room for the two women and the baby, he had gone to report directly to Pepperdyne, who was coordinating Mrs. Burnwood's transfer with the U. S. Marshal's office in Columbia.

 

"There's no help for it, John," Pepperdyne said patiently.

 

"According to the doctor, she shouldn't fly for at least a month.

 

We can't wait that long. This trip will only take three days'

 

travel, two nights on the road."

 

"I could make it in two days, easy."

 

"Alone. Not with passengers. Especially an infant. You'll cover approximately three hundred miles a day. It won't be a picnic, but it won't last forever."

 

Ignoring John's pained expression, Pepperdyne handed him an itinerary and a road map. "You'll leave in the morning and spend the first night in Monroe, Louisiana. Second night in Birmingham. Next day, you'll go on to Columbia."

 

Would he live to see it? he wondered. "At least Ruthie Fordham is along," he said, trying to look on the bright side, if there was one. "She seems to get along well with both of them."

 

"She'll stay with Mrs. Burnwood and the baby. We've arranged for you to have the connecting room at each of the motels."

 

John glanced over the itinerary. "I dread every mile of it.

 

Do you think we can trust her not to try something crazy?"

 

"Like escape, you mean?"

 

"She's scared, Jim."

 

Pepperdyne grinned. "Couldn't help it, could you? You've analyzed her in spite of yourself."

 

"I didn't have to analyze her. A blind fool could see that she's terrified."

 

"She won't go anywhere without her baby. It would be awfully difficult for her to overpower you and His. Fordham, and make a run for it while toting a child."

 

"You're probably right, but the lady has moxie. And there's something else you should know. She's a liar."

 

"A liar?" Pepperdyne repeated with a laugh. "What do you - .. mean!

 

"I mean," John said drolly, "that she tells stories."

 

"You don't believe she's making up this"

 

"No. She's telling the truth about the Brotherhood. The evidence you've got so far bears that out. But Mrs. Burnwood holds her cards very close to her chest. There's something she's holding back. She has a devious streak."

 

"She's a lawyer."

 

Pepperdyne's offhand comment prompted a snicker from an agent who was manning a computer printer across the room.

 

Pepperdyne turned to him. "Got anything yet?"

 

"Nope."

 

Pepperdyne said to John, "We're running a routine back ground check on her, although she seems to be on the up and up. According to her win/loss record, she was a shrewd public defender and gave the good-ol'-boy legal system in Prosper a run for its money. Knowing what we do now about the people in key positions there, she'd have to be tough to have survived as long as she did."

 

"So what's the problem?" John asked, nodding toward the computer, which he knew was linked to numerous national and international information networks.

 

"Apparently there's a bug in our system. The data we received made no sense. He's trying to straighten it out."

 

"Let me know when you get something."

 

Jim chuckled. "Dr. McGrath is curious to see what makes her tick, huh?"

 

"It's nothing for you to get a hard-on about, Jim," John said as he turned to leave. "Old habits are hard to break, that's all."

 

"You can have your job back whenever you want it. I'd love for you to work out of my division."

 

Pepperdyne was serious, and John was grateful for his former John's recollections brought him to the morning of the accident. When they left Birmingham, he was grumpy and eager to relinquish Mrs. Burnwood and her baby. He estimated that they would reach the South Carolina capital around sundown.

 

As soon as they had eaten breakfast in the motel coffeeshop, he hustled them through a light rain to the car.

 

The farther east they drove, the heavier the rainfall became.

 

By noon his nerves were shot. His shoulders ached from keeping such a tight grip on the wheel. Silently he cursed the trailer trucks that passed at speeds he considered unsafe even on an interstate highway. Sure enough, one of the teamsters made an error in judgment.

 

John immediately noticed when traffic began slowing down in all lanes. Eventually it was reduced to a crawl. He turned up the volume on the police radio, with which the car was equipped, and listened with mounting impatience as officers discussed the major accident that was causing the bottleneck.

 

The wreck involving several vehicles was another consequence of a stalled weather system that continued to dump rain on the whole southeastern region of the country, causing local flooding and other hazards.

 

According to John's rough calculations, the accident was miles ahead of them. Other traffic was being halted so that emergency vehicles could reach the scene. While he was sympathetic toward the people involved, he was irritated by the delay.

 

Ruthie Fordham had been sharing the front seat with him.

 

He handed her the map and asked her if she saw an alternate route they could take. There was one, she told him, but it - would take them out of their way. He decided that driving a colleague's vote of confidence, but his answer was still no.

 

"Too much pressure. My present occupation is less stressful."

 

Then he glanced at the road map marking their route from Texas to South Carolina and added grimly, "Up till now."

 

few extra miles was preferable to sitting still. He took the next exit.

 

That's how they came to be on that rural road where fate had placed a felled tree. His decision to divert from the prearranged route had cost Ruthie Fordham her life. They hadn't been in a cellular area, so he couldn't call the office in Columbia on the car phone. The police radio was jammed with calls relating to the accident, so he had decided not to add to the confusion on those channels.

 

Once they left- the interstate, he intended to stop and use a pay phone. But there were no pay phones on the country roads. Consequently, no one knew exactly where he was.

 

How long had they waited for them in Columbia before putting out a bulletin? Surely by now Jim's men had tracked them as far as that hospital in Stephensville. He assumed that Ruthie Fordham was dead. Did she have a family?

 

John wondered. Because of his poor judgment, his colleague had died needlessly. Chalk up another one to John McGrath.

 

Of course the doctor would have apprised Jim of his injuries, but that was all he would know.

 

Damn, Kendall Bur nwood was clever. Thinking back on it, John could see now that she hadn't left a single clue. There would be no trail to follow. To anyone investigating their disappearance, it would seem that he, Kendall, and the baby had vanished into thin air.

 

He realized now that she was no longer singing a lullaby.

 

He heard the water pipes knocking inside the walls and knew that she had turned on the faucet in the shower. He had a few more minutes to think before she discovered that he was awake.

 

It had been a stroke of genius for her to claim him as her husband. That had given her authority to speak for him while he was incapacitated. But once she had told that lie, she was trapped into perpetuating it. That, too, had been handled cleverly.

 

All her answers to his questions had been based on truth.

 

So had her accounts of their wedding day, their wedding night, his affair. Everything had been factual. Except that she had been recounting her married life with Matt Burnwood. By sticking to the truth, rather than inventing another story, she couldn't be tripped up as easily. Smart. She had also used his own name, just in case she made a slip. She was very good.

 

So good that John began to wonder if last night had been just another lie.

 

another nightmare had awakened him last night. It hadn't been as severe as previous ones, but it had disturbed him enough to jolt him awake. Restless and hot, he had worked himself free of the damp, clinging sheet and had sat up.

 

Kendall's side of the bed had been vacant, but that hadn't alarmed him. She frequently got up during the night to check on the baby. She possessed that instinctual, maternal sensory system that immediately alerted her to the child's needs. Some times she even anticipated them, which never failed to amaze him.

 

Propping the crutches under his arms, he hobbled across the hall to the second bedroom. The crib was empty. So was the room. He experienced an unmanly pang of anxiety and regret. Had she sneaked out? She had been noticeably quiet and subdued all day. Had she been planning another departure?
BOOK: The Witness
7.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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