Back from the Brink Read online

  BACK FROM THE BRINK

  A NICOLE COBAIN MYSTERY

  Emery Hayes

  Giselle

  Strength, courage, dignity—you possess each of these

  Acknowledgments

  I am incredibly grateful for my children who are, in every way, amazing. Madeleine, Ava and Lilah there is no greater beauty, no deeper strength than that found in each of you.

  Thank you, Anne Tibbets, for your steadfast integrity, wisdom and passion.

  1

  The baby was quiet. For days, he had moved. Kicking his feet, his tiny hands fluttering and then pushing against the womb. Sensing her anxiety? Sure. She believed it. Feeling the increase in cortisol as she teetered between fight or flight? Definitely. But now, as she pushed through thick vegetation, running but clumsily, picking up speed in the open spaces, sidling through dense cover, her arms wrapped around her middle as she fought the cloying branches, the baby was quiet.

  Miles from the house now, she still felt them with her. No closer than when she had slipped out the second-story window, slid down the rough shingles, hung from the gutter, falling as the tubing peeled away from the eaves and set her on her feet at the back of the house. They were still inside then, thundering up the stairs, slamming doors—bedroom, bathroom, closet.

  “Keep moving,” Matthew had said. It was not enough to just hide. She smiled at the thought of him, and then, as the memory of the men in her house and what that meant about the man she loved crowded her vision, she stifled a sob. But she wouldn’t let tears slow her down.

  She stumbled and broke free of the tree line, lost her footing and balance as the earth tilted. She hit her knees, and because her arms were wrapped around her baby belly, she could not break her fall. She turned enough that her shoulder took most of it. She bounced and the wind left her lungs in a thick whoosh that stunned her. She turned and got to her hands and knees. Then she heard herself crying. Heard her tears knot in her throat and the wet snot as she drew a deep breath and prayed, prayed that their baby was all right.

  She was tired, but she stood. Her arms hung heavily at her sides and in the pitch darkness she turned in a slow circle, looking for life. She found it in a small, white light, so far away. It blinked on and off, but then she realized that it was she who moved as she wavered on her feet. If she stood absolutely still, the light remained steadfast. A promise. And she moved toward it while behind her she heard the sharp rustle of leaves as branches were pushed aside, as first one pursuer and then another cleared the trees and burned her heels.

  And she took off. Not in a straight line. She knew better than that. She knew about cross hairs and zigzag patterns and the possibility of surviving even the most ardent hunters. Matthew had prepared her for that while at the same time promising she would never need to use the knowledge. And she couldn’t, absolutely could not, tear her eyes away from the hope in that white light.

  The land sloped, and when she found herself in the gullies, she fired her engines until she came to the crest and saw light. She stood still long enough to open her lungs, then trudged forward. It was impossible to tell how far away salvation was, with the moon and the stars tucked behind clouds and the landscape draped in darkness—the trees darker than the earth but lighter than the night sky.

  Her chances were slim to none. Matthew had told her that. Those pursuing her were trained for this kind of thing and she was not. Evasion of any kind was not her forte. But she was bold. She was even foolishly optimistic. She had to believe.

  She picked up steam. Her legs burned with the effort. She knew from the way the earth slanted, the soft rise and fall of the hills, that she was on track, heading toward the lake. That the light was on the other side, that she would have to skirt the edge of the water, another mile or more, before she had a door to knock on, help at hand.

  She felt another ripple of pain across her abdomen. A cramping below that, sudden, breathtaking, the kind that seemed to pull her insides out. The baby was coming.

  She remembered Matthew’s words on mental toughness. It was the difference between failure and success.

  One mile. She could do that. With more than that already behind her, she had come farther than Matthew had thought possible. And a bubble of pride swelled inside her. It made her feel light on her toes. Eased the pinch in her lungs. She would do anything for Matthew. Anything for their son.

  * * *

  Nicole was up, her legs over the side of the bed, before she realized it was the phone that had woken her. She rubbed sleep from her eyes as she reached for her cell on the nightstand. It rang again, a sharp trilling that pierced her ears. The display read DISPATCH. She opened the call.

  “Cobain,” she said.

  “Hi, Sheriff.” Her night shift operator, Lodi. “I have Border Patrol on the line. Patching through.”

  Nicole waited. Calls this late into the night—it was 2:37 AM—were rare from BP. Blue Mesa was the seat of multiple agencies. The sheriff’s department, Border Patrol, and Highway Patrol all kept offices in the small town, and while the late hour was unusual, working together was not.

  “Sheriff? It’s Kyle Monte.” A senior agent at BP North. Nicole had worked with him many times. Since the shift in 2016 of presidents and policies, immigration in particular—the border with Canada was fourteen miles from the town proper—their paths had crossed far more frequently. Monte was an easy man to work with. He listened more than he spoke, understood that nothing was superficial, and Nicole had never heard a bullshit party line from him.

  “What’s up, Monte?”

  “Have a DOA here. Can’t get to ID. Probably a UDA.” Undocumented alien. Nicole could hear the disappointment in his voice. New policies on immigration had led to riskier border attempts. Since January, seven bodies had been recovered. All women and children. All succumbed to the weather. But Nicole and her office hadn’t dealt with those. Her team was brought in only when foul play was suspected and the sheriff’s office had jurisdiction. “And there was nothing natural or circumstantial about his death,” Monte continued.

  Nicole stood and turned on the bedroom light. She pulled a uniform off a hanger in the closet and laid it over the bed.

  “Location?”

  “Middle of Lake Maria.”

  That gave her pause. The lake was thawing, its edges completely fluid now, but a quarter mile in it was slushy, with floes that drifted on the currents. At its center were solid patches of ice that reached all the way to the bottom. “What?”

  “I came out on a tip. You know we’ve been getting more of those than ever and most of them are good, so I didn’t hesitate.” Nicole listened to his story unfold. Monte had arrived at the lake more than an hour before. Their caller was waiting at the water’s edge. The man had reported seeing a group of young men—four or five—board a boat and head north. They wore dark clothing and each had a day pack with them.

  From the northern edge of Lake Maria, it was a seven-mile hike through dense forest and steep passes to the Canadian border. But it was a cool night, twenty-seven degrees with a heavy mist in the air and cloud cover. All of which complicated the passage.

  “You catch up with them?” she asked.

  “Nah. We have officers at the border, of course. Spread so thin a herd of trumpeting elephants could charge through unnoticed.” And so there was little hope of rounding them up before they crossed the border into terrain both steeper and colder than stateside, where life and death and the line between them blended into the landscape.

  “What makes you think your DOA is my business?”

  “His hands and feet are tied. We can see that much. You’re going to have a job here, cutting him out of the ice.”

  That surprised her. “He’s frozen?”

/>   “Yeah. Damn ice cube. And you know how that goes, right? His face tells it all.”

  Nicole had seen it before. Ice preserved its victims, including casting facial expressions.

  Monte gave her his coordinates, and then she hung up and called dispatch. She arranged for a deputy to meet her at the south side of the lake with the department skiff. She had Lodi rouse MacAulay as well—they couldn’t move the body without the ME first working the scene. Next, Nicole called Mrs. Neal, grateful for the woman’s flexibility.

  Nicole walked through the house, toward the kitchen and the coffeemaker. She looked in on Jordan but didn’t wake him. It was enough to watch the comforter rise and fall in sync with his light snoring, to feel his warmth from across the room. She stood in the doorway and thought about the young man he was becoming. Four months ago Benjamin Kris, his father, had arrived in town and done his best to destroy Nicole. His weapon of choice had been their son. Nicole had stopped him, but only with the help of a young man, Joaquin Esparza, to whom she would always be indebted.

  She let out a breath thick with gratitude and closed the door.

  She took the time to brew coffee and to shower. She couldn’t go anywhere without a boat and the ME, and it would take a half hour or more to get that set up. After she was in uniform, she pulled her hair back in a ponytail and filled a thermos, topping her coffee with vanilla creamer. Twenty minutes after her call to Mrs. Neal, the woman was working her key into the front door. Nicole met her there.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly.”

  Mrs. Neal smiled, though Nicole saw shadows pass through her eyes. It would be a long time, if ever, before either of them forgot about Benjamin and the havoc he’d wreaked on their lives. He’d taken Jordan from this house and left Mrs. Neal to die.

  “Not another child, I hope,” she said.

  “No.” It wasn’t often she was called out in the middle of the night, and she thought of Beatrice Esparza and all she’d lost here four months ago. “A young man, as far as I know.”

  “I hate hearing it.”

  Nicole agreed. “Go to bed. I’ll lock up on my way out.”

  Nicole’s home, a single-story ranch remodeled over the years, had three bedrooms. She had fixed up the spare as a guest room and kept several of the niceties Mrs. Neal favored there. Nicole had hired the woman for afternoon and weekend help. She picked Jordan up from school, ran him to friends’ houses and sometimes Scout meetings, and prepared their dinner before leaving for home. Their arrangement included some late-night calls as needed. But Mrs. Neal had become more to them. Nicole’s parents had died in a car crash when she was twenty-two years old. She missed them, her mother in particular, and Mrs. Neal softened that ache. She was good with Jordan too. A fierce grandmother figure.

  Nicole watched the woman walk toward the back of the house, then grabbed her thermos and headed out the door.

  * * *

  People could not fly. Not unless they were inside an airplane. Or a helicopter. Wouldn’t that be amazing? she thought. For a helicopter to buzz by, with searchlights and the right people inside, looking for her. For them to find her, here, right now, standing up to her ankles in frigid water with mud oozing around her shoes, pulling at her feet, making it hard, almost impossible, to go any farther. Wouldn’t that be God, to pluck her out of this situation and into the night sky? Saved. She would like that. But she had just enough grit left on the inside to know dream from reality, hallucination from dire circumstances.

  She would die, by man or by her own foolishness, but she would see the sunrise first. She would birth her child and swaddle him in whatever she could find and leave him on a doorstep, under that white light that blazed across the water and offered her hope.

  It had to be that way. The men chasing her wanted only her and what she could give them.

  It was always farther than first thought. With anything. The words kept playing through her mind. It had taken a long time for her father to die. Even longer for her mother to leave him. It had taken too long to come of age, so she had cut corners there. Terrified of the marriage her father had arranged for her in Syria, of being placed on an airplane at the age of sixteen and sold for a mahr of ten thousand American dollars and interest in a smoke shop in Aleppo, she had slipped through her bedroom window at fifteen, with just babysitting money in her pocket and a change of clothes in her backpack. That first breath of independence had more fear in it than freedom, and given her circumstances, that had surprised her. But she had made it. She had purchased a bus ticket with some of her money, showing her aunt Aya’s driver’s license when the cashier doubted her age. Thirty-seven dollars got her out of Wyoming and all the way to Billings. She’d gotten by that first year waiting tables at a diner and more babysitting when she could find it. She’d rented a room in the back of someone’s house. And later, she’d met Matthew Franks.

  She pressed her fist to her mouth to push back the cry. Loss. Her life had been full of it. But she would not lose this baby.

  She looked across the water. A string of lights, triangular and bobbing on the tide, caught her attention. A boat was out there. If she called, would they hear her? Possibly, but so would the men who followed her. They had killed once and would again.

  She turned away and sought her compass. The white light was steady and no closer, but it had to be. She had not stopped moving. She had not changed direction. And yet the distance seemed to have doubled. Or maybe her optimism had sunk.

  Behind her they scrabbled over the hillsides like crabs. They had guns and needles filled with propofol. Matthew had said there would be at least five of them and probably more. And they would stop at nothing to have what she had. And she understood that. She understood that freedom was everything.

  The pain came again, sharp and deep. She stopped and bent at the waist. The pressure was building. The baby wanted out.

  “Not now,” she whispered, her voice thick with tears, gasping for breath. “Please not now.”

  She’d read about it. She’d asked the midwife many questions. She liked to gather wisdom and face the unknown with facts. In that way, she was ready.

  She wished for something better. Safer. For Matthew’s arms around her, his deep voice coaching her, like they’d practiced. And she thought again about flying. How beautiful that would be. Altitude. Matthew had told her about climbers on Everest, those who were not prepared. When the Os were thin and the body not acclimated, people dreamed. Hallucinated. Died.

  She was breathless but bound to the earth. She was desperate and quickly running out of options.

  * * *

  They were still deeply into night when Nicole arrived at the southern edge of Lake Maria. She glanced at the clock on the Yukon’s dash: 3:15. Cloud cover minimized the natural light from the moon and stars, and once she extinguished her headlights, the trees loomed large and menacing. Nicole pulled her Colt Commando from its console holster, grabbed her thermos, and shouldered out of the SUV.

  Ty Watts waited for her at the bottom of the concrete ramp. The skiff was already lowered into the water. It was a fast, simple vehicle with a Sailfish center console covered by a small canvas roof and powered by a Yamaha four-stroke outboard. It was fully equipped with sirens, emergency lighting, a radio, and rescue/first-aid equipment. The hull was manufactured with a special blade at its pitch to cut through the ice.

  “Hey, Sheriff.” Ty hailed her when she was still several yards distant. She had recently promoted him from a strictly patrol position to case duties. It was a fifty-fifty split, because their department was small and their jurisdiction vast at nearly two thousand square miles, but he was happy and he had earned it.

  “Hi, Ty.” Nicole felt her breath bloom in the air between them. It seemed a bit cooler than the twenty-seven degrees Monte had reported. “You bring the chainsaw?”

  His smile gleamed in the shadows. “Yeah. And the ME too.”

  MacAulay. Their family doctor turned ME. That was how it was done in small towns.r />
  Nicole pivoted on a bootheel. She didn’t see another man standing nor a crouching figure in the shadowed boat.

  “Where is he?”

  Ty nodded toward his cruiser, a Yukon similar to hers but currently hooked to a boat trailer. The lights were off, but the engine was running.

  “Had to pull over twice to let him hurl,” Ty said.

  “He’s sick?”

  “Flu or food poisoning, he said.”

  But Nicole was already heading for the cruiser, trying in vain to push the heavy hand of guilt off her shoulder.

  She had seen MacAulay the day before. Early. Jordan had Scout camp and she had spent the weekend with the man. Two solid days. Just the two of them, laughing, cooking, a long hike, some fly-fishing and plenty of time in bed or somewhere close to it. It had been … sublime. Altering. Scary. She’d left his side before sunrise and returned home for a shower, a clean uniform, and a few moments to steady her nerves. She considered herself a smart woman. Careful and self-aware. But yesterday she had woken in that man’s arms with the absolute certainty that she had fallen in love with him. And that was followed by the clear gonging of a bell that, she feared, was heralding the end of a good thing.

  Nicole did not do romantic relationships well.

  She pulled open the passenger door and the cabin light snapped on, startling MacAulay. Nicole’s hand fell naturally to his shoulder to steady him.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded. “I’m a little worried about the boat ride,” he said. His cheeks were flushed, but his skin was otherwise pale.

  “Ty says you’re sick.”

  “He’s got that right.” MacAulay shifted in the seat, turned toward her, and his eyes grew thoughtful. “You okay?”

  She held his gaze, felt awareness rip through her body, then lowered her eyes. “I’m good.”

  “I called,” MacAulay said, and Nicole felt a wince surface from deep within her. She had avoided calling him back. And he had needed her, if only to bring him soup and NyQuil.