Cut and Run(16)

The front doors of the hotel lobby opened, and Faith stepped out into the ring of light. She glanced at her phone as the bellman approached and a black four-door sedan pulled up. She tipped the bellman, slid into the back seat, and the car drove off, its taillights vanishing around the corner.

When he’d seen her picture in the lobby, he’d made a few inquiries about her in general. She enjoyed a solid standing as a forensic pathologist, had a curious mind, and had a reputation for being tenacious. He wasn’t sure why the likes of Jack Crow and Faith McIntyre were on the same list, but it wasn’t for him to question, only to execute orders.

He still didn’t know how much she did or didn’t know about the package, but that didn’t really matter. She was on the list, so he would make the time to have a chat with her.

His phone vibrated with an alert from the camera he’d posted at the country ranch. As he glanced at the screen, he wasn’t sure what he expected. A random coyote. A sagebrush’s prickly arms reaching up toward a moonlit sky.

He sure had not expected to see a woman walking toward the stones in the dark. She knelt, ran her hand over the rock, and then looked to the other two as if she’d recognized them for what they were.

He stared at her face for a long moment. Then did a double take in the direction of the car that had just carried Faith away. The woman at the ranch looked exactly like Faith. Jack had been so mutinously silent during their chat, and now he knew why. There’d not been one baby on that night in 1988, but two. Twins.

When the phone vibrated with a text, he cursed until he saw the number.

He perched a cigarette on his lips and flicked the flint wheel of a gold-plated lighter until a flame appeared. He inhaled deeply, savoring the burn as the smoke flowed out of his nose and mouth.

Are we on track with our project?

He stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette and then typed. All is going according to plan.

Have you found it?

He hesitated. Not yet. But I will.

Watching the woman walk back to the truck that he knew belonged to Jack Crow, he could feel the skin on the back of his neck prickle the way it did when there was a problem. Who the hell was she? And then it hit him. She was Jack’s kid. Macy Crow. She was the little kid in all the photos he’d smashed. When she had looked up at the camera, her gaze had been defiant and annoyed.

You need to wrap this up, his employer typed.

So you’ve told me. He was a professional and didn’t need coaching.

All this needs to go away quietly and quickly.

The tone of the text reminded him that no matter how far he’d climbed, there would always be someone adding their two cents. Very annoying, and he had his limits. I’m on it.

Macy had been to the ranch, no doubt tipped off by Crow. If she was curious enough to go to the ranch at night alone, she was tenacious like her old man. He admired her grit.

Where would he send Macy next, if he were Crow?

When the answer came, he almost laughed.





CHAPTER SIX

Monday, June 25, 11:50 p.m.

Macy checked into a local, nondescript hotel that looked exactly like every other in the chain. With a pizza and diet soda and her backpack on her shoulder, she quietly slipped into a room near the staircase. Since she’d become an agent, she’d gotten more careful about knowing her exits and always having a retreat strategy mapped out in her head.

She tossed the pizza box on the bureau and her backpack on the bed. She grabbed a slice of pizza and turned on the shower. As she pulled off her hair tie, she bit into the pizza and toed off her boots. The first bite reminded her she’d not eaten in almost a day, and she polished off the slice in seconds. She stripped off her jacket, weapon and holster, shirt, and jeans and kicked her dusty clothes to the side as the steam rose up in the bathroom.

She stepped under the steaming spray, letting the heat sink into her muscles, and thought about what needed to be done. It was a given she would have to contact local police and let them know about the house and suspected old graves.

It would be easy to stay in the shower and drain every last bit of hot water from the hotel boiler, but that wasn’t going to help Jack.

“Get it together, Macy.” She shut off the water, toweled dry, and wrapped her hair and body in new towels. She grabbed two more slices of pizza, sat on her bed, and opened her computer. She went directly to YouTube and searched “Faith McIntyre, Travis County.”

Several results appeared immediately. The top one was a news report from earlier in the summer titled SAN MARCOS’S BODY RANCH. She took another bite of pizza and clicked on the link.

The first camera shots were of a metal fence enclosing land covered by tall grass and grazing goats. A young reporter stood at the entrance by a crude gate and started spouting statistics about the Texas State University Forensic Anthropology Center in San Marcos. It was a research facility stocked with donated bodies, stripped of all their clothing and laid out on their backs so that scientists could study decomposition rates. The camera panned over several bodies protected by wire cages.

The reporter cut to a woman inspecting a sun-bleached skull as she began to speak in a husky voice tinged with a Texas accent. The voice Macy had heard on her voicemail.

The reporter introduced Dr. Faith McIntyre, and Macy leaned in and watched closely as the woman looked up toward the camera. Macy hit pause and stared at the face that could have been her own. Same blue eyes. Same cheekbones. Lips. Ears. Same everything.