Edge of Black (Dr. Samantha Owens #2)

“Leighton’s enemies.”


“Leighton’s dead, and his grand wide-reaching appropriations bill has been tabled indefinitely. His enemies don’t have anything more to work with. But someone’s going to have to fill his seat. And there is a tradition in this town. I’ll bet you good money the powers that be have been knocking on Mrs. Leighton’s door already, asking for her to do the right thing and step in. I don’t know how Indiana works, if they can appoint her to fill out his term or if they’ll call for a special election, but either way, she has a lot to gain by keeping her husband and his life in the news cycle. It’s completely feasible. If it’s true, it just means she was a little more ambitious than I gave her credit for. According to her, she and her husband knew he had a death knock coming, it was just a matter of when. Besides, who else would know about the kid? It wouldn’t be hard to keep a record of work with the CIA under wraps, they wouldn’t be in business if they couldn’t keep a decent secret. But an illegitimate kid—that’s the meat and potatoes of any decent opposition researcher.”

“Maybe the kid did it herself?”

“Come talk to her. I think you’ll see that isn’t the case.”

“And we’re sure that Gretchen Leighton isn’t behind this whole thing?”

“Andi, I’m not sure of anything right now.”

She started to pace. “So, why were they murdered? Why the grand cover-up of a Metro attack if the point was to knock off the three people? Why not just take them out and walk away?”

“I’ll give you my best guess. This is personal. It has felt personal from the get-go. The delivery methods, the timing, everything. I think the killer was trying to win back his ladylove in there. He had something good going, out there in the woods, with just the birds and the trees and his perverted faith as their best friends. Then she got knocked up, scared and ran away. He hunted her down, found out she’d given the kid up for adoption. I have a good feeling that when we look into this kid they have in Boulder, we’re going to find that it’s the child they conceived, and he took her from her adoptive parents. With the kid back under his roof, mommy makes three. He probably didn’t know she was estranged from her mother. He probably figured Dr. Ledbetter was influencing her to stay away from him. So he eliminates the two authority figures that are keeping her from him—mommy and daddy.”

“And Conlon?”

“He thought Conlon was his friend. Everything on the boy’s computer says he’s been drawing information out of Carter for months. Carter felt used, and while he was eliminating the people who made him unhappy, decided he might as well take care of the friend, too.”

“That’s insane.”

“From what Loa has been telling me, he’s not sane. Not in the least. He’s a religious zealot who takes great pains to follow the words of the Bible without understanding the actual message, just takes the lessons and makes his own kind of sense from them. I’m betting he’s got a touch of schizophrenia. It fits. Brilliance and madness all bundled together. No one said it had to make sense to us, it only has to make sense to him. Murder rarely does have its roots in logic.”

Bianco sighed.

“You’re one hell of an investigator, Fletcher. So where is this whack job now?”

“That I can’t tell you, outside of I’d lay bets he’s within a four-hour radius of Boulder.”

His cell rang, and he looked at it, relieved. He’d tossed a lot of that off his head, theories that came together with the details Bianco had thrown at him, and now he had to go make it all stick.

The call was from Sam.

He excused himself and answered it, shocked to hear actual fear in her voice.

“Fletch? Thank God I caught you. My cell signal sucks. Listen. We think we know where the bomber is.”

And the phone went dead.





Chapter 50

Eagles Nest

White River National Forest, Colorado

Dr. Samantha Owens

“Oh, hell. He’s going to kill me.” Sam shook her cell phone as if that would help her get service again. The farther into Eagles Nest they drove, the worse the mobile service. She’d finally managed to get through to Fletcher, and the minute she dropped the news, she dropped the call, too. They’d been flirting with the rain for a while now, heavy downpours interspersed with rumbles of thunder and some foggy virga hanging low over the mountains, but the storms now seemed to be passing without too much bother. They should have clear weather into the night.

They’d found Crawford’s vehicle, and Sam had to admit, Xander had been right about where Crawford was headed.

“Don’t worry,” Xander assured her as he tied a backpack on her. “Once we get above 7500 feet, we should have a nice clear signal coming across the mountain.”

“And how long’s that going to take?”

“I don’t know. What do you say, Roth? Day? Day and a half?”

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