The Hidden

As in fact he feared it might.

After they climaxed, when they lay replete, Scarlet didn’t speak and he thought that she might have fallen asleep, curled against him, her head on his chest, one long leg draped over his body. He thought about their marriage and the way it had been destroyed, and he wondered again how they had managed to tear each other apart so completely.

And then she spoke.

“I understand now,” she said softly. “I understand how you can’t walk away from a case like this.”

“No. It’s not right—it will never be right—for a job to take precedence over a marriage,” he said. “Most people would have thrown me out long before you did.”

She sat up and looked down at him, a hand on his chest. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not most people.” She grinned slightly. “Though I might have been stupid and acted as if I was.”

He only meant to hold her, but the minute he pulled her into his arms the urgency returned, the feeling that they had to cling tightly to one another because the cataclysm was coming and it would try to pull them apart.

They made love again. Afterward, when she curled up against his side, he held her close and they slept.

Diego began to dream, and in his dream the old Cuban refugee woman was back. She walked up to him through a sunlit field, and he realized he was standing on the mountain, and in the distance he could see the Rocky Mountains tipped with brilliant, sparkling snow.

“You’re a good man,” the old woman said. “But sometimes that isn’t enough. You have to listen, listen with your soul. Only then will you know how to survive.”

She smiled as she stopped speaking and faded into the sunlight. He stood on the mountain alone as a chill breeze began to blow, flattening the grass around him. In seconds the daylight was gone and it was full night. The white mountaintops began to move closer, but they weren’t mountain peaks dazzling with snow anymore.

They were gravestones.

He woke with a start and realized that his phone was vibrating under his pillow.

It was Lieutenant Gray.

“They’ve lost Charles Barton,” he said without so much as a hello. “My men watched the damned hotel all night and never saw him leave, but his wife called us this morning, crying hysterically, saying he was gone. I’ve got her down here right now. You want to come talk to her? She’s a mess—certain the killer got hold of him somehow.”

*

Scarlet was still feeling the effects of a very deep and comfortable sleep when Diego woke her to tell her what was going on.

Charles Barton had eluded the police, and they were torn between suspecting that he was a victim, or the killer. Gwen was a basket case down at the station, and Diego was going down to question her. He explained that he was going to take Ben and Trisha down with him, which the group had decided on the night before.

Linda had gotten dressed and gone out very early; Jane and Adam were following her. Meg and Matt were watching Angus, while the police were still assigned to keep an eye on Terry and the Levins.

Scarlet said she would be fine with Brett and Lara, but he promised that if he was going to be detained long at the station, he would send someone to pick her up and bring her down to be with him.

She nodded vaguely when he left her.

She started to drift back to sleep and then woke with a start. She looked around, suspicious that someone was in her room, but it seemed to be empty. Still, she decided to shower and dress, then head into the kitchen.

Company would be good right now.

The company of the living.

She found Brett and Lara at the kitchen table. They’d brewed coffee, and cereal, milk and juice were on the counter. Lara was working on her laptop, and Brett was pacing back and forth by the window that looked out on the stables.

Lara grinned at Scarlet and told her in a whisper, “He hates sitting around watching. He’s an action kind of a guy.”