The Hidden

“I figured he would. And Agent McCullough, your dear ex, will be first in line, rushing heroically in to save you—and I’ll shoot him,” he said. Once again, she knew that he was smiling. “That will actually be a pleasure. Come on, Scarlet, no more playing for time, hoping for rescue. I have the horses ready. Blaze for you, of course. Come. Now. Or stay here and wait for the bloodbath. And then, once I’ve gotten what I want anyway, I’ll make sure that you bleed out slowly yourself, watching life, in all its beauty, disappear before your eyes.”


She was still stalling, desperately trying to decide what to do, when he shot at her foot—close enough for her to feel the burn and watch the leather of her boot rip.

“Don’t think I caught flesh yet,” he said cheerfully, “but next time...I will.”

“Let’s go,” she said, heading for the stables.

She could play for time there just as easily. Pretend she couldn’t mount Blaze, adjust the girth, mess with her stirrups...

There were all kinds of things she could do.

And then she felt the gun in her back and heard him whisper coldly into her ear, “Don’t even think about wasting any more time or this gun goes off and I’ll find the damned gold on my own. Do. You. Understand?”

She realized then that he was on the verge of losing control and she’d run out of time to play games.

*

Lieutenant Ernest Gray was alive—just barely.

But even as he hunched down by the man, doing his best to stop the flow of blood from the hole in his side, Diego could hear the ambulance siren, along with the sirens of half a dozen police cars.

Lara had burst from the museum the minute he arrived, speaking as quickly as she could. “The killer attacked Angus, and then Angus disappeared, so Brett went out to look for him. Then the killer shot Gray when Scarlet opened the door. I called 911, and then looked, but I couldn’t find the bullets for any of the guns. Diego, he’s taken her somewhere, I think on horseback. The horses are all running loose, and I don’t know why he would let them out otherwise.”

“Lara, put pressure on this wound,” Diego told her.

The minute she knelt down and replaced his hand with hers, he took off on the run, heading to the stables. As Lara had said, the horses were all gone. But even as he stood there raging against the time it would take him to try to find their trail and follow on foot, he saw that one of the horses was loping back toward him.

He blinked. The horse appeared to have a rider.

Yes, there was a ghostly rider astride the black gelding. Nathan Kendall was bringing him a horse.

Had Nathan Kendall seen what had happened?

The apparition pulled Zeus to a halt in front of Diego.

Nathan’s voice was as raspy and faint as it had ever been, but he said very clearly, “The cemetery.”

Time. Time meant everything now. The killer had a gun. But he also wanted something, information he thought Scarlet had, and that meant he wouldn’t kill her right away, not until he got what he wanted, or was convinced she would never give it to him. Diego prayed the time she had left was enough time.

Diego’s mind had been racing during the drive to the ranch. He’d gone over everything he knew about the psychology of killing. This murderer combined disorganized and exceptionally organized skills. He was a sociopath, putting his own needs above the slightest concern for others’ lives. He’d thought he had it all figured out, and in a way, he had.

But now the killer had Scarlet.

And he wasn’t working alone. The way people were always covering for someone else, the logical conclusion was that two people were in on the killings, with one always covering for the other, so they could cover their tracks with alibis.

Diego swung up on the horse and realized he’d paid no attention to the ghost, who hadn’t dismounted.

Nathan Kendall was riding with him.





19

“Everybody thinks they know everything these days. All those ancestry sites! Thing is, all you find online is what someone knew before you decided to write it down. So if you look at those sites, I’m a descendant of Nathan Kendall. That’s because I hacked a few historic documents. And once you write something down, it becomes fact, so if anyone checked, they would see the connection.”