Hide The Child

* * *

GABRIEL DECKER SWUNG his rope with practiced ease. The loop settled on the ground just in front of a calf’s hind legs, tricky to do in such tight quarters in the temporary corral. The second the calf stepped into the loop, Gabe pulled in the slack, wrapped the rope around the saddle horn and drew the calf toward the fire. Once a pair of wrestlers tossed the struggling calf to his side and pulled off the rope, Gabe would coil it up and go back for another one. Today, four ropers and four teams on the ground were moving things along well. They aimed by the end of the week to have every spring calf branded, dehorned, castrated and vaccinated.

His eyes stung from the dust cloud raised by bawling calves penned in the corral and their mothers milling outside it. Unpleasantly reminded of a dust storm in Afghanistan, Gabe had to keep pushing the memory back. The work demanded focus. At least he felt useful, which he hadn’t much lately. He was irked that he couldn’t be one of the men tossing the calf and holding it down, a task he’d performed by the time he went to live on a Texas ranch when he was fourteen. Size and muscle were appreciated for that job, since even two-to-three-month-old calves could weigh up to two hundred pounds.

Now he was lucky to be able to sit astride for hours at a time, although he’d suffer for it later. Actually, he was already suffering but refused to let anyone else suspect. He’d been wounded before but never taken so long to heal.

This had been a bad one, though. An IED had thrown him into the air and he’d landed poorly, breaking his femur on top of the damage done to his pelvis by the explosion. The doctor had suggested age might be an issue. A twenty-two-year old healed faster than a man closing in on forty, he’d said with a shrug. Gabe knew that, at thirty-six, he was close to aging out of active duty with his Army Ranger unit. But damn it, he wasn’t ready to hang it up yet!

He’d tightened his legs in a signal to his gelding and gripped the rope in a gloved hand to start swinging it, when his partner waved him over to the side of the temporary corral.

Boyd Chaney rested one booted foot on a lower bar and his forearms on the top one. “If you’re hurting, take a break.”

Gabe stared expressionlessly at his friend. “What makes you think I hurt?”

“I know you,” Boyd said with a shrug.

He did. They’d served together for a decade and become best friends. On recent deployments, Gabe had missed Boyd, who had been shot and crushed beneath his jeep when it rolled two years ago. He’d spent the next year in rehab and conditioning, trying to achieve the state of fitness required for their elite ranger unit, but had finally accepted that he’d never pass the physical. Unwilling to accept a desk or teaching job, he’d retired to the Oregon cattle and cutting horse ranch the two men had bought together with an eye to the future.

“I can manage,” Gabe said now, tersely, and reined his horse back into the melee. Even over the bellowing cattle, he heard Chaney call after him.

“Stubborn bastard.”

Yeah, so? Since that was the working definition of a man tough enough to make it as a spec-ops soldier, Gabe didn’t bother responding. He’d make it back. He told himself that every day. Two, three more months, tops. But right now he could contribute here on the ranch. A little pain had never stopped him before, and it wouldn’t now.

* * *

“I’LL BE THERE in ten minutes,” Detective Risvold said.

“No!” Trina was in her office, seizing the chance to make the call between patients. In the past week, Chloe had made enough progress that Trina felt obligated to report that there was hope she’d soon be able to talk about what she’d seen.

Trina was thankful she’d been careful not to tell either of the investigators who called her on a regular basis where she “stashed” Chloe during working hours. That had been Detective Deperro’s word. When he used it, Trina had almost said, Oh, when I’m not home, I keep her in the third drawer to the right of the sink but had managed to refrain. If either of the men possessed a sense of humor, she had yet to see it.

“What do you mean, no?” Risvold snapped. “She’s talking, and you know how much is riding on what she can tell us.”

“I wanted you to know she’s begun speaking.” Already regretting she’d made this call, Trina leaned on the word begun. “She’s not back to natural chattering, and if I even tiptoe toward asking about that morning, she goes silent again for hours. Anyway, how is a three-year-old’s description going to clinch anything for you? If I asked her to draw her father, it would be a stick figure. You do know that, don’t you? What little she can tell you would be useless.” She paused. “Unless you have a suspect?”

The answer was slow coming. “We’re looking at a possibility,” he said grudgingly. “Several 911 calls had come in from that neighborhood in the week before the attack on the Keifs. Someone may have been casing houses.”

“But you told me nothing was taken.”

“The guy may not have had robbery on his mind. He might have been a nutcase looking for the right opportunity.”

Making it a random crime. It happened, of course, but rarely. So rarely she had trouble buying it now. “Do you even have a good description of him?”

“One of the homes he wandered around had security cameras. We have footage. If we have confirmation from the girl about what he looks like...”

Her eyes narrowed. The girl? What was with these guys? Were they deliberately trying not to see Chloe as a real person? Maybe cops had to do that, because keeping an emotional distance was healthy for them, but she didn’t like it. “So you’d arrest him if she says the man had brown hair and brown eyes, and that matches the camera footage. Even though half the men in Sadler meet that description.”

More silence. There were undoubtedly things he wasn’t telling her, but...

“From what I understand, you didn’t recover any weapons or meaningful trace evidence.”

“No weapons, but we have a wealth of fingerprints and hairs we can match to the killer once we have him.”

Usually he said “or killers.” Had he become enamored of the idea of the wandering nutjob? And unless, say, they’d found a hair in the blood, she wasn’t convinced. The Keifs probably entertained. Chloe’s six-year-old brother had undoubtedly had friends in and out, the friends’ parents there to pick them up and drop them off. Maybe in the kitchen to have a cup of coffee. However tidy the house, there were bound to be hairs or fingerprints or whatever that didn’t belong to family members.

But investigating was up to the two detectives. Her obligation was to protect Chloe.

“I’m sorry,” she said firmly. “She’s not ready. I wanted you aware that she has begun to speak, that’s all. When I’m sure she can handle it, I’ll let you know.”

They sparred some more, with her the winner—although she wasn’t so sure she would have been if either investigator knew how to lay his hands on Chloe while Trina was tied up with her patients.

* * *

TRINA AWAKENED WITH a start. Her phone must be ringing, she thought blearily as she reached out to grope for it on the bedside table. If that annoying Detective Risvold was calling again—

Except...did she smell smoke? With returning consciousness, she realized the shrill scream wasn’t the phone. A fire alarm downstairs had been set off, and suddenly the one in the hall up here began to squeal, too.

Trina shot up to a sitting position, fear punching her in the belly. Her eyes watered, and when she inhaled again, she bent forward coughing. There was a sharp undertone to the smell that she knew she ought to recognize.

Chloe!

Trina grabbed her phone and dropped to the floor. She crawled faster than she’d known she could to the door and into the hall. Even in the dark, she could tell the smoke was thicker here, and she heard the roar of fire. Heat radiated from the staircase, and when she turned her head, she saw flame burning up the wall.

No escape that way.

She crawled into Chloe’s room and kicked the door shut behind her. Block the crack at the bottom. She’d read that advice before. A door could slow the flames.

Nothing she could use lay in easy reach. Like Trina, Chloe seemed to be obsessively tidy by nature, which meant no dirty clothes strewed the floor. Trina gave it up temporarily and pushed herself up. Heart beating wildly, she hit the light switch, but nothing happened. Then she ran to the bed and shook the small figure that formed a lump beneath the covers.

“Chloe! Wake up!”

A snuffling sound was her only answer—and if anything Chloe drew herself into a tighter ball.

Trina yanked back the bedcovers. “The house is on fire.” Somehow she kept her voice calm. “We have to get out.”

The three-year-old sat up. “I don’t know how to get out,” she whispered, and then jerked. “Look!”

Trina turned to see the orange glow already beneath the door. How could the fire move so fast? She yanked the comforter off Chloe’s bed and hurried to cram it against the base of the door. Then she said, “We have to go out the window.”

Nothing to it, she thought semihysterically. She unlocked and lifted the sash window, peering down at lawn that in early April was still winter brown and probably rock hard. She could scream for help...but what if men who had set the fire came instead of neighbors?

Gasoline, that’s what she smelled. This fire hadn’t started with a spark in the wiring or a frayed electrical cord.

After shoving the window screen until it popped out and fell, she said, “Come here, sweetie.”

Chloe obeyed, thank goodness. Trina rushed to the bed for the two pillows and, leaning out the window, dropped them to the ground. They looked puny below. What were the odds they’d help break a fall? But she couldn’t think what else to do. Remembering her phone, she picked it up and dropped it, too. It bounced off one of the pillows onto the dark ground.