“What the hell, Lynch?” she murmured. “What have you been up to?”
Well, with any luck, she was going to find out. She began to carefully peel the leather sleeve from around the object.
But something was definitely wrong.
Only a few minutes later she realized it wasn’t a sleeve she was unfolding.
It was a glove.
She gazed down in shock at the five extended fingers that were now being revealed.
And she realized that fine leather glove was protecting ahandthat had been disconnected at the wrist!
She almost dropped the blasted thing in revulsion before she caught herself.
No, Lynch would never have been party to sending her this little horror package to find. Lynch’s hand? That was an even more terrible thought. She forced herself to look more closely.
Then she gave a gasp of relief as she trained the beam of the light on her phone at the hand.
Because it wasn’t a human hand. She had seen replicated body parts before in laboratories and morgues, and this appeared to be an extremely complicated and expertly crafted hand and digits. Thank heavens!
She melted back against the wall of the cave panting with relief, trying to regain her composure. Okay. Not Lynch and not a torture scene. She was back to the hand having something to do with the case Lynch was working on that was so top secret that he had trusted no one except perhaps her.
So what to do now?
Proceed as she had been: Keep Lynch’s secrets until she found him, then get him to tell her what was happening. This hand she was holding must have some significance, but if Lynch hadn’t thought it safe to tell Cambry or anyone else about it, she couldn’t, either. She would definitely search this entire site, but Cambry couldn’t know what she’d found or that Lynch had ever been near this cave. She’d come back later on her own for the search. She had an instant of panic as she realized she’d probably spent too much time here now already. Cambry might be on his way here to check on her!
She sat upright, swiftly redid the wrappings around the gloved hand, and slipped it into her backpack. Then she was on her feet and climbing over the boulders and away from the area toward the pine forest where she’d been before.
“It’s about time.” Cambry was on his way up the slope, scowling. “I told you that you wouldn’t find anything. I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Yes, you were right.” She tried to sound disgruntled. “But I had to see for myself. I couldn’t give up until I was certain.” She passed him on the path. “At least I was able to check that one off.”
“You should have listened to me.” He turned back and followed her down toward the pine forest. “Can we go back to civilization now that you’ve wasted all this time?”
“No.” She looked back over her shoulder at him. “I still want to go down to that creek site and see if I can find anything there that Lynch might have left. Do you want to go with me?”
“I’ll pass.” He made a face. “But hurry and get it over withso that we can get back to the airport and talk about Lynch’s safe house.”
“It will take as long as it takes.” She was already branching off to take the path down to the creek. “You haven’t been all that helpful toward me on this hunt so far. I might decide I need to take a little extra time . . .”
She heard an impatient curse behind her, but she was already moving among the cypress trees near the creek.
All right, now she’d make a perfunctory search of this area, but she wasn’t expecting any results. She had an idea that she’d already found what Lynch had wanted her to find and tucked it in her backpack. If there was anything else, it would probably still be somewhere in the site she’d just left. But just in case Cambry had second thoughts, she had to make him think that this search in the creek area was important to her. So she’d have to spend a comparable period of time here to take his attention away from the length of time he’d already noticed her spending at the site where she’d found that bizarre mechanical hand that had given her such hope.
She took another glance over her shoulder and saw Cambry already again settling himself on the ground beside the helicopter with his thermos of coffee. Dammit, she’d like to just cut this short and get back figuring out how this new info fit into the picture. Patience. She knew she had to strike a balance.
Okay. Start to search. Spend the time and effort here to assure Cambry that this entire hunt had so far been a total failure for her. She bypassed the waterfall and began to wade through the creek, making a show of carefully examining the banks on either side of the Leyland cypress trees . . .
TWO HOURS LATER
CYPRESS CREEK
“Dammit, you’ve been down there in the forest for over two hours,” Cambry shouted from the top of the hill to where she was wading near the waterfall. “It’s almost sundown. It’s getting so dim you probably can’t even see. Don’t you ever give up? Why don’t you admit that you were wrong and you’re not finding anything? And I told you that I’d never actually seen Lynch anywhere near these particular areas.”
“I needed to see for myself,” she called out. “I thought you were going to stay with the helicopter and drink your coffee.”
“I finished it an hour ago. I thought you might have lost your way.” He paused as he focused the beam of his flashlight on the thick stand of pines near the creek where she was standing. “Did you find something? It’s getting so dark I can’t see what you’re doing down there. Should I come down and take a look?”
