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Chapter 11
“We’ll be sitting ducks,” Gideon said, frowning at Alex. Did she really think he’d leave her by herself in his motel? “I’m not leaving you here alone. Where I go, you go.”
“And you’re not going anywhere without a car,” she shot back.
“But your car works just fine. If the roads are clear, we’ll leave in the morning.”
She stared at him for a long moment, and he knew exactly what she was thinking. “You don’t want me in your car, right? You don’t want to be trapped in that small space with a killer.” He watched her as he spoke. Didn’t miss her tiny flinch when he’d said ‘killer’.
Finally she sighed. Flopped onto the pillows at the head of the bed. “I don’t think you’re a killer,” she said, staring at the floral-patterned bedspread. Her voice was so low he had to lean closer to hear her. “If you were, you’d have killed me when I stopped to help you out of that ditch.”
“Yes,” he said immediately. “If I was a contract killer, you gave me the perfect opportunity. Wouldn’t be a better chance than that. You’d be buried in about four feet of snow right now, after the plows came along and dumped a couple of feet of ice and snow on you. They wouldn’t find your body for a couple of months.”
“There’s a cheery thought,” she said.
He nodded toward her cell phone, which was sitting on the night table between the beds. “Call the FBI office in Washington. Ask to speak to Special Agent Tony Conklin. Ask him if he knows me. Ask him if my firing was righteous. If he’d recommend me for a job. Or whatever you want to ask about me.”
Alex nudged the phone with one finger. Stared at it for a long moment. Finally shook her head. “I should call. I’m a lawyer. I don’t take anyone’s word without checking for myself.”
She sighed. “But I also don’t want anyone tracking my cell phone. And don’t tell me the FBI doesn’t do that, because I wouldn’t believe you.” She looked at him. Held his gaze, as if his expression could tell her what she needed to know.
Finally she slumped back against the headboard. “Maybe it makes me stupid, but I believe you’re not going to kill me.” She smiled faintly. “After dealing with the scum of the earth for the past four years, I have a pretty good sense of who’s telling the truth. Who’s not. Maybe I’m a fool right now, to trust a man who was hired to murder me. But…” She swallowed and glanced toward the window, where the curtains fluttered a little in the air blowing out of the heater. “I’ve had to trust my instincts since I was a kid, and they haven’t failed me yet. I don’t think you’re going to kill me.”
Warmth spread through Gideon. She trusted him. He wanted to grab her and kiss her, but instead stared at his hands.
Tony trusted him. His Mom trusted him. So did his two brothers. Probably. But that was about it right now. Thanks to his boss’s boss, everyone he’d worked with at the Bureau, besides Tony, thought he was dirty.
And he didn’t have a lot of friends outside of his colleagues. He’d worked too hard to have the time to hang out in bars or go on a lot of dates.
“So you’re comfortable riding in a car with me?” he asked.
She shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah. I am. But even if I wasn’t, what choice to I have? I’m not going to leave you stranded in Boughton, North Dakota without a car for almost a week. What if Jerry shows up?”
“You’d be long gone,” he pointed out. “He wouldn’t be looking for me, anyway.”
He stared down at his phone, which sat on the bed beside him. He picked it up. Ran one finger over the dark screen. If he told her what this phone contained, she could report him to the Bureau. Get him into a lot of trouble. Make it impossible to ever get his job back. If he decided that’s what he wanted to do.
But she’d been frank with him. Said she trusted him. He should repay the favor and tell her what he’d done. And how it could help them now.
“I have a way to find out where Jerry is,” he said quietly.
“What’s that?” She frowned. “Did you plant a tracker on his car, too?”
“Never had the chance to do that. No, this is something else. And it’s illegal. I basically stole it when I left the bureau. I had to turn in my agency phone, but I copied an app before I turned it in. Put it on my personal phone.”
“You can copy apps from phones?”
“If you know what you’re doing. And I did. Agents get lots of classes in cybercrimes and cyber security.”
He let his hand hover over his phone for a long moment, then snatched it up before he could chicken out. “This is an app the bureau designed. It uses a cell phone number to track its owner’s location. What’s your cell number?”
She bit her lip, then rattled off a set of numbers without looking at him. Gideon opened the app, typed them in, then hit search.
Thirty seconds later, a red dot showed up. In the same room as the phone. He handed his phone to her. “There you are.”
“That’s…” She stared at the screen. “That’s amazing. And very, very scary. In the wrong hands, that app could cause a lot of harm. Hurt people.” She handed it back to him.
“Exactly.” He stared at the screen, then cleared it, closed the app and set the phone aside. “Which is why it’s only allowed on Bureau phones.”
