Chapter 1
JUNE 2014
“Hang back, hang back,” Dalton Slater said.
Two of the young men who worked for him stepped in front of the trial participants to make sure the hunters held their ground while their boss checked the prey.
A head shot, just below the cheek. That didn’t always guarantee a kill, but in this case, the bullet had done more than enough damage on the way out to seal the deal. A second shot had caught the prey in the chest, a little high to hit the heart, but the clients wouldn’t know that.
Slater turned back to the others and smiled. “Great job, gentlemen. Two kill shots.”
“Which of us was first?” asked one of the participants. He had been designated Mr. Grant for the weekend.
Slater shrugged. “You shot pretty much at the same time. So you were both first.”
“Mine was the head shot,” Mr. Van Buren said. Slater and the other organizers had gone for a president’s theme on this, the inaugural gathering of the trials.
“Hold on,” Mr. Grant said. “I’m pretty sure the head shot was mine.”
They were both wrong, but instead of saying anything, Slater caught the eye of his daughter, Monica—using the name Miss Roosevelt this weekend—and gave her a subtle nod. She said, “Gentleman, the observer has declared a shared kill. The trials are over. It’s time to join the other participants and celebrate the conclusion.”
As had been the case since the start of the festivities three days before, Monica had them eating out of her hand. With the appropriate amount of grumbling, they nodded their assent and followed her back to the lodge.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Slater nodded at the prey and said to his boys, “Get it out of here and make sure everything is nice and pretty.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
Slater rode his ATV back to the lodge and entered the large kitchen. A few of the others he’d recruited into the organization—a trio of teen boys and two men in their twenties—were putting the finishing touches on the closing banquet.
Each took time to acknowledge Slater with a hello, sir or a good afternoon, sir.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” he replied as he crossed the room. In the back hallway, he stopped at the basement entrance, punched in the code, and opened the door.
His brother and their cousin were waiting for Slater in the central room below.
“They finally got the son of a bitch, huh?” his brother said. “Took ’em long enough.”
“They didn’t get him,” Slater smirked. “Jerry did.”
“What?” his cousin said.
“Did you want them to keep going all night? Because that’s what would have happened. Those two idiots couldn’t hit a tree if they were standing in the middle of the woods. Finally had Jerry hide out of sight and put the prey down with a double tap, head and chest.”
“Damn, Dalton!” the cousin said. “What if they’d have figured it out? They could’ve demanded their money back. Think what would have happened if they spread that around? We’d be ruined just as we’re starting!”
“We talked about this, remember?” Slater’s brother said. “Dalt was just following procedure.”
“Procedure you two came up with. I had no part of that, as I recall.”
“Because you were too busy to meet with us, as I recall. And a decision had to be made.”
Slater said, “Relax. No reason for anyone to get worked up. It worked, okay? They’re happy. They’ll tell their friends about this, and pretty soon we’re going to be turning people away.”
“We’d better be,” his cousin said.
“We will. I guarantee it.”
* * *
Not only was Slater proven right, but business picked up so much that instead of quarterly events, they started holding the trials every other month, and then, in 2017, every month.
Chapter 2
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5, 2017
Tasha Patterson mouthed a silent thank God as the portal to the company’s cloud storage servers appeared on the screen.
She was using the computer in the mobile office at the Scolareon solar farm construction site, north of Bradbury, at night when no one else would be around. Until that very moment, she’d been unsure if this particular machine was authorized to connect to that part of the system. If it hadn’t been, she would have been forced to attempt the riskier route of using a computer at company headquarters back in Bradbury.
Getting into the cloud was only step one, however. She still needed to locate and access the hidden files. She glanced at the paper she’d set next to the keyboard, on which she’d written a list of drive locations she thought would be the most logical places to find the files.
They had to be there somewhere. The one she’d stumbled upon couldn’t be the only document. Its discovery had prompted this insane mission to investigate further. The file was a simple transportation log and had looked innocent enough at first. But on closer examination, it matched none of the company’s records.
Whoever controlled the document had apparently discovered their mistake, because when she tried to pull it up again the next day, it had disappeared. Thankfully she’d made a copy. She always made a copy.
Still unsure of what she’d found, she’d asked one of her employees to look into the discrepancies. Two days later, before he reported back, she received his emailed resignation. An opportunity had come up with a company in Shanghai, he’d written, and he’d had to leave right away.
She tried contacting him but he never returned her call. She would have called the company he went to work for but he hadn’t named it.
Though he had talked about wanting to work abroad someday, Tasha felt sure he would have told her first, in person. Over the next couple of days, her thoughts transitioned from confusion to wondering if his inquiries on her behalf had been met with a get-out-of-town-now ultimatum.
Maybe she was reading too many thriller novels.
Whatever the case, his abrupt departure made her reluctant to bring anyone else into her private investigation. The most she allowed herself were a few cryptic emails to her mentor and former employer Scott Davos in California. Until she had concrete evidence, she was keeping the bulk of her suspicions to herself.
She logged into the cloud, using the still active username and password of her China relocated ex-employee, and brought up the directory. She had whittled down her list to four possible areas where the files could be hidden. Back at her office, she hadn’t dared probe any of the areas. Now she dove in, searching for anything that shouldn’t be there. The first two areas proved to be dead ends, and she couldn’t help thinking the files had been removed.
Or you’ve been wrong all this time, her subconscious suggested. And you’ve been seeing shadows where there were none.
God, she hoped that was true. She would love nothing more than to prove her suspicions were completely groundless, and that someone on the inside wasn’t trying to skim product from the company.
As she accessed the third area, however, she came up against a firewall that shouldn’t have been there.
One of Davos’s many imprints on Tasha’s life was the importance of “understanding everything,” as in all parts of the businesses she worked for. Because of her adherence to this philosophy, she’d been continually promoted until—with the recommendation and blessing of Davos—she landed her current CFO position at Scolareon, Inc., in Bradbury, Washington. So, even though her area of expertise was finance, she had studied information technology on the job and knew as much about IT as many of those who worked in the field.
She searched the firewall for a weakness, and when she found one, slipped through the gap utilizing a trick she’d learned from a Davos coder. On the screen was a log of hundreds of files that should have been there. She opened a spreadsheet document, and immediately recognized strings of characters almost identical to the ones she’d written in her notebook at home. It contained information she’d scrounged up over the last few weeks that she thought might be connected.
Somewhere within this set of files must be the proof she’d been looking for. She would figure out who was involved and the monetary damage they’d done to Scolareon, and then present everything to the CEO and president, Kyle Scudder.
She scrolled through the list and was surprised to find a group of photographs. Could the embezzlers have possibly been stupid enough to take pictures of themselves? It would definitely be a nice shortcut.
She opened the first four images.
Her elation about possibly uncovering proof of her suspicions turned instantly to revulsion. Criminal activity had been going on, but it wasn’t being committed by rogue employees stealing solar panels. What the pictures showed was so much worse and more repugnant than her imagination could have dreamt up.
For a horrified moment, she could do nothing but stare at the monitor. When she finally closed the files, she glanced over her shoulder, half expecting to find someone holding a gun to her head. But the trailer was still empty.
She plugged one of her jump drives into the computer and began copying everything onto it. There were a lot of files, but the trailer office had a decent satellite connection, and in a little over seven minutes, the task was completed. She inserted a second jump drive into another slot and started duplicating everything from the first drive onto it. With two sets of documents, she could keep one and send the other to Davos in case something happened to her or her drive.
The display said it would take four minutes.
She paced the trailer, glancing nervously out each window she passed. The moonless night offered little for her to see beyond the outline of the forest around the edge of the clearing. Each time she passed the computer, she checked the copy status bar.
Three minutes.
Two.
On—
A light on the desk phone blinked—no ring, just the glow for line one.
She took a few deep breaths to try to calm herself. It didn’t work. The call could have been nothing more than someone wanting to leave a message, but she couldn’t help thinking IT had registered the computer’s activity.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. The construction site was nearly thirty minutes north of Bradbury. If the company sent someone to check, she’d be long gone by then.
The final seconds of the file-copy countdown seemed to last forever. When the status bar hit zero, a voice in her head screamed at her to get out of there, but she needed to do one last thing.
With shaking hands, she opened the browser in incognito mode, brought up Gmail, and created an email account. In another window, she found the contact information for Darren Gaines, the US attorney in charge of this part of the state, and copied his address onto the message. Sending him everything would take way too long, so she attached the first document she’d found and two of the jpegs, wrote THIS IS JUST A START as the subject title, and hit SEND.
She snatched the two thumb drives, stuffed them in her pocket, closed the browser, and put the computer back to sleep. After scanning the desk to make sure everything looked as it had when she arrived, she headed for the door.
The construction site was half a mile from the main dirt road, which was at least a mile from the highway. When she stepped outside, she expected to hear only a gentle wind blowing through the trees, maybe an owl at most. What she didn’t expect was the drone of a car’s engine. The vehicle wasn’t close, but it did sound as if it was coming from the construction site access road.
It can’t be someone from the company already, can it? How could they have gotten here so fast?
She had to get out of there. The problem was that the access road was the only way in and out, so if the other vehicle was on it, she was already as good as discovered.
Wait. When she’d taken the management tour of the site, she had noted a few old, overgrown roads leading into the woods from the access road. If she could find one of them before the incoming car saw her, she could hide and while it went on to the trailer, she could escape.
She jumped into her Prius and took off for the gate, leaving her lights off. She’d left the gate open when she arrived, so she raced through and onto the road. She figured the others, if they were indeed coming for her, already knew someone was out here. If they found an open gate, they might approach with caution, slowing and giving her even more time to get away.
Eyes glued to the road, she drove as fast as she dared through the darkness.
The flash of headlights ahead caused her gaze to jerk up. It had shone through a momentary perfect alignment of gaps between trees, confirming the other car was heading her way.
“Come on, come on, come on,” she said, willing her escape route to show itself.
Despite her vigilance, the old road was so overgrown, she almost missed it. When she realized it was there, she whipped the wheel to the right and pressed the accelerator enough to help the vehicle up a small incline.
Just a bit farther, she thought. Another thirty—
The car lurched to the left.
Out of instinct, her foot shoved the brake pedal, bathing the trees behind her in red light. She yanked her foot away, returning the vehicle to darkness. Whatever had pulled the Prius to the side had also stopped it.
Breathing deeply, she killed the engine, and after making sure the dome light was off, opened the door and listened.
She could hear the other vehicle loud and clear now. Leaning outside, she looked back the way she’d come. Headlights, not a quick burst like before but a series of blinks between trees, were no more than fifty feet from the end of the old road.
Had the driver seen her brake lights?
Subconsciously, her hand slipped into her pocket and caressed the drives as if they were talismans that would turn her and her car invisible.
The lights moved closer and closer.
Tasha eased one foot out the door, ready to run if the other car turned toward her.
Another blink, and then the car drove past the old road without stopping or turning.
She let out her breath and listened to the engine move farther and farther away. When it became a distant rumble, she climbed out to search ahead for a place to turn around without having to reverse. She quickly discovered that wasn’t an option.
The front left wheel had fallen into a channel that grew deeper and wider the farther ahead it went. If she were to continue in that direction, she’d become permanently stuck within a few feet.
Reversing was her only choice.
She knew it was possible to remove the bulbs in the reverse light, but figuring it out would take time she didn’t have. Instead, she draped a blanket from her cargo area over the back of the car, tucking the top and sides in around the hatch before she closed it. The extra bulk made it hard for the lock to catch, but after a few tries she got the hatch closed.
Back behind the wheel, she muttered a prayer as she shifted into reverse, using her side mirror to back down the road because the blanket prevented her from seeing through the rear window. Much to her surprise, she made it unscathed and, by the looks of things, undetected.
As fast as she could safely go, she headed for the dirt road that would take her back to the highway. Her tuck job at the back hadn’t been as perfect as she’d hoped, and the blanket flapped. But the glimpses of the road in her rearview mirror showed no lights heading her way.
When she felt there were enough trees between her and the construction site, she flipped on her headlights and pushed the pedal to the floor.
She was going to make it. She was going to get out of this. With the proof.
Those bastards, whoever they were, would go down. Hard.
As she came out of the final bend, she slammed on her brakes.
A sedan sat diagonally across the end of the access road. And not just any sedan—a Scolareon security vehicle, with two men in front.
There was a moment when neither Tasha nor the men did anything. She had no idea what they were thinking but knew she had a choice. It was possible security knew nothing about the crimes she’d uncovered, meaning they would help her. But what if they were well aware of the issue, or even involved? For now, she knew trusting anyone who worked for Scolareon would be a mistake.
Putting the Prius in reverse, she looked back.
“Dammit.”
She’d forgotten about the blanket. She switched her gaze to the side mirror and raced backward as best she could. For the first fifty feet she did fine, but she made the mistake of glancing forward to check on the security car. When she returned her eyes to the mirror, she misjudged her position and swerved the car back toward the center of the road. But she overcorrected, and the car rocked as the passenger side drifted off the shoulder and swiped a tree.
She jerked the wheel, angling the Prius’s back end toward the center of the road, but before she could straighten again, the front passenger fender smashed into the same trunk, stopping her.
Ahead, the security sedan was driving toward her.
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