A Darker Justice by Sallie Bissell Page B

way to Hartsville, North Carolina, she would just drive up there by herself.
    “Morning,” she called, her footsteps brisk on the damp pavement.
    “Morning.” Safer took her measure with his dark eyes, which were just as intense as they had been yesterday. “Glad to see you’re on time.”
    “Actually, I’m fifteen minutes early.” Mary dropped her backpack an inch away from Safer’s toe.
    He glanced at his watch. “So you are.” He looked at her single small bag. “What are you taking with you?”
    “A sketch pad. A paperback. A Christmas present for Irene.”
    “Didn’t forget your gun, did you?”
    Glaring at him, Mary allowed her down jacket to flop open. His eyes made a brief appraisal of her breasts before they noted the Beretta nestled in her shoulder holster. “Good,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
    He opened the back of the truck. Mary shoved her pack in beside Safer’s black briefcase, a battered camera bag, and two impressive-looking tripods.
    “You a photographer?” She couldn’t imagine Safer needing a camera to snap anything. His eyes alone seemed to etch everything permanently on his brain.
    “No.” He moved the tripods to one side. “These make a good cover up there.”
    “So what’s the plan?” she asked, stepping back as he slammed the tailgate shut.
    “I’ll drive you to Judge Hannah’s farm. If you can talk her into accepting our protection, I’ll work as a liaison between her and the rest of the team.”
    “And if I can’t talk her into it?”
    “Then we’ll do the best we can by ourselves. Either way, we’ll fly you back here.” He gave her a tight smile. “You’ll be home in time for Christmas.”
    Mary buckled herself into the front seat. Safer kept a cell phone on the console, nestled beside a paperback
Guide to the Eastern Night Sky.
A glow-in-the-dark bookmark in the shape of an alien protruded from the pages of the book. Mary repressed a groan. Surely this guy wasn’t of the Mulder and Scully persuasion.
    “You into spacemen?” Mary gave Safer a dubious eye as he jammed his key into the ignition.
    “No.” He looked at her challengingly, not embarrassed to be caught with a luminous alien bookmark. “I like astronomy. My daughter gave me that bookmark.”
    “Oh.” For some reason, Mary could peg Safer as an obsessed astronomer far more readily than a contented family man. “You have children?”
    “Just one daughter.” He adjusted the rearview mirror. “Leah. She’s four. She lives with her mother in Montreal.”
    “That’s pretty far away.”
    “Yep.” He put the truck into gear. “My ex-wife made sure of that.”
    Mary heard the acid in Safer’s voice. The rest of the story was so common, she knew it without asking—a woman marries a cop, then she grows tired of the hours and the brutality and the alcoholism or any of the other thousand things that eat cops alive. So she leaves, and puts as much distance between them as she can. It was sad, but it was a fact of life, and everybody who went into law enforcement ought to be forewarned
—abandon normalcy, all ye who enter here.
Quickly she changed the subject.
    “Do you know the way to Hartsville?”
    “Like the back of my hand,” Safer replied, his dark brows drawing together so sternly that he reminded her of a Byzantine icon she’d seen once at the High Museum. “I’ve put in some hours up here before.”
    “Work the Eric Rudolph case?” The man who’d five years ago allegedly bombed a gay nightclub in Atlanta and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Birmingham had been spotted in the southern Appalachians. Battalions of federal agents had given furious chase, but ultimately came up empty-handed and humiliated.
    Safer nodded.
    “Too bad you couldn’t catch him. He would have landed on my docket.”
    Safer shrugged as they pulled out of the parking lot. “A couple of times we were five minutes behind him. Then the mountains just swallowed him up.”
    She thought of her own