Mountain Investigation by Jessica Andersen Page B

her hand. “What do you say?”
    He looked at her for a long moment, seeing her outstretched hand and the delicate bones of her wrist,which he could break one-handed if he wanted to. But though her bone structure might be more delicate than he’d remembered—made especially prominent now by her days in captivity—the woman herself was far stronger than he’d thought. He saw it in her eyes and heard it in her voice.
    The part of him that still spent the holidays with his family, knowing it mattered to them, said he should decline, that he should put Mariah into protective custody, stay on the job and do whatever he could—or rather whatever Johnson would let him do—to bring Lee Mawadi, al-Jihad and the others to justice through official means.
    But the other part of him, the part that awakened from nightmares drenched in sweat, seized with killing rage and the need for revenge—that part had him reaching out and gripping her hand. As he shook on it, he felt a twinge of guilt and regret, a premonition that pretty Mariah Shore would be the one to suffer the most from her choices.
    In the end, though, he knew that nothing else mattered but getting justice for the dead. He was a little surprised to find that she knew it, too.
    “Okay,” he said softly. “I’ll do it.”

Chapter Four
    Over the next two days, Mariah learned that it was far easier to say “Use me as bait” than it was to actually be the so-called bait.
    Gray and the others had installed her in a square private hospital room that embodied the word drab. The furniture was cheap prefab; the upholstery, paint and uninspired wall art were all variations on the same theme of beige, mauve and mossy green. The single window overlooked the parking lot and was on a low floor, so she couldn’t even see beyond the neighboring buildings to the mountains in the distance. Not that she’d even seen much of the parking lot, because Gray had ordered her to stay in bed, aside from necessary trips to the small bathroom located in a walled-off corner of the room. They had no way of knowing the sophistication level of al-Jihad’s local network, so she had to play the part of an invalid.
    Round-the-clock guards stood outside her door, but they were mostly for the show of protective custody, and were on orders to let their vigilance slip now andthen for a bathroom break or conversation. Mariah’s real security came from electronic surveillance that had been installed in secret by a team dressed to look like a maintenance crew. Thanks to them, she was constantly being monitored by both video and audio. Hello, Big Brother.
    Five years earlier, when she’d moved to New York, full of hope and enthusiasm, bursting with plans to launch herself into the world of fashion photography while becoming part of the “in” crowd, she might’ve seen the hidden cameras and microphones as no big deal; she’d tried out for that reality show, hadn’t she? But that period of her life had been a fluke, an aberration. She’d been trying to make herself into someone bright, glittering and interesting, someone very unlike the shy, uprooted loner she’d been throughout high school and college.
    And for a time, she’d succeeded.
    It had been during that time that she’d met Lee—or rather, he’d arranged to meet her. For the months he’d been courting her, she’d truly felt like the bright, glittering, interesting person she was trying to be. But she hadn’t been bright and interesting, she’d been desperate for attention, and so gullible that she’d bought his act right down to the last “I love you.” She’d thought it was her idea to move to Bear Claw in an effort to forge a better relationship with her parents, her idea for her father to help Lee get a job. In reality, she’d been played, and played badly.
    She hadn’t been glittery or interesting. Worse, she’d been stupid. In retrospect, it seemed ludicrous that she’dever believed that a man like the one Lee had