“Where is he?” a woman demanded, her voice stern in the night.
Trace, dizzier still, looked over his shoulder. What? Who was. . She drew closer, a rifle to her shoulder, the sight of her gun—his rifle — centered on the wounded man.
Kacey?
But—?
He looked down at the woman he loved — Kacey — lying pale as the snow that was beginning to cover her as the sirens shrilled more loudly.
“Where the hell is Eli, Cameron?” this new Kacey demanded, holding her rifle on the flailing, injured man. Trace thought he might be hallucinating. Two of them. .
The newcomer—Kacey? — was still advancing.
But it can’t be. . She reached the wounded man and kicked his weapon away from him. The would-be assassin let out a last, gasping groan that rattled, wet in his lungs, then didn’t move.
Pulling her gaze from his masked face, she turned, finding Trace’s eyes before she saw the blood flowing from his thigh, the snow around him discolored and dark from his blood.
“Oh, Jesus! Trace!”
Woozy now, the blackness pulling him under, he watched, sliding onto the ground, as she ran to him as if in slow motion. Kicking up snow, the rifle in one hand, a flashlight bobbing in her pocket, she crossed the short, powdery distance and fell to her knees at his side. “Oh, God, you’re hurt!”
“Kacey,” he whispered and reached for her, wanting to wrap his arms around her, to hold her close, feel her warmth, smell her hair… But his eyes wouldn’t stay open and he was spinning, further and further away…
“Wait. . Let me see how badly you’re injured…. Oh, dear Christ, Trace. .” He heard her sharp intake of breath and saw that she was focused on the dead woman lying next to him. “Oh, my God. Who?” she whispered, then clearing her throat, she moved close to the woman who was nearly her twin. Leaning over the body, she searched for a pulse at the woman’s neck, pushed her ear next to her nostrils. “Gone,” she whispered, then dragged her gaze from the body that was so like her own. Touching him on the shoulder, she said gently, “We have to get you to a hospital!”
He was drifting away, his eyelids leaden, “But Eli?” he forced out. “Where’s Eli?”
“I don’t know,” she said softly, holding him close. He drank in the smell of her, felt her warm, wet cheek against his own as the wintry world, like one of those snow globes turned upside down, seemed to spin around him.
“No,” he said fighting to stay conscious. He had to find his son. Had to!
“We’ll find him,” she promised over the shattering wail of sirens. “You just hang in. You hear me? Trace? Trace! You just stay with me. .”
But he didn’t. One second he heard her voice, the next he was floating away, wondering how this woman he loved could be two, one dead, one alive.
He sank into himself, heard voices… men and women. . couldn’t respond.
Kacey’s alive. . she’s alive. . but Eli. .
He loved them both. .
“Don’t you leave me, Trace O’Halleran!” she yelled at him from somewhere far off. “Damn it, Trace, it took me thirty-five years to find you and you’d better not die on me. Do you hear me? Stay with me.” Her voice broke. “Come on, Trace… come on. I love you. Oh, Holy Christ, I love you!”
I love you, too. .
She was losing him!
Right here, right now, Trace O’Halleran was dying in her arms.
And the woman lying next to him, dead in the snow, she was now certain must be Leanna, his ex-wife, probably another one of Gerald Johnson’s sperm bank children, and mother to Eli.
“Hang in there,” she ordered Trace as the sound of sirens blasted around them and lights bobbed up the driveway.
She didn’t look over her shoulder but prayed the EMTs had the equipment to save him. He’d lost a lot of blood, but she wasn’t going to let him die. Not on her watch. Quickly, she stripped him of his pants, yanking out the flashlight from her pocket to get a good look at the bullet wound in his thigh. Blood was pumping out of the hole in his flesh and she suspected his femoral artery had been hit. She crossed one hand over the other and pressed them to the wound just as she heard, “Hey! Over here!” from a deep voice yelling near the house. Then footsteps and heaving breaths and conversation swirled around her in the snow. “We’ll take over, ma’am,” someone said and she felt a man’s hand on her shoulder.
“But I’m a doctor—”
“Holy Christ, there’s another one!” He started bending over Leanna’s body.
“She’s dead.”
“Hey! Over here!” A woman shouted from the vicinity of Cam’s corpse. “Holy shit, what happened here. Looks like goddamned Armageddon!”
“Here, ma’am. . I’ve got him now,” the EMT said, turning back to Trace.
“But I’m—”
“A doctor. I know.” He was firm. “Hey, Annie,” he called over his shoulder as Kacey was vaguely aware of colored lights strobing the night. Red and blue flashes through the ever-falling snow. “I could use some help over here! This one’s in shock,” the EMT said and glanced up at Kacey.
The O’Halleran ranch was a madhouse.
All hell had broken loose before Alvarez and Pescoli arrived, their Jeep sliding around the corner at the end of the drive and nearly taking out the mailbox. Two department issued vehicles were parked near an open gate and an ambulance too, idled, waiting to transport the injured.
At the back of the big farmhouse while battling the elements EMTs were tending to Trace O’Halleran, strapping him to a stretcher while a search team had been dispatched to find O’Halleran’s missing son. Cameron Johnson, dressed in black and wearing night goggles, was dead from two gunshot wounds, inflicted, admittedly, by Kacey Lambert.
Shivering, a blanket thrown around her shoulders, Kacey herself admitted to cutting him down when he refused to drop his weapon. Pale as death, obviously in shock, Kacey swore that Cameron had already killed the woman still lying in the snow in front of them.
A woman who could have been her twin.
“I think it’s Leanna,” Kacey said, almost numbly, her gaze fastened on the woman’s frozen features.
“Dead,” one of the EMTs confirmed.
“I need to go with him,” Kacey insisted as two burly rescue workers carried Trace on a stretcher through the piling snow to the waiting ambulance.
“You can ride with us,” Pescoli said.
“Hey!” Trilby Van Droz, one of the road deputies, cocked her head toward the main road. “Looks like we’ve got company.” Twin headlights glowed at the end of the drive, but Pescoli couldn’t make out the vehicle. “Five will get you one, it’s the press.”
A news van.
Of course. Great. Just what they didn’t need. “They have to back off. Until we know what went down,” Pescoli shouted and Van Droz began heading down the lane, following the tracks of the ambulance that carried Trace.
“I think O’Halleran is going to be okay,” Alvarez said.
“But Eli. We have to find him,” Kacey insisted. “Leanna. . I thought she was in the house with me. . warning me. . but the timing probably couldn’t be. I thought she was an angel.”
Pescoli glanced at her partner. “Let’s have a doctor look at her, too.”
“I’m fine,” Kacey insisted, but her face was pretty bruised, the skin scraped, her chin covered in blood.
“Okay, let’s go,” Pescoli said. As the ambulance sped off through the snow, Pescoli, Alvarez, and Kacey trudged through the drifts to the Jeep. Kacey climbed into the backseat. Her car was still in the police garage, the black paint transferred from her fender bender, not yet analyzed. Alvarez settled into the passenger seat and Pescoli backed up, then rammed the Jeep into gear.