Chapter One

“I don’t mean to rain on your parade,” T.J. told Bailey, and she could see he was trying to say it in the kindest way possible. “But you figure that federal marshal fella’s gonna be in his office today, it being Thanksgiving and all?”

She hadn’t even thought of that.

As soon as she got over the shock of seeing the man who had murdered her husband standing in the background of the photo she, Brice, T.J. and Dobbs had taken at the Nautilus Casino the night of her birthday party, her brain had likely had only one or two synapses still firing.

Mikhailov was the reason she was in the Witness Protection Program, the reason she’d been shipped all over the country, the reason she had given up her little girl. The police had stashed her away until they could arrest the mafia boss and lock him up, said her life and the lives of everyone she cared about would be in jeopardy if he knew that the woman he’d killed along with Aaron — and then made it look like they’d both been killed in a car wreck — was actually a homeless woman they’d stopped to pick up off the side of the road in the rain.

Mikhailov thought Bailey was dead. But she was alive, thank you very much, ready to leap out of the shadows and testify against him as soon as they served the sealed indictments.

But Mikhailov vanished before they could put the cuffs on him. Returned to Russia. Left Bailey in Witness Protection Program limbo, unable to reclaim the life he’d stolen from her. She believed he still was in Russia. Apparently, the police did, too. And she’d have gone right on believing it if he hadn’t decided to show up at the Nautilus Casino while she was there with her friends celebrating her birthday.

They’d caught his image in the background of their grinning group picture.

As soon as the implications of that sunk in — he was here in this country, they could lock him up and she could get her daughter back! — she’d reached for her phone to call her federal marshal contact in the WITSEC program and tell him.

That’s when T.J. pointed out that it was Thanksgiving Day. The guy might not be in.

“Then I’ll call his cellphone. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll call him at home.”

Bailey’s hands were trembling when she pulled up the emergency call list on her phone. She hadn’t set it up, of course. Hadn’t picked out or purchased the phone either. Things like that — her name, the city where she was parked until the mythical “soon” which never came, or the middle-of-the-night visits from the U.S. Marshal’s Service to whisk her away into the darkness — she was only on the receiving end of such things. She didn’t get to decide.

The day U.S. Marshal Bernard Jordan — probably Bernie to his friends, if he had any friends — had given her the phone, his face had been as expressionless as an eggplant.

“My office, my home and my cell numbers,” he’d said, when he’d programmed it for her. “They’re all on the ‘emergency call list’ in this phone.”

Perhaps she was supposed to feel grateful that he’d given her all three numbers. Maybe she was supposed to feel safe and well-cared-for since she could reach Marshal Jordan no matter where he happened to be.

But at the time she’d felt neither safe nor well-cared-for. She had felt as desolate as barren wasteland a hundred thousand years removed from the ocean floor it had once been.

She punched in his office number first — just in case he’d decided to work on the holiday. But when she was sent to voicemail, she hung up. This was not a message she intended to communicate with a recording.

Home or cell?

Cell seemed less intrusive. He could be anywhere — at a crime scene, or in his car. Home conjured up images of a man watching the Cowboys play the Panthers, sitting on the couch in his underwear, and she didn’t like that visual.

He picked up after the first ring.

“Marshal Jordan.”

Bailey was momentarily speechless, had no idea how to convey the enormity of what she had discovered, a life-changing occurrence, the end of “soon” and the beginning of “now.”

Her life back.

Her little girl!

“This is Jessie Cunningham.” The name, her real name, came out effortlessly. She’d only spoken it aloud a handful of times since her name had been taken away from her along with her husband, her child and her life. And one of those times had been when she’d blurted it out to T.J. the first day she met him, the day she’d put Oscar in her skull even after T.J. had pleaded with her not to.

She shot him a glance.

The old man was seated in the same spot he’d been that night. The image of him in the lantern light, with Sparky beside him soaking the couch with his wet fur flashed like a comet across her mind and was gone. He smiled what she was sure he meant to be an encouraging smile, but it hung on his face as limp as a surgeon’s mask.

“I saw him! He’s here. He’s back.”

If the federal marshal asked “he who?” Bailey would somehow reach into the telephone and rip his throat out.

“Mikhailov? Where did you see him?”

“At the Nautilus Casino.”

“A casino — figures.”

“He’s standing in the background of a picture that was taken Halloween night.”

“And you’re just getting around to telling me about it.”

“I’ve been busy!” she snapped.

She’d been recovering from near drowning in a flooded coal mine with half a dozen girls kidnapped by an international sex slave ring. But she couldn’t tell him that. Because he’d ask how she’d gotten mixed up in a thing like that and the explanation wasn’t one a man like Jordan would ever believe.

“I didn’t see the picture until just a few minutes ago. It’s him in the background. I’m positive. Pointed beard. Eyepatch.” Her arms broke out in sudden gooseflesh. “I will never forget that face.”

“All right then. I’m on it. I’ll start lifting up rocks, see which one he’s crawled under.”

Bailey couldn’t have said what she’d expected, but that response clearly wasn’t it.

“That’s all? You’ll go ‘looking for’ him? Hope he turns up somewhere before he decides to spend another two years in Russia?”

“I know how you must feel, Mrs. Cunningham.” Oh, how Bailey hated it when someone told her they knew how she felt. “We want this guy — bad. He’s left a trail of dead bodies dating back thirty years and this is the first time we’ve had a shot at making a charge stick. We’ll pull out all the stops on this one.”

That made her feel better.

“So when can I⁠—?”

“You stay right where you are! Don’t say anything to anybody. You’re only alive because Mikhailov thinks you’re dead, and you’ll be dead if he finds out you’re alive.”

Bailey wondered if he realized how convoluted that sounded, but she got the message.

“You’ve hung in there this long. Don’t blow it all now. Let us find him, arrest him and then you come out of hiding.”

“All right.” She couldn’t help the disappointment in her voice. But what had she expected — that she’d call the marshal and he’d go out and arrest Mikhailov before dinnertime so she could have her life back by tomorrow morning? Yeah, she kinda had. “I will remain a good little WITSEC bobblehead doll.”

The marshal made some kind of grunting sound that might have been a surprised laugh. “You do that.”

“But you’ll call me, let me know what’s going on, right?”

“I’ll keep you informed.”

Now was that natural place in the rhythm of a conversation where he said goodbye and hung up. But he didn’t.

“So … how have you been?”

Bailey was struck momentarily speechless by the non sequitur.

He sounded like he was her college roommate, had bumped grocery carts with her in the produce section and was trying not to look surprised that she’d gotten fat.

She opened her mouth to say, “Oh, fine. And you?” but could not shove the inane words out past her lips.

The federal marshal had no idea what she’d been through since she moved to Shadow Rock, West Virginia. He knew nothing about her suicide attempt, about Oscar, or her special “gift.”

Or where that gift had sent her. Then she realized he’d asked the question because he had somehow sensed that she was no longer the pathetic, devastated woman he’d parked in a rental house in Albuquerque almost two years ago.

“I’ve been through hell in a dinghy, Marshal Jordan. If what doesn’t destroy you makes you stronger, I’m ready to bench press a Hummer. I want my life back!”

She meant to say the rest just as forcefully, but all of a sudden she had only enough air to whisper, “I want my daughter back.” The steel came back into her voice for the rest, though. “I am counting on you to make that happen.”

“Yes ma’am.” He said nothing more. Just hung up.