When she broke off, he looked over at her. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“I’m onto a huge story. I’m not just reporting it, I’m living it.”

“Living it,” he said with scorn. “Yeah. For the time being.” Then, angrily, “Jesus, Britt, this isn’t a game. Five minutes from now you could be dead.”

“I realize that. I was the one in the flooded car last night, remember?”

“I remember. Do you?”

“Your life is on the line, too. Would you give up your investigation?” she demanded. “Well?” she prodded when he didn’t respond. After several more seconds of stubborn silence, she continued. “I’m not giving up my story, either. And I’m not going into hiding. That’s that.”

A mile whizzed past. Maybe two. Finally he said, “You could surrender to the police. You’d be safe in police custody.”

“No I wouldn’t. If Fordyce and/or McGowan can’t kill me, they’ll make dead certain I’ll be convicted of killing Jay. You said so yourself. They’ll make sure I look so guilty that no one would believe anything I told them about Jay, the fire, nothing.

“You should know. They stopped just short of having you charged with Suzi Monroe’s death. If it hadn’t been for your friend Candy’s influence on Fordyce, he probably would have seen you tried and convicted of something. Not premeditated murder, but something where you would have been muzzled and put away for a long time.”

When he muttered a heartfelt goddammit, Britt knew she’d won the argument. To seal it, she added, “Unfortunately, I don’t have a Candy running interference for me.”

“I hate to call and ask a favor. It’s been five years since I’ve talked to her. Besides, she’s busy with this Senate confirmation thing.”

Britt’s jaw went slack with disbelief. “Are you…Is…Your Candy…Candy Orrin…is Judge Cassandra Mellors?”

“Yeah. I thought you knew that.”

“No!”

“Oh.” He shrugged an apology of sorts. “I always think of her as Candy. She hated Cassandra when we were kids. Wouldn’t answer to it. Said it made her sound stuck-up. Now, I guess it sounds more professional.”

“Judge Mellors is your friend,” Britt said, trying to wrap her mind around this startling revelation.

“A friend I haven’t talked to in years. I started to contact her when her husband died but figured she didn’t need me crawling out of the woodwork when she was trying to cope with her personal tragedy.”

Britt knew from the background research she’d done for her feature story on the judge that she had been married less than a year when her husband, some kind of software developer, had been killed in a ferry accident in New York harbor. He’d gone there on business and was calling on clients on Staten Island. His ferry had been struck by another vessel and sunk rapidly. He’d perished along with twenty-four others.

“I know her,” Britt told him. “I did a piece on her, and we got along well. I tried to contact her…actually it was the day you kidnapped me. I was trying to line up support from influential people. Anyway, I called her office, but she wasn’t available to take my call. But she might now, especially if she knew I was with you.”

“I hope I can get her to myself for a minute or two at the funeral. Gauge her thoughts on Jay without coming right out and asking for her help. She put her career on the line for me once before. I don’t think she’d want to do so again, not before the Senate vote anyway.”

Britt understood his reasoning, but having Judge Mellors in their corner certainly couldn’t hurt. Lost in that thought, she gazed out the passenger window. Nothing looked familiar. It wasn’t the route he’d mapped out for her last night. “Are we headed toward Charleston?”

“Ultimately. But we’ve got to have new wheels first. Just in case the truck’s got a transponder on it. Even if it doesn’t, we can’t drive around in this. They know it now.”

Noting the severity of his expression, she said, “They really and truly are after us.”

“They really and truly are.”

“Then why didn’t they do something at the cabin?”

He frowned. “I can’t figure that. Maybe, as I said, they get off killing people in their cars. Or maybe their contract was just to locate me and now they’re waiting for further instructions. Maybe they want an advance on their fee before committing a double murder. Maybe what the guy found in my cabin threw him for a loop.”

“He didn’t find your files.”

“But he found you, and he thought you were dead.” She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, he asked, “How’d you recognize the guy? Did you get a clear look at him?”

“Through the window in the bathroom. He looked out. His face was perfectly framed. He was there fifteen, twenty seconds, searching the area at the back of the cabin.”

“He didn’t see you?”

“I’m sure he didn’t, or he would have reacted. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I was frozen with shock because I recognized him instantly.”

“You’re sure? You’re positive you saw him at The Wheelhouse?”

“It was like one of those flashbacks you described, except it stayed fixed in my mind. I remember seeing him the moment I arrived. He was seated at the bar, near the door. When I walked in we made eye contact.”

“Did you speak?”

“No. Just looked at each other the way strangers do. No smiles were exchanged, just pleasant-like. You know. Then I spotted Jay and…Wait.” She stopped and squeezed her eyes shut. “I may have seen him when Jay and I left the bar. There was a man sitting in a car, parked across the street from the bar’s entrance.”

“Ordinary sedan? That’s what they were in today. Maroonish?”

“Maybe. You know what the traffic is like on East Bay during the dinner hour. In between passing cars, I saw…” She strained to remember clearly, but the image remained cloudy. “There was a man sitting in the driver’s seat, but I don’t know for sure that it was the same man as the one at the bar.”

“But you’re sure the man at the bar and the one in the cabin today were the same?”

“Positive.”

“Okay.” He gnawed the inside of his cheek, thinking.

“What?”

He tapped the steering wheel with his fist several times. “Couple of things I can’t figure out. First, why did they come snooping around my cabin? What were they looking for?”

“How did they find you?”

“It wouldn’t be hard. I have a driver’s license. I pay property taxes. It would be easy enough to find out where I live. But why did they come looking?”

“They could’ve put two and two together.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mentioned Yemassee to Bill Alexander. If they located your address-”

“And saw it wasn’t far from there.” He nodded. “Yeah. I see where you’re going. They would have thought that was a weird coincidence.”

“Maybe McGowan and Fordyce are thinking you’re a loose end they can no longer afford to leave loose.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” he mumbled. Giving her an uneasy glance, he said, “And so are you, Britt. A loose end they thought they didn’t have to worry about anymore. Bet it came as a shock to discover that you’re still alive and in my company. That would make them real nervous.”

To stave off her rising fear, she insisted again that the man in the cabin hadn’t seen her. “If he had, he would have done something.”

“But the Target bags were on the bed in plain sight. He would have looked inside them, checked the date on the receipt, seen the clothes, seen the new makeup in the bathroom. I doubt they’d mistake me for a cross-dresser.”

“You could have bought all that for another woman.”

“What other woman?”

“Any other woman. A living woman. They think I’m fish food at the bottom of the Combahee.”

“I hope that’s what they think. But if I were them, and I hadn’t seen your corpse for myself, and I saw new clothes in your approximate size in the home of a man with whom you have something in common, like being screwed over by Jay Burgess and friends, I’d be thinking that maybe you hadn’t drowned. I’d have a hunch, just like this guy said. So until proven wrong, I’m going to assume this is a fight, and it’s us against them. For reasons known only to them, they didn’t take us out at the cabin, but that doesn’t make me any less paranoid.”