“No, thanks.”

She frowned at him. “Nate, what’s up? You didn’t come here to check on my stitches, and you’re not the one who snuck in this pink swimsuit.”

He looked uncomfortable, a rarity for him, and finally sighed. “Do you still believe the man who attacked you looked familiar?”

“Yes.” It didn’t surprise her that Nate knew. He could have found out from Gus or Carine, never mind law enforcement. “I keep trying to remember where I’ve seen him. I’ve checked my student records, fugitive cases I’ve worked on, everything I can think of. So far, no connections.”

“It’s not your job to find this guy. If the investigators in New Hampshire want your help, they’ll ask.” Nate regarded her more with the authority his job afforded him than with brotherly affection. “You understand that, right?”

“Did someone complain about me?”

“No one’s complained. I just know you, Mackenzie. You need to be smart,” he said bluntly. “Be patient.”

Mackenzie grabbed her coffee, trying to resist a surge of defiance. But she knew she wouldn’t. She gave Nate a cool look. “How smart and patient were you after you were shot?”

Almost a year and a half ago, he and a fellow deputy – his wife’s twin brother – were shot sniper style in New York ’s Central Park. Nate’s bullet wound, a graze to the shoulder, was relatively minor, but he hadn’t left the investigation to the FBI and his colleagues in the Marshals Service. He’d bulldozed his way into the middle of it. He’d met Sarah Dunnemore as a result and given up his solitary life, opened himself up to having a family of his own and all the risks that came with it, as he, orphaned at seven, understood more than most. But as far as Mackenzie could see, he had no regrets.

He said stiffly, “We’re not talking about me.”

“That’s for damn sure.” Mackenzie’s urge to stand up to him dissipated, and she grinned. “You weren’t wearing a pink swimsuit when you were shot.”

She thought she detected a spark of amusement in his eyes. “I remember that suit. It’s one bright shade of pink. Tough to miss you in the water.”

“I don’t think our knife-wielding fugitive ever saw me in the water. The shed door was open. I suspect he was on his way out or on his way in while I was underwater or something – I didn’t see him, anyway – and I surprised him. He tried to hide, but ended up attacking me.”

“Could he have slipped away without being seen?”

“If he’d waited until I went back into the house, he’d at least have had a better chance. He crouched in the brush alongside the shed. I heard him before I saw him. It’s filled with Japanese barberry – he could have gotten stuck with thorns. It had to be buggy there, too. Maybe he saw a snake. Whatever. He decided to jump me.”

“His thinking might not have been that organized.”

“The prevailing wisdom still is he picked the hiker and me to attack at random. He looked wild, but he also seemed in control of himself. I can’t explain it.”

“Gut feeling?”

“If you want to call it that.” Mackenzie was suddenly aware of Nate’s nearly two decades of experience in law enforcement compared to her months of training and mere weeks at her first assignment. “I need to figure out where I’ve seen him.”

“Adrenaline can do strange things to people.”

“So why not me? I know I could be imagining I’ve seen him before, but, honestly, I don’t think so.”

“It could just be a simple mistake. Mackenzie -” He broke off. “Never mind. I need to get rolling.” He nodded to her holster. “How’re you with a shoulder holster?”

“Terrible. That fraction of a second extra it takes to reach across my body for my weapon – I don’t know. I’ll try not to shoot myself.”

“Were you as big a pain in the ass as a professor?”

“Bigger.”

She’d known Nate and his two sisters for as long as she could remember. In those awful months after her father’s accident, Gus would bring them by the house with food, and they’d help with repairs that she and her mother couldn’t manage on their own. Harry and Jill Winter had died up on Cold Ridge before Mackenzie was born, but she knew that their children – Nate, Antonia and Carine – had faced a tragedy far worse than her own. She’d looked up to them, let them show her the route to survival.

But they’d never imagined her as a federal agent. Not one of them.

“No, don’t go,” she said. “Tell me why you’re really here.”

“Just to check on you.”

“Nate. I know you think I should have stayed at the college, finished my dissertation. But I got through training. I didn’t have your help or support there. I did it on my own.”

“I know you did, kid.” There was a measure of tenderness in his expression now. “I keep thinking of you as that little curly-haired redhead sitting in your father’s blood. Mackenzie, we all want what’s best for you.”

“What’s best for me right now is that you be straight with me.”

He started for the elevators, but she followed him.

“You know why Andrew Rook was in Cold Ridge, don’t you?” she asked.

Nate banged the down button, sucked in a breath through his teeth and regarded her with a big-brotherly impatience that was entirely familiar to her. “You’re relentless, Deputy Stewart. Always have been. I put that in my report about you.”

“Relentless is just another way of saying pain in the ass.”

“So it is.”

“Nate – what about Harris Mayer?”

He glanced away from her. “He’s late for a meeting with the FBI.”

“Rook?”

The elevator dinged. “You want to play with the big guns, Mackenzie? Here’s your chance.” The elevator doors opened, and Nate stepped inside, turning to her. “Rook’s all yours.”

Seventeen

J. Harris Mayer owned a white-painted, black-shuttered brick house on a narrow, prestigious Georgetown street. As Rook stood in the front room, he could see the overgrown rhododendron that grew past its first-floor window.

Harris’s neighbors probably wished he had moved or gambled away the house. Rook and T.J. had checked with them, and they clearly hoped the FBI or the local police – someone – would find Harris dead of a heart attack. His disgrace wasn’t the issue so much as the shabby condition of his house. It needed paint, extensive repairs and a couple of guys with trimming shears and chainsaws to tackle the out-of-control greenery. The windows hadn’t been washed in years. Bees had built nests in various cracks and crevices.

But Rook and T.J. and two other agents hadn’t found Mayer dead in his bed or passed out on his kitchen floor. They’d arrived an hour ago, in the heat of the afternoon, having obtained a warrant to check the house for him. The scope of the warrant limited them to searching places where a person could have fallen ill or be hiding – a closet, a shower, not a desk drawer.

“He’s skipped,” T.J. said, joining Rook from the foyer. “He’s not here.”

Rook concurred. They’d gone through the house from attic to basement, alert to anything in plain sight that would lead them back to the judge for permission to conduct a more thorough search.

T.J. eyed a slender, curve-legged desk in a corner of the threadbare but elegant room. Everything needed dusting. The house smelled musty; the central air-conditioning hadn’t been turned down low enough to keep up with the heat and humidity. The family antiques throughout the house just emphasized that Harris’s was a life squandered. He’d gone off the tracks a long time ago, well before his public downfall. It had just taken a while for him to crash.

“Wish we’d found a receipt for a plane ticket to Fiji sitting on a desk,” T.J. said. “That’d get us in here going through this place with a fine-tooth comb. I don’t have a good feeling about our friend J. Harris, Rook.”

Rook sighed. “I don’t, either. We’ll just have to keep looking for him. I don’t know if a soup-to-nuts search here would help us, but I’ll see what we can do to get an extension on the warrant.”