say nothin’, that it’d be easier if I just pretended it was over!”
Tanyalee gasped. “So you lied to an officer of the law?”
As soon as the words left her lips, Tanyalee imagined Fern rolling her eyes.
“Oh, right.” Fern snorted. “Like you haven’t had days where you lied five times before breakfast.”
“Well, I suppose I might deserve that, but I have changed my ways and I advise you to do the same. Now, why don’t you get to the point of your story?”
Fern let out a long-suffering sigh. “I just told you the point! I recognized a bad guy. The bad guy knows I recognized him. The bad guy grabbed us and threw us in a trunk. He’s gonna kill me because I can identify him and he’s gonna kill you because you happened to be with me! Get the picture now?”
Tanyalee swallowed. “That clears things up considerably. Thank you.” The big car swerved again. This time the force did not slam them up against each other, but the road had clearly deteriorated. Though they had to raise their voices to hear each other over the rattling and squeaking of the old car on a rutted lane, they could hear Tanyalee’s phone ringing just fine—for the fifth time.
“Tell me what you want…”
On top of everything else, Tanyalee was breaking her promise to Dante that she would always answer her phone. Disappointing him was last thing she ever wanted to do.
They had to have reached the hill country by then. Noting the drastically reduced speed, Tanyalee suspected they were so far out in the backwoods that Miller wasn’t worried about anyone seeing what he was up to. And that terrified her.
“I wish I could reach my cellphone,” she said. “Dante would be here quick as a lick.”
Fern grunted. “I wish I had my daddy’s thirty-eight. Or my old slingshot or even a jagged piece of glass. Too bad there ain’t no such thing as Death by Cupcake.”
Tanyalee bit her lip, thinking, staring into the dark, wondering what a truly determined and resourceful woman might do in this type of situation. She smiled. “Fern, we need to go out of the box.”
“Oh, hell, no. Not the box again.”
“I mean it literally this time, sweetheart. I have a plan.”
Chapter 21
The final task force meeting had taken only three hours, but that was an hour more than Dante had expected, and he was late to meet Tanyalee.
Westley sat to his left at the Cataloochee County Sheriff’s Department conference table, shooting sideways glances at him and squinting each time Dante tapped his foot in impatience or made a stealth text or call from the cell phone in his lap.
Something was wrong. Dante could feel it. He’d been calling to tell her he’d be late, but she hadn’t answered.
Tanyalee had promised him. She said she understood that his mind was programmed to think the worst. So why wasn’t she picking up?
He checked the time. Forty minutes had passed since he’d stepped out of the meeting to call Tanyalee, who was with Fern delivering cupcakes to Cherokee Pines. Was she now waiting for him in the bakery parking lot as planned, her phone battery dead? Or had something happened to Tanyalee on the way back from Cherokee Pines? What if she were hurt and couldn’t get to her phone? And where was Fern?
“Agent Cabrera?”
Dante glanced up, feigning patience. He despised meetings that rehashed the same points again and again. The task force had a detailed plan in place. They had a minute-by-minute timetable and everyone had their assignments. He’d done hundreds of these raids and was ready to go. So why couldn’t they just wrap it up?
Okay, yes. Spivey’s last two men got whacked in the Gaston County lockup just that morning, but it was hardly a shock since inside jobs were Ramirez’s calling card. The primary focus of this task force at the moment was the Possum Ridge bust. Afterward, they could assist with the murder investigations.
O’Connor scowled at him, and Dante stopped his internal bitch-and-moan session, realizing that someone had just used the words “the Fat Man” in a sentence.
“Yes,” he said. “I did get the opportunity to interview Fern Bisbee, the juvenile who’d lived at the Spivey compound with her father.” Dante looked around the room to make sure he was answering the right question. It seemed he was. “Miss Bisbee said she’d never heard the name before, and never encountered anyone who might fit the description.”
“So you’re wrong after all. There’s no local acting