The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,52

rest of the world. I had real trouble with maps. This, combined with the natural tendency to wander, resulted in me doing quite a bit of unintended sightseeing whenever I traveled. Today was no exception. A half-hour drive had turned into three times that, and I was distracted, my mind anywhere but on the case I was working and the agreement I needed to make for my client this morning. I’d been obsessing about Rauser and Amazon Jo and I didn’t want to be this far from the War Room. It would be an exciting time in the investigation and it pulled at me. Was I drawn to this investigation because I really deeply cared? Or was it tugging at me because it filled the gaps in me, because it was another thing an obsessive mind and a bend toward addiction needed to grab on to?

By the time I turned the rented Jeep into Roy Echeverria’s driveway, I wasn’t in a good place. I did not give a damn about some sleazy little accountant who got caught with his fingers in the corporate cookie jar, no matter how fat and succulent those cookies were. This man had used the money he took from my client to buy himself a new identity and put a sizable down payment on a home in the Westridge section of Highlands Ranch, twelve miles south of Denver, a sprawling master-planned community with golf courses, open space, and the eighty-five-hundred-acre Wildcat Mountain Reserve. Not bad for a junior-level accountant.

Echeverria was on his knees spreading wood chips around the shrubbery under his front windows. He was wearing gardening gloves and blue jeans and rubber-soled gardening shoes without heels, half loafer, half sandal. He was olive-skinned with large dark eyes and black hair and couldn’t have been more than thirty. Attractive enough in a dark, brooding way and thinner than he’d been in the file copy of the photo on his employee badge.

“Mr. Echeverria,” I said as I approached. “My name is Keye Street. I’d like to talk with you about some property in your possession belonging to your former employer.”

He rose slowly to full height, slipped the gardening gloves off and let them fall to the ground, dusted his hands off on his jeans.

“You are mistaken,” he said calmly and with an even smile. His accent was thick. I knew from his file that he’d come from Basque country in Spain. “My name—”

I held up the copy of his employee badge. “Your name is Echeverria. Can we just cut the crap? Do you want to talk here or should we go inside?”

“You cut the crap!” he yelled to my utter astonishment, and very aggressively stepped toward me, shoved me hard with both hands, and shrieked “No!!!” the way they teach you to scream it in self-defense classes. I went down on my backside in his front yard and he took off. The heelless gardening shoes slapped the ground like flip-flops and Echeverria had to raise his knees very high to keep from tripping over them. He looked like some kind of demented waterfowl, a seabird gone berserk.

Me, I’m little, but I’m fast. Two lawns down, I caught up enough to make a dive for his ankles. He tried to kick free and lost a shoe. I held on until he hit the ground chest-first with a grunt. The air rushed out of him and I climbed onto his back, tried to hold him down, reached around for my cuffs while he flopped around like a fish in a rowboat. He shook me off and got himself turned over. I wrapped my arms around his head and we rolled several times until he bit my shoulder so hard I yelped and had to let go. Then he ran toward the golf course and hijacked one of the carts. He gave me the finger as he disappeared over the green.

“Shit!” I climbed to my feet and brushed myself off.

Standing on a porch a few yards away, I noticed a woman with two young children staring at me, slack-jawed. The children crowded up close to her legs when I took a step forward, as if I might cook them and eat them.

“We’re family, Roy and me,” I offered by way of explanation, and smiled. “It’s just a thing we do.”

All three of them kept staring.

I moved the Jeep out of sight a block away, then returned to Roy Echeverria’s house. The door was unlocked. He obviously had not expected to