Justine Davis - In His Sights

“We’ve considered it,” Dorothy said, but she didn’t look at him when she said it. Nor did she say anything more on the subject.

He thought about that as he loaded his photography gear into the car, and then headed out. He wondered if those bills he’d seen were what was stopping them. He frowned at the idea. No wonder Walt was gruff; he could well be hiding a lot of pain and frustration behind that crotchety exterior. Just like Dorothy was hiding a lot of worry and strain behind her cheerful demeanor.

He was surprised at how much both ideas bothered him. He liked the Crawfords, and the idea that they might be doing without anything—let alone needed medical treatment—grated on him. He put it on his mental list of things to look into. Right behind the whereabouts of Kate’s former income, an inquiry he had yet to make. He wasn’t sure why he was putting it off, but he knew that he was. He told himself it was because he was still just getting started on this case, but even he didn’t quite believe that.

His surveillance today took a different turn. Shortly after noon, Kate came out of the main, lodge-style building and walked to her car. There was no sign of the furtiveness he’d seen in the maroon-haired girl, but it was a change in the pattern he’d seen since he’d been here, so it caught his attention.

Lunch? he wondered with a glance at his watch. Possibly. Maybe the post office, although she hadn’t been carrying anything. Could be in her purse, or briefcase, whatever that bag thing was she had slung over her shoulder. Heck, anything could be in there.

He wondered if it was a holdover from her big-city days, where women often carried a pair of walking shoes to travel between a subway station and their office, where they then changed into dress shoes. Or maybe she was just one of those that had to have a ton of stuff with them all the time; he’d never understood that. But it seemed to be the norm; his frequent partner, Samantha Beckett—Samantha Gamble now, he corrected himself—had been the only woman he’d ever known who preferred to carry no purse at all.

It suddenly occurred to him how small the insulin pumps were. And that it would be easy to carry several of them in a bag that size.

Could it be that simple? Was she simply walking out with them, in plain view of everyone?

The more complicated the plan, the bigger the chance for failure.

Rand tried to remember. Had it been Draven who had said it? No…St. John. It had been Josh’s mysterious right-hand man who had said it, but Draven had agreed, in the more blunt terms of Keep It Simple, Stupid. Whenever one of them came up with some elaborate plan for a job, he always found a way to simplify it, telling them to leave the Mission Impossible schemes to Hollywood.

Simple. What could be simpler than sticking a few things in your big purse and walking out the door, the same way you did every day? Were the boxes that were found empty at the delivery point in fact empty when they went into the truck in the first place? Was that why there was no sign of damage on the truck’s locks, because in fact the trucks had never been broken into?

Suddenly where Kate was headed became critical. He waited until she opened the driver’s door and got in, and he heard the car start. When it was clear she was actually going to leave, he grabbed up his equipment hastily and headed down the path to his car at a run.

He tossed the camera and binoculars somewhat haphazardly into the front seat, jumped in, then started the rental and maneuvered back toward the road. Her blue coupe was nowhere in sight. He inched forward, until he could see both ways down the road. He was just in time to catch a flash of blue headed toward town.

“Such as it is,” he muttered as he turned that direction, at the same time being thankful there was so little traffic that he didn’t lose her.

She turned into the small shopping center that held the post office, the sandwich shop and the Curl and Cut.

The post office? he wondered. Was she actually mailing the things through the U.S. Mail? You couldn’t get much more basic than that. Draven and St. John would appreciate the simplicity of it.

She parked at the outer edge of the parking lot, although there were several spaces available closer in. Odd, he thought. He pulled into the lot, stopping several yards away in the shelter of a huge four-by-four pickup. He watched as she got out of her car, waited to see where she was headed. If she indeed went to the post office, he wasn’t sure what he would do. Come up with some story to get the clerk to tell him where the package had been sent. Maybe something about Kate sending him, afraid she’d put the wrong zip code on it or something. Or maybe—

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