Reckless

Frank Dorrien and Jamie MacIntosh had left him so many messages since he got to the States that in the end Jeff had disabled his phone and bought a disposable, pay-as-you-go handset. That, by contrast, never rang. Suddenly, it seemed, nobody at the ranch or the local garage remembered seeing a woman, unusual or otherwise. No one at the cop shop had access to the police report. All the staff at Yampa had been exemplary and none of Nicholas’s school friends or teachers could remember anything unusual in the days leading up to the crash. Or, indeed, any other days. If Jeff Stevens the New York journalist was looking for scandal, he could look elsewhere. Steamboat Springs had closed ranks like a threatened clam snapping shut its shell.

After his dinner with Tracy in Paris, Jeff knew he had to come here. He had to find out for himself what had really happened to his son. After all, it was Nicholas’s death that had dragged Tracy into all this in the first place. Group 99, Althea, Hunter Drexel, Cameron Crewe. None of those names would have touched Tracy if Blake Carter’s truck hadn’t plunged off the road that night, right here in Steamboat Springs.

And now Jeff, too, had been drawn in. This wasn’t their world, his or Tracy’s. They weren’t spies or counterterrorism experts, for God’s sake. And yet here they were, running around Europe fighting other people’s battles, solving other people’s riddles, like pawns in some giant game of chess. A game in which, increasingly, Jeff doubted there would ever be a real winner.

Meanwhile Tracy, his Tracy, was blaming herself. Tracy thought Althea had killed Nick. That Nick, and Blake, were dead because of her. And she was turning to another man to assuage her of that guilt, to comfort her in her grief.

But what was the truth, really? What had happened here?

Perhaps, Jeff thought, if I could answer that one question, I could stop the

madness. I could save Tracy, spare her the torment.

I could save myself.

The problem was, he couldn’t answer it. Rumors swirled around him, taunting him like blowing leaves he could never quite catch. But he had no actual evidence of anything. As far as Jeff could tell, there was a woman at the diner that night, who may or may not have taken the same road Blake Carter did. But that was it. Maybe the police could have dug a little harder, or the ambulance crew driven a little faster, or the surgeons operated on Nick’s brain an hour earlier. But every accident had its “maybes,” every tragedy its “what ifs.” Jeff had seen nothing in Colorado to make him believe that Tracy’s crazy conspiracy theory about Althea was true. The whole thing was smoke and mirrors.

I’ll fly back to Europe tomorrow, Jeff thought. Nurse Karen Young had been his last hope, but even she had always been a long shot. Chances were there was nothing worth seeing on the CCTV footage anyway.

Jeff’s hotel was in town, a simple but cozy Victorian with a wraparound porch and a fire permanently lit in the parlor. Ski season was over and the tourists had poured out of Steamboat like water through a sieve, so there were plenty of parking spaces out front. Dusk was starting to fall when Jeff got back, tired and defeated. He’d spent most of the day roaming uselessly around Blake Carter’s old haunts, getting the cold shoulder from wary locals. But despite his bad mood, he took a moment to look up and appreciate the beauty of his surroundings. Mountains rose like giants from behind the hotel, their snowy tips blushing pink in the sunset. A rainbow of colors oozed into the blue sky like spilled paint, every shade of orange, red, purple and peach, shot through with flashes of turquoise.

No wonder Tracy was drawn to this place.

What a magical corner of the world for Nick to grow up in.

Walking up the porch steps, Jeff felt a stab of loss and longing, a visceral wrench of pain for all the years he’d missed. With Tracy. With their son. It struck him forcibly then that the whole idea of closure was ridiculous. Knowing what happened wouldn’t change anything. He couldn’t save Tracy from the agony of Nick’s death, any more than he could save himself.

“Ah, Mr. Stevens, there you are.” Jane, the hugely overweight receptionist, smiled at Jeff warmly. “I’m so sorry, but the young lady just left. She waited more than an hour but I think she had to get to work in the end. I would have called you but I didn’t have a number and—”

“What young lady?” Jeff interrupted her.

Jane blushed. “Oh Lord. How stupid of me. All this time she was here and I never got her name. She was young. Blond. Very attractive.”

Karen.

“She left you this.”

The receptionist picked up a sealed brown paper envelope in her pudgy hands and passed it to Jeff.

His heart rate shot up. He could feel immediately that there was a USB chip inside.

Bounding up the hotel stairs two at a time, Jeff hurried into his room, locking the door behind him. Drawing the curtains, he sat down at his computer and loaded in the chip.

The footage was time-stamped. There was a little under two hours’ worth in all. Thank you, Karen! Images were streamed from the Yampa Valley Medical Center’s car park, front entrance, reception desk and waiting room, and from three corridors inside the building. One clearly led to a surgery suite of some kind. The others looked like regular corridors on a ward, with patients’ rooms to the right and left.

Jeff settled back to watch, not sure what he was looking for exactly, but hoping it would jump out at him when he saw it.

Minutes rolled by. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. An hour.

When he finally saw the figure, sauntering confidently up to the reception desk, he had to pause the footage and rewind.

It can’t be. Jeff leaned forward, staring at the screen as if he’d seen a ghost. It can’t possibly be.

Jumping up, he pulled open the bedside drawer and started reassembling his phone, sliding in the sim card and battery.

I have to call Tracy. Right now.

Waiting impatiently for the home screen to load, Jeff tried to think of what he was going to say exactly. What words would he use to break this news? To tell Tracy she was wrong. To tell her . . .