Manhunt in the Wild West by Jessica Andersen Read Free Book Online

together through several more rounds of questioning. The worst of it came from Romo Sampson, a dark-haired, dark-eyed suit from the Internal Affairs Department, but she stayed strong and answered his questions fully on everything except the way her heart had bumped when she first saw Fairfax. That much she kept to herself.
    After the questioning, Chelsea also held it together—more or less—through a tearful reunion with Sara and her other coworkers, and a trip down to the morgue to say goodbye to Jerry. She held it together through a phone call to Jerry’s devastated girlfriend, and then through calls to her own parents and sister. Each person she spoke to or saw was cautioned to pretend they hadn’t heard from her if asked; her survival was being kept very quiet because the escapees—three of them, anyway—thought she was dead. The fourth was still an enigma.
    Once she was off the phone with her mother, Chelsea thought about calling her father, but didn’t. Despite her mother’s best efforts to keep the family together, her parents had divorced when she was in her early teens. Her boat-captain father, a charismatic man with a wandering heart, had called and visited a few times a year for the first few years after the divorce, but that had dwindled and eventually stopped. Last Chelsea had heard, he was living with a woman twenty years his junior, running charters off the Florida Keys. He didn’t have a TV, and if he happened to hear about the escape, he probably wouldn’t even remember she lived in Bear Claw.
    Besides, she figured he’d lost the right to worry about her, in the process teaching her a valuable lesson that had only been reinforced in the years since: men who seemed larger than life usually cared more about that life than they did the people around them.
    Chelsea, on the other hand, cared very deeply about her mother and sister, and the friends who had become her extended family in Bear Claw.
    Just because she cared, though, didn’t mean she was going to let them run her life; she stood her ground when it was time for her to go home, and each of her friends had a different theory on where she should stay, none of the answers being “at home,” which was where she wanted to be.
    Mindful that Tucker was still watching her for signs of collapse—or Stockholm syndrome—she held it together through the arguments that ensued when she insisted on going home that night, and refused to let any of her friends stay over.
    She loved them, she really did, but her self-control was starting to wear seriously thin. She just wanted some alone time, some space to fall apart. Permission to be a wimp.
    “Seriously,” Sara persisted, “I don’t mind.”
    You might not, but I do, Chelsea thought, her temper starting to fray. She just wanted to go home and cry. “I’ll be fine,” she said, pulling on her coat. “I’ll be under police protection, for heaven’s sake.” Tucker had arranged to have a patrol car watch from out front of her place, just in case. She shook her head and said, “Honestly, what can you do that the cops can’t?” Like her, Sara was an ME. They didn’t carry guns, didn’t live in the line of fire.
    Not usually, anyway.
    “I’ll listen if you want to talk,” Sara said softly, quick hurt flashing in her eyes.
    “I’m all talked out,” Chelsea said firmly. But she leaned forward and pressed her cheek to Sara’s. “I’ll call you if that changes, I promise.”
    She held her spine straight as she marched out of the ME’s office, and made herself stay strong as she drove home in her cute little VW Bug, hyperaware of the Crown Vic following close behind her, carrying the surveillance team.
    After an uneventful commute, made unusual only by the fact that she couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing some mention of the jailbreak and her own supposed death, she pulled her cherry-red Bug into her driveway.
    The small, cottagelike house faced a side road and had large-lot