Page 11 of False Evidence
Alexandra knew where the emergency gate key was hidden. Same with the house key.
If JT hadn’t sold the place, she’d bet he still used the same hiding places.
She had no connection with JT anymore. Their breakup had been epic and painful. The cops might question him at some point, but he’d be far down the list. And JT would never in a million years guess that she’d flee to his cabin, the place where he broke her heart one week before their wedding.
ChapterFour
Alexandra thought she was going to puke as she approached the security gate. She wondered if JT had installed a camera. They’d never had one in the past—supposedly because of connectivity reasons, but she’d learned the truth in the days before she was to marry JT.
Joseph Talon Sr. regularly met with his mistress at the cabin and didn’t want a camera capturing the other woman coming and going. He’d had both his marriage and his upcoming run for president to consider.
With Joe long gone, had JT installed a camera?
Lord, she hoped not, but she was about to find out.
The same solid metal gate greeted her. No sign of a camera.
If she couldn’t find the key, she’d have to ditch the car and hike in. The problem was, it was only a matter of time before an all-points-bulletin was out on the Jetta, and she wasn’t exactly dressed to hike up a mountain on a cold December night. Her flimsy sneakers would probably soak through before she found the key.
She climbed from the vehicle and approached the gate, which was mounted to a rock wall on either side. The wall extended into the woods a hundred yards in both directions. It gave way to a ravine on one side—JT liked to call it the moat—and a cliff on the other. No car could enter the property from this access point without going through the gate.
She slipped under the high crossbar and walked along the wall to the right of the drive. The ground was uneven as forest abutted rock wall. She searched for the loose rock at the base of the wall.
It had been over ten years since she’d been here. She’d been overconfident in her ability to remember the location and hadn’t taken weathering into consideration.
Desperate, she ran her bare hand over frozen stone after frozen stone, wondering if ice held the one loose rock secure and she’d missed the hiding place.
It was dark. Her cell phone was smashed by the side of the road near a murdered police officer who’d assaulted her, so she had no flashlight. Nor did she have a lighter or candle to thaw ice that might fill the crevices between stones. Maybe she could use the tire iron as a chisel. But she needed to find the right rock first.
Finally, her hand landed on a stone that wiggled. She pried at it with frozen fingers, tears burning her eyes as she tried to stave off panic. The rock came free, and she felt inside the crevice, her fingers feeling the bite of a metal key.
She burst into tears as she pulled it to her chest.
With scraped fingers that verged on numb, she unlocked the dead bolt and pulled the gate open. She then drove the Jetta inside and locked the gate behind her, tucking the key into her pocket as she climbed back behind the wheel. The driveaway was more than a mile long, twisting between trees as she wound her way up the mountain.
Thankfully, it hadn’t started to snow yet. Still, the road was slick, and she had to stop more than once to remove a tree branch. No one had been here in a while.
She gripped the steering wheel when the car slipped on a patch of ice. Her foot remained steady on the gas, and she slowly steered the car up the mountain road, well aware that if it snowed tomorrow, there was a reasonable chance she’d be stuck here.
Her heart ached at the thought of Gemma. All she could do was hope her baby was safe with Erica. Surely child protective services wouldn’t be able to snatch her from a friend who was listed as an emergency caregiver with the daycare?
She had no clue how the law would treat her child if she was a fugitive wanted for murdering a cop. For some reason she’d never thought to plan for such a scenario.
She burst into tears again as the dark cabin came into view. The tears were relief that she had a place to hide as the temperatures dropped, but also triggered by shock and horror that this was necessary.
For the first time in her daughter’s life, she hadn’t been there to give Gemma her bedtime bottle, and tomorrow morning, she wouldn’t be there to lift her from the crib.
Her sweet, darling girlie. She ached with fear and the need to hold her baby.
She’d give anything to be able to call Erica, but that would put Gemma’s safety in danger and get Erica in legal trouble.
Finding the hidden key to the house was much easier than the gate key had been.
She held her breath as she unlocked the door and stepped inside, and let it out again in relief when there was no alarm keypad to be found.
If the house had an alarm, it was silent and managed through an app, but she suspected JT had never bothered to have one installed. The place was so remote, and the gate was an effective deterrent. Hikers could trespass, of course, but nothing of value was kept in the house, and hikers weren’t going to steal a sixty-inch TV by carrying it down a mountain.
She grabbed the key to the side door of the enclosed garage—which was detached from the house—and returned outside to move the car so it would be hidden from drones or satellite images should anyone think to look for her here.