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Chapter 19:

The snow was crunching loudly under Joe's feet and his boots were thudding on the path. Too much noise, he thought. He slowed down and shifted to stalking mode, stepping carefully, rolling his feet. Harder in boots than summer sneakers, but he'd done it plenty of times before when he was after a deer. It helped to keep his feet in the other man's tracks. The smaller prints had disappeared now, but Joe didn't have time to think about that. He was focused on moving his feet quietly and thinking about the terrain.

About twenty yards ahead another footpath branched off and twisted up through the trees. If, as Joe guessed, the man he was following had kept to the main trail and set himself up on the wide, flat surface of Lookout Rock, the smaller path would bring Joe out to a spot on the cliff ten or twelve feet above him. It was a scramble to get up there even in the summer, but the cliff would give him some cover and help muffle any sound he made.

An idea had formed in Joe's mind about what this guy might be up to, and the thought of looking down on him from some height and cover was a whole lot more appealing than the thought of taking the last few steps up to the Rock and walking into the muzzle of a gun.

Joe was right about the tracks: they never swerved from the main trail. When he came to the place where the smaller path began, he took it. It was a good thing, he thought, that the brush was mostly fir and cedar here; the path was overgrown, but he could push past the feathery branches without worrying much about dry twigs snapping. And small stones that would have been easy to dislodge in warmer weather were mostly frozen in tight.

Still, he had to be careful as he scrambled up to the top of the cliff. His foot slipped once, startling some crows and sending them flapping up into the air, cawing. He hoped the guy down below would think they had just been spooked by a marten or a raccoon.

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Reggie Morton heard the crows, but paid them no attention. The whole of his rather whiskey-fuddled thought was focused on the choice before him. The girl he had a clear bead on? Or the boy in the shadows?

Then it occurred to him that he could have it both ways. The boy had had his arm around the girl; he was sweet on her. She was boy-bait: if Reggie took her, the boy would come running to her, sure as shootin'.

He chuckled at the joke. He was good that way; he had a reputation online as a funny guy. He put his eye to the scope again, and adjusted his aim.

But what was happening now? The man in the red Santa suit was bending over her, wrapping his arms around her. The sight made Reggie's stomach heave, but he didn't want to get him, that wouldn't look good at all. He wanted Rush Limbaugh and the guys on his favorite sites to say he was a hero. They wouldn't think he'd saved Christmas if he took out a Santa Claus, even one who'd been hugging a little brown-skinned illegal spic.

Okay, the boy then.

He shifted his aim a bit. Damn the way the lights down there made everything beyond them harder to see. He'd just have to take a chance on it.

But wait a moment. He'd been right; the girl was boy-bait. As Santa scooped her up into his arms, a small form ran out of the shadows, right into Reggie's crosshairs.

He smiled and squeezed the trigger.

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Sabrina Maxwell had never been so outraged in her life. Her hands were cuffed behind her. The metal was digging into her wrists and scratching the three-inch-deep 24-carat-gold Tiffany bracelet she was wearing.

She was perched on the edge of the Mies van der Rohe bench in her own front hall, being questioned by three hard-faced policemen, not one of whom had thought to offer her a more comfortable seat or to get her a cup of coffee, in spite of the fact that she was clearly shivering. Her feet and the hem of her sable cape were soaking in a puddle of ice-cold, filthy water that was melting off the policemen's boots onto the floor. Her husband had been taken away to the kitchen, of all places, where he was being questioned by three more of these horrible men. She hadn't been allowed to talk to him since they'd come in.

And that was only the beginning. They were tearing her house to pieces. She could see them at it in her living room, rumpling rugs and tossing cushions around as they pulled the furniture back, dumping the contents of cupboards out and spilling them everywhere. The same thing was happening in the dining room behind her, and the study off that.

They'd shown Max something they'd said was a special warrant, but she didn't believe it could be legitimate. These men were clearly hooligans, no matter what law-enforcement agencies they said they represented. There seemed to be several of those, including the FBI and the Secret Service.

What they thought she could possibly have to do with the disappearance of the President's son, she had no idea. She'd told them over and over about the boy who'd plummeted into her lap in the car and then taken off into the woods, but they didn't seem to believe her. They'd made some sort of call about it, sending a car to double-check the place where the Jaguar had crashed, but they were going right on destroying her house anyway.

She was furious. And then one of the officers came down the stairs with his hand on Mariana's elbow. Her eyes were wide with shock. She had Tyler in her arms. Why hadn't they put handcuffs on her, too?

"Do you know this woman?" the officer asked Mariana, pointing to Sabrina.

Mariana nodded. "That's Mrs. Maxwell. She lives here. This is her son."

He looked into the chaotic adjoining rooms, and then at the officers around Sabrina, a question on his face.

One of them gave him a tight nod and said, "Screw formalities; all that matters now is time." And then, turning to Mariana, "Do you know anything about another boy? An older one?"

Mariana shook her head. "This is their only child."

"Not their boy. An eight-year-old, the President's son. What do you know about him? Have you seen him?"

Mariana's eyes went so wide Sabrina thought they were going to pop out of her head.

"The President's son?" she repeated, in a trembling voice. "Noah? Yes. Yes, I've seen him. Of course I've seen him."

"You bitch!" Sabrina screamed. "Don't listen to her, officer! She's completely unreliable! She shouldn't even be here, she doesn't have any papers. She's illegal!"

Mariana sucked in her breath. Tyler took his fist out of his mouth and started to cry. The officer asking the questions never even blinked.

"We'll look into that later, ma'am," he said. "Right now, you have something to tell us about Noah Lyman. The sooner you come clean, the better off you'll be."

His voice was as hard as steel. A shiver suddenly went up Sabrina's spine, and she started to cry.

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