Read Online The Hidden by Heather Graham - Free Book Online Page A

she was stunned. And then they were gone. Just gone. And the elk was back where he was supposed to be.”
    “I didn’t take those the pictures,” Scarlet said firmly. “And I didn’t erase them.”
    “The police took the camera,” Ben said. “They didn’t find any sign of those shots, and they let Scarlet go.”
    Scarlet looked at Ben and then at the agents. “The thing is...well, it’s strange, even stranger than it seemed at the time. I was thinking about it while I was cooking breakfast, and those pictures were like the story of this place. It was built by one of Ben’s ancestors, Nathan Kendall. He was attacked one night. Whoever did it dragged him up the mountain and tortured him with a knife, then shot him. And when his wife heard him screaming and went to help him, she was shot, too. They never did catch who did it. There were several theories, but no one was ever arrested, much less convicted.”
    She paused, shivering slightly as she looked straight at Diego. “It’s as if history repeated itself. He was tortured, then shot...she was shot but at least not tortured. They died the same way and in the same place as Nathan and Jillian Kendall died nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.”

4
    S carlet was extremely grateful—and still a little incredulous—that Diego had not only come to help her, but that he had also come so quickly
and
with a contingent of fellow agents.
    She knew Brett, of course. He and Diego had worked together for years—she’d often felt that Brett knew her husband better than she did. Of course, in their line of work learning to think almost in tandem was imperative.
    She still thought the world of Brett. He had been a good friend to both of them during the divorce, even helping her pack up when it had been time to leave.
    But she’d never heard of the other agents or this “special” unit Diego and Brett had joined. She still didn’t know anything, if it came to that.
    Didn’t matter. It had to be one hell of a unit if they’d gotten here in less than twenty-four hours simply because she’d asked her ex-husband for help.
    She’d heard—the whole country had heard—about the Miami zombie case, and she’d known that Diego and Brett had been assigned to it. She had to assume that Matt and Meg had worked it, too, and that it was somehow connected to whatever made their special unit, well,
special
. She’d thought several times about calling Diego, just to see how he was weathering the stress. The pressure on law enforcement must have been terrible. She knew how he took his cases—or, really, the people who were part of them—to heart. The temptation to pick up the phone had been almost overwhelming at times.
    But then she’d reminded herself that maybe he’d moved on. Maybe he had a girlfriend. Diego was a natural flirt. He simply liked people in general, despite what he did for a living and the kinds of people he so frequently had to deal with. Women, especially, naturally liked him. It was those dark good looks and killer smile. They couldn’t help themselves.
    He had never betrayed her during their two years together, but they weren’t married anymore. She hadn’t just left him, she’d left the state.
    He’d had the right to move on.
    The thought that he might well have done so disturbed her more than she wanted to admit, and that, as much as anything else, had kept her from making the call. Being so far away, cradled by the mountains, had acted like a buffer zone. It was almost as if she was looking back at a story about two other people.
    But after Brett, Matt and Meg had left for the police station, and Ben and Trisha had headed back to the main house to check on their five remaining guests, Scarlet discovered that she suddenly felt incredibly awkward with the man she had once known better than anyone else in the world.
    Admittedly, she’d been drawn to Diego at the outset because of the way he looked. He was tall and fit, and there was something of the