“Yeah, I said something.” But she did precisely as he’d hoped she would. She wiggled closer on the seat and leaned against him. He felt every curve. “I said you’re going the wrong way. My place is back there, about ten miles back there.”

“I know where you live.”

She huffed and kept her voice lifted over the purr of the engine. “Then what are we doing out here?”

“Nice night for a drive.”

Yeah, maybe it was, but nobody had asked her. “I don’t want to go for a drive.”

“You’ll want to go on this one.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, where are we going?”

Sebastian zipped around a sedan and punched it up to sixty.

“Utah.”

It was a good ten miles before Mel managed to close her mouth.

*  *  *

Three o’clock in the morning, in the ghastly light of the parking lot of a combination convenience store and gas station. Mel’s bottom felt as though it had been shot full of novocaine.

But her mind wasn’t numb. She might have been tired, cranky and sore after riding on the back of a bike for four hours, but her mind was functioning just fine.

Right now she was using it to develop ways of murdering Sebastian Donovan and making it the perfect crime.

It was a damn shame she hadn’t brought her gun. Then she could just shoot him. Clean and quick. On some of the roads they’d been traveling, she could dump the body into a gully where it might not be found for weeks. Possibly years.

Still, it would be more satisfying to beat him to death. He had her by a few inches, and maybe fifty pounds, but she thought she could take him.

Then she could ditch the bike, hop a bus, and be back in her office bright and early the next morning.

Mel stretched her legs by pacing the parking lot. Occasionally a semi rattled by, using the back roads to avoid weighing stations. Apart from that, it was dark and quiet. Once she heard something that sounded suspiciously like a coyote, but she dismissed it.

Even out here in the boonies, she assured herself, people had dogs.

Oh, he’d been clever, she thought now, kicking an empty soda can out of her way. He hadn’t stopped the bike until they’d been past Fresno. Not exactly walking distance back to Monterey.

And when she’d hopped off, punched him, and let loose with a string of curses that should have turned his ears blue, he’d simply waited her out. Waited her out, and then gone on to explain that he’d wanted to follow James T. Parkland’s trail.

He’d needed to see the motel where David had stayed with the first woman he’d been passed to.