Radiant Dawn by Cody Goodfellow Page A

apparently was to her, Stella cried some more.
    She was still crying when they topped the ridge beside her car and she made out the shapes of residents at work on the dusty field. They were digging irrigation ditches, laying the groundwork for turning the desert into a farm. She wiped her eyes and climbed into the car. She stopped and stood up again and craned her neck, looking at one of the fieldworkers. His ginger hair and lanky build. She'd never seen him upright, but that same perverse voice that'd urged her to flee told her she was looking at Stephen. Standing on his two legs in a field. Holding a shovel in his two hands. He was talking to someone with their back turned. She shielded her eyes against the glare and the airborne dust and strove to see just a bit more clearly, but the dust was caking her face, miring in her tears. Then the man he was talking to turned and faced her and he seemed to see her very clearly indeed. It was Dr. Keogh. He waved once more to her and watched her as she dove back into the car, started the engine and sped away.
    She couldn't stop crying until she got home. After a long bath, she realized that despite what Keogh'd told her, despite what she'd thought she'd seen, she was beginning to hope, and that nothing else mattered.
     

7
     
    Storch drove out to the place where he knew they hid. The place that immediately leapt to mind when Hansen had told him she'd been missing nine years. He didn't know why he hadn't thought of it before.
    The skin traders.
    A year before, they'd come into his store. They smelled like organized crime. Three men, two bodyguards flanking an out-of-work Greek lounge emcee in a powder-blue Dacron suit that seemed to squirt sweat from strategic gutters when he walked or waved his arms. Which he did constantly, as if he were freezing to death in the hundred and three degree heat. His shopping list reinforced Storch's suspicion that they were penny-ante crooks on the lam—sleeping bags, lanterns, shotgun shells, and such—but a few unusual items, like bolts of canvas, camcorder batteries, pepper spray and handcuffs led him to believe they were going into the rough-trade porn business. They had four moving vans that came and went at odd hours from a mining hut two miles north of Thermopylae.
    Storch minded his own business and took their money, until about four months ago. The emcee was trying to hustle Hansen into procuring Thiopental for them in industrial volumes, and Hansen must have complained to the Field Marshal, who chased them out of town. Storch visualized the two or three underage girls he'd spotted in the van that tore out of his parking lot inches ahead of the Field Marshal's half-track. They'd never stopped in town again, but the vans kept coming and going.
    The mysterious combatants whose secret war had trampled his life whirled about in his mind. He couldn't figure out which side was which. The feds—if they were feds—had raided the weapons cache that Harley was sitting on for someone involved in a race war, but had shown little or no interest in him. If he were under surveillance, they'd surely have stopped him by now. They'd have Hiram, and they'd have the girl. The girl…
    What did the body of a girl kept alive for nine years, then unceremoniously dumped into the San Andreas Fault, have to do with a militia group? The skin traders were strictly business, however depraved. Why did the militia want so desperately for him to dig up a body and hide it? Why not call the police, or the media? People far less clever than Storch had concocted less far-fetched schemes to frame someone for murder. It had to be something they wanted him to see, to provoke him to take action. Harley's last words swam into his thoughts, that incomplete sentence that at the time had told him only that he wasn't alone in his room, and probably not holding his own gun to his temple.
    Zane, some people will try to contact you soon. Don't…
    Don't what? Don't believe them? Don't