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  She locked her truck and closed the garage door, standing still in the middle of her garage for several seconds until the automatic lights went out. Her eyes picked out the duffel bag in the dim confines of the garage, and then she spun around and charged through the door connecting her garage to her kitchen.

  There was no turning back now.

  She unpacked her suitcase. She hadn’t lied to Gran about spending a few nights away, but she’d been in Tucson, not Phoenix. Nobody needed to know where she’d been.

  After she unpacked, she searched through her kitchen for suitable dinner fare and ended up grazing on hummus, crackers, a stale flour tortilla and a handful of trail mix.

  She watched the time on her cell phone and the rain outside the window. When the digital numbers ticked over to ten o’clock and the remainder of the storm clouds skittered across the sky, she headed for her bedroom and changed into a pair of jeans and a dark blue T-shirt.

  She grabbed a small purse and a backpack, leaving her phone charging on the counter. Stepping from the kitchen into the garage, she hit the lights and stuffed some gloves, a spade, a flashlight, a rope, wire cutters and a few other items into the pack. She opened the garage door and unlocked her truck. The purse went into the front seat and the backpack went into the back.

  She returned to the garage and curled one hand around a shovel. She balanced it on her shoulder and approached the truck. The puddle of water in the bed rippled as she laid down the shovel.

  Placing her hands on her hips, she pivoted toward the garage and eyed the duffel. She huffed out a breath and strode toward it, her boots clumping on the cement floor of the garage.

  She dragged the bag from beneath the counter and hauled it over her shoulder. She swung it onto the floor of the truck’s back seat and brushed her hands together—as if that were it. That wasn’t it. That was part one.

  She climbed into her truck and punched the remote with her knuckle. She watched her garage door settle into place before backing out of her driveway.

  When she merged onto the highway, she flicked on her brights. The crescent moon didn’t have enough power to light up the desert, and the road didn’t have many travelers. When the odd car did approach from the oncoming lane of traffic, she dimmed her lights.

  Finally, she didn’t meet any other cars coming the other way, and she expelled a breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding. Nobody else would be out here at this time of night.

  Her headlights illuminated the mile marker on the side of the highway, and she glanced at her odometer to track the miles. At two miles past the marker, she eased off her gas pedal and peered over the steering wheel.

  She spotted the break in the highway and turned onto an access road. Her truck bounced and lurched as it ate up the rough ground beneath its wheels.

  If you didn’t know the fencing was there, you could drive right into it, but she caught the gleam from the metal posts and the heavy-duty wire strung between those posts.

  She pulled up next to the fence and cut her lights. Her flashlight would have do. She didn’t want to advertise her presence on this land, just in case another driver saw her lights out here from the highway. She hopped from the truck, opened the back door and snagged her backpack first.

  Flicking on the flashlight, she ran its beam along the length of the fence. It hadn’t been designed to keep people out so much as to stake a claim.

  She ground her teeth together and ducked between the two wires that stretched from post to post. At least nobody had thought to electrify this fence, but again they didn’t have anything to protect—not yet.

  She stumbled across the desert floor for about twenty feet, and then dropped to her knees at a slight dip. Her flashlight illuminated the area—no rocks, no cactus, no distinguishing features.

  She wedged her pack in the dirt to mark the spot and jogged back to her truck. She grabbed the shovel and wrestled the duffel bag from the back seat. The items slowed her progress back to the perfect spot, but she still had enough energy to do what she came here to do.

  She dragged the backpack out of the way and plunged her shovel into the sand. In and out, she dipped the shovel into the sand and flicked it out to the side.

  Sweating, she pinched her damp T-shirt from her body and surveyed her work. How deep did it have to be? Enough to conceal but not hide forever.

  She unzipped the duffel bag at her feet, positioned it at the edge of the hole…and dumped the contents into the shallow grave.

  * * *

  SAM PUSHED HIS laptop away and with it, the faces of the missing people. Gone without a trace. How did that happen? And all of them last seen near the Arizona border towns.

  He didn’t believe in coincidences.

  He’d thought at one point that the bones of the missing might be found in the myriad tunnels that ran between the US and Mexican border, but Border Patrol had gotten a line on most of those tunnels and no bodies had turned up inside them.

  Still, the Sonoran Desert provided a vast graveyard. He pulled his laptop toward him again and switched from the faces of the mostly young people to a map of the desert running between Paradiso and the border.

  One area on the map jumped out at him, and he traced his fingertip around the red line that marked the location where the new casino was planned. That land, which belonged to the Yaqui tribe, had always been somewhat reachable due to the access road.

  He stood up, stretching his arms over his head. He wandered to the window of his motel room and gazed at the drops of water glistening on the glass. The rain had stopped, nothing preventing him from his expedition now.

  He grabbed his weapon and his wallet and marched out to his rental car. When did Border Patrol ever stop working? Especially when an agent didn’t have anything better to do.

  He pulled out of the motel parking lot and headed toward the highway. His headlights glimmered on the wet asphalt, but on either side of him, the dark desert lurked, keeping its secrets—just like a woman.

  Grunting, he hit the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and cranked up the radio. Two days back and the desert had already weaved its spell on him. He’d come to appreciate its mystical, magical aura when he lived here, but the memory had receded when he moved to San Diego. When he left Paradiso, he’d tried to put all those feelings aside—and failed.

  When he saw the mile marker winking at him from the side of the road, he grabbed his cell phone and squinted at the directions. He should be seeing the entrance to an access road in about two miles. A few minutes later, he spotted the gap and turned into it, his tires kicking up sand and gravel.

  His rental protested by shaking and jerking on the unpaved stretch of road. He gripped the wheel to steady it. “Hold on, baby.”

  A pair of headlights appeared in the distance, and he blinked his eyes. Did mirages show up at night? Who the hell would be out here?

  His heart thumped against his chest. Someone up to no good.

  As his car approached the vehicle—a truck by the look of it—he slowed to a crawl. The road couldn’t accommodate the two of them passing each other. One of them would have to back into the sand, and a truck, probably with four-wheel drive, could do that a lot better than he could in this midsize with its four cylinders.

  The truck jerked to a stop and started backing up at an angle. The driver recognized what Sam had already deduced. The truck would have to be the one to make way but if this dude thought he’d be heading out of here free, clear and anonymous, he didn’t realize he’d run headlong into a Border Patrol agent—uniformed or not.

  Sam threw his car into Park and left the engine running as he scrambled from the front seat. The driver of the truck revved his engine. Did the guy think he was going to run him over? Take him out in the dead of night?

  Sam flipped open his wallet to his ID and badge and rested his other hand on his weapon as he stalked up to the driver’s side of the truck.

  Holding his badge in front of him and rapping on the hood of t
he vehicle, he approached the window. “Border Patrol. What’s your business out here?”

  The window buzzed down, and a pair of luminous dark eyes caught him in their gaze. “Sam? Sam Cross?”

  Sam gulped and his heart beat even faster than before as the beam of his flashlight played over the high cheekbones and full lips of the woman he’d loved beyond all reason.

  Don’t miss

  BURIED SECRETS by Carol Ericson,

  available September 2020 wherever

  Harlequin® Intrigue books and ebooks are sold.

  www.Harlequin.com

  Copyright ©2020 by Carol Ericson

  ISBN-13: 9780369702647

  Stealth

  First published as Infiltration in 2014. This edition published in 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 by Janie Crouch

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  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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