Free First You Run by Roxanne St. Claire

want to protect you but have much different plans.” She looked pointedly at Adrien, lowered the mirror, and took a step back. “Josefina will show you to your rooms, and I will see you in the courtyard for cocktails at seven. We’re expecting more than four hundred people, so I’m sure you understand that I must leave you now.” She nodded toward Adrien and the table. “Please feel free to make yourselves comfortable.”
    She disappeared under yet another archway, leaving Miranda worlds away from anything that resembled comfortable .
    Could the shaman see something in Adrien Fletcher that Miranda hadn’t?
    She turned from the shadows to confront him, but he was gone.

C HAPTER SIX
    J ACK C ULVER SQUINTED into the thick foliage that rolled over the hills of the Dutch Fork area of Richland County, South Carolina, and pressed the cell phone tighter to his ear. “Canopy? What the hell is that?” he asked.
    “Some bizarre California compound,” Fletch replied. “Named for the trees.”
    “I’m in a pretty bizarre compound, too.” Jack glanced at the fifteen-foot wall, the barbed wire that ran along it, and the huge iron gate that let women in but not out. “It’s the Camille Griffin Graham Correctional Institute, and I’m on my way to see a killer of a woman.”
    “You said she’s innocent.”
    Jack pulled off the road to finish this conversation with Fletch before he started the clearing process. Even when all a visitor wanted to do was stop in the infirmary and see a nearly dead woman, it could take the better part of an hour, a strip search, a discussion with some hard-edged correctional officers, a bit of banter with Warden McNally’s just-past-her-prime assistant, and an endless wait to see Eileen Stafford.
    And chances were she’d be asleep.
    “My gut says she’s innocent,” Jack said.
    “Your gut’s been a bit natty lately.”
    “It probably wouldn’t hold up in court,” Jack agreed. “And still, I’ve been in Charleston digging into history, and my gut, natty as it is, says there’s more to this than meets the eye.” Much more. More than he could even tell Fletch.
    “What did you find?”
    “Mostly a big fat rug with a shitload of secrets swept under it. And no one willing to talk.” The last ten days had been a series of blank faces and shrugged shoulders. Whatever went down behind the scenes in the Charleston PD and the ensuing murder trial thirty years ago, someone wanted it to go to Eileen Stafford’s grave. “And why are you at a compound in…where is it again?”
    “Santa Barbara. I’m here because I’ve got a live one.”
    “Reel her in, man. Eileen needs good news today. Which one is she?”
    “Miranda Lang.”
    “Has she agreed to the bone-marrow transplant?”
    Fletch snorted. “She doesn’t even have a clue she was adopted. I’m trying to find the tattoo, but it isn’t visible with clothes on.”
    “Get them off. You’re good at that.”
    “Working on it, mate. Right now, she needs some protection services on a weekend of book promotion. I took that job, hoping it includes a tattoo hunt, but…”
    Fletch’s voice trailed off, and Jack frowned. “What is she? Blind? Gay? Married?”
    “None of the above. In fact, she’s gorgeous, smart, and quite available.”
    “What’s the problem?”
    “The problem is we just met up with a very astute and uncannily perceptive woman who might be on to me. She’s already planting seeds in Miranda’s head that I have ulterior motives.”
    “All men have ulterior motives. Strip her down and search, for God’s sake, and in the meantime, I’ll tell Eileen we’re getting closer. Maybe she can give me something. Whoever she’s covering for still has her believing he or she has the power to hurt her daughter. She wants me to help her, but she doesn’t fully trust that I can.”
    “Listen, mate,” Fletch said. “I like this woman, and I don’t want to crap all over her life for no good reason. If she’s not