“It’s a go.” His voice in her ear confirmed what her eyes saw. Her turn to step up and do or die.
In a perfect mimicry of his actions, Phoebe took her place at the parapet. A confident vault, her body kept angled against a gravity more imagined than felt, then the slide into darkness. Slow at first, she quickly picked up speed. The side of the building formed out of shadow. She curled her legs and thrust out with her feet, using the resulting bounce to swing up and hook the edge of the roof. Her partner, programmed to be gallant, reached down and pulled her up beside him.
Phoebe shed her pack and knelt by the grill over the building’s airshaft and removed it, while he got out their equipment, all of it the latest in high-tech gadgetry. When she’d exposed the alarm wires bypassed them, they roped up again and started down the shaft, following a route laid out in her head. It was a gift, a talent, an instinct that was as much a part of her physiology as her eyes and hair and what she’d heard was her father’s nose. If there was a way to get to something, a path to follow, she could find it.
Deep in the building’s bowels, cutting-edge technology opened the wall they needed to access as easy as a whore spread her legs, giving them the prize they sought. They lost two minutes when a guard broke routine, but made up the time on the trip back to their starting point. Phoebe released the rope and drew it in with a sigh of relief.
“I think that was our best time yet,” her companion said, the English accent giving the words more importance than they deserved.
Phoebe frowned. “If we could shave off another sixty seconds—”
The muffled shrill of her telephone, followed by the harsh whine of two computers attempting communication, cut across her words with a warning that her virtual reality game was about to be invaded.
Phoebe looked around, wondering where, from which direction, the invasion would come, but when Phagan spoke, his voice, disembodied and synthesized, came at her from the star-studded night “sky.”
“Playing with Steele again, Pathphinder?”
“Phagan.” Phoebe touched a button on her headset, deleting the virtual Remington Steele she’d used as her partner-in-crime. She crossed virtual arms. “Coming down? Or are we playing God tonight?”
It was his favorite role, in virtual or real reality.
The darkness to her right rippled, and a figure stepped out from behind a ventilation stack. On Phagan’s cue, not Phoebe’s, the moon rose to light his entrance as Deputy US Marshal Samuel Gerrard from “The Fugitive.”
She grinned inside her headset. Trust him to crash her B&E game with a lawman. The boy had always had a dark sense of humor.
“Some say my best role is Lucifer,” he drawled, his voice less disembodied now that he was “earthbound.”
“I’ll pretend to disagree if you’ve cast me decently this time.” Phoebe trusted Phagan with her life but not her dignity. Never with her dignity.
He walked a circle around her, his purloined visage showing a wicked appreciation for the female form. “I’m feeling benign tonight, with a taste for Meg Ryan.”
“I look like Meg Ryan?”
He arched “Sam’s” brows. “Do you mind?”
“Why should I? She’s cute and her thighs are smaller than mine.”
Phagan laughed, throwing “Sam’s” head back. The faint, artificial light was kind to the craggy face and dark tumble of stolen hair. Sam seemed amazingly real—as long as Phagan kept his mouth shut. When he didn’t, he sounded like the android from hell. Phagan never used his own voice. Like God, he preferred a mouthpiece.
She’d been playing his games for seven years and still couldn’t put an actual face or a voice to him. Sometimes, in her real world, she’d study the faces around her, wondering if one of them belonged to him. There were things he’d said, things he did that told her he’d seen her more than once.
“You do it?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the building across the way.
“Despite you wanting the timing tighter than Meg Ryan’s thighs.”
“You needed a challenge. The last one was too easy.”
“Not my fault,” Phoebe said. “You’re the wizard of virtual world.”
He straddled a ventilation pipe, sat and flashed his stolen grin.
She smiled back, but it was perfunctory. She had to tell him, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to keep the past at bay, but she couldn’t. It nicked her present like paper cutting skin, welling scarlet from the breach, burning like acid.
“What?”
Instead of speaking, Phoebe produced a couple of virtual cigars, handing one to him and “lighting” hers. Virtual smoke was no threat to her lungs and it gave her something to do with her hands. A wise precaution, since even in virtual world Phagan could read them like a Gypsy.
With a purloined brow cocked, he took his and lit up, blowing smoke out in a stream before asking, “We celebrating something?”
Phoebe looked at Phagan but “Sam’s” cool dark stare deflected her ability to read him, even as she felt his X-ray scrutiny rake her from top to toe. She blew a series of perfect smoke circles, with a little help from the computer program, before saying as flatly as she could, “I found him.”
Phagan stood up, took a drag of the cigar, then rolled the brown cylinder between his fingers as he considered her words. “You sure?”
Phoebe lowered her cigar, her hands a work of rock-steady art. “I’m sure.”
Phagan turned his virtual high beams on her, waiting for more. With a frustrated sigh, she gave it to him. “He’s had some work done on his face. But I’d know his eyes if he’d turned himself into a woman.”
“Sam” looked thoughtful. He sent some smoke rings out to ambush hers, before asking as if it didn’t matter, “Where?”
She looked at him, feeling a brief moment of real amusement take the edge off her angst. “Denver.”
Phagan had Sam do surprise. “How’d we miss him?”
“He’s been playing Howard Hughes recluse.”
Phagan crushed out the cigar. “So how’d you spot him?”
“Apparently he’s decided to come out. Caught his mug in the newspaper. It seems—” Phoebe couldn’t stop the quiver in her hands from playing out in front of Phagan, “he’s almost engaged to a prominent widow.”
“Sam’s” gaze got sharper. “Kids?”
“Two.” Phoebe licked her dry lips inside the VR helmet. “Girls.”
He nodded. “Right. I’ll contact Ollie. Make sure he’s ready to move when you are.”
“I’m ready.” Inside the headset where he couldn’t see, Phoebe’s mouth curved in a smile seared by her acid past. “He made me ready.”
ONE
One year later
“His name is Oliver Smith.” Jake Kirby looked across the body at the detective, Mac something-or-other, kneeling on the other side. Jake never forgot who he was hunting or any details about them, but there were just too many cops in too many towns and he’d met most of them tracking fugitives for the U.S. Marshals Service. “Ollie to his friends. He was on my least-likely-to-die-violently list.”
Mac, middle-aged and showing signs of awe at working a crime scene with a Deputy U.S. Marshal, gestured toward Ollie’s face, taking care not to touch the hole punched between his bruised eyes. “Someone sure worked him over good before they killed him?”
Mac didn’t say it, but Jake heard the “why” in his voice. A good question with no answer. Had the killer got the answer he wanted?
Jake rose, his senses on full alert as he studied the one-room apartment that had been Ollie’s last stand. It had one official entrance, though a fire escape was visible out the lone window. Two other doors led to a closet and a bathroom, now being rummaged through by what passed for crime scene techs in this small Montana backwater. Shabby furniture and a clutter of dishes around the Pullman kitchen affixed to one wall looked odd sharing space with the high-tech computer being dusted for prints. The smell of blood mingled with that of old food, ol
der building and Ollie’s slowly dissipating aftershave.
“What’d a geek like him do to get federal attention?” Mac asked, giving Ollie’s innocuous-looking face a last glance before straightening his own fifty-something body with a grimace of pain.
“Failing to do his time for a variety of computer-related crimes and high-tech burglaries,” Jake said. “He is—was—a hard man to hang on to.”
“What put you on his trail?”
“He used an old alias to book his flight out of Denver. Must have been in deep trouble to make a mistake like that.” Jake signaled to the tech emerging from the bathroom with various bagged toiletries, examined each bag, then frowned. “No Old Spice. So Ollie didn’t live here.”
“Old Spice?” Mac asked.
“Everybody has something they can’t give up. Ollie’s was Old Spice.”
Mac gave him a skeptical look. Jake got a lot of skeptical looks, so he wasn’t offended. “Smell him.”
It was obvious Mac didn’t want to sniff Ollie’s corpse, but he didn’t know how to get out of it, so he did, a look of surprise chasing distaste from his face.
“Landlord says the tenant’s name was Jones. John Jones. Young guy,” he offered in lieu of anything better to say as he got up and followed Jake to the kitchen area.
Jake studied the debris, looking without touching. A tech dumped the contents of the trash can out onto a plastic sheet; a tiny shower of pistachio shells caught his attention and began sorting it into evidence bags.
“Speaking of things you can’t give up.” A lot of people liked pistachios, but few liked them as much as Dewey Hyatt. Did that make Hyatt the tenant or another visitor? With luck, fingerprints would tell the tale.
“I want you to compare any prints with—”
A stir in the doorway swallowed up the end of his sentence. Jake turned in time to see Bryn Bailey flash her FBI badge at the cop trying to stop her from coming in. The cop, not surprisingly, fell back. It was a common reaction to Bryn, even without the badge.
Vigorous and driven, this poster girl for FBI affirmative action was high gloss, with a near-regal beauty wrapped in a sexy black power suit that concealed her practical side. Beneath the suit and the flawless makeup was a farmer’s daughter, a lass of the soil. Yeah, she wore spiked heels, but she used them like boots. Wasn’t afraid to mess up her hair tackling a perp either. Not that her assignment to electronic crimes required a lot of body contact with the bad guys. Wasn’t too hard on her manicure either, if the red pointed tips were any indication.
If Jake had to hunt with a “Fibbie,” then it might as well be Bryn. She had a good nose for following a trail and was less averse than some to following what seemed like a wild-goose chase. Couldn’t relax with her, though. Anyone dumb enough to give Bryn even the slim edge of the wedge would find she’d taken a big chunk of the credit. And she’d look surprised if anyone had the guts to object.
Right now she looked annoyed.
Bryn was more than annoyed at finding Jake here before her. She crossed her arms and looked at him, fighting to stop the mixture of chagrin and resignation bubbling up her inside appearing on her outside. “Jake Kirby. Why am I not surprised?”
Bryn was tall, but Jake topped her by at least four inches, which did nothing to help her shake off the “little woman” feeling she always got around him. Maybe it was a genetic response. Or a primal one. Lean to the point of lanky, he had a graceful strength only apparent when he was in motion. Worn blue denims and a soft white tee shirt hugged his lean body the way half the female population would like to.
Something about a guy not in uniform, she decided with an inward sigh.
As if he caught her thought, his signature charm-intensive grin spread across his absurdly young-looking face. Amusement lit eyes too blue for any woman’s good and piercing enough to see through lead. The nose between the eyes was straight, the full mouth below sweet in repose, wicked in response.
His tousled, light brown hair was brushed straight back from his high, broad forehead, except for a few tendrils that fell forward, adding to his little-boy-lost look. His eyes weren’t lost or young though. They were old and wise. Set deep beneath run-amok brows and framed by worry lines a girl had to curl her hands into fists to resist smoothing away, they saw everything, were surprised by nothing. His deceptive air of innocence put a smoke screen around a just-shy-of-ruthless determination. This wasn’t a man who feared anything or gave up ground. He was the Marshals Service’s top tracker. If he didn’t get his man, no one could. Or the quarry was dead, like poor old Ollie Smith soon to be tucked into a morgue drawer.
“Let me guess,” she said on a deliberate drawl, “you found him?”
Jake’s shrug and quick grin was her answer. It was almost spooky the way he could feel his way to the fugitive of the hour. The guy was a born hunter. Pity the poor woman he finally set his sights on. She’d be shoeless and in the kitchen before she knew what hit her.
For an instant Bryn let herself wonder what she’d be like, this mythical woman Jake might someday hunt, might someday want enough to keep. To her annoyance, it wasn’t pity she felt. It was envy.
She walked up to Ollie and looked down, directing her attention to the problem at hand. His killer had saved the taxpayers a bunch of cash in court and incarceration fees, but had cost her a lead in her own investigation. Like Jake, she was hunting. “Wish I knew how you did it.”
His grin got wider and whiter. His dentist must love him.
“Magic,” he said.
Bryn didn’t grin back, but only because she wouldn’t let herself, not because her mouth wasn’t entirely willing to oblige him. He didn’t need to be encouraged in his pain-in-the-ass behavior.
Jake looked at his watch. “You take a rocket out of DC?”
“I was already on my way.” Just thinking about why took away all desire to smile. The quick, questioning arch of Jake’s brow didn’t improve her mood. “I got a hot tip.”
Her mouth tightened as she thought about her hot tipper, the mythical and mysterious hacker known only as Phagan. It was him she hunted, though apparently not very well, or he wouldn’t be sending her leads. She wouldn’t allow herself to stop and think why he did that. It just made her crazy.
She saw questions in Jake’s eyes and put up a do-not-ask sign in hers, then went on the attack with a subject change. “This closes the file on Ollie-as-fugitive, so why are you still here and not already after your next fugitive?” She waited a beat, then added, “And don’t give me that curiosity crap.”
“I am after my next fugitive,” Jake said, then made her wait for whom.
He hadn’t been spanked enough as a child. She gave him a look, so he gave her what she wanted.
“Hyatt.”
“Dewey Hyatt?” Her smile was slow and loaded enough to make Mac catch his aging breath. “Maybe you are magic, Kirby.”
* * * *
Peter Harding stood with his hands clasped behind his back, staring out the window without seeing the panoramic view of Denver spread out below him or the distant Rocky Mountains acting as frame. What he saw, what he always saw, was the reflection of himself.
The handsome man, flawlessly turned out in a custom-made silk suit of softest gray, was still a stranger, though a pleasing one. The hair flowing thick and sleek from a high, proud forehead, and the kindly gray eyes, were his, though the blond hair color came from a bottle. The patrician face, newly restored to vigor by a visit to the plastic surgeon, and that gave him the air of a statesman, had become his own years ago. He liked to think it was the way he’d always been meant to look. He hadn’t changed, just trimmed away the rough edges.
The discerning found him almost too perfect. Sensed the elusive aura of a man playing a part and playing it very well. Buried deep beneath the superficial warmth of his light gray eyes was the cold heart of a completely amoral, utterly ruthless man.
The charm with which nature had so generously endowed him dazzled those who knew him s
lightly. Got caught in the radiance of a personality that knew how to beam wide from a shallow base.
Those who knew him well fell into two camps. Those who were the fortunate beneficiaries of his schemes and those who were the victims of the ruthlessness with which he used the bounties nature had given him to get what he wanted. The lucky ones got only moderately singed by the casual contempt he had for their lives or hopes.
There were few lucky ones in his world.
Fools, all of them; in his opinion they deserved what they got. The cosmos allowed only a few winners and a lot of losers at any given moment. Fate had constructed him to be a winner. Now, after years of planning, fate had brought him within reach of achieving all he’d ever wanted.
His reflection showed neither satisfaction nor guilt over his ways and means. Guilt clouded the issue, though he sometimes found it useful for others to be caught in its toils. Satisfaction would be premature. He was too careful to fall into that trap.
Impatience was his choice of the hour. He looked at his watch yet again, bit back an imprecation, and noticed the wrinkling of recently smoothed skin in his reflection in the glass. He smoothed the area with the tip of one manicured finger, enjoying the feel of almost young skin.
Amazing how easily youth was restored if you had enough money. He adjusted some wayward strands in his expensively cut hair. Defying his paternal genes, his hairline was the same as it always had been.
Nice to exceed the paternal model in every way possible.
Was the petty thief looking up from hell proud of what his genes, combined with those of a third-rate prostitute, had wrought?
Probably not.
Peter smiled; the coldly satisfied smile that few rarely saw, certainly not his soon to-be-announced fiancée. Only a fool let the quarry see the cold steel jaws of the trap ready to close with bruising force around them.
Peter was no fool.
The door opened soundlessly behind him, but he’d been watching for it and turned with concealed relief as Barrett Stern stepped in, closing the door behind him.
The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy Page 33