Lethal

by Sandra Brown

  She nodded thoughtfully. “I know where we can go.”

  Tom VanAllen was awakened early that morning with the startling news that Fred Hawkins was dead and that Honor Gillette and her child were missing from their home. Both the murder and the kidnapping were attributed to Lee Coburn.

  When Tom shared this news with Janice, she registered total disbelief, and then remorse. “I feel terrible about the unflattering things I said about Fred yesterday.”

  “If it’s any comfort to you, he would have died instantly. He probably didn’t feel a thing.” He told her about Doral’s finding the body.

  “That’s horrible. They were so close.” After a moment of silence, she asked, “What were they doing at Honor Gillette’s house?”

  He told her about the discovery of the boat. “It was a few miles from her house, but near enough to worry them, so Fred went to check on her. According to Doral, when Fred arrived he found that the house had been tossed.”

  “Tossed?”

  He described the condition of the house as it had been described to him by Deputy Sheriff Crawford. “Fred’s body was lying just inside the front door. Coburn apparently came up behind him.”

  “Just like he shot Sam Marset.”

  “Looks like. Anyway, I need to go, see it for myself.”

  He hated having to leave the house before helping her with the arduous morning routine of getting Lanny cleaned, dressed, and fed. Because he couldn’t chew or swallow, Lanny got his nourishment through a feeding tube. Mealtimes weren’t pleasant.

  Janice, however, was understanding about duty taking him away. She told him she could handle things at the house and for him not to worry. “This is a crisis situation. You’re needed.” As she saw him off, she whispered in his ear, “Be careful,” and even went up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

  Most of his work was done sitting behind a desk. He supposed that the exciting elements of this case represented to Janice more of what she’d had in mind when he told her he wanted to become an agent for the FBI. He surprised and pleased her by kissing her back.

  He got lost twice on the back roads but finally found the Gillette place, arriving just as Crawford was about to leave. The two introduced themselves and shook hands. Crawford brought him up to speed.

  “I’ve turned it over to our CSU. They’ve got their hands full with this one. Your agents have come and gone. They’re meeting me back in town, where we’ll set up phone lines, organize a task force, divide the labor. Tambour P.D. has offered us space for a command center on their top floor.”

  “Yes, I talked to my men on my drive down. I emphasized that cooperation is key, and that priority one is to find Mrs. Gillette and the child before they come to harm.”

  Crawford looked at him with an implied Duh, which Tom tried to disregard. “Anything enlightening come from Doral Hawkins?”

  “Not much. He says he received an excited call from his brother just as dawn was breaking. Got here as fast as he could. Fred’s boat was tied up at the dock. First sign that something was out of joint, the front door of the house was standing open.”

  “What did he make of the mess inside?” Tom asked.

  “You mean in addition to his brother’s body? Made the same thing I did of it. Somebody—we gotta presume Coburn—was searching for something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Anybody’s guess.”

  “Was it found?”

  “Anybody’s guess. Nobody seems to know what Coburn was after. Not Doral, not Mrs. Gillette’s father-in-law.”

  He told Tom about Stan Gillette’s untimely arrival at the crime scene and described the former Marine down to his spit-and-polished shoes. “He’s a real hard-ass, but in his present situation, I probably wouldn’t be a nice guy either,” the deputy admitted.

  The investigator took his leave, but gave Tom permission to walk through the house. He was conscientious to stay out of the way of the technicians who were painstakingly picking through the mess, trying to gather evidence. He was in and out in a matter of minutes.

  His drive back to Lafayette from the Gillette place took over an hour, and when he walked into his office, he did so relieved that the obligatory errand was behind him.

  But no sooner had he sat down at his desk than the office line rang. He depressed the blinking intercom button. “Yes?”

  “Deputy Director Hamilton is calling from Washington.”

  Tom’s stomach dropped like a plunging elevator. He cleared his throat, swallowed, thanked the receptionist, and depressed the other blinking button. “Agent VanAllen.”

  “Hi, Tom. How are you?”

  “Fine, sir. You?”

  Clint Hamilton, with customary brusqueness, cut straight to the reason for the call. “You’ve got a dung heap of trouble down there.”

  Tom, wondering how in hell Hamilton had gotten wind of it, hedged. “It’s been a busy couple of days.”

  “Fill me in.”

  Tom talked for the next five minutes without interruption. Several times, he paused to make sure that they hadn’t been accidentally disconnected. During those pauses, Hamilton didn’t speak, but Tom could hear him breathing, so he kept talking.

  When he finished, Hamilton remained quiet for several moments, long enough for Tom to dab at his damp upper lip with his pocket handkerchief. Hamilton had placed a lot of confidence in him. That faith in his abilities was now being tested, and he didn’t want Hamilton to find him lacking.

  When Hamilton finally spoke, he stunned Tom with a question. “Was he one of your agents?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This man Coburn. Was he an agent working undercover for you to investigate Sam Marset’s trucking interests?”

  “No, sir. I never heard of him until I went to the crime scene at the warehouse and learned from Fred Hawkins the name of the suspect.”

  “Fred Hawkins who’s now dead.”

  “Correct.”

  After another noticeable pause, Hamilton said, “Okay, continue.”

  “I… uh… I forgot—”

  “You were telling me that agents from your office are working hand in glove with the Tambour P.D.”

  “Yes, sir. I didn’t want to sweep in there and piss them off. The warehouse murders are their jurisdiction. The sheriff’s office has Fred Hawkins’s homicide. But once it’s determined that Mrs. Gillette has indeed been kidnapped—”

  Hamilton rudely interrupted him. “I know about jurisdiction, Tom. Let’s go back to Sam Marset. He would have been in a perfect position to engage in illegal interstate trafficking.”

  Tom cleared his throat. “Yes, sir.”

  “Has any such connection been drawn?”

  “No, nothing so far.” He told Hamilton about the search of every truck in the fleet, the questioning of each driver and other employees. “I’ve assigned agents to track down and interview anyone that we can place in and around that warehouse in the last thirty days, but so far no illegal contraband has been discovered.”

  “What motive did the suspect have for killing his boss and fellow employees?”

  “We’re trying to ascertain that, sir. But Coburn’s lifestyle is making it difficult.”

  “In what way?”

  “He’s been described as a loner. No friends, family, little interaction with coworkers. Nobody knew him well. The people—”

  “Give it your best shot, Tom,” Hamilton said with palpable impatience. “Take a guess. Why’d he kill them?”

  “He was a disgruntled employee.”

  “A disgruntled employee.” Hamilton said it without inflection, certainly without enthusiasm.

  Tom thought it smart to keep quiet.

  Eventually Hamilton said, “If Coburn’s only beef was with his boss, if he wigged out over a slight he suffered on the loading dock, or because he was shortchanged on overtime pay, why’d he go to the house of a dead cop and turn it upside down? If he was fleeing the scene of a mass murder, why’d he hide out with the widow an
d child for an estimated twenty-four hours? And if he took them, why did he? Why not just dispose of them right then and there? Doesn’t that atypical behavior bother you like a popcorn hull stuck in your teeth?”

  These weren’t rhetorical questions. Tom had worked in the Lafayette field office with Clint Hamilton only briefly, but it had been long enough for him to learn that the man didn’t waste his breath on unnecessary words.

  When Hamilton was bumped up to Washington, D.C., leapfrogging the district office in New Orleans, he had recommended Tom as his successor, and, even at the time, Tom had been aware that Hamilton’s endorsement of him had been met with skepticism by some and vociferous opposition by others. Hamilton had fought for Tom, and he’d won the fight.

  Each day when he entered the office where Hamilton had once sat, Tom felt pride in succeeding such an able, revered, even feared agent. He also experienced a cold panic that he wouldn’t live up to the other man’s standards or expectations. In any capacity.

  If he were being baldly honest with himself, he would even go so far as to wonder if Hamilton had tossed him a bone because of Lanny. It made him hot with humiliation and indignation even to consider that his appointment had been extended out of pity, but he feared such was the case.

  He also wondered where Hamilton was getting his information. He didn’t just know about Marset’s murder and what had happened afterward, but he was well informed of the details. Meaning that he had consulted someone in the local office even before calling Tom. That rankled.

  However, he didn’t want Hamilton to discern his self-doubt, so he affected a confident tone. “I’ve asked those questions myself, sir. They’re unsettling.”

  “To say the least. They imply that this was no mental malfunction, no ordinary shoot-’em-up by some nutcase with personality issues. Which means, Tom, that you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “First order of business, find them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After a pregnant pause the length of an aircraft carrier, Hamilton said a brisk, “I’ll be standing by,” then clicked off.

  Chapter 20

  Following the directions Honor gave him, Coburn drove the stolen car down the narrow dirt lane. It was overgrown with weeds and saplings that knocked against the car’s underside. Forty yards from their destination, he rolled to a stop and stared in dismay at the derelict shrimp boat, then turned his head and looked pointedly at Honor.

  Defensively she asked, “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Yeah. We don’t launch it.”

  He took his foot off the brake and continued on, approaching with caution, although it was virtually impossible that anyone would be lying in wait to ambush them on the hulk. A person would have to be crazy to board the vessel, which seemed about to collapse in on itself at any second.

  “Who does it belong to?” he asked.

  “To me. I inherited it when my dad died.”

  Coburn knew virtually nothing about marine craft of any size, but he’d been in coastal Louisiana long enough to recognize an inshore shrimp trawler. “He shrimped in that thing?”

  “He lived on it.”

  The craft looked about as seaworthy as a broken matchstick. It sat half in, half out of a sluggish channel that Honor claimed eventually fed into the Gulf. But from this vantage point, the waterway looked like a stagnant creek.

  Coburn guessed that the boat hadn’t been afloat for years. Vines had overtaken the hull. The wheelhouse paint, what was left of it, was curled and peeling. Windowpanes that weren’t missing altogether were cracked and so coated with grime they barely resembled glass. The metal frame supporting the butterfly net on the port side was bent practically at a forty-five-degree angle, making it look like the broken wing of a great bird.

  But for all those reasons, it had been abandoned, probably forgotten, and that worked in their favor.

  “Who knows it’s here?” he asked.

  “No one. Dad brought it here to ride out Katrina, then decided to stay. He lived here till he got sick and went downhill fast. I moved him into a hospice house. He was there less than a week when he died.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Only a few months before Eddie’s accident. Which made Eddie’s dying all the more difficult for me.” She smiled ruefully. “But I was glad Dad didn’t live to see me widowed. That would have been very upsetting to him.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Died years before that. That’s when Dad sold the house, moved onto the boat.”

  “Does your father-in-law know it’s here?”

  She shook her head. “Stan didn’t exactly approve of my dad’s way of life, which was rather… bohemian. Stan discouraged visits with him. He especially didn’t like Emily being exposed to him.”

  “Exposed? Bohemianism is contagious?”

  “Stan seemed to think so.”

  “You know,” he said, “the more I hear about this father-in-law of yours, the less I like him.”

  “He’s probably thinking the same of you.”

  “I won’t lose sleep over it.”

  “I’m sure you won’t.” She pushed back her hair and, after a moment of staring at the boat, said, “Stan means well.”

  “Does he?”

  That touched a sore spot. She came around to him quickly. “What business is it of yours?”

  “Right now, it’s my business to know if he’ll look for us on this damn heap.”

  “No.”

  “Thank you.”

  He opened his door and got out. A snake slithered past his boot. He swore under his breath. He wasn’t especially afraid of snakes, but he’d just as soon avoid them.

  He opened the door to the backseat and reached in for Emily, who’d already unbuckled her seat belt and was holding her arms up to him. He lifted her out, then carried her around to the other side and passed her to Honor.

  “Don’t set her down. I saw a…” He stopped himself, then spelled out the word.

  Honor’s eyes went wide with fear as she inspected the ground. “A water moccasin?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  He slipped the pistol from his waistband, but palmed it quickly when Emily turned to him. “Coburn?”

  “What?”

  “Are we still on a ’venture?”

  “I guess you could call it that.”

  “Mommy said.”

  “Then, yeah, we’re on an adventure.”

  “Can we be on it for a long time?” she chirped. “It’s fun.”

  Oh, yeah, this is a blast, he thought as he went ahead of them, cautiously picking his way to the boat. The name of it was barely legible because of the peeling paint, but he could make it out. He gave Honor a significant look from over his shoulder. A look she ignored.

  By design, the sides of the hull were shallow. He stepped aboard easily, but his boot settled into a nest of Spanish moss and other natural debris. His trained eyes looked around for signs that someone had been there recently, but cobwebs and forest detritus were evidence that the deck hadn’t been disturbed for some time, probably not since the day that Honor’s dad had been moved to a hospice house to die.

  Satisfied that they were alone, he kicked aside the clump of moss to clear a spot for Emily when Honor passed her up to him. He set her down on the deck. “Don’t move.”

  “Okay, Coburn, I won’t.”

  Once she’d broken the barrier of using his name, it seemed she welcomed every opportunity to do so.

  He leaned down, extended his hand to Honor, and helped her up and over. Once aboard, she surveyed the littered deck. Coburn noticed a sadness in her expression before she shook it off and said briskly, “This way.”

  She took Emily’s hand and told her to be careful where she stepped, then led them around the wheelhouse to the door, where she halted and looked back at Coburn. “Maybe you should go first.”

  He stepped around her and pushed open the door, which resisted unti
l he put his shoulder to it. The interior of the wheelhouse was in no better condition than the deck. The control panel was covered with a littered tarp that had collected small lakes of scummy rainwater. A tree branch had broken through one of the windows so long ago that a good crop of lichen had had time to grow on its bark.

  Honor surveyed it with evident despondency. But all she said was, “Below,” and pointed to a narrow passage with steps leading down.

  He descended carefully, and had to duck to keep from hitting his head when he squeezed through an oval opening into a low-ceilinged cabin. It smelled of mildew and rot, brine and dead fish, motor oil and marijuana.

  Coburn looked behind him at Honor who was poised on the steps. “He smoked weed?”

  She admitted it with a small shrug.

  “Do you know where he kept his stash?”

  She glared, and he gave her a grin, then turned his attention back to the compact chamber. It had a two-burner propane stove that was ghosted over with cobwebs. The door of the small refrigerator stood open. Empty.

  “Electricity?” Coburn asked.

  “There’s a generator. I don’t know if it still works.”

  Doubtful, Coburn thought. He opened two pantry doors that revealed mouse droppings but otherwise bare shelves. There were two bunks separated by an aisle no more than a foot wide. He pointed to a door at the back of the cabin. “The head?”

  “I don’t recommend it. I didn’t even when Dad lived here.”

  In fact, there was nothing to recommend the boat except that it seemed watertight. The floor was a mess, but it was dry.

  “Can we stay here?” she asked.

  “Hopefully we won’t have to for more than a few hours.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  He went to one of the bunks and peeled back the bare mattress, checking beneath it for varmints. Finding none, he turned to Honor and held his hands out for Emily. Honor handed her over. He deposited her on the mattress.

  She wrinkled her nose. “It smells bad.”

  “Tough,” Coburn said. “Sit there and don’t get down.”