“Oh, yeah.” Sam had been thinking about that. “I don’t think we could scare this guy off if we tried. If he made us—and he might or might not have, depending on how fast he got out of here and how far away he was—I don’t think it’s going to make any difference. I think he’s going to keep coming after her until either we catch him or she’s dead. Hell, he might even like the idea of trying to kill her right under our noses. He seems to get off on knowing we’re right behind him.”
The thought of just how close Maddie had come to being dead still had the power to weaken his knees. They’d been pulling into the lot when her windows shattered. One second she’d been sitting there behind the wheel of her car, and the next her windows had exploded and she’d fallen out of sight. Christ, he’d thought she was hit. Hit worse than a gash on her shoulder. Hit as in dead.
He didn’t like remembering how that had made him feel. Way worse than it should have, considering Maddie Fitzgerald’s role in his life.
Okay, reality check: She had no role in his life. Except as the object of a surveillance operation.
Never mind that she had silky soft skin and big take-me-to-bed eyes and smelled of—what was it?—strawberries?
His lip curled. Now there was a true romantic for you. Think of a girl, picture food.
“Think we ought to pull her out of here, take her into protective custody or something?” Wynne asked. “That was close. Too close.”
Sam had been thinking about that, too.
“She can’t stay in protective custody forever. Sooner or later, she’ll get cut loose. And unless we’ve caught the bastard by then, he’ll be waiting.”
“Who the fuck is this guy?” Wynne’s frustration showed in the kick he aimed at a rock on the asphalt. His exhaustion showed in the fact that he completely whiffed.
Sam had to smile at the stunned look on Wynne’s face. But something was niggling at the back of his mind, something that if he wasn’t so tired, he thought he might be able to shape into a point of significance. His smile faded.
“The thing is,” he said slowly, “this guy’s not trying to keep what he’s doing a secret. He’s been taking us right with him all along. He wants us to know where he is. Just as long as we stay a step behind.”
Gomez and Hendricks came pushing through the bushes at the back of the parking lot just then, both looking slightly the worse for wear. Gomez had lost the jacket and tie, and his short-sleeved white shirt was untucked and bore several obvious smears of dirt. Hendricks’s tan dress slacks had a rip in the knee, and, Sam saw as he drew closer, the tassels to one of his shiny brown loafers was missing.
“Damn big-ass dog in a backyard about half a block down,” Hendricks said by way of an explanation, seeing where Sam’s gaze focused. “I had to vault the fence.”
“Thing got his pants leg, then his shoe.” Gomez was grinning. “Hey, Hendricks, are you having a bad day or what? First you take a knee to the nuts, then Cujo tries to eat you alive.”
“Shut up, Gomez.”
“Find anything?” Sam asked, before the situation could deteriorate.
They both shook their heads.
“Keep looking.”
Gomez grimaced. Then, at the expression on Sam’s face, he burst into speech. “The thing is, Hendricks and I have been up all night. We need some sleep, bad. From the look of you guys, you do, too.”
Hendricks nodded. “It’s not like there’s anyplace around here we haven’t searched. Anyway, those shots could have come from anywhere. A couple of streets over, even. I can tell you already, we’re not going to find crap.”
Sam frowned. This case ate at him, and he hated to take a break from it, even for a few hours, because time was definitely not on their side. What it had turned into, basically, was a race. If the killer won—and so far he was winning big—somebody died. But Gomez had a point. In order to function at anything approaching maximum efficiency, they needed sleep. They had Maddie safe upstairs. The next clue to the identity of Walter could come at any time, but he didn’t actually expect it before tomorrow at the earliest. That left open this brief window of opportunity where they could sleep, eat, do all the little things ordinarily deemed necessary to human existence.
Like shave.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Get out of here. I’ll call you when I need you. I’ll need the van back ASAP, though.”
“No problem.” Gomez looked at Hendricks. “I’ll drive you to your car, then you can follow me back over here. Then you can take me to my car.”
“I’ll drive you to my car,” Hendricks said. “It’s closer.”
“You could start banging on doors asking the neighbors if they saw anything,” Sam suggested.
Gomez and Hendricks looked at each other.
“We did that,” Hendricks said. “Nobody saw crap.”
Gomez made a face.
“Okay, you drive,” he said to Hendricks, and then they took themselves off with quick see ya’s, clearly afraid that Sam would find something else for them to do if they gave him time to think about it. Minutes later, the van pulled out of the lot.
“So, what’s the plan?” Wynne asked, still beside him.
“You mean we’ve got a plan?” Sam’s voice was dry. His eyes skimmed over the parking lot. Maddie’s Camry, shattered windows and all, remained where she had parked it, not far from where they were standing. Other than that, the lot was empty.
“We were going to stay undercover and keep Ms. Hot Bod under surveillance,” Wynne prompted him. Sam was getting used to the sound of gum smacking in his ear now. He was even starting to find it kind of soothing.
Not.
“Ye-a-ah.” Sam drew it out. Gomez had started referring to Maddie as Ms. Hot Bod after the full-body wrestling match he had engaged in with her in the airport parking lot. Wynne and Hendricks had picked it up, much to Gardner’s loudly expressed disgust. Sam didn’t doubt that Maddie would have a problem with it, too, if she ever heard it, but, hey, the truth was, it was apt. “I’d have to say that under the circumstances, that’s no longer operational.”
“Since she made us,” Wynne said.
“Exactly.”
“So?”
“So we forget the undercover bit and just keep her under surveillance.”
Wynne stopped chewing and looked at him. “How do we do that? She knows we’re here.”
“We enlist her cooperation,” Sam said.
“Oh, boy. Yeah. Like she’s going to go for that.”
“So we persuade her,” Sam said, and turned toward the house.
THIRTEEN
Gardner opened the door to Sam’s knock. Having snatched a couple hours of sleep on the plane, she was looking marginally less bleary-eyed than either he or Wynne. That didn’t mean that she was looking good, however. Her bottle-brush hairdo was flat on one side, and the only makeup she seemed to have left had morphed into black smudges under both eyes. She had traded her black skirt for snug, black pants before they had boarded the plane, and with them she was wearing a clingy black T-shirt. Tucked in. With what looked like the same wide black belt as before cinched around her waist. Combined with the double D’s and the J.Lo butt, the outfit made her look hot. And hungry.
Like a woman on the hunt.
She smiled at him, which sent a warning chill racing down Sam’s spine. He’d found himself in dangerous situations often enough to recognize them when they occurred. And this was definitely one.
“Yo,” he said. “Everything okay?”
“Just peachy keen.” Her smile widened as she pushed the door wide.
Finding himself caught squarely in the crosshairs, Sam’s instinct for self-preservation kicked into high gear. To save himself, he offered up a sacrifice: He took a step back and pushed Wynne through the door ahead of him. Wynne looked at Gardner as she closed and locked the door. Sam looked around the apartment.
His initial impression was that it was cheerful. Homey, even. The walls of the room he was in, the living room, wer
e a soft, bright yellow. The floors were hardwood. The huge couch that dominated one whole wall was—he didn’t want to call it pink; call it, rather, the color of raspberries. Two armchairs, one green, one flowery, were drawn up on either side of the couch. There was a rug, a couple of tables and lamps, a coffee table. A TV. A trio of big windows directly opposite the door looked out into a vista of leafy tree branches. Sniper city? The branches he could see all looked like they might hold about ten pounds max, so not unless the sniper was a squirrel. Just to double-check, Sam crossed to the window and looked out, evaluating the risk. He could see down into about a dozen tiny backyards, all separated into grids by a myriad of fences. About four fences over, a big black dog snoozed on its side in the grass. Even from this distance it looked about the size of a small pony, and, remembering Hendricks, Sam grinned: He was pretty sure he was looking at Cujo. The upper stories of neighboring houses were obscured by the leafy foliage of big old oaks and maples, with the occasional elm and chestnut-trunked birch thrown in. Good. Nobody was going to be shooting through the windows from nearby roofs. Relaxing slightly, he turned to survey the rest of the apartment. To his right he could see part of a kitchen. To his left, a pair of closed doors.
“So where is she?” he asked Gardner when his visual sweep turned up no sign of Maddie.
“Taking a shower. We all should be so lucky.” Gardner had dropped into a corner of the couch while Sam had been looking out the window. Her legs were crossed and she had twisted herself into a position that he suspected was calculated to show off her eye-popping figure. Now she nodded at the closed door on the left to indicate where Maddie could be found, then let her head drop back to rest on the high, rolled back of the couch. Sam immediately realized exactly how half of her hairdo had ended up flat. “Come sit down. I think this is where we do that thing called hurry up and wait.”
Gardner made shameless eyes at him from beneath half-closed lids, and patted the couch beside her invitingly. Wynne frowned, while Sam caught himself leaning backward just a little, probably an instinctive result of his determination to stay well out of harm’s way.
“You checked the bathroom out before she went in there, didn’t you?” Sam asked, ignoring Gardner’s gesture in favor of walking toward the closed door. Beyond it, very faintly, he could hear the sound of water running.
Gardner gave him a look that said yes, she definitely had. For his part, Wynne headed toward the couch, then veered off at the last minute and lowered himself into the green armchair. Lips thinning in exasperation, Sam had to fight the urge to walk over and smack him upside the head.
Faint heart never won fair lady, you big wimp. Sit on the couch.
“So, what’s the plan?” Gardner asked, just as Wynne had minutes before.
“Same plan.” Restless, Sam prowled toward the kitchen. “We keep watching Miz Fitzgerald until we catch our UNSUB.”
The kitchen was old-fashioned, with white Formica countertops and tall wood cabinets and a gold-speckled linoleum floor. The refrigerator and stove were white, freestanding rather than built-in. There was a stainless-steel sink in front of another window. As he glanced out, he saw that the squirrel thing applied to this one, too. A rectangular oak table with four chairs occupied the center of the room. On the counter beside the sink, a draining board held a single white cereal bowl.
Looking at it, Sam wasn’t all that surprised to feel his stomach rumble. Jesus, how long had it been since he’d eaten? He tried to remember. Not today. Yesterday. Fast food in the hotel room. If he was lucky, sometime today he might snag more of the same.
Yum.
The only area of concern was a rear door. Sam crossed to it, looked out the multipaned window in the upper half, then opened it and stepped out into the muggy morning. He found himself on a small wooden stoop, which was connected by three zigzagging flights of open wooden steps to the ground. Clearly a do-it-yourselfer’s version of a fire escape, probably added when the house was converted to apartments. He checked the lock—it was a deadbolt, but flimsy—and made a mental note to do what he could to make the rear entrance more secure. Pronto.
Retracing his steps, he returned to the living room and found Wynne watching Gardner, who had cut her eyes toward him as soon as he had reentered the room. With an inward roll of his eyes, Sam gave up on the whole match-making thing and started pacing again.
What the hell was she doing in there?
“Okay. We need sleep, we need food. We also need to keep Miz Fitzgerald under a twenty-four-hour watch. Which means for the time being we’ll be taking shifts.” He glanced at Gardner. She smiled at him. Christ. “I assume you’ve got the computer working on locating possible targets?”
“Oh, yeah. By now we probably have a database of about a hundred thousand people with Walter for a first or last name in the cities the computer deems most likely to be the location for the next killing. Without anything more specific than a single name to go on, though, it’s pretty useless. Take our girl in there, for example. She didn’t even live in New Orleans, so her name didn’t come up on any of the searches I ran. Neither did the dead one’s, for that matter.”
Get her focused on work and she turns totally professional. Go figure.
“Yeah.” Sam was already well acquainted with the ways in which their attempts to locate the next victim could get screwed up before the sick bastard did his thing again. And just to complicate matters more, now that his plans had been thrown off by Maddie’s survival, the parameters of the game might well have changed. They could no longer take anything for granted.
Except, Sam was almost certain, that he’d be coming after Maddie again.
“You’re something with that computer,” Wynne said admiringly to Gardner.
“Thanks.” She smiled at him, and Sam watched with fascination as a flush the color of Maddie’s couch started to creep over Wynne’s face.
Jesus. The perils of being blond.
“Right,” he said by way of a distraction. “First thing is, we need to establish a base here. There’s bound to be a hotel somewhere nearby. Next ...”
He outlined the way he expected the next few days to play out. By the time he finished, the atmosphere was strictly business all around. Also, he’d circled the room about ten times, and there was still no sign of Maddie.
Pausing outside the closed bathroom door, he frowned at it. What the hell was she doing in there?
“Why don’t I take the first shift with her? At least I got a couple hours of sleep on the plane,” Gardner suggested. “And I have trouble sleeping during the day anyway. You guys go on, get us a hotel, get some sleep.”
Sam nodded absently. It was a good suggestion. He didn’t expect another attack to come today; the UNSUB was as human as the rest of them, and if he was the shooter—and Sam was fairly positive that he was—he had to be suffering from lack of sleep, too. He seemed to like to work under cover of darkness, and by the time night fell again, Sam had every intention of being personally back on the job. But he didn’t say any of that. Instead, he was concentrating on the sounds he could hear beyond the closed door.
Water still running? Yes, but something else, too.
His brows snapped together. Was she talking to someone?
He glanced sharply at Gardner.
“She have a pet or anything?”
“Not that I saw. Why?”
“She’s talking to someone.” Could the UNSUB somehow have gotten into the bathroom with her? Sam could feel his muscles tensing even as he rejected the thought as unlikely.
Unlikely, but not impossible.
He rapped sharply on the door.
Just like that, she shut up.
“Miz Fitzgerald?” He banged again. He didn’t know why, exactly, but he was getting the feeling that something about the situation wasn’t quite right. “Could you open the door, please?”
He could no longer hear water running. Just as he registered that, the door opened a few inches. Sam found himself looking down into n
arrowed honey-colored eyes. With straight black brows furrowed into a V above them.
Even frowning at him, she was pretty, he registered against his will. Tired-looking. Pale as paper. Face marred by a faint, blue-tinged bruise angling across her left cheekbone. But still very, very pretty.
The last time he’d looked down into those eyes, they’d been big and scared. Now she just looked annoyed.
“Did you want something?” she asked.
Sam had expected her to be all damp and dewy, maybe wrapped in a bath towel and showing more skin than it was probably good for him to see. And she was, indeed, wrapped in a bath towel, a fluffy blue one. And she was, indeed, showing some skin. The towel fit snugly up under her armpits and was tucked in between her breasts, he saw as his gaze swept her. He could see a nice amount of cleavage, her bare shoulders, and the neat white bandage on her back the paramedics had left her with. Below the towel, which ended at approximately mid-thigh, her legs were long and slender and shapely. They were, as he had noticed before, great legs.
The thing was, though, she wasn’t all damp and dewy. In fact, she was dry as a bone. Her hair still hung in tangles around her face. There was a faint smear of blood on her jaw, and another down her arm where the paramedics hadn’t quite gotten her all cleaned up. She’d traded her bloody clothes for the towel, but otherwise, as far as he could tell, nothing about her except her expression had changed a lick from when he had last set eyes on her.
In other words, she hadn’t been taking a shower.
“What on earth have you been doing in there?” Surprise probably rendered him something less than diplomatic. She’d been in the bathroom a good twenty minutes that he knew of, with the water running the entire time. And she wasn’t even wet.
Maybe she’d been answering nature’s call? He toyed with the idea, rejected it. Not for that long.
She smiled way too sweetly at him. Oh, God, the attitude was back.
“Maybe you want to tell me how that’s any of your business?”
He remembered then why he’d banged on the door in the first place. “Were you talking to someone?”
Bait Page 17