Bait

by Karen Robards

  The first shot echoed through the phone, through his head, through his soul.

  “No!” Sam yelled again, and then, his voice shaking, “You sick fuck, we’re going to get you. We’re going to ...”

  Bang.

  The second shot rang out, stopping Sam in full spiel. Insurance, of course. The woman was already dead. He knew it, but he still felt that shot like a body blow. His heart slammed against his rib cage. Sweat streamed out of his pores.

  “Now you’re playing again.” The bastard was back on the line, sounding delighted. “That’s good. I’m in Dallas, by the way. 4214 Holmsby Court. And once again, you’re too late.”

  Keep him talking. The computers—and Gardner—were hearing this, too, and the cops would be on the way.

  “I didn’t know we were playing a game,” Sam said, trying to clamp down on every emotion except the need to catch a killer. It required the effort of a lifetime to sound cool, sound dispassionate.

  “Now you do. And now that I’m having so much fun, I’m going to up the ante even more. Next time, I might even let you watch.”

  “Next time ...” Sam began. He was interrupted.

  “Here’s your first clue. Where in the world is—Kerry?”

  Sam thought he could hear, very distantly, the sound of sirens coming over the phone. Keep him talking.

  “I don’t ...”

  Definitely sirens. The cavalry was on the way. Just keep him talking. . . .

  “Better hurry, asshole.”

  There was a click, and suddenly Sam found himself talking to air.

  “Shit,” Sam said, feeling as if he were bleeding inside. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  He looked up and saw that Maddie was staring at him. She was sitting up now in the middle of the bed, her eyes wide as saucers, her mouth open, her skin paper-white. The covers were clamped under her armpits, and the dog was huddled against her legs. She’d heard everything, it was clear. Probably she’d been traumatized for life.

  But he couldn’t worry about that now.

  “Sam ...” she said in a thin, high voice. “Who ...?”

  “Wait.” He was already punching numbers into the phone. “One minute.”

  Gardner answered, sounding wide-awake despite the fact—he glanced at the clock—that it was 3:28 a.m. Probably she’d been goosed by adrenaline, too.

  “Did you get that?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, rock-steady as always. “The cops should be pulling into the driveway of 4214 Holmsby Court any minute now.”

  Too late, Sam thought. Too fucking late. Snapping the phone shut, he nearly crushed it in his fist.

  Then he looked at Maddie and thought, That could have been you. At the image that thought conjured up, he felt as if all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. It required real physical effort on his part to force himself to breathe.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I’m in mourning, Maddie thought.

  That was the only way to describe how she felt as she basically sleepwalked through the following day. Listening to that poor woman being murdered last night had been a horror almost past bearing. She’d been up the rest of the night, unable to sleep, unable to get the sounds and the terrible images they had conjured up out of her mind. It was almost as if she’d been there and seen what had happened—and she knew why. She had been there, once upon a time. She had seen what had happened. Seven years ago ...

  Then it had occurred to her with a rush of icy fear that she had almost shared Carol Walter’s fate in that hotel room in New Orleans. That was the death her attacker had planned for her.

  Still had planned for her.

  At that realization, Maddie had broken into a cold sweat.

  Seeing her fear, Sam had pulled her into his arms and buried his face in her hair and sworn to her that whatever happened, he would keep her safe. And then he’d kissed her, a deep, fierce kiss, before putting her away from him and getting to work.

  Curled in a corner of the couch, she’d watched him pacing restlessly through her small apartment, tracking the progress of the investigation over the phone. She’d been forcibly reminded that he was an FBI agent, and it hadn’t mattered. He was, simply, Sam to her now. He had assumed a veneer of hard professionalism. She had seen through it, though. Seen his guilt. Seen his pain.

  Just like he had seen her fear.

  It had been then, as they waited for Wynne, who had immediately rushed over to babysit her while Sam headed for their hotel to take long-distance charge of the frenzied hunt for the killer, that Sam had told her the whole thing, in quick bits and pieces interspersed between phone calls. Maddie had listened, appalled, to the story of how he had chased the killer across the country, of the phoned-in clues and the rising body count and the constant race to save yet another life. And by the time he had finished, she had realized something: She was going to have to tell Sam the truth.

  She didn’t know who the killer was, but she knew where to start looking. With seven people already dead and another life on the line, the price of keeping her secret had suddenly grown too high.

  She’d almost told him last night. The words had trembled on the tip of her tongue as they had waited for Wynne. But then she’d looked at Sam, and the truth had stuck in her throat. She was crazy about him—no, face it, she was crazy in love with him—and what she was going to tell him would blow this shiny, new, wonderful thing between them sky-high.

  Imagining how Sam would look at her once he knew made her feel like she was shriveling up and dying inside.

  And there was Creative Partners, too. And Jon and Louise and Judy and Herb and Ana. The Brehmer account. Her apartment. Her life.

  If she told the truth, it was gone, all of it. The clock would strike midnight. Her fancy coach would turn back into a pumpkin. Her glittering gown would revert to rags. As for her handsome prince—well, he would stay a handsome prince.

  She was the one who would be turning into a frog.

  “WHAT THE HELL are you still doing in St. Louis?” Smolski bellowed over the phone. “You’re supposed to be in charge of this investigation, so get your ass down to Dallas and take charge of it.”

  “I’m staying put,” Sam said. It was shortly after three p.m. He and Gardner were in the hotel room that served as their base of operations. The curtains were open, and they had a prime view of brilliant blue sky, busy interstate, and the nearly empty parking lot two floors below. The air conditioner hummed, working hard. The files he’d been reviewing when the phone rang—the most recent of the cases he’d been working on—were spread out across the bed. Gardner was seated at the desk, working at her laptop. A printer attached to another laptop across the room was spewing out pages of composite photos based on witness descriptions of suspicious persons observed in the vicinity of last night’s crime scene. Unfortunately, the witness descriptions were all over the map, and so far none of the resulting photos matched composites from the previous crime scenes, making it unlikely that anyone who’d been interviewed so far had seen the actual killer.

  “What do you mean, you’re staying put? You got any dead bodies in St. Louis? Hell, no. The dead body’s in Dallas. What you got in St. Louis is a piece of ass.”

  “He’s going to come for her. I mean to be here when he does.”

  Smolski grunted and said, “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m as sure of it as it’s possible to be.”

  “What about this new target, huh? Whosit—what’d you say the name was?”

  “Kerry.”

  “What about Kerry, huh?”

  “We’re working on it here, and we’ve got people out doing legwork in every likely city, trying to come up with an ID. Just like we got people doing legwork in Dallas on last night’s homicide.”

  “But you think the best thing you and your team can do is stick with that hot little St. Louis gal.” There was no mistaking the sarcasm in Smolski’s tone.

  Sam kept his voice steady. “Yeah, that’s what I think.”


  “What if I ordered you to get your ass down to Dallas?”

  Sam grimaced. Knowing Smolski as he did, he had been expecting this. “Then I’d have to decline. Respectfully.”

  Smolski grunted. “Respectfully, my ass.” A beat passed. “Like I said before, your case, your call. But McCabe—”

  “Yeah?”

  “If we don’t get the UNSUB pretty shortly, it’s your ass.”

  With that, he hung up.

  “Shit,” Sam said, and turned back to see what Gardner was doing. Her fingers had stopped moving over the keyboard. She was staring at her computer screen, seemingly transfixed.

  “Something up?” he asked, his attention caught, and moved over to stand behind her. Looking at the images glowing up at him from her screen, he realized she’d just come up with a fingerprint match.

  “You are not going to believe this,” she said in a strangled voice. And she pointed at a way too familiar picture on the screen.

  “COME ON, ZELDA,” Maddie said dispiritedly, trying to hurry Zelda across the parking lot and inside the Brehmer’s Pet Food factory. The QuikStop where she had gotten gas was just visible to her left through the tall chain-link fence. To her right, the interstate overpass blocked her view of the corner where she’d seen the hooker at work. The drone of traffic rushing past on the expressway provided background noise to the nearer sound of cars cruising through the lot, looking for a place to park. The white gate at the entrance gave a dull thud each time it was raised or lowered to allow a vehicle to pass through. It was getting on toward five, and she was supposed to meet Susan and Jon, who’d been checking out various interior locations in the plant as possible spots for the soon-to-be-filmed commercials featuring Zelda, in the manager’s office at five, at which time she would hand over the poky pooch to her rightful guardian. Thank goodness. Not that Zelda wasn’t being reasonably well behaved, because she was. At the groomers, at the photo shoot, at lunch, at the office—everywhere they’d been that day, Zelda had been as little trouble as anyone could expect an animal she’d had to take everywhere with her and pamper like a doggy diva-to-be. Of course, some of Zelda’s good behavior could be thanks to the supply of snacks Maddie had armed herself with. Right now, the pocket of her aqua linen jacket was half-full of goldfish crackers, which she’d been dispensing judiciously throughout the car ride from her office to the plant. Unfortunately, since Zelda had already consumed a large quantity of pretzels, bagel bits, and french fries (Maddie had decided against giving her any more candy after Louise had told her that chocolate was bad for dogs), she’d had some gastric issues over the course of the afternoon.

  All in all, though, Maddie considered noxious gas and near-hourly dumps a small price to pay for relative peace.

  And as far as she was concerned, the problem would soon be resolved, because it would soon be Susan’s.

  Meanwhile, the air smelled of car exhaust and melting asphalt, the heat was tropical and intense, and the sun blazed in the endless blue sky, although just at that moment the shadow of the building in front of her sheltered her from the worst of its rays. The parking lot was filled to overflowing with cars, as another shift arrived to replace the workers who would soon be going home. As soon as she handed Zelda over to Susan, she would be heading home, too. According to Wynne, who was trailing at a more or less discreet distance behind her, Sam would meet them at her apartment to take over for him.

  The prospect made Maddie nauseous.

  The moment of truth was speeding toward her on winged feet.

  The sad thing was, for one brief shining moment last night, she’d taken a look around her bedroom and realized that she finally had everything she’d ever wanted: an unbelievably sexy man, a cute little dog, and a successful, respectable life.

  Too bad none of it was hers to keep.

  “You can’t stop and sniff everything,” Maddie told Zelda with exasperation, tugging on the leash as the little dog, trailing behind, stopped in her tracks yet again, then took a detour beneath the bumper of a small red pickup. She emerged moments later, looking pleased with herself as she chomped on what looked like the remains of a burrito.

  “Zelda, no!”

  But it was too late. The burrito was gone. Zelda licked her lips, looked at Maddie with shining black eyes, and wagged her tail. Then she gave an unmistakable belch.

  “Oh, Zelda.”

  “Dog must be part goat,” Wynne said, coming up behind her.

  She glanced around at him. He was wearing a bright blue Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and a baseball cap in what she assumed was an effort to look like something other than the FBI agent he was. He succeeded in that, but he did not succeed in being inconspicuous. In St. Louis, giant blond cherubs were pretty thin on the ground.

  “She’s been kept on a strict diet,” Maddie said excusingly, and dredged up a smile. The thing was, just looking at Wynne made her stomach twist. Soon he was going to know the truth. Ridiculous as it seemed, over the course of the last few days she had come to consider him a friend. She’d be losing that, too.

  The list of losses she was getting ready to suffer was growing so long that she could hardly bear to think about it.

  “Think you two could move it along here?” Wynne asked as he walked past her. “Remember, the objective is to get inside the building as fast as you can.”

  He stopped about three cars up from her, propped his sneaker on a bumper, and made a business out of tying his shoe. He was trying to pretend that he wasn’t with her, that they were strangers exchanging casual conversation in a parking lot, Maddie knew. Gomez and Hendricks were present, too, watching from the van, which they had parked not far from her car. The entire exercise seemed pretty pointless, however. Unless the hit man did his thing within the next half-hour or so, he was out of luck. She was going to be sounding the death knell on this little travesty herself.

  “Come on, Zelda.”

  Sniffing around the truck for a second course, Zelda ignored her. Maddie tugged at the leash, sighed, and faced the truth: Unless she was prepared to drag Zelda across the parking lot, they were basically going nowhere fast. It was too hot to be covered in dog hair, especially given the fact that she was zipped up from neck to hips in a bulletproof vest, and her jacket and matching tank and white linen pants had just come back from the cleaners, but there was no help for it if she wanted to get inside the factory anytime soon. She bent to scoop the animal up. So far today, Zelda had shown no inclination to bite the hand that fed her, and with that in mind, Maddie held another goldfish cracker in front of the dog’s flat little face as she headed toward the plant.

  Zelda gobbled it up, and rewarded her with a lick on the wrist.

  “I know the way to your heart,” Maddie said sourly. She had almost reached the gray metal door set into the side of the building marked Office when she heard Wynne, who was once again some small distance behind her, speak.

  “Yo, what are you two doing here?” he said, sounding surprised.

  “Gardner’ll fill you in.” It was Sam’s voice, and its tone was grim.

  Maddie turned so fast that her jacket swirled. Despite everything, a smile trembled on her lips.

  Sure enough, it was Sam. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a white polo shirt that hugged his broad shoulders and wide chest and made his hair look as black as the melting asphalt and his skin mouthwateringly tan. He was in his dark-and-dangerous mode, with a hint of stubble, no trace of a smile, and a pair of Ray-Bans wrapped around his eyes to shield them from the sun. He was closing the distance between them fast, his tall, powerful body cutting like a knife through the shimmering veil of heat that rose from the pavement. Her eyes flicked beyond him to Cynthia, who was dressed in a black T-shirt and slacks and had a hand on Wynne’s arm. She was saying something to Wynne, and he was frowning down at her.

  Then she looked at Sam again, and her heart lurched. There was something about the way he moved....

  Her smile died.

  “Sam?”
As he reached her, she looked up at him uncertainly. His jaw was hard and set. His mouth was a thin, straight line. His head tilted toward her, and she thought he was looking at her, though it was impossible to be sure with the sunglasses hiding his eyes.

  “We need to talk,” he said. Taking hold of her arm, he turned her about and took her with him into the building. There was nothing remotely gentle in his grip. Where before she had been almost suffocatingly hot, now she felt suddenly very cold. It was possible that this was because she’d just stepped out of the sun and into an air-conditioned building, but she didn’t think so.

  “What—what is it?” Her heart was beating very fast. His fingers holding her were like iron. She glanced up at him as he hustled her down the hall past the manager’s office, where Jon and Susan were probably already waiting. The harsh fluorescent lighting in the narrow hall hid nothing. She could see the whiteness at the corners of his mouth, see the tension in his face, see the muscles bunched in his jaw.

  This was bad.

  Her breathing quickened. Little curls of panic twisted in her stomach. She could feel a hard knot of dread tightening beneath her breastbone.

  “Sam ...” She tried again, fighting for a measure of calm, looking up at him almost pleadingly.

  “Wait till we get somewhere private.” The words were clipped, the tone harsh.

  Maddie despaired. He knew. She knew he did. There was no other explanation for his behavior. She’d just found him, just fallen in love with him, and now he knew and was lost to her forever.

  She said nothing more as he pushed open one door after another and marched her along a series of hallways. She wasn’t even surprised that he seemed to know exactly where he was going. Of course he knew the layout of the plant, knew where to find privacy in a factory teeming with people. He would have checked. He would have found out before coming. He was an FBI agent, after all.

  It was the FBI agent whose hand was wrapped around her arm.

  Maddie realized that she was shivering as he pushed open one last door and she stepped through it to discover that they were at the very back of the building, in a high-ceilinged, metal-walled, cement-floored space that she guessed, from the tractor-trailer-sized garage doors, was the loading dock. It was the size of a small warehouse, and sunlight filtered in through grimy little windows set high up in the walls. The huge overhead doors were closed, but a smaller, ordinary-size door was propped open in the corner to her right. Dust motes hung in the air, and the place smelled, vaguely, of beef.