Bait

by Karen Robards

  He shut the door through which they had just entered behind him, and let go of her arm. Maddie stepped a few paces away, then turned to face him. She was hugging Zelda close, too close for the little dog’s liking, in a reflexive attempt to find what comfort she could. Only when Zelda squirmed did she realize that she had the dog in her arms at all. Taking a good grip on the leash, she set Zelda on her feet and straightened, looking at Sam apprehensively.

  He took off his sunglasses. His eyes were as cold and hard as chips of black ice as they met hers. His jaw was unyielding. His face could have been carved from granite.

  She wet her lips.

  “Sam,” she said. To her dismay, she realized that her voice sounded all croaky.

  His eyes flashed at her.

  “A funny thing happened this afternoon,” he began almost conversationally, hooking the sunglasses in the neck of his shirt and folding his arms over his chest. There was a terrible burning anger at the backs of his eyes that stopped her breath. “We ran all the fingerprints that came out of your hotel room in New Orleans through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System a couple of days ago, and the results came back today. There was only one set of flagged prints. They came complete with a picture. The picture was of you. The name that went with it was Leslie Dolan. That ring any bells?”

  She’d known it, of course. Known it from the moment she got a look at his face. Still, his words hit her like a blow to the solar plexus. She hugged her stomach, shivering, feeling bile rising in her throat, as corrosive as acid.

  “Sam,” she said. Her voice was piteous now. She would have been ashamed of the poor, pitiful begging sound of it if she hadn’t been so busy listening to her world shattering into a million tiny pieces around her like a dropped globe of delicate handblown glass.

  “Just to jog your memory, Leslie Dolan was arrested in Baltimore eight years ago and charged with being an accessory after the fact to first-degree murder as well as with money laundering, racketeering, and a whole bunch of other, slightly less impressive charges. She was looking at a sentence of maybe twenty, twenty-five years of hard time. But she never came to trial. Somebody sprung her on bail. Then, a little over a year after she was arrested, Leslie Dolan died.”

  Something about the flatness of his tone coupled with the hard, black glitter of his eyes made her physically ill. If he didn’t stop, she feared she might vomit. She shook her head, took a step back.

  “Are you saying you deny it?” His voice was suddenly sharp, as cutting as his eyes. “Before you do, maybe I should tell you that I didn’t believe it at first. I thought there had to be some mistake, identity theft, something. So I checked into the background of Maddie Fitzgerald. Madeline Elaine Fitzgerald. You, right? And you know what? Nothing checks out. Western Illinois University has no record that a student by that name ever attended. Holloman High School in Winnipeg, Illinois—Maddie Fitzgerald’s high school—has no record that a student by that name ever attended. Parents, John Fitzgerald, dentist, and Elaine Fitzgerald, homemaker, don’t turn up on any records anywhere. Credit agencies, Social Security, the IRS—everywhere we checked came up empty. For the parents always, and for Maddie Fitzgerald, until just about seven years ago. You know what that means?” A deep, high flush had crept up to stain his cheekbones. His voice cracked like a whip at her. “Until seven years ago, Madeline Elaine Fitzgerald—you—didn’t exist.”

  The words echoed around the four walls, bounced off the ceiling. Maddie felt faint. Her head spun. Tears blurred her eyes as she looked at him.

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “You were going to tell me.” The words were heavy as stones.

  “Tonight. I was going to tell you tonight.”

  “You are Leslie Dolan.” It was a statement, not a question.

  She shuddered and nodded.

  He was looking at her as if he wanted to kill her. “No wonder you didn’t want to talk to me. No wonder you didn’t want us protecting you. You were hostile from the beginning—and that’s fucking why.”

  “Last night ...” she began, meaning to explain to him how hearing Carol Walter’s murder had tipped the scales for her, made her see that she couldn’t keep the secret any longer. Meaning to beg him to listen, to try to understand.

  “Last night,” he interrupted, his eyes blazing at her. He took two hasty steps toward her, grabbed her by the arms and hauled her up against him. Her heart hammered. His face was hard with anger. His voice was harsh with it. “Last night. Yeah, let’s talk about last night. What, did you decide to fuck me to soften me up for when I found out?”

  Maddie recoiled as if from a blow.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” she whispered, shaking.

  “A terrible thing to say? You’ve got to be kidding me. A terrible thing to say? Darlin’, as far as I’m concerned, skipping out on your old life to beat an accessory-to-murder charge, creating a whole new identity, living a lie for seven years, and then, when you had to realize you were about to be found out, fucking the fed who was in line to bring you in is a terrible thing to do.”

  “No.” Maddie had to fight for air. “That’s not how it was.”

  “So how was it?” His hands tightened on her arms. His fingers dug into her skin, and for a moment she thought he was going to shake her. “I’m listening. Go on, Leslie Dolan. Tell me how it was.”

  Hearing herself addressed by the name she hadn’t used for seven years tore something inside her. It was as if a lid had been ripped off her emotions, and suddenly everything she’d been bottling up inside for all those years flooded through her: the shame, the fear, the anger, the hatred.

  He was an FBI agent.

  She hated them most of all.

  “You,” she said, glaring up into his eyes, loathing him at that moment. “You. With your badge and your gun and your power. You, with your grandma and your family and your whole white-bread world. What can you possibly know about me?”

  Ripping herself from his hold, she took a step back, stumbled, and nearly fell. He caught her arm, kept her from hitting the floor, pulled her upright again.

  “Let go of me.” Jerking her arm from his grasp, she took a deep breath and stood up, proud and tall. If she was shaking to pieces inside, if part of her was dying inside, she was too wild with anger and fear—and, yes, grief—for what she was losing now and for the girl she had once been to notice. “All right, yes, my name was—is—Leslie Dolan. So now you know. What are you going to do about it? You want to arrest me? Well, I’m right here. You got your woman, Mr. Special Agent. Go ahead and take me in.”

  Fury blazed at her from his eyes as she thrust both hands out at him, close together as if waiting to be handcuffed.

  “You want to cuff me? You can cuff me. You can march me right out of this building and turn me over to whoever the hell it is that arrogant jackasses like you turn people over to, and then you can go on back to your nice, safe life, knowing that you’ve taken a dangerous criminal off the streets.”

  She didn’t realize that the tears that had been stinging her eyes had spilled over until she felt them, wet and hot, running down her cheeks.

  God, she was crying. She hated that she was crying. How pathetic; how weak ...

  Dropping her hands, she turned her back on him and started walking away. She might not be able to stop herself from crying, but she could stop him from watching. He wasn’t Sam any longer, not to her. Sam was gone. In his place was this hard-eyed federal agent who was not ever again going to be able to see past who she had been.

  And now, she realized with a dreadful clarity, who she was once again.

  “Goddamn it to hell and back,” he said, his voice low and harsh.

  He had seen her tears. She could tell it from his tone. A glance over her shoulder showed her that he was standing stock-still where she had left him, staring after her, his face dark with anger, his hands curled into hard fists at his sides. He made an abortive movement, and for a moment she thought he was
going to come after her. But he didn’t. Muttering something under his breath, he swung around and started walking very fast in the opposite direction.

  At least, if she was now a frog, so was her handsome prince.

  She found herself by the open door and leaned against it for a moment, welcoming the heat now as an antidote to the terrible shivering cold that seemed to be creeping through her bones. She felt broken, shattered, raw. Impossible to believe that the world still smelled prosaically of melting asphalt and ozone. Impossible to believe that it was the same bright blazing afternoon that she had left behind when Sam had dragged her into the building. Impossible to believe that there were still lazy tendrils of white clouds floating across the brilliant blue sky and that heat still rose from the macadam and that people still went about their daily lives. For the garbage men, for instance, who were backing their rumbling green truck up to one of the three huge metal Dumpsters that lined this end of the lot, nothing had changed. The factory worker, apparently late to his job, who was hurrying across the pavement, was still going about his business as usual. The driver of the white pickup she could see heading for the exit had no idea that behind him, a life had just ended.

  Her life.

  Tears streamed down her face at the thought.

  Okay, get a grip, she told herself savagely, and scrubbed at her streaming eyes with both hands. As she had already learned many times over in her life, tears didn’t do anything except give you a stuffy nose. The truth was out, and the happy, healthy, hopeful world that she had created as Maddie Fitzgerald had crashed and burned. Those were the facts. She was just going to have to deal with them.

  I could run.

  The thought of her secret garage, of her car and her emergency kit, popped into her head like a shiny, tempting bauble. No one knew about those....

  She was standing in an open doorway at the top of a quartet of narrow concrete steps that led down to the parking lot. If she could get to her car ...

  Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that Sam was clear on the other side of the loading dock. He had stopped pacing, and was standing with his back to her, his head down, his hands locked behind his neck, thinking or cursing or getting a grip on his anger, she had no idea which. He looked tall and dark and handsome, all of those clichés, and for a moment, just a moment more, she let herself grieve the loss.

  Then she looked determinedly toward the future.

  And saw Zelda darting under the wheels of the garbage truck.

  Until that moment, she had forgotten all about her. Now she realized that the leash, which was trailing after Zelda, had also just disappeared beneath the truck. She had no idea when it had dropped from her hand.

  “Zelda!” Maddie cried, horror-stricken, and swarmed down the steps as everything flew out of her head except the need to protect the little dog from her gluttonous self.

  The truck was rumbling as it backed up, the sound loud enough to block out almost everything else. But it was moving very slowly, inch by terrifying inch.

  “Stop!” Maddie raced toward it, waving at the driver, who was looking over his shoulder and didn’t see her. “Zelda!”

  Darting around the cab—she wasn’t quite stupid enough to run behind the thing when it was backing up—she found herself in the narrow, shady space between the truck and the chain-link fence, with its thin line of weedy trees.

  And she saw Zelda. The little dog was trotting out from beneath the huge truck, not inches away from a wheel big enough to turn her into puppy pizza, as if she didn’t have a worry in the world.

  A red McDonald’s fry container was clutched between her teeth.

  “Zelda!” Laughing, crying, almost nauseous with relief and reaction and God knew what else, she swooped down on the runaway, gathering her up in her arms. She was still hugging the dog when, with her peripheral vision, she became aware of a tall, shadowy figure looming behind her.

  “Hello, Leslie,” a man’s voice said in her ear, and in that instant she realized that the unthinkable had happened. Her past had just caught up with her again. And this time it might very well prove fatal.

  She started to whirl, opened her mouth to scream, filled with a mindless, soul-shattering terror.

  She didn’t want to die. ...

  Something slammed hard into the side of her head, and everything went black.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Maddie—for Maddie, she discovered, was how she still thought of herself—came back to awareness slowly, reluctantly, resisting consciousness with every fiber of her being. Consciousness hurt. No, she hurt. Her head felt as though it had been split in two, her hip ached, and her hands and feet felt swollen and numb.

  They felt that way because they were bound, with some kind of thin, smooth rope that had been pulled so tightly that it was cutting into her skin. The realization that she was tied—shades of her dream—made her stomach contract with fear. She was out of the sun, indoors, lying on her side on a hard, cool surface—concrete. A concrete floor. She could smell oil and a musty odor that made her think of damp earth. And ... and some kind of food. Something greasy. The smell of it made her want to heave. If she looked, she would know exactly what it was. But looking struck her as a really bad idea.

  If there was food, there were probably people. And, though she didn’t hear any sounds that would confirm it, she got the sense that she wasn’t alone.

  The good news was that she wasn’t dead. The bad news was that that fact could change at any second.

  For the moment, she preferred to concentrate on the good news.

  She remembered then. Remembered that a man had said her name—her old name—just before something had exploded into the side of her head.

  Oh, God. Have I been shot? Had the hit man ...

  No. If the hit man had found her, she wouldn’t be alive.

  Something cold and wet touched her face. She jerked, unable to control the reaction in time. It was all she could do not to scream.

  Zelda. She knew it even before she heard the telltale snuffling sound, even before she gave in to overwhelming temptation and opened her eyes a slit to find the small, monkeyish face not three inches away from hers. It was Zelda all right, complete with a mustache of goldfish-cracker crumbs, munching away. Maddie realized that she was no longer wearing her jacket—or her bulletproof vest, for that matter—and surmised that Zelda had discovered the jacket somewhere nearby. Except for those items, she was fully dressed in her aqua tank and white pants. She only hoped that whoever had taken off her jacket and vest had done so in some kind of search for, say, a gun.

  The thought of anything else happening while she was unconscious made her skin crawl.

  Zelda was regarding her from behind unblinking black eyes. Her leash still hung from her collar, and her tiny satin bow—pink again, freshly styled by the groomer that morning—was askew. Maddie took what she realized was a ridiculous amount of comfort from the little dog’s presence.

  It was possible that the hit man might be keeping her alive for some nefarious purpose of his own. But would that somehow include Zelda? She didn’t think so.

  The sound of a door opening made Zelda look off to the left. Maddie would have looked, too, except she couldn’t. She was too busy playing unconscious. But she had a funny feeling that the door opening was not a good thing.

  “DiMatteo says we should get her to tell us where the stuff is.” The speaker was male, about medium height, she thought, although it was hard to judge from her position on the floor, heavyset, fortyish, with thinning black hair swept back from his face, small eyes and mouth, big nose, jowls. He was wearing pale gray Sansabelt slacks with a cheap-looking black rayon shirt tucked into it. The shirt was unbuttoned far enough that a thick silver necklace, a deep V of pale skin, and a meager quantity of black chest hair were on view. In other words, too far.

  The hit man? She didn’t know. But her heart was beating very fast.

  She watched through her lashes as he walked across the garage—now that Z
elda had moved on, she could see that she was inside a multicar garage, though only a blue Ford F-150 pickup truck was currently parked in it—toward another man, who was sitting at one end of what looked like a workbench built into the far wall of the garage.

  “So, how do we do that?” the other man asked, chewing. This guy was thin, wiry even, too thin to be the man who had attacked her in New Orleans. He was maybe in his early thirties, with thick black hair and big, loose lips and a receding chin, and he wore a short-sleeved blue shirt. She could only see him from the chest up, because he was seated at the table, so the rest of him remained a mystery.

  The heavy man shrugged. “Torture her, I guess.”

  “You torture her. I’m eating.”

  The heavy man looked around at her. Horrified, she just managed to remember to breathe.

  “Hell’s bells, Fish, why me? I had to carry her in here. She’s no feather, that’s for sure.”

  Maddie would have felt insulted at that if she hadn’t been so scared.

  “Because I’m eating, lunkhead. Can’t you see? Me— eat.” He took a huge bite out of what looked like a fast-food burger.

  “What about me? I’m hungry, too.”

  “Torture her, then eat.”

  “My food’ll be cold.”

  “You can put it in the microwave.”

  “Shit.” Lunkhead sighed. Then he came toward her, and she felt her blood run cold. “If I have to torture her, then you have to shoot the dog. I don’t do nothin’ to dogs.”

  “I don’t know why you brought the damned thing anyway.”

  “Because it was there. Because it was barking. Another couple of minutes, and everybody in the damned factory would have been coming out to see what was going on. Lucky I was able to grab hold of its leash. It would have given us away.” Lunkhead was standing over her now, and Maddie concentrated on emptying her mind of everything, imagined being in a calm, serene place, concentrated on her breathing. In out, in out. Like in her dream.