Who, he was surprised and yet not surprised to see, was Leonard Smolski. He and Gardner had listened to every word the bastard had said from the time the cell phone had been activated. They hadn’t recognized his voice—the technology he’d used to disguise it had held up—but some of the things he’d said, plus the information that Smolski had worked in the Baltimore field office during the time in question, which had come in over Cynthia’s cell phone as they had driven in hot pursuit of their suspect, had made the discovery much less of a shock than it would have been.
“Sam,” Maddie said in a voice like a sob when she saw that he was there, and wrapped her arms around him. He did a quick check to make sure that she was in one piece, then gathered her up in his arms and buried his face in her hair and held her until they both stopped shaking.
EPILOGUE
Friday, August 22
Maddie hurried into the small private terminal at St. Louis airport at shortly before five p.m. Jon had called her an hour before to tell her that Susan Allen had gotten an urgent call and was returning to New Orleans.
As Creative Partners’ owner, she wanted to see Susan—and Zelda—off.
The last day and a half had been hectic. Sam had had to fly back to Virginia to wrap things up, although he was scheduled to return today. She would be picking him up after seeing Susan off. He’d called last night to tell her that, among other things, the strongbox had been found. The key to locating it was an address her father had scrawled on the back of a business card and told her to keep. She’d snatched it, Fudgie, and a few necessities from their apartment before running, then sewn it, along with a last few relics of her life as Leslie Dolan—the watch her father had given her, her senior-class ring—into Fudgie’s stuffing. The strongbox had been just where Charles Dolan had left it, and in it had been enough evidence to put all kinds of bad guys away for a long time—and to completely clear her name. Charles Dolan had recorded Ken Welsh—Smolski—talking about the charges that had been filed against his daughter, and had asked him point-blank if it bothered him that they were bogus. And Smolski had laughed and said not at all.
Maddie spotted Jon and Susan and Zelda across the plush beige waiting room before she was anywhere near them. Not that they were hard to spot. Zelda, confined to her carrier, was once again giving vent to her inner wolf.
Everyone in the terminal was staring. The gate attendants were hovering around helplessly. Jon was trying to comfort Susan, who looked on the verge of an apoplexy.
And no one was feeding Zelda.
Maddie rolled her eyes.
“Does anyone have any food?” she asked over the din.
Jon fished in his pocket and produced a mint. Maddie snatched it, unwrapped it, and popped it through the grate. The howling stopped instantly, and Maddie heard the familiar snuffle.
Her heart gave a little pang. She was actually going to miss Zelda.
“You like her, don’t you?” Susan asked, looking at Maddie intently. The gate attendant was opening the door that led out to Brehmer’s plane.
“I adore her,” Maddie said, and realized that she wasn’t being insincere at all.
“Then keep her.”
“Keep Zelda?” Maddie asked, wondering if Susan had lost her mind.
“That isn’t Zelda,” Susan said with a sniff, and Maddie’s jaw dropped. “That is a dog I picked up from a Pekingese rescue organization in New Orleans. She’s had three different families and nobody’s ever kept her and I can see why.”
She shot a venomous look at the crate, from which ominous snuffling sounds were emerging.
“Do you have another mint?” Maddie asked Jon urgently. Jon obliged, and Maddie pacified Zelda.
“What happened to the real Zelda?” Jon asked, looking as floored as she felt.
“She got away from the groomers,” Susan said. “They’re friends of mine, and we’ve all been searching frantically for her for the past three weeks. We even hired pet detectives. I didn’t dare tell Mrs. B., of course.” Susan shuddered. “But I got a call this morning: They found her. Thank God. So I can go home.”
“You can go home?” Maddie asked.
“I only brought Zelda—no, not Zelda, that dog—here on such short notice because I was afraid Mrs. B. was starting to suspect. And don’t worry, it won’t affect your having our advertising account at all. Just consider this a dry run.”
Maddie knew her mouth must be hanging open, because Jon’s was.
“Miss,” the gate attendant said, “are you ready to go?”
“Yes,” Susan said. “I’m leaving.” She looked at Maddie. “Do you want her or not? I can always take her back to the rescue society if you don’t. Although I hate to fly with her again.”
She gave a shudder.
Zelda was snuffling.
“Mint,” Maddie said urgently to Jon, who complied. She popped one in to Zelda, and suddenly knew that there was nothing in the whole world she would like better than to keep her.
“I’d love to have Zelda,” Maddie said.
“That is not Zelda.” Susan turned to go. “I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with the real Zelda.”
“Are you nuts?” Jon said when Susan had gone and they were exiting the terminal. Since he was now out of mints, Zelda had once again started to howl. “That dog is a monster.”
“No she isn’t.” Maddie set the carrier on the pavement and carefully opened the grate. The dog bounded out, silenced by the prospect of freedom, and Maddie grabbed the end of her leash just in time. Then she reeled her in, picked her up, and looked her in her bulbous black eyes.
“You’re mine,” she said. “And just for the record, you’ll always be Zelda to me.”
Then, walking across the pavement toward her, she saw Sam. He was dressed in a jacket and tie, and looked so handsome that she caught her breath. He looked up and smiled when he saw her, and Maddie felt her heart skip a beat.
Then it occurred to her: She finally had everything she’d always wanted.
A man. A dog. And her life back.
For keeps.
Read on for a gripping
preview of Karen Robards’s
next novel of suspense,
SUPERSTITION
Available in April 2005
from G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Get away from me! Oh, God, somebody help me!” Tara Mitchell screamed, glancing over her shoulder as she fled through the dark house, her widened eyes seeking the blurry figure of the man chasing her.
She was slim. Tanned. Blonde. Seventeen years old. Blue jeans, T-shirt and long, straight hair: In other words, she pretty much had the average-American-teen thing going on. If it hadn’t been for the terror contorting her face, she would have been more attractive than most. Beautiful, even.
“Lauren! Becky! Where are you?” Her cry was shrill with fear. It echoed off the walls, hung shivering in the air. No answer—except for a grunt from her pursuer. He was closing in on her now, narrowing the gap between them as she fled across the living room, the knife in his hand glinting ominously in the moonlight that filtered in through the sheer curtains that covered the French doors at the far end of the room. Tara reached the doors and yanked frantically at the handle. Nothing happened. They were locked.
“Help!” Glancing desperately behind her, she clawed at the dead bolt, her nails scraping audibly over the wood surrounding it. “Somebody help me!”
The doors didn’t budge. Giving up, Tara whirled. Her face looked ashen in the gloom. A dark stain—blood?—spread like a slowly opening flower across the pale sleeve of her T-shirt. Her back flattened against the French doors as her eyes fixed fearfully on the man stalking her. He was no longer running. Instead, having cornered his prey, he was slowly closing in on her. The sharp pant of her breathing turned loud and harsh as she seemed to realize that she was out of options. Besides the locked doors at her back, the only way out of that room was through the pocket doors that led into the hall—the doors through which she had run moment
s earlier. They were ajar, admitting just enough light from some distant part of the house to enable her to see the outline of shapes—and to backlight her pursuer.
Big and menacing, he stood between her and the door. It was obvious to the most casual observer that she had no chance of getting past him. He clearly realized it, too, and savored the knowledge that he had her trapped. Murmuring under his breath, the words not quite audible, he talked to her. The knife waved slowly back and forth in front of him as if to leave her no doubt about what was coming.
For the space of a couple heartbeats, her fear shimmered almost tangibly between them. Then Tara broke. Screaming, she bolted for the door, trying to dodge the man. He was too fast for her, jumping toward her, blocking her exit, catching her. His hand clamped around her arm, yanking her toward him. She screamed again, the sound an explosion of terror and despair.
The knife rose, sliced down ...
Watching from the couch, where he had come bolt upright after having been wakened by who-knew-what from what must have been his third involuntary catnap of the day, Joe Franconi broke out in a cold sweat.
“Like I told you before, pal, you’re losing it,” Brian Sawyer observed wryly from behind him. Brian was thirty-five years old, six feet tall, blond, and good looking. He was also dead. That being the case, Joe ignored his comment in favor of listening to the TV reporter, who was now alone on the screen. Violence, even televised violence, was no longer his thing. True crime might be the TV flavor of the month, but to someone like himself, who had seen way more than his fair share of crime in real life, it didn’t qualify as entertainment. Didn’t even come close.
So why was he still watching?
Good question.
Was it the reporter? She was maybe in her mid-twenties, a slim, good-looking redhead with big brown eyes and a cool, matter-of-fact manner. High cheekbones. Porcelain skin. Full, pouty red lips. Okay, she was hot. In his previous life, though, he’d never once felt the slightest stirring of interest in a talking head, no matter how attractive, and after considering the matter, he was glad to realize that his apathy toward media types remained unchanged.
It wasn’t the reporter. But there was something—something ...
Trying to figure out what that something was, Joe frowned and focused on what she was saying.
“Fifteen years ago this month, seventeen-year-old Tara Mitchell was brutally murdered in this house,” the woman said. A shot of a white antebellum mansion, once grand, now sagging and neglected, filled the screen. Three stories, double porches, fluted pillars, overhung by huge live oaks, branches bearded with Spanish moss, leaves the delicate new green that meant spring. Since this was early May, the shot was recent. Or maybe it had been taken in another, past, spring. Whenever, something about the house nagged at him. Joe squinted at the screen, trying to figure out what it was. The shadows that had become an inescapable part of his life kept shifting in and out of the edges of his peripheral vision, which didn’t help his concentration any. He ignored them. He was getting pretty good at that, just like he was getting good at ignoring Brian.
The redhead on TV was still talking: “Rebecca Iverson and Lauren Schultz vanished. No trace of them has ever been found. What you just saw was a reenactment of what authorities think may have occurred in the final few minutes of Tara’s life, based on the evidence in the house. Earlier that night, Lauren’s parents had taken the girls out to dinner to celebrate Lauren’s seventeenth birthday, which was the following day. Becky, who was sixteen, and Tara were planning to sleep over at Lauren’s house. Lauren’s parents dropped them off at the house at around ten-fifteen that night, then went to check on Lauren’s grandmother, who lived less than half a mile away. When they returned, it was twenty minutes until midnight. Andrea Schultz, Lauren’s mother, describes what they found.”
Another woman, mid-fifties maybe, with short, blond hair, faded blue eyes, and a face that had been deeply etched by time or grief, or some combination of the two, appeared on the screen. She was sitting on a deep gold couch in what appeared to be an upscale living room. A man of approximately the same age was sitting beside her. Gray-haired, a little paunchy, with the look of a solid citizen about him, he was holding her hand.
Mrs. Schultz spoke directly into the camera. “We noticed coming up the driveway that the only light on in the house was in the downstairs bathroom, but that didn’t really strike us as odd. We just thought the girls had gone to bed a whole lot earlier than we had expected. We came in through the kitchen door. Mike—my husband—put away the doughnuts and milk we’d picked up for their breakfast, and I went on out into the center hall. When I turned on the light”—her voice shook—“I saw blood on the floor of the hall. Not a lot. A few drops about the size of quarters leading toward the living room. My first thought was that one of the girls had cut herself. I started calling Lauren, and I went into the living room and turned on the light. Tara was there on the couch. She was d-dead.”
Mrs. Schultz stumbled over the last word, then stopped, her eyes filling with tears, her composure crumpling. The man—Joe assumed he was her husband—put his arm around her. Then they were gone, and the reporter was back on-screen, looking coolly out at him as she continued.
“Tara was stabbed twenty-seven times that night, with such violence that the knife went all the way through her body to penetrate the couch in at least a dozen places. Her hair had been hacked off to within an inch of her scalp. And her face had been damaged to the point where it was almost unrecognizable.”
“Shit,” Joe said, suddenly transfixed. He’d just figured out what had been nagging at him. That morning, he’d seen a photo of the murder house, which had been in the file he’d been reading through. The file on this case. The details were unforgettable.
“Thought you’d want to see this.” Brian sounded smug. “You would have slept through it, too, if I hadn’t dropped the remote on your lap. You can thank me anytime.”
Joe couldn’t help it. He glanced down and, sure enough, there was the remote, nestled between his jean-clad thighs, where it would have landed if it had been on his lap when he’d jarred awake. Had it been on his lap when he’d fallen asleep? Christ, he couldn’t remember.
“Dave!” he yelled, at the same time doing his best to keep his focus on the screen. Dwelling on the state of his mental health was a good way to drive himself nuts—always supposing he wasn’t there already. “Get in here! Stat!”
The program went to a commercial.
“Jeez, Joe, you might want to keep it down. You’ll wake the kid,” Dave O’Neil said as he appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, his slow Southern drawl effectively robbing the words of any urgency that they might have been meant to impart. He’d attended his church’s five P.M. Sunday service—almost all the local churches had one—but his church jacket and tie were long gone now. The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled up past his elbows, there was a blue-checked apron tied over his neat gray slacks, and he held a long-tined meat fork in one hand. Thirty-two years old, he was about five-eight, pudgy, and balding, with what was left of his dark brown hair grown long and slicked back in a mostly futile attempt to cover his scalp. Sweat beaded his forehead, and his round cheeks and the tip of his pug nose were rosy, making Joe think he’d just straightened up from checking on the progress of the roast chicken that at some time tonight was supposed to be dinner.
In an unfortunate triumph of hormones over common sense, Dave was infatuated with a high-maintenance divorcée whom he’d recently allowed to move into his house with him—the house he and Joe were currently in—along with her three bratty kids, two of whom thankfully had not yet been returned by their father, who had them for the weekend. The third, a toddler, had fallen asleep shortly after Joe had arrived as agreed at seven for Sunday-night dinner, which was still cooking, although it was now just after eight-fifteen. Amy Martinez, Dave’s girlfriend and the children’s mother, had run to the corner store for some forgotten essentials
a good twenty minutes before, leaving Dave to hold down the fort. Not that Dave had a problem with that. In fact, since Joe had known him, Dave had never to his knowledge had a problem with anything. When Joe had been hired as Chief of Police of tiny Pawleys Island, South Carolina, five months earlier, Dave was already the Assistant Chief of the twelve-man force. Joe’s first impression of him had been that he was a slow-moving, slow-talking, slow-thinking bumbler, but he’d kept him on, kept everyone on, just like he’d resisted making any but the most minor of changes in the way things had always been done, whether he’d found them irksome or not. The truth was, he’d needed the job too badly to risk making waves in those first few weeks, and now he found the Southern-fried culture of his department—in fact, the whole island—more soothing than crazy-making. And he’d developed a real fondness for Dave, who had done his best to make his new boss feel at home in what was, for the Jersey vice cop Joe had once been, an environment as alien as Mars.
“I forgot about the kid.” Remembering the two-year-old’s pre-bedtime antics, Joe was truly remorseful. Keeping his voice down, he pointed to the TV. “Listen to this.”
The redhead was on again. She was standing in front of the house in which the crime had been committed, the Old Taylor Place, as it was called, if his memory served him correctly. The case she was profiling was the only unsolved homicide in the island’s recorded history, and it had come to his attention for just that reason: The file had been the only one in its section. This time, Joe didn’t miss the signs that she was operating in what was now his territory: The pink and white of the overgrown oleanders that crowded around the wide front porch, the head-high clump of sweetgrass off to the reporter’s left, the hot, bright blaze of the sun, and, underlying it all, the faint gurgle of the ocean that he had learned was the never-ending backdrop to life on Pawleys Island.
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