The FBI Thrillers Collection

by Catherine Coulter

  “Your wife?”

  “No, my sister.”

  “So they paid you to tell them if the cops showed up? That was all?”

  Dykes nodded, then as if suddenly realizing he was talking to an FBI agent, and saying things he shouldn’t, he gulped and shut his mouth.

  Dane said, a bit of threat in his voice, “Too late, Mr. Dykes. If you don’t tell me everything now, we’ll make it real hard for you. You phoned their room when we were getting into position outside?”

  Dykes began to rock, his arms collapsed over his chest. He nodded.

  “What else? What were you expecting to happen?”

  “Nothing. They said they’d go out the back,” Dykes said. “I’d let the phone ring three times, that’s all I had to do, just warn them. Nothing more. I heard them laughing later about firecrackers. When I asked them what they meant, the old guy, Mr. Grace, he laughed some more, said he’d like to scare the bejesus out of the cops, if he could, said the lot of you weren’t worth spit. If he only had one firecracker, that’s all he needed, he said. But he didn’t have one, did he?” He looked at the burnt heap of rubble that was, up until an hour before, his main support, then raised smoke-reddened eyes to Dane’s face.

  Dane wanted to smack him upside the head for being so greedy, so stupid. “He didn’t lie. He didn’t have a firecracker, what he had was a bomb.”

  Dykes whispered, “Why did they lie to me, Agent Carver? Why? I did what they asked, called their room when you showed up, let the phone ring three times. This was crazy, mean and crazy. They ruined me.”

  Savich said, “No, Mr. Dykes, you did this yourself.” He was still trying to get his brain around what this man had done, for five hundred dollars.

  “It was the girl with all that beautiful hair; she paid me to let them know if you guys showed up. But I wasn’t born yesterday, people are always trying to stiff me because they figure the rooms are cheap, the name of the hotel is a joke, but look, I believed them. And she was so pretty, and she liked me. Her stomach was so white and—I guess I didn’t call this one right at all, did I? I’m an idiot.”

  Dane said, “Yes, I’d say tonight you were.”

  Dykes, skinny as a nail, wrapped up in a coat two sizes too large for him, thick mousse glistening on the half dozen long gray hairs plastered down over the top of his skull, realized fully now that he was in deep trouble. “No, I—I—I’m not an idiot, and it isn’t nice of you to agree with me like that. I didn’t mean for anything bad to happen, Agent Carver, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t have a clue what they were planning. Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Marlene is going to kill me.”

  “You took five hundred dollars knowing that our lives were on the line.” There was no rage in Dane’s calm voice, but it was there, clear as could be, in his eyes, if Dykes had looked up at him. But he kept his eyes on his shoes, and shook his head.

  Savich asked him, “They requested room two-twelve?”

  Dykes nodded. “Yeah, that’s a prime room since it’s on the end and there’s a window in the bathroom.”

  Dane said, “You realize now that they either cut through that thin back bathroom wall or they went out the back window and were gone by the time we walked into your office. They meant to kill as many of us as they could. The bomb was powerful enough. Do you have a family, Mr. Dykes, or are you only at the mercy of your sister Marlene?”

  “No, Joyce left me two years past for a trucker whose eighteen-wheeler smoked up every state he traveled through. I’ll bet he told her he’d show her all the sights and the dip believed him.”

  Savich said, “Then you can think of Joyce enjoying the Grand Canyon while you’re nice and snug in jail.”

  Dane said, “Maybe Marlene will visit you in your cell.”

  Dane accepted a pair of handcuffs from one of Police Chief Tumi’s deputies, clicked them around Dykes’s bony wrists, and handed him over to a deputy, who stared at Dykes like he couldn’t believe what he’d done. The deputy hauled him off, none too gently, to a cruiser. Chief Tumi called out, “Read him his rights, Deputy Wiggins. It’s a right shame that stupidity isn’t a felony.” He turned to Savich. “So the two gunshots we heard—they really were gunshots, weren’t they?”

  “They were well timed, whatever they were,” Dane said. “Maybe the arson investigators will find the remains of a tape recorder in the wreckage. Maybe the conversation we heard, as well as the gunshots, was recorded to play at a specific time.”

  Chief Tumi nodded, looked over at his deputy, who was stuffing Dykes into the backseat. “Roy, don’t leave that yahoo alone. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  Savich said to Dane, “One thing we can bank on—they were long gone out of that room, with Pinky, before we heard the gunshots. They might have been watching.”

  Connie said, “You can fry Rolly when I reel the little bugger in.” She shook her head. “This will sure shake Ruth’s belief in her snitches. Do you know the little geek reminded me about his extra pint because he’s throwing a goth party?”

  Chief Tumi said to Savich, “My deputies are reporting no sign of them yet, but we’ll find them. I’ve called the State Police, given them descriptions, told them about Pinky. We’ve done what we can.”

  Savich knew there was a lot more to do but mostly for the forensic team.

  Connie said, “That old Chevy van over there—it was bait, the lure to keep us here. I wonder if they really are heading for Arlington National Cemetery.”

  “Or is it more misdirection?” Sherlock wondered aloud.

  But Savich knew they had no choice but to run another complicated operation, and they only had about four hours to get everything nailed down. He couldn’t imagine how much manpower they’d need to cover that huge expanse of land, with its thousands of white markers and monuments and rest areas. “I hate to say this, I really do, but I have a feeling they’ll actually be there. Find Rolly, Connie.”

  “Dillon, do you want to call Ruth, bring her back in?”

  Savich started to nod, then thought of how excited she’d been about the trip, about going into a cave this time, and just wait until he saw what she brought back. “No, let her have her time off. There are enough of us here. She’ll be back on Monday.”

  They looked up to see an older woman striding toward them, boots to her knees, a head scarf tied tight around her face, a thick wool coat flapping around her calves. She stopped at the cruiser, leaned in, and screamed, “What did you do, Raymond?”

  Savich cocked an eyebrow. “Marlene, I presume.”

  CHAPTER 4

  MAESTRO, VIRGINIA

  FRIDAY EVENING

  SHERIFF DIXON NOBLE shrugged into his leather jacket, pulled on his gloves, and left his office at Number One High Street just before five o’clock. It was colder than Brewster’s nose against the back of his knee in the dead of winter. Snow was coming, forecasted to dump a good one and a half to two feet. He really didn’t want to think about the phone calls it would bring, from downed power lines to car pileups, older citizens with no heat, sick folks without a way to get to the hospital—the list was endless. He’d learned a long time ago to have a solid number of what he called “disaster deputies” he himself had trained to handle the worst that bad luck and nature could throw at them.

  It had been a slow February anyway, he thought, except for Valentine’s Day. Will Garber had brought his wife, Darlene, a three-pound box of Valentine chocolates as an apology, but Darlene wasn’t buying it. She grabbed up a handful of chocolates and rubbed them in his face, at which point he slugged her, slammed out of the house, got drunk at Calhoun’s Bar, broke Jamie Calhoun’s nose, and ended up in jail.

  “Hey, Dix, anything going on this weekend for you?”

  Dix paused a moment, nodded to Stupper Fulton, owner of Fulton’s Hardware, as his father had been before him, and said, “Not so’s you’d notice, Stup. Me and the boys will be sledding down Breaker’s Hill along with half the kids in town if this storm coughs up enough snow. I
f it coughs up too much, I’ll be all over town with a shovel, digging people out of ditches.”

  “Don’t think I’d want to sled in a storm,” Stup said. “At my age, I’d break bones if I hit a tree.”

  Dix saw Stup was obviously cold but he wasn’t moving. “You got something on your mind?”

  “Well, yeah, it’s like this, Dix. Rafer wants a job.”

  “Rafe’s fourteen, old enough, but his grades in English and biology stink, and I’ve already told him there’ll be no part-time job until he gets both of them to a B average. I’m trying to help him out myself, helping him build a model of the double helix for biology in the evenings and even reading Othello with him for English. The guy’s an idiot.”

  “Rafer? He’s not an idiot, Dix, he just needs some good motivation.”

  “No, Stup, not Rafer, this guy Othello. You know, the guy who murders his wife in Shakespeare’s play.”

  “Oh, well then. Rafer wants a job so much he even promised me he’d work extra fast, do all I asked him to do in half the time it would take anyone else, and then he’d study.”

  Dix laughed. “That kid’s always got a line. What did you tell him?”

  “That I’d speak to you about it.”

  “Tell him you pay by the hour, so if he does the work in half the time, he’ll only make half the money. Let’s see what he has to say to that.”

  Stup rubbed his arms and broke into a grin. “That’s good, Dix. He’s supposed to come see me tomorrow, so I’ll try it.”

  Before he reached his Range Rover, Dix walked along High Street, as he usually did, and spoke to a half dozen more citizens of Maestro, including Melissa Haverstock, the local librarian, who asked him if he’d like to come with her to the First Methodist Church potluck supper on Saturday night. He kindly refused.

  When he pulled into his driveway eleven minutes later, it was already getting dark. He was getting real tired of the long winter nights. It was cold, the naked branches shuddering in the frigid air. He sniffed the air. Snow was coming, all right, he could smell it, heavy and moving closer. The house was all lit up, and that meant the boys were home or they had left and didn’t bother to turn the lights off. Who knew?

  He heard Brewster bark, knew he was waiting beside the front door, his tail wagging so fast it was a blur. Brewster tended to pee when he got excited, so Dix speeded up, hoping to head off an accident.

  It was Friday night and he’d have to nag Rob to do the laundry. The three of them had lived through pink shorts and undershirts until Rob finally got clued in to colors running in the washer. Rafer had worn a bathing suit under his jeans for a good two weeks after the guys in gym class laughed their heads off at him for being a girlie-man.

  Brewster, whose truly impressive bark exceeded his body weight by at least fifty pounds, tried to climb up his leg when he came in the house. “Hey, Brewster, you hanging in there, fella? Yeah, I’m home and we’re going to have a fine old time. And you didn’t even pee on my boots.” He picked up the four-pound toy poodle and laughed when he wildly licked his five o’clock shadow.

  “Hey, boys, you here?”

  Rafer sauntered in, shoulders slouched, yawning. “Hey, Dad. I’m here.”

  “Where’s your brother?”

  Rafer gave a trademark teenage shrug, Like ask me if I care. “Dunno, maybe he went over to Mary Lou’s house. He said he wanted to get in her pants.”

  “If he tries to get into Mary Lou’s pants her dad will skin off his face.”

  Rafer grinned at that. “That’s good, I’ll warn him, but you know, Dad, he gets this glazed look in his eyes when he’s with her, like he’s a little nuts. Oh, never mind.”

  “Yeah, you warn him, Rafe.” Of course Rob was nuts, he was a teenager. Given those raging hormones, it was a blessing there were fathers like Mary Lou’s. Her parents kept a tight rein on her, but he supposed he’d have to speak to Rob again, for the umpteenth time—the teenage boy and sexual responsibility talk, now that gave him a headache.

  “Rob did the laundry,” Rafer said. Dix felt a leap of pleasure, but it folded when Rafer snickered.

  “What color are our shorts this time?”

  “A real pretty robin’s-egg blue,” Rafer said, “that’s what Mrs. Melowski called it.”

  “Great. Wonderful. Why did you show Mrs. Melowski our blue shorts?”

  “You know, she’s always coming by, wants to see you, and Rob was holding a pair of his shorts and she looked at them and started laughing. She showed Rob what he did wrong.”

  “So have I, countless times.”

  “Well, yeah, she said they’d need another couple of washings with lots of bleach and the blue would come out. She left a lemon cake for our dessert tonight. Hey, Dad, what’s for dinner?”

  “Not pizza tonight, Rafe, hang that up. I made some stew Tuesday and froze it. I’ll make biscuits to go with it.”

  “I’ll see if we’ve got enough catsup.”

  “We do. I checked before I left this morning. Is there any of the lemon cake left?”

  “I did eat a couple of pieces,” Rafer said.

  Dix could easily picture the gutted cake. He pulled his cell out of his jacket pocket and called the Claussons’ house. Sure enough, Rob was there, playing Foosball with Mary Lou and her parents, who were killers at the game. They had the fastest reflexes Dix had ever seen. Rob must have been getting beat really bad because he didn’t sound at all sorry to come home to dinner. “Hey, Dad, can Mary Lou have dinner with us?”

  Before Dix could answer, he heard Mr. Clausson say in the background, “No, Rob, Mary Lou’s aunt is visiting us tonight.”

  “Come on home, Rob.”

  “Yeah, Rob,” came Rafe’s voice loud in the background, “you don’t want Mr. Clausson to skin off your face.”

  IT STARTED SNOWING about nine-thirty that night. Dix and the boys were watching TV, he and Rafe having buried Othello and Desdemona an hour before. Rafe, rightfully in Dix’s opinion, wanted to know why Iago didn’t get his guts ripped out, to which Dix replied, “Hey, Shakespeare gave us a body count of five. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

  Rafe had finally said, “Yeah, I guess enough of the cast did croak.”

  Rafe’s model double helix was finished and sat once more on top of his desk next to his Titans football signed by Steve McNair. They usually watched TV on Friday nights. It was a treat for the boys since he had a no-TV rule during the week.

  Rafe fell asleep in the middle of Law & Order, his head on Dix’s leg. Rob, sixteen, long and skinny, was slouched in his favorite chair, snoring lightly. His hair was as black as Dix’s but his eyes were his mom’s blue-green. I’m the old man here in the room, Dix thought, and I’m the only one awake. It made him wonder what the boys had been up to today to wear themselves out.

  He got the boys off to bed at ten o’clock and took Brewster out for his night run. Since the snow had only just begun to fall, he didn’t have to worry about Brewster sinking in over his head and getting himself in trouble, a very real concern in the winter. He let him down on the front porch and watched him leap joyfully off the top step and race into the yard, barking and yapping. He twirled back around, bouncing like there were springs on his back legs, trying to catch the snowflakes with his front paws, his fluffy little tail wagging frantically.

  Dix walked down the sidewalk and raised his face to the sky. The snow was so lacy and soft it dissolved the instant it touched his face. He stood silently, smiling at Brewster, letting the cold night air fill his lungs. He realized he felt good, felt more whole again than not, and that was surely a step in the right direction.

  Brewster yelped three times at him and took off toward the woods.

  “Brewster! Come back here, you know the woods are off-limits!”

  But Brewster had the scent of some animal and wasn’t about to give up the chase. Dix headed after him, pulling on the gloves he’d pushed into the pockets of his leather jacket as he walked. There were lots of feral animals in th
e woods, 99 percent of them bigger and more vicious than Brewster.

  Dix called the dog again and again, but all he heard were Brewster’s yelps, growing more distant. He kept talking to Brewster, following the sound of his barks. He’d found something, perhaps an injured animal.

  The night sky hung heavy, fat, bloated clouds waiting for some internal alarm to dump their snow, and no more of this penny-ante stuff. “Brewster!”

  More yelps cut the night silence, not so distant now. Had Brewster trapped an opossum?

  The snow was coming down a bit heavier now, but the trees were thick, shielding them. “Brewster!”

  Brewster was barking madly at a dark hump on the forest floor, something that wasn’t moving, something that looked human.

  Dix grabbed up his dog, stuffed him inside his jacket, and zipped it up. “Calm down, Brewster, and don’t pee on my shirt.” He looked down at a person lying in front of him, unconscious or dead.

  Dix fell to his knees and turned the person over. It was a woman, her face covered with blood. He pulled off his gloves, scooped up some snow, and lightly rubbed it over her face. The blood came off easily. He saw a gash on the side of her head, bleeding sluggishly. He touched his fingertips to the pulse at her throat. It was slow and steady. Good. He leaned into her face. “Hey, can you hear me? You need to wake up.”

  Her lashes fluttered.

  “That’s it. Open your eyes, you can do it.”

  She didn’t open her eyes but she moaned low in her throat. Dix methodically felt her arms, her legs, her torso, and nothing felt broken. Not that that meant anything. He pulled his gloves back on. Brewster poked his head out the top of Dix’s jacket. Dix carefully lifted the woman in his arms. She was tall, lanky and heavy enough. He was afraid to carry her over his shoulder because she might be injured internally, so he cradled her in his arms.

  As he walked out of the woods, the clouds let loose and the wind came to vicious life and blew blinding snow in his face. By the time Dix got back to his house, it was snowing so hard he could barely make out his porch light.