“Who is out there? What are your names? Tell me or I’ll blow your heads off. We’re a bit on the cautious side here.”
“I’m Savich.”
“I’m Sherlock. Thomas sent us. He said we needed to meet Adam and Becca, talk to them, get all the facts straight and together. Then maybe we can nail this stalker.”
“I told him not to,” Adam said, laid his gun on the kitchen table, and walked out into the hallway. A big man stood there, a 9mm SIG pistol held snug in his hand. A woman stood behind him, as if shoved there for protection. She stepped around the man and said, “Don’t be alarmed. We’re the good guys. As Dillon said, Thomas sent us. I’m Sherlock and this is my husband, Dillon Savich. We’re FBI.”
It was the man Thomas wanted to save his daughter’s butt. His friend’s son, the computer hotshot at the Bureau. Adam didn’t like it, any of it. He stood there frowning at the two of them. A man brought his wife to a possible dangerous situation? What kind of an idiot was he?
Becca stepped forward. “You’ve got a neat name, Sherlock. You’re Mr. Savich? Hello. Now, I don’t know who this Thomas is, but he’s probably Adam’s boss, only Adam refuses to tell me anything about who hired him and why. I’m Becca Matlock. The man who’s been stalking me and who shot the governor was just here. He called me and then he tried to kill us. I hit him, I know it. Adam found some blood, but he’s gone, covered his trail, and I had to bandage Adam up and so—”
“Now we understand everything,” Sherlock said and smiled at the young woman facing her. Sherlock thought she was pretty, but she looked like she’d been ground under for a long time now. She’d been pushed over the line. She said to the big man, Adam, who was standing beside Becca, “Dillon here is great with wounds. Do you want to have him look at your arm?”
Adam was mad and he felt like a jerk for feeling mad. If the guy really was a genius with computer tracking programs, or whatever it was he did, maybe it could help. He shook his head. “No, I’m fine. I hope to heaven the sheriff doesn’t show up here, what with all that gunfire.”
“This place is set way back from its neighbors,” Savich said. “And all those thick trees, it’s doubtful anyone heard the shots unless he was real close.”
Becca blinked up at him, then said, “I hope you’re right. This is Adam Carruthers. He’s here as my cousin. He’s here to help clean up this mess, and to protect me. As I said, I guess he works for this Thomas character. I told the guy down the street that he’s gay because I’m afraid he’s jealous of Adam, but he’s really not.”
Sherlock said, “He’s really not jealous?”
“No, Adam really isn’t gay.”
Savich, that big guy who’d been standing very still until this instant, looking solemn and mean, began to laugh. And laugh.
The woman with the beautiful bright red curly hair looked up at him, cocked her head to one side, sending all that hair to bouncing around her head, and began laughing herself.
“I’m glad you’re not gay,” Savich said. “What? You really think this other guy is jealous of Adam here?”
Becca nodded. “Yes, and it’s so stupid really. This is a life-and-death situation. Who would ever think of jealousy or sex at a time like this? That’s just nuts.”
“That’s right,” Sherlock said. “No one would. Right, Dillon?”
“That’s exactly what I would have said,” Savich said.
Adam watched Savich slip the SIG back into his belt. All right, maybe the two of them could help. He’d wait and see what they did before he said anything more.
Becca said, “Adam is drinking a diet Dr Pepper since I don’t have any brandy to help him get over the shock of being wounded. Ice or lime in yours?”
Savich grinned at her. “Give me a goodly amount of lime and then Sherlock and I will go out and buy some brandy.” He then looked long at her. He wanted to tell her that her father was worried sick about her, that she looked a lot like him, that, when this was all over, he would come into her life for the very first time. But for now, Savich couldn’t say anything at all. They’d promised Thomas Matlock that they’d keep him in the shadows until the mess was all cleared up. Thomas had said, “Until I can be certain that Krimakov is really dead, I can’t take the chance. And for me to believe that, really believe it all the way to my gut, I’ve got to see a photo of him lying on a slab in a Greek morgue.”
Sherlock had said, “But if he’s not dead, sir, and he is orchestrating all this, then he already knows about Becca and is trying to terrorize her with the ultimate goal of getting to you through her.”
Thomas had said, “I know only enough to scare myself spitless, Sherlock. I want to keep a lid on all of this until I’m certain. In the meantime, I want to keep her hidden from all the cops and the FBI because I’m certain they can’t protect her from this stalker.”
Becca said over her shoulder as she led them into the kitchen, “Before anyone comes over, you’ve got to tell me who you are and why you’re here. As I told you, Adam’s cover is that he’s my gay cousin.”
Adam said as he cocked the soda can at Savich, “You want to be her other gay cousin?”
“Then what would that make me?” Sherlock said. “I can’t keep my hands off him. That would blow the cover right off.”
“Maybe we’ll be your friends, Adam. I know quite a bit about you and your background. You and I went to school together, how about that?” Savich said.
“Then what are you doing in Riptide, Maine?”
Sherlock took a glass of soda from Becca, sipped it, and said, “We’re here because of that skeleton that fell out of your basement wall, Becca. You guys wanted some help, and since we live in Portsmouth, it wasn’t tough for us to get up here.”
“How do you know where I went to school?” Adam said, his eyes dark and hard on Savich’s face.
“MAX gave me most of your particulars. It took him a while longer to find out about all your other activities. You went to Yale. No problem. Did we crew?”
Well, damn, Adam thought, it was a good idea. “Yeah,” he said. “We did crew. We also beat Harvard, that bunch of pissy little wimps.”
Sherlock wondered why Adam Carruthers didn’t want her or Dillon there. Didn’t he realize that they could help? The stalker was here in Riptide, he’d tried to kill them.
Sherlock gave Adam a sunny smile. “Why don’t we go look in the woods and try to uncover a trail for this guy?”
“Yeah,” Savich said, rising. “Then we need to figure out why he would want to kill Becca like this. It doesn’t make sense. He’s into terrorizing her. Why shoot her and end it all? He’d have no more fun.”
“Good question,” Becca said. “We haven’t had time to think about anything since it happened. Me, I don’t think he wanted to kill either of us, just scare us real bad, just announce that he was here and ready to play again.”
Becca sucked in her breath. “Oh dear, we need to get the front door repaired before our neighbor, Tyler McBride, or the sheriff come to visit. I don’t want to try to explain bullet holes in the door.”
“Let’s check for a trail first,” Sherlock said. “Then, Becca, you can tell us what the stalker said to you this time while we all repair the door.”
“You’re good,” Savich said some thirty minutes later to Adam. “You said there was no trail and there isn’t.”
Adam grunted. “Let’s go out a bit farther. Maybe we’ll see some tire tracks.”
“No way,” Sherlock said. “The stalker is a pro, which means that he isn’t really a stalker. That’s just a cover. A misdirection.”
Savich nodded. “I agree. He isn’t a stalker.”
Becca said, “What do you mean, exactly?”
Adam said, as he slowly lifted leaves some ten feet away, “It doesn’t make sense, Becca. Usually stalkers are sick guys who, for whatever strange reason, latch on to someone. It’s an obsession. They’re not pros. This guy’s a pro. This was well thought out.”
And Savich thought: If Krimakov is alive, the
n it’s a terror campaign, and Becca’s the means to the end. Thomas Matlock is right to be afraid. And the ending Krimakov planned wasn’t good for either father or daughter.
Becca was shaking her head. “But he sounds nuts whenever he’s called me. He called a couple of hours ago. He said much of the same things. He sounded all sorts of excited, very pleased with himself, like he couldn’t wait. I know he’s toying with me, getting a real kick out of my fear, my anger, my helplessness.” She stopped a moment, looked at Adam, and added, “The thing is, I can’t help but feel that inside, he’s dead.”
Sherlock said, “Maybe he’s dead on the inside, but it’s the outside we’ve got to worry about. One thing we know for sure is that he’s clever; he knows what he needs to do and he does it. He found you, didn’t he? Now, could we go back to the house and Becca can tell us everything? You said he called you again. Tell us exactly what he said. Then we can put all our brainpower together and solve this mess.”
“Another thing,” Savich said as he brushed his black slacks off, “I don’t want us out in the open like this. It isn’t smart.”
And Sherlock, her brilliant red hair shining brightly in the fading afternoon light, led them back to Jacob Marley’s house.
They found caulk, an electric sander that worked, and some wood stain in the basement, on some shelves near the hole in the brick wall.
They took the front door off its hinges and brought it inside. While Savich sanded it down and Adam caulked in the bullet holes, Becca and Sherlock kept watch, their guns in their hands, watchful. Very soon, Sherlock had Becca talking and talking. “... and when he called me a while ago, he said the same sorts of things, like I would contact the governor as soon as he was well enough again and have him come to me.”
“You know,” Adam said, “he doesn’t believe you’ve slept with the governor. It’s part of a script. He needed something so that he could claim you needed punishment.”
“You’re right,” Sherlock said, giving Adam his first look of approval, for which he didn’t know whether to be pleased or snarl. “Yes, you’re perfectly right. Go ahead, Becca, what else did he say?”
“When I asked him about Dick McCallum, he wouldn’t admit that he killed him, but I know that he did. He said I’d gotten all pissy, that I’d gotten too confident, that he was coming for me soon. I tell you, when I hung up, I was ready to throw in the towel. He calls himself my boyfriend. It’s beyond creepy.”
“Yeah,” Adam said, raising his head to look at her, “she was ready to throw in the towel for about three minutes.” Then he said toward Savich, “Then she put her Coonan in her pocket and went out into the woods. Why’d you go out there, Becca? It wasn’t real smart, you know.”
She looked inward for a moment, all of them saw it—and the sanding and caulking stopped. Not one of them was surprised when she shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I wanted to go there, alone, and sit under the sunlight against that tree. Jacob Marley’s house was getting to me. There are ghosts here, the air is filled with remnants of the people who lived here, residue, maybe, not all of it good.”
“Before I finally found her, I nearly croaked,” Adam said, realizing he was grinning at Savich. Well, why not? He was here and he did seem competent, at least so far. Maybe he’d still fall flat on his face.
“Listen, I’ve got to contact my men,” Adam said. “The stalker—or whatever he is—is here. He tried to kill us, or maybe he was after me—that’s more likely. We’ve got to close this town down. And we need to finish with this door before he just walks right up and shoots us.”
“He won’t even get close,” Becca said and raised her Coonan.
“Agreed,” Savich said. He winked at Sherlock. “You want to tell Adam about how we’ve got everything covered?”
“Yep. A half dozen guys from Thomas are on their way here.” She looked down at her wristwatch. “In about an hour, I’d estimate. And here we were worried that there wouldn’t be enough for them to do. We were really wrong on that one.”
“The timing’s perfect,” Savich said as he wiped all the sawdust off his hands. “Don’t anyone fret that they’ll all be piling into town and staying at Errol Flynn’s Hammock. Nope, they won’t stick out at all, but they’ll have this place well covered. Now, we need to get busy as soon as we’re done with this door. We need to bug the phone. He’ll probably call again, soon. Also, we need protection around the house. The guys will be calling in and we’ll set up a guard rotation. Also, Adam, you can show them where the blood is and they can get it analyzed. We’ll at least verify that it’s human.”
“I know I hit him.”
Savich nodded to Becca. “Yes, I’m sure you did. We’ll see if anything interesting shows up in the blood work. Now, it would probably be a smart thing if you stayed inside, Becca.”
Sherlock said, “If he was trying to kill Adam, to make things easier for him, then that makes all of us open season. It would be wise if this Tyler McBride kept himself and his kid away from here. It isn’t safe.”
And Adam thought, Where’s my brain? I should have thought and said all of that.
Becca said, looking Sherlock straight in the eye, “No, I don’t want Tyler or Sam in any danger, either. Now, who’s this Thomas?”
“He’s Adam’s boss,” Savich said, well aware that Adam was on full alert, “or he used to be. Now Adam is on his own. Actually, as I understand it, Adam is doing Thomas a favor. Hey, don’t worry about it, Becca, you don’t know him. Adam, you did a good job of filling in all the holes. A bit of stain and the door will look perfect again.”
Becca jumped up. “I left it in the kitchen.”
“I’ll go with you,” Sherlock said. “I think I’d like to look at that gash in the basement wall again.”
“Of course he was after you,” Savich said easily, once Becca was out of hearing. “He wanted you out of the way, wounded or dead, it didn’t matter to him. It still doesn’t.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“He wants her. He wants to take her so he figured he’d have to knock you out of the way.”
“That’s what I figure.”
FIFTEEN
Becca held the can of stain in front of her.
Adam, instead of taking the can, found himself standing there staring down at the too thin, formerly pale young woman who was now flushed red to her eyebrows.
“I’m really mad now,” she said, and he believed her, and smiled. “He shot up Jacob Marley’s door. That’s beyond the line.” He couldn’t cut off his smile, because her eyes were glowing. Her soft blue eyes were hard and pulsing with rage. Her dyed hair was nearly standing on end. “I heard the two of you talking. He tried to kill you, Adam, to get to me. That’s beyond the line, too.” She was panting now. She was major-league pissed, and she wanted to protect him. He took her face between his big hands. His mouth was nearly touching hers. He immediately straightened and took the can of stain. He didn’t want this, but he couldn’t help it. An enraged Becca Matlock who still wanted to protect him did something to him, something strange and wonderful that seared him to the soles of his scuffed boots.
He looked at her mouth again, but instead of kissing her, he started to laugh. And he kept on laughing, he wanted to kiss her that bad.
She blinked at him and then took a step back. “Don’t get stain on your clothes. I’m not going to wash them for you.”
“When it’s necessary, I’ll wash my own clothes,” Adam said, then added on a grin, “if you’ll show me how to work the washing machine.”
“Mechanical things defeat you, do they? No, don’t say it, only mechanical things that involve work could defeat a guy.”
Adam eyed Savich’s outstretched hand, grunted, and handed him the stain. His arm burned and ached and Savich knew it. He said to Savich, “You know something? I’d really like to rearrange your pretty face when this is all over.”
Savich stared at him, then laughed. “If you think my face is pretty, then you’ve got a big problem,
because that’s what I think about yours.”
“Bull.”
Savich shook his head. “You want to play at the gym? Fine by me.”
Becca stood by the front window as Savich stained the front door, her Coonan held loosely in her right hand, looking all around, like a pro. After a bit, Adam couldn’t stand it and took the brush from Savich.
Savich grinned at him. Sherlock said, “I love to see a real macho guy in action.”
Adam brushed on the stain, slowly, carefully, gritting his teeth because his arm hurt. But he wasn’t about to whine. He whistled low, between his teeth, hoping Savich heard it.
Tyler showed up with Sam an hour later. “Hey, what’s that smell? Who are these people?”
Becca went blank for a moment, then said, “I didn’t like the stain on the front door. It was looking tatty and old. I just finished re-staining it.” She waited to see if Tyler would say anything about hearing bullets, but he didn’t.
Sam stared up at her, sniffing, but as usual he didn’t say anything.
“Smells weird, huh, Sam? Hey, here are some friends of Adam’s. This is Sherlock and her husband, Savich.”
Sherlock went down on her knees in front of the little boy. She made no move at all toward him, and said after he’d studied her for a bit, “Hi, do you like my name?”
Sam didn’t step back, but he did lean his head back a bit. He gave Sherlock a bit of a smile and eyed her hair. He reached out two fingers and patted the top of her head.
Savich came down beside her. “We’ve got a little kid, Sam, a lot younger than you are. His name is Sean and he’s only six months old. He can’t pat the top of his mama’s head yet. He doesn’t even talk yet. But he is growing teeth.”
“Teeth are good,” Sherlock said, “but all that drool is a pain.”
That drew Adam up really fast. These two had a kid? Well, why was he so surprised? Most men his age were married and had children. He’d been married once, and he’d wanted a kid, lots of them as a matter of fact, but Vivie hadn’t been ready yet. A long time ago now, five years, nearly long enough to forget her name, if it hadn’t sounded like a song out of Cabaret.
Twice Dead Page 14