“When?” Starrett sounded as if he’d woken up, all laziness gone from his voice.
“Three weeks ago.”
“Ah, man, that trail’s got to be stone cold.”
“A cold trail’s better than no trail,” Max heard Alyssa say tartly. “Don’t complain. We’re closer to finding Mary Lou and Haley than we were just a few minutes ago.”
“All we know is that—maybe—Mary Lou was in Gainesville three weeks ago. Three weeks.” Sam wasn’t happy about that.
“Locke,” Max interrupted them, hating the way both Alyssa and Sam had said we. Like they were already a team. Or a couple. “Will you call me back after you drop off Starrett?”
“Is there something more?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I just … I wanted to touch base with you at a time when you could, I don’t know, speak more freely, I guess.”
“Max, I’m fine,” she said, her rich voice warm in appreciation of his concern.
“Please don’t—” Max stopped himself. Let him get within six feet of you. What was she going to do? Make him sit in the backseat? “Good,” he said instead. “Good.”
“Wait a sec,” he heard Sam say. “You have a map of Florida?” he asked Alyssa.
“Hang on,” Alyssa told Max. “In the pocket of the … Yeah, in there.”
“I just remembered—Mary Lou’s mother. She called me about two months ago,” Max heard Sam say over the crinkling of paper being unfolded. “Because she didn’t have Mary Lou’s new phone number, and she wanted to tell her she was moving out of Georgia, down to northern Florida, to … shit, where was it? I remember the address, number two Happy Lane in, Jesus, Wallace or Wanker or Wacker or—”
“Max, we might have a connection to—”
“Waldo!” Sam said. “Fuck me! Look at this!”
Max had to laugh. Most people said “Eureka.” Sam Starrett, however, said “Fuck me.” Interesting use of the phrase as an expression of jubilation. Sometimes he really had to work to hate the guy.
“Mary Lou’s mother lives just northeast of Gainesville in a town called Waldo,” Alyssa told Max, excitement making her voice ring. “I’d call that a major connection.”
“Can you drive me back to Camilia Street?” Sam was saying to Alyssa. “My rental car’s still there.”
“Whoa,” she said. “Sam, what are you thinking?”
Max knew exactly what Starrett was thinking. Midnight road trip to Gainesville, ETA ASAP. “Alyssa, for the love of God, talk him out it.”
“I’m not going to sleep at all tonight,” Sam said. “I might as well head up to—”
“You’re exhausted,” Alyssa said. “Let’s wait until the morning—”
“I can’t wait. I’m sorry, Lys.” The SEAL actually sounded sincere. “I know it’s unlikely, but if there’s even just a chance that Mary Lou and Haley are in Waldo—”
“Okay,” Alyssa said. “But it doesn’t make sense for you to go by yourself. I promised Manny Conseco that I’d keep tabs on you, so—”
“No,” Max said. “No, no, no. What are you doing? Damn it, Locke, you suck when it comes to negotiating. You’re already caving. Let me talk to him.”
“Max wants to talk to you,” he heard Alyssa say.
Then Starrett’s voice directly in his ear. “Yeah.”
“If you insist on going tonight, she’s going to go with you,” Max said. “You know that. And she’ll never admit it, but she’s tired, Starrett. Give her a break.”
“I’ll drive,” Sam said. “She can sleep in the car.”
“First thing in the morning, I’ll arrange for a chopper to take you up to—”
“Look, I’m really sorry,” Sam said. “You want to keep me from going?”
Max sighed and said it with him. “Find your daughter. Yeah, I know.” He sighed again. “I didn’t want to have to say this, but … You mess with Alyssa, and you’re dead.”
Most people who knew Max crapped their pants when he put that cold edge into his voice. But Starrett just laughed. “I hear you, and I know exactly where you’re coming from.”
Max Bhagat was one of the FBI’s top negotiators. He was a professional communicator. He could read a person’s intentions clear as day by what that person didn’t say. And since Sam hadn’t said, “Okay, Max, I promise I’ll keep my distance from Alyssa,” he was essentially broadcasting his intention to do the exact opposite.
“Listen to what I’m about to say, Starrett,” Max emphasized. “I can fuck you up but good. One word from me, just one word, and you’re working a desk job in a windowless office until the day you retire. Don’t you forget that for one single second.”
“I can’t believe it.” It was Alyssa’s voice on the phone now. “Were you actually threatening him?”
Shit. When busted, go with the truth.
“Yeah,” Max said. “Actually, I was. It didn’t seem to be working too well, though. Do me a favor and make sure he heard that part about the windowless office, because I don’t think he—”
“Good-bye, Max.”
“Alyssa, wait. Don’t hang up—”
But she was gone.
Damn it.
He was definitely going to Tampa tomorrow.
Sarasota.
Sarasota.
Jesus H. Christ.
Max dumped his Rice Krispies into the garbage disposal by throwing the bowl into the sink and breaking it in half. Rubbing the back of his neck, he went into his study and tried to make himself stop thinking about all of them—Alyssa and Sam and Tom Paoletti.
And Gina.
He turned on his laptop and started reviewing his notes for tomorrow morning’s meeting with the President, hoping that would do the trick.
It didn’t.
“He really loves you,” Sam said.
Alyssa glanced over at him, but she couldn’t see his face well in the dim light from the dashboard, especially since he had his hat pulled down over his eyes. She’d thought he was asleep. She should have known better.
“Yeah,” she said, hoping that he wouldn’t push the topic. He was talking about Max, and the truth was, Max didn’t love her. Not the way Sam thought.
She and Max were friends. True, theirs was an odd friendship. And yes, at one point over the years they’d worked together, they’d begun a different kind of relationship. They’d shared lots of dinners. They’d had lots of long conversations late into the night. They’d even kissed more than once. But right before they’d stepped across the line into a sexual relationship, Max shut them down.
Alyssa would have gone there. In fact, she’d wanted to rather badly.
And that was a polite way of summarizing that awful night nearly a year ago when Max had come to her apartment for dinner. Dinner had led to a second and then a third glass of wine, which had led to some of those kisses and some more of those kisses and …
The hard truth was, she’d had him half undressed on her sofa, she hadn’t thought of Sam Starrett once all evening, and she was so, so ready to get busy with a man who honestly liked her, a man who listened when she talked, a man who wanted to know what she was thinking and feeling—and whammo.
Max threw on the brakes.
Because he couldn’t get past the fact that she worked for him.
The man had actually had the nerve to ask her if she’d be willing to transfer out of his elite FBI team. If she transferred—and he couldn’t have anything to do with getting her placed elsewhere in the Bureau, he’d made that more than clear—then and only then could they become sexually involved.
Oh, he’d apologized left and right. Effusively. At one point, Alyssa had been close to certain that he was even going to start to cry. It was one of the weirdest rejections of her life. It was clear that he wanted to spend the night with her as badly as she’d wanted him to stay, but when push came to shove, he simply could not do it.
She had been half-naked herself, and in the process of unfastening the man’s pants. The fact that he’d had th
e strength to say no, to refuse to let his beliefs get overrun by physical desire, still impressed her. It would have been nicer if he’d figured out that it wasn’t going to work between them before they wound up on the sofa, but still …
The entire incident had made her fall a little bit in love with Max Bhagat.
Which was just her style. She apparently only loved men she couldn’t have. Men she shouldn’t want.
Max had refused to let the weirdness of that night of almost-sex screw up their growing friendship. The kissing and the romantic dinners stopped, but the long conversations continued. He’d been relentless about it, continuing to call her and bring over pizza until she almost forgot that she’d been ready and willing to sleep with him.
Almost.
Alyssa was certain that Max hadn’t forgotten it, either. But that had nothing to do whatsoever with whether or not he truly loved her.
“So are you going to, you know, marry him?” Sam asked now.
“He hasn’t exactly asked me,” she replied with a twinge of guilt. It wasn’t a lie, not like the lies she’d told about her relationship with Max in the past, but it was close, because it perpetuated Sam’s misinformation. Still, she couldn’t afford to let him know the truth.
“If he asks you, are you going to marry him?”
She glanced at him again. “I’m really not interested in talking about this.”
“What do you want to talk about?” he asked. A car approached from behind them, its headlights hitting the rearview mirror and lighting Sam’s face. His mouth was tight and his eyes were shadowed. “The fact that Mary Lou intentionally set out to get pregnant? The fact that I’m never going to use a condom again unless it’s one I’ve bought and taken out of the box myself? The fact that I was played—completely? Jesus, could I be more of a fool?”
Alyssa forced herself to watch the road. “Not all women are like Mary Lou.”
“Not all women are like you, Alyssa. In fact no other woman in the entire world—”
“Stop,” she said sharply.
He was silent for only a few heartbeats. “I’m sorry, but I have something I need to say—”
“Don’t waste the effort,” she told him. “Because we are not going to have sex. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not next week, not ever. Never again. Listen closely, Roger, and I’ll repeat it—”
“That’s not what I—”
“Nev. Ver. A. Gain. We played that game, and it was terrible—”
“It was incredible and you know it,” he countered hotly.
“Yeah, right up to the point where it was incredibly terrible,” she insisted.
“There were some bad moments, yeah, but the rest of it—it was worth it,” he said.
“Speak for yourself!”
“I am. Alyssa, look, I know you were unhappy when I—”
“Unhappy?” She was shouting now. “Sam, for God’s sake, you eviscerated me!”
The thick emotion in her voice seemed to echo in the car. Her words seemed to shock Sam as much as they’d shocked her. She hadn’t meant to tell him that. Shit.
Thank goodness the car behind them on the highway had sped up and gone past and it was once again too dark for her to see his face. She hoped he also couldn’t see hers.
What was she doing here? It was insane and absurd. She was helping this man who had once been her lover, whom she’d done shockingly intimate things with, who’d gotten under her skin, and whom, even now, all these years later, she still hadn’t managed to shake loose.…
And she was helping him find his wife.
Ex-wife, sure, but he was pretty freaking eager to find her, wasn’t he?
Okay, that was just petty jealousy talking. Sam was eager to find his daughter. To be fair, his concern was mostly for Haley.
But still …
“You have no idea how sorry I am,” he said quietly.
“Yeah,” she said, angry at him, angry at herself. “Thanks. Gee, that makes it all better.”
“I want to try to make it up to you.”
“What do you want me to do, assign you a stack of Herculean feats? And after you do them, I’m supposed to say, ‘Oh, Sam, all is forgiven. Come and fuck me’? Let’s be honest here about what it is you really want, shall we?”
He laughed in disbelief. “You obviously have no idea what I really want.”
She laughed, too, with disgust. “Said the man who ended up married to some bar bunny because he couldn’t keep his pants zipped for half a minute.”
She’d pushed him too far with that one.
“You’re right. You’re abso-fucking-lutely right, you know that? You’re always right, Alyssa, and this time you’re mega-right. Except, you ever wonder why I went home with Mary Lou in the first place? You ever stop to think that maybe it had something—just a little bit—to do with the fact that you wouldn’t have any-fucking-thing to do with me?”
She laughed her anger. “Oh, that’s perfect. So now it’s my fault? You are so fucking immature!” And now he’d gone and done it again. He’d managed to bring her completely down to his super-crude level.
“I’m not saying that it’s your—”
“Forget it. It’s fine,” she said. “Blame me.” She gripped the steering wheel, her eyes on the road, gas pedal to the floor. The sooner they got to Waldo and out of the confines of this car, the better.
“You know, I do blame you to some degree,” he countered. “You used me for sex—”
“Yeah, at the time, you were really complaining—”
“—and I was such a fool, I didn’t realize it was just sex. I fucking fell in love with you.”
Alyssa’s heart stopped. But then, as it started beating again, she shook her head. “You have absolutely no idea what those words mean. You’re like, like … ABBA, singing phonetically in a language you don’t understand. You fell in love with me. No, excuse me. You fucking fell in love with me. Of course. The same way you fucking fell in love with Mary Lou the first time she took off her clothes for you.”
“You are so wrong—”
“What did you fucking fall in love with first, Roger? My breasts or my ass?”
“Your eyes.”
Alyssa laughed. “That’s only marginally better—not that I believe you.”
He laughed, too, in pure disgust. “Why should you believe anything I say? Since you obviously know better than I do exactly how and what I feel—”
“Do you know how many conversations we had before we had sex?”
“No, but I’m sure you do.”
“Only a few. And most of the time we didn’t talk, we argued. We fought—”
“I can tell you, though,” he interrupted, “exactly how many times and how many different ways I made you come—”
“Who am I, Sam? If you fell in love with me, you should know. But I don’t think you have a clue.”
“I do so—”
“Bullshit. Even if you did somehow think you knew me back then, well, guess what? I’m not the same person I was two years ago. And neither are you.”
Sam didn’t speak, but he was far from silent. Alyssa was aware of him sitting there, breathing. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn he was trying to rein in his temper, to keep himself from saying something stupid or hurtful, trying to bring this crazy argument back to a more civilized conversation.
“You’re right,” he said, and his voice was actually quiet. “I am different. I’m very different. I think … I think you might even like me now.”
God help her when he said things like that.
Alyssa made herself laugh, tried to make light of what he’d just said, to turn it into a joke. “I doubt it.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah, maybe that was a little too optimistic. How about, I think you might not hate me so much now?”
Now she had to fight hard not to laugh. As it was, a snort escaped. “Please just go to sleep.” Despite her efforts, desperation tinged her voice and she took a deep breath before she said, “It
’ll be your turn to drive in an hour.”
He sighed, taking off his hat and throwing it on the dashboard, rubbing his forehead as if he had a bad headache. “I’m sorry if I freaked you out,” he apologized. “You know, by saying what I said. It’s just … I didn’t say it soon enough before. I should have told you I loved you before we first—”
“Just go to sleep,” she said again.
He was silent, then, for several minutes. She was on the verge of relaxing, when he said, “I should have written it on you in chocolate syrup. You know, that very first night.”
When she’d gotten completely shit-faced drunk and handcuffed herself to him so she could be sure he wouldn’t sneak out of his hotel room and try to help his friend John Nilsson. She’d lost her mind and spent the night having sex with Sam. And somewhere down the line, they’d unearthed a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and …
The sight of chocolate still made her feel light-headed.
Alyssa kept her mouth closed. If she didn’t respond at all, surely he’d consider the conversation over and go to sleep.
The Sam Starrett she used to know sure would have.
But the man sitting next to her sighed. “No comment, huh? You know, to this day, I can’t eat chocolate without thinking about you, Lys.” He shifted in the darkness, and she knew he was looking at her. “I can’t taste it without tasting you.”
Oh, God. “Go to sleep,” she said, marveling at her own ability to keep her voice sounding relatively cool and reserved. “Or change the subject. Or I’m turning this car around.”
Sam sighed again. “All right, you win. I’ll be good.”
He was quiet again, then, this time for only about thirty seconds.
“What are the odds we’ll actually find Mary Lou and Haley in Waldo?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Alyssa replied. “It depends on a lot of things.” She was relieved to be talking again. This topic was a relatively safe one, and it kept his words from echoing in her head. I can’t taste it without tasting you.…
“I keep trying to figure out why Mary Lou would run.” Sam sounded tired, his Texas drawl more pronounced. “I keep trying to imagine that day. She comes home after picking up Haley from day care and goes inside, and there’s Janine with her head blown open, on the kitchen floor. It makes sense she would get out of the house right away—in case the shooter was still in there. But why not hop in the car and drive to the police station?”
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