Inside the minimart, a line of people, their arms filled with gallon jugs of milk, loaves of bread and cartons of cigarettes, waited for the harried clerk to ring their purchases. Ignoring the customers’ angry glares, Stephen and Rachel moved to the head of the line and showed the clerk their federal identification.
“Great,” the plump, gray-haired woman said with a grimace. “First the other cashier calls in sick. Now I’ve got the FBI to contend with.”
“Hurry it up, will ya?” a large man with a beer gut and ruddy face yelled behind them.
Stephen turned to the waiting crowd and raised his gold shield. “This is an official investigation. We won’t take long. In the meantime we’d appreciate your cooperation. If anyone’s been here longer than twenty minutes, we’d like to talk with you, too.”
A few in line murmured among themselves, but the grumbling ceased.
“Did you notice a man using the pay phone outside about twenty minutes ago?” Rachel asked the clerk.
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” the woman said. “It’s going-home time, my helper’s out sick, and I haven’t taken my eyes off the register for the past hour. Someone could have shoplifted half the store, and I wouldn’t have seen ’em.”
“What about cars?” Stephen said. “A blue—”
“Nope. The president could have gassed up his limousine, and I woulda missed him.”
Rachel wasn’t about to give up so easily. “Do any of your regular customers drive an old blue Impala? It’s a matter of life and death. Think hard, please.”
The woman shook her head. “Sorry.”
Rachel pulled out her card. “If you remember anything, give me a call.”
“What’s this all about?” the clerk asked.
“Nothing we can talk about now,” Rachel said, “but it is urgent. Thanks for your time.”
She stepped aside for the impatient customer to place his purchases on the counter.
Stephen eyed the crowd. “Nobody came forward when I asked if anyone had been here over twenty minutes. Looks like we’ve hit a dead end.”
“Maybe not.” Rachel nodded toward a preadolescent boy in baggy shorts and T-shirt with a skateboard tucked under his arm, holding a comic at the magazine rack near the exit. “He pretends he’s reading, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off us since you spoke to the crowd.”
“He’s worth a try.”
As Stephen approached, the boy ducked his head into his book again.
“Been here long?” Stephen asked.
The boy lifted his head and studied them with startled blue eyes, barely visible beneath shaggy blond bangs. “You guys really FBI?”
Stephen flipped open the thin leather folder that held his gold shield with the federal eagle and picture ID and displayed them to the boy.
Wide-eyed, the boy traced the shield with a grubby finger, then glanced at Rachel and back to Stephen. “Wow, just like The X-Files.”
“Except we’re not after space aliens,” Stephen said with a wry smile. “We’re looking for a man who used the pay phone here within the last half hour. Did you see him?”
With a panicked look, the boy flung the comic onto the rack, pivoted in his high-topped tennis shoes and headed toward the door. “Gotta go.”
“Hold it.” Stephen grabbed him by the shoulder. “Just answer my question, son.”
The kid jerked from Stephen’s grasp. “Leave me alone. I ain’t mixed up in this.”
“In what?” Rachel asked.
The boy’s face blanched, as if he realized he’d said too much. “Whatever you’re asking about.”
“Even if you could help us save a life?”
The gentleness mixed with urgency in Stephen’s voice had its effect. The boy wiped his nose with back of his hand. “He has that man’s wife, don’t he?”
“How do you know?” Rachel asked.
“I heard him talking. He wants two million dollars to give her back.”
Stephen frowned. “Did he know you were listening?”
“Uh-uh. I was around the corner.”
“So you didn’t see him?”
“No. Didn’t want to see him after what I heard.”
Rachel’s hopes of teaming the boy with a sketch artist evaporated.
“But I saw his car when he drove away. It was a ole beat-up Chevy with a Georgia tag.”
“Did you get the number?”
The boy shook his head. “Too far away. But the car headed toward Savannah. Now can I go?”
“Give us your name and address first,” Stephen said, “in case we have more questions later.”
Rachel jotted the boy’s information in her notebook.
“What now?” she asked Stephen when the boy left, swerving through traffic on his skateboard.
“We secure the pay phone and wait for the crime scene technicians. Then we’ll go back to the office to start the grunt work.”
THE GRUNT WORK made for a long night. The sun was rising over the river marshes when Rachel lifted her head from studying the forensics reports.
Stephen appeared at the door to her office and handed her a cup of freshly brewed coffee. She stretched to ease the knots from her tired muscles and accepted the steaming cup gratefully.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“No prints on Maitland’s car and no tire tracks at the abduction scene. The pay phone and kiosk at the minimart yielded hundreds of prints, but the most promising are a few partials lifted from quarters at the top of the coin box.”
“Quarters left by the most recent callers?”
She nodded. “I’m running them through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. AFIS should have some names for us within the hour.”
Stephen rubbed his eyes with his fists, reminding her of a sleepy little boy and evoking a tenderness that took her by surprise.
She sipped the coffee and lowered her eyes to hide her unexpected emotion. “Did you find anything on Maitland?”
“His credit rating is excellent.” He stifled a yawn. “I’m still accessing his accounts. But if he’s engaged in anything shady, like gambling debts to the mob, it won’t show up on his bank records.”
“So there’s nothing so far to incriminate him?”
“Except Margaret Maitland’s will. Her father was more than happy to fill me in on the particulars. He hates his son-in-law with a passion.”
Rachel’s heart sank. “Harold Maitland is Margaret’s beneficiary?”
Grim-faced, Stephen nodded. “And Margaret, thanks to an enormous trust fund from her grandfather, is a very wealthy woman.”
The pain of Caroline’s death, which had blunted over time, returned with piercing intensity, multiplying Rachel’s fears for Margaret’s safety. “What do your instincts tell you? Is Margaret still alive?”
Before Stephen could answer, the phone on Rachel’s desk chimed. She glanced at the flashing indicator. “It’s your line.”
Stephen punched the button and grabbed the receiver. “Agent Chandler.”
His expression registered surprise, but he said nothing more, listening for a few minutes, before reaching for pencil and paper, and writing quickly.
“We’re on our way,” he said.
“They found her?” Rachel asked when he hung up.
“No, but the sheriff’s office had a tip.”
She closed the forensics folder and pushed away from her desk. She hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, and her stomach was empty, but all thoughts of food and sleep vanished at Stephen’s alert expression. “What kind of tip?”
“A farmer north of town heard noises and saw lights in the woods near his house an hour before dawn.”
“How does that relate to Margaret Maitland?”
“The farmer heard voices, two men and a woman’s. By the time he got dressed and went out with his dog to check on his property, the people had vanished in an old Chevy barreling past his house.”
Rachel shivered. If the men had been the kidnappers and the woman Mar
garet Maitland, any one of several explanations existed for their presence in the woods, none of them good.
“We’d better hurry,” she said.
Stephen was already headed for the door. “A deputy will join us at the farm with a tracking dog. We’ll swing by the Maitland house on the way and pick up something with Margaret’s scent.”
AN HOUR LATER, Rachel, Stephen and two deputies were tramping through a pine forest thick with underbrush and pine needles and hastening to keep up with the bloodhound who had picked up a scent almost immediately from the Hermes scarf Harold Maitland had provided. He and Parker Dayvault had demanded to participate in the search, but Jason, who had remained at the house to ask more questions and monitor the phones, insisted they were needed to answer the phones in case the kidnappers called again. Reluctantly the husband and father had agreed to stay behind.
It was just as well. Rachel had no idea whether the bloodhound would lead them to the place the abductors had hidden Margaret...or to her body. Her heart sank when the search party broke into a small clearing centered with a mound of freshly turned dirt.
“We’re too late.” She blinked back tears.
The bloodhound began digging furiously at the fresh earth.
“Get shovels from the farmhouse,” Stephen ordered the other deputy, who took off at a run.
Stephen dropped to his knees and began digging with his hands. Rachel and the other deputy joined him, but without tools, progress was slow. The bloodhound continued his frantic pawing, scattering dirt across the clearing and into Rachel’s eyes.
After a few minutes that seemed like hours, the deputy returned, bringing two men and several shovels. For the next ten minutes, nothing sounded in the clearing except the ker-chunk of shovels slicing through the earth and the rain of dirt onto piles that steadily grew.
Rachel stood to the side with the deputy who restrained the dog, while Stephen, the other deputy and the farmer and his son attacked the earth. Stephen had removed his coat and tie and rolled the sleeves of his dress shirt. In the humid summer air, the imported cotton, wet with sweat, delineated the firm muscles of his back and chest and the power of his movements. His generous mouth, set in a hard, thin line, showed his determination.
Emotions ambushed Rachel again, and admiration and a strange tenderness flooded her as she watched Stephen work. If she were ever in trouble, she hoped she’d have a champion like him to rush to her aid. Lack of sleep was making her punchy. She shook her head to dispel the sentimental thoughts.
Suddenly the thud of metal on wood reverberated through the woods. With the shovel’s blade, Stephen scraped earth from broad pine planks.
“It’s a casket,” the farmer said. “You boys might as well slow down and rest. If somebody’s in there, she ain’t going nowhere.”
“No,” Stephen yelled and increased the pace of his shoveling. “Keep digging!”
Fearing the farmer was right, Rachel was afraid to hope, but the men followed Stephen’s order. Within a few minutes, they had stripped the dirt from the lid of the pine box.
The farmer pointed to its edges. “I told you whoever’s in there is a goner. It’s nailed tighter than a miser’s fist.”
Ignoring the wizened old man, Stephen forced the blade of his shovel beneath the casket lid and pried. The deputy, following Stephen’s lead, did the same on the other side. With the screech of yielding nails, the lid broke free and they tossed it aside.
Rachel’s breath caught in her throat. Inside the makeshift coffin lay the body of Margaret Maitland, her golden hair tousled, her clothes shredded, and worst of all, the nails of her hands bloodied where she had tried to scratch her way out of the pine box.
“The bastards.” A sound like a sob caught in Stephen’s throat. “They buried her alive.”
Rachel pushed him aside and laid her hand against Margaret’s neck. A pulse, weak but steady, fluttered beneath her fingers. “She’s alive! Get her out of here. She needs a doctor.”
With a compassion that brought tears to Rachel’s eyes, Stephen gathered the unconscious woman in his arms and, with the deputies’ help, climbed from the hole and started back toward the highway. While one deputy raced ahead to call an ambulance, the other deputy helped Rachel secure the crime scene—or what little evidence was left after their frantic excavation.
AFTER A SHOWER and change of clothes, Rachel and Stephen visited Margaret Maitland at the hospital later that morning. The private room, guarded in the hall by a Savannah cop, was crowded with her husband and parents and the FBI sketch artist.
Margaret, conscious now and propped against her pillows with a flush of color in her cheeks, smiled at the new arrivals from her bed. The only visible sign of her ordeal was her bandaged hands.
Serena Dayvault, her aged, aristocratic face glowing with gratitude, swept toward Rachel and Stephen like a queen at a reception. “You saved my daughter. I can’t thank you enough.”
Parker Dayvault unashamedly wiped tears with a monogrammed handkerchief. Harold Maitland, standing stoically beside Margaret’s pillow, hands clasped behind his back, showed only the effects of a bad hangover.
“I’m sorry,” Stephen said, “but you must all leave so we can question Mrs. Maitland.”
Dayvault drew himself to full height. “Now see here—”
“Be quiet, Parker,” his wife said softly, but the effect was the same as if she’d shouted. “These people have a job to do and we’re in the way. We’ll come back later, sweetheart,” she said to Margaret.
Parker followed his wife meekly out of the room. Harold kissed his wife on the forehead and, avoiding the agents’ eyes, left without a word.
“We’re almost finished, anyway.” The sketch artist set aside her pad. “I’ll take a coffee break.”
Stephen stepped to the bedside. “Do you feel strong enough to answer a few questions?”
Margaret nodded, offered him a weak smile, and self-consciously adjusted the neckline of her hospital gown. Rachel suppressed a smile of her own. She had yet to run into a woman who didn’t respond to Stephen. His unpretentious sincerity, combined with his compelling good looks, usually had women falling all over themselves to answer his questions.
Rachel pulled a chair beside the bed. “The doctor says you’re going to be fine.”
“A bump on the head and broken fingernails seem minor when, except for the FBI, I’d be dead.” Margaret shivered, as if remembering.
“Our work isn’t over,” Stephen said. “Not until the men who did this to you are behind bars. Had you ever seen them before?”
Margaret shook her head. “Never.”
“Where did they take you,” he asked, “after they pulled you from your car?”
“I couldn’t see.” Margaret’s soft drawl had the cadence of her mother’s but was more hesitant than the steel magnolia’s tone. “They blindfolded me, tied my hands and feet, and laid me on the back seat. They didn’t remove the blindfold until they took me to the woods.”
Stephen placed his hand gently across her bandaged, shaking ones. “I know answering is hard, but we have to find these men before they harm someone else.”
Margaret brightened at his touch. “I understand.”
Stephen returned her smile. “Did these men ever give any indication they weren’t working alone?”
“I only heard the two of them.”
“They never contacted or referred to anyone else, someone they might have been working for?”
Margaret frowned. “They mentioned several times that if they didn’t follow the plan, they wouldn’t get paid. But I thought they were referring to the ransom.”
“Did they call each other by name?” Rachel asked.
Margaret nodded. “The tall man was Bubba. He called the short one Weed. That’s not much help, is it?”
“The nicknames may pop up in our computer files,” Rachel said.
She removed a folder from her briefcase. When AFIS had identified fingerprints from the pay phone coins, tw
o of the hits had criminal records with mug shots on file. She had mixed the photos of the two suspects with a half dozen other mug shots. After pulling a rolling table across the bed, she spread the pictures for Margaret to study. “Do any of these men look familiar?”
The woman’s gaze flitted over the first few shots without recognition. Then she gasped. “That’s him! That’s Bubba.”
“You’re certain?” Stephen asked.
“Absolutely.” Margaret shuddered. “That ugly face will haunt me the rest of my life.”
“You’re safe now,” Rachel assured her. “It’s only a matter of time until we catch Bubba and his pal.”
Later, in the hospital elevator, empty except for the two of them, Stephen turned to Rachel. “Melvin Tucker, alias Bubba, is just a two-bit crook. I find it hard to believe he and this Weed planned the kidnapping alone.”
“You think they were working for someone else?”
“We’ll know when we bring them in” he said. “No doubt, we offer them a deal and they’ll spill their guts.”
BUBBA AND WEED never had a chance to reveal whether someone else had hired them. That afternoon, acting on a call to a tip line, Agent Jason Bender had stormed the room the kidnappers had rented in a seedy hotel. When they drew weapons, Jason shot and killed them both.
The capture had been a coup for Jason, who’d often failed to hide his resentment at working in Stephen’s shadow. Local media proclaimed him a hero, and the Dayvaults presented him with a hefty check as a reward. If Jason hadn’t risked his own life in storming the room where the kidnappers had holed up, Rachel would have found his cockiness less tolerable. Another event turned her attention from Jason’s boastfulness.
Two days after the shootings, Stephen was promoted to the Atlanta office. The Maitland kidnapping was the last case he and Rachel worked as partners. What happened afterward had nothing to do with the FBI.
Chapter Three
Where was Stephen?
Rachel paced the broad front porch of Stephen’s mountain safe house and peered into the midnight darkness. Far below, barely visible through the trees, the headlights of an occasional passing car stabbed the blackness on the highway, but none turned up the winding mountain road.
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