Riptide

by Catherine Coulter

  “Yeah, right, Tommy,” Rollo said, and he sounded depressed. He was short, dressed all in black, and he was perfectly bald, his head shining brightly beneath the summer moon.

  Tommy the Pipe said, “Maybe he left before we got here. It could be that he took her with him, as a hostage.”

  Linda Cartwright was a woman alone, and Becca knew he’d been in there, with her.

  Damn the bright moon, Adam was thinking, it lit them up as clearly as daylight from the front of the farmhouse. But there were thick pine trees crowding the eastern side of the small farmhouse. Folk grew potatoes in this area, and so much of the land was cleared, open, just occasional random clumps of pines and maples dotted here and there, but no place to hide. There was a big mechanical digger sitting in the middle of an open field. There was a small sagging porch in front of the house, a naked lightbulb burning over the front door.

  On the eastern side of the house, he could get to within twenty feet of the structure before the pine trees played out. It would have to be good enough. He pulled out his Delta Elite, thoughtfully rubbed his temple with the barrel. Then he said, a feral gleam in his eyes, “I got a plan. Gather round.”

  “I don’t like it,” Savich said after Adam had fallen silent. “Too dangerous.”

  Adam said, “I was thinking that all of us could go in guns blazing, raising hell, but the woman might still be alive. We can’t take the chance he’d pop her then and there and then kill two or three of us, what with all this damned moonlight.”

  “All right,” Savich said after a moment, “but I’ll go with you.”

  “Bullshit,” said Adam. “I don’t care if you’re a damned FBI agent and your goal in life is to catch bad guys. You’re married and you’ve got a kid. What I need from you and everyone else is good cover. I hear you’re a pretty good shot, Savich. Prove it.”

  “I’m coming with you, Adam,” Becca said. “I’ll cover your back from right behind you.”

  “No.” He held up his hand. “I’m the professional here. Just say some prayers, that’s all I ask.”

  “No,” Becca said, and he realized then that if he wanted her to stay put, he’d have to have one of the men tie her down. He didn’t like it, but he understood it. It could be dangerous, too dangerous. He just didn’t know what to do.

  “I’m coming,” she said, and he knew she was committed. “I have to, Adam, just have to.”

  He wished he didn’t understand, but he did. He nodded. He heard Savich snort. “Becca will cover me from the woods,” he said. “No, no arguments, Becca. That’s the deal.”

  Sherlock took the walkie-talkie and spoke to Chuck and Dave at the back of the house, told them what was going to happen.

  Becca’s heart was pounding hard and fast. The night was chilly but she was sweating. She felt faint nausea in her stomach. This was real and it was scary and she was terrified, not just for Adam and her, but for that poor woman inside the house, that poor woman she prayed was still alive. Sherlock and the men looked calm, alert, ready. Tommy put his pipe back in his pocket and handed Becca a Kevlar vest. “It’s the smallest one, after Sherlock’s.” He shrugged. “Let me help you with it. You’re going to stay under cover in the woods, remember. You’ll be out of the line of fire, but hey, it always pays to be careful.”

  Once she was strapped into the vest, she pulled her Coonan, and checked the clip three times. Adam took one look at her and didn’t say a thing, just mouthed at her to stay a bit behind him. Her heart was pounding harder and faster than it had just five minutes before. Her hand was shaking, no good, no good. She stuffed her left hand in her pocket. Keep steady, she thought, as she looked down at her right hand, which held her pistol. She looked over at Sherlock, who was frowning at one of the Velcro fastenings on her Kevlar vest. No one was taking any chances at all.

  “Show time,” Savich said after he checked his watch. “Go, Adam. Good luck. Becca, you keep down.”

  Adam, with Becca on his heels, made a wide berth to the east side of the house. He walked slowly, quietly, Becca just as quiet, through the pine trees. When they got to the edge of the woods, Adam pulled up. Twenty feet, he thought, not more than twenty feet. He looked through the window at the other end of those twenty feet, right in front of him. There were curtains, thin, see-through white lace, but they weren’t drawn over the single wide window. It was probably a bedroom. He turned to look at Becca, her face as pale as the fat moon overhead. He cupped her neck in his hand and pulled her close. He whispered against her cheek, “I want you to stay right here and keep alert. You stay hidden, do you hear me? You see him, you blow his head off, all right?”

  “Yes. Please be careful, Adam. Your vest is on correctly? You’re protected?”

  “Yeah.” He touched his fingertips to her cheek, then dropped his arm. “Stay alert.”

  It seemed to Adam that it took him damned near an hour to run those twenty feet. Every step was long and heavy and so loud it shook the earth. It seemed to him that every night sound, from owls to crickets, stopped in those moments. Watching, he thought, they were all watching to see what would happen. Nothing from the house, no movement, no sound, not a single quick shadow. He flattened against the side of the house, his pistol held between both hands, then slowly, slowly, he looked around into a bedroom filled with old white rattan furniture with cheap faded red cushions, a dim-watted bulb shining from an old Lava lamp on a nightstand next to a single bed. He saw nothing, no movement, no one. The cover on the twin-size bed barely covered the top of the mattress. He could see that there was nothing beneath the bed except big-time dust balls. No, no one in the room. If anyone was in there, he was in the closet, on the far side, the door closed. He saw that the door to the bedroom was also shut. He quietly tested the window, paused, listened intently. Still nothing. The window wasn’t locked. He raised it slowly, the sounds of creaking and scraping against old paint as loud as thunder in his head.

  The window was some five feet off the ground. Because he had to, he stuck his pistol in the waistband of his jeans. He’d always hated doing that ever since he’d heard the story some decades back that an agent had stuck his gun in his pants and hit against a car fender in some weird way that pulled the trigger. He shot off the end of his dick. Damn, no, he didn’t want to do that. He pulled himself up and eased his leg over the windowsill. He waved back at Becca, motioning for her to stay back and keep hidden. But, of course, she didn’t. She trotted right up to the house and stuck out her hand for him to help her through the window.

  “Only if you stay hidden in here while I check the rest of the house.”

  “I promise. Pull me up, hurry. I don’t like this, Adam. She was alone here. I know he’s done something bad.”

  A lone owl hooted fifty feet away, from the safety of the woods and a tall tree. The moon glistened down on her face. Adam pulled her over the ledge and she swung her legs to the floor.

  She watched him walk toward the closet door, listen intently, then jerk it open. Nothing. Then she watched him walk to the closed bedroom door, staying to the side, never directly facing the door. He slowly turned the knob, then smashed the door open, sending it banging back, and stepped into the hallway, his pistol up. Then he was gone. She stood there shaking, wishing she wasn’t, listening to that owl, loud and clear, sounding from the forest.

  Where was he? Time passed as slowly as it did in the dentist’s office. Maybe even slower.

  Finally, she heard him shout, “Becca, go back out the window and tell Savich it’s okay for everyone to come in. He’s not here.”

  “No, I want to come out—”

  “Out the window, Becca. Please.”

  When he was sure she was outside, Adam stepped out onto the sagging front porch with its scarred and peeling railing and said, “He’s gone. Savich, come here a moment. The rest of you just stay outside and keep watch, okay?”

  “Yeah, we’ll keep watch, but this is nuts,” Tommy said and pulled out his pipe. “No one moved after we got here and
we converged on the place not ten minutes after you called, Adam.”

  Savich said slowly, “Then he knew, of course, that we’d tapped the phone.”

  “Yes,” Adam said. “The bastard knew, all right. In the kitchen, Savich.”

  “I don’t like this,” Becca said to Sherlock as she pressed toward the front door. “Why can’t we go in the house?”

  “Just stay there for the moment, Becca.”

  Several minutes passed. No one said anything, but one by one the men walked into the farmhouse through the open front door.

  Becca didn’t know what to do. Sherlock, who was standing on the small front porch, her 9mm SIG drawn, sweeping in a wide arc around her, scanning the perimeter, said, “I’ll go check. Becca, why don’t you wait out here just a while longer?”

  Becca stared at her. “Why?”

  “Just wait,” she said, her voice suddenly sharp. “That’s an order.”

  Becca heard the men talking, knew all of them but her were in the house. Why didn’t they want her in there? She ran around to the back of the house and slipped in behind one of the men who was standing in the middle of the back door. The kitchen was painfully bright with two-hundred-watt bulbs hanging naked from the ceiling. The kitchen was small, the appliances were harsh white, clean, and very old. There was an old wooden table, scarred, a beautiful old vase holding dead roses in the center. It had been pushed against the wall. Two of the chairs were overturned on the floor. The refrigerator was humming loudly, like an old train chugging up a hill.

  She slipped around the man in the doorway. He tried to hold her back, but she pulled free. Tommy, Savich, and Sherlock were standing in a near circle staring down at the pale-green linoleum floor. Adam rose slowly.

  And suddenly Becca could see her.

  17

  The woman had no face. Her head looked like a bowl filled with smashed bone, flesh, and teeth. He’d struck her hard, viciously, repeatedly. There were two broken teeth on the floor beside the woman’s head. There was dried blood everywhere, congealed and black on her face and on the worn linoleum, streaks of blood, like lightning bolts, down the white wall. Her hair was matted to her head, blood-soaked dark clumps falling away onto the floor. And there was dirt mixed in with the dried bloody hair.

  “She’s young,” she heard a man say, his voice low, calm, detached, but underlying that voice was a thick layer of fury. “Jesus, too young. It’s Linda Cartwright, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Adam said. “He killed her right here in the kitchen.”

  Linda Cartwright lay on her back on the floor wearing a ratty old chenille bathrobe that had been washed so many times it was nearly white rather than pink, except for the dirt that clung to the robe, dirt everywhere, even on her feet, which were bare, her toenails painted a bright, happy red. Becca eased closer. It was real, it was horrifyingly real, in front of her, and the woman was dead. “Oh, God. Oh God, no, no.”

  She watched Savich bend down to unpin a note that was fastened to the front of Linda Cartwright’s bathrobe. She saw for the first time that the woman was heavy, just as Savich had read off her driver’s license. “Don’t let Becca come in here,” he said to Sherlock, not looking up as he read the note. “This is too much. Make sure she stays outside.”

  “I’m already here,” Becca said, swallowing again and again against the nausea in her stomach, the vomit rising in her throat. “What is that note?”

  “Becca—”

  It was Adam and he was turning toward her. She put up her hands. “What is that note?” she asked again. “Read it, please.”

  Savich paused, then read slowly, his voice firm and clear:

  Hey, Rebecca, you can call her Gleason. Since she didn’t look like a dog, I had to smash her up a bit. Now she does. A dead dog. She’s nice and fat, though, just like Gleason, and that’s good. You killed her. You and no one else. Give her a good wake. This is all for you, Rebecca. I’ll see you soon and it’ll be you and me, from then to eternity.

  Your Boyfriend

  “He wrote it in black ink, a ballpoint,” Savich said, his voice flat, emotionless, as he carefully eased the paper into a plastic bag he pulled out of his pants pocket and closed the zipper. “It’s just a plain sheet of paper torn out of a notebook. Nothing at all unique about it.”

  “Do you think he’s out of control?” Sherlock said to no one in particular. Her face was pale, the horror clear in her eyes.

  “No,” Adam said. “I don’t think so. I think he’s really enjoying himself. I think at last he’s discovering who he really is and what he really likes. I can practically hear him thinking, ‘I want to scare Rebecca shitless, prove to her I’m so bad that when I call her again I won’t hear any more cockiness from her. No, I’ll hear fear in her voice, helplessness. Now, what can I do to really make this happen?’” Adam paused a moment, then said, “And so he decided to kill Linda Cartwright and make her into his fictional dog.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said, “I think Adam is right. There’s nothing but control here. Too damned much of it.”

  “I need to make some calls,” Savich said, but he didn’t move, just stared down at the note and at what had been Linda Cartwright.

  There was silence in the small, bright kitchen and the harsh breathing of six men and two women, one of them drawing hard on a pipe that wasn’t lit. Then Becca broke free, ran out the back door, and fell to her knees, vomiting until her body was jerking and heaving and there was nothing more in her belly. Still she crouched there, holding her arms around herself, shuddering, wanting to die because she’d brought death to Linda Cartwright, just as she had to that poor old woman standing outside the Metropolitan Museum, just as she’d nearly brought death to the governor of New York. She felt him coming up behind her, knew it was Adam.

  “Her face—he obliterated her face, Adam, for a sick joke that only he thought was funny. He murdered her and smashed her face so—”

  “I know.” Adam fell to his knees behind her, pulling her back against his chest. “I know.”

  She felt him begin to rock her, back and forth. “I know, Becca.”

  “I’m responsible for her, Adam. If I hadn’t shot him, if I hadn’t—”

  Adam pulled her around to face him. He handed her a handkerchief, waited for her to wipe her mouth, then said, “Now, you will listen up. If you feel any guilt about that poor woman, I’m going to deck you. None of this is your fault. He’s the evil one. This guy will do anything to terrorize you, to hear you whimper, beg, plead with him to stop. Anything.”

  “He’s succeeded.”

  “Yeah, you’ve got to stop that as well. You can’t let him crawl under your skin. That means he wins. That means he’s got the control, he’s got the power. Do you understand me?”

  She pulled away from him and began kneading his arms with her hands, not even realizing what she was doing. “It’s hard, Adam. I know he’s evil. I know there must be a reason he’s doing all this, a reason that makes perfect sense to him, but in my gut, it feels like I smashed in that poor woman’s face. Oh, God, if I hadn’t fired at him, hit him—”

  “Stop it,” he said and shook her good. “Now, here’s the bottom line. We’re going to leave her just as she is in the kitchen and make an anonymous call. No, don’t argue.” He lightly tapped his fingers against her mouth. “Listen, I know this is very hard to do, given the fact that we’re breaking the law and she’s not going to get the attention she deserves right away. Even Savich and Sherlock are having a real problem with it.

  “Even though they’re part of the highest police force in the land, they realize that nothing good would be served if the world suddenly found out that you’re here and you’re up to your ears in another murder. The cops and the Feds would fight to see who could hold you and question you. On the other hand, you’d be protected, and that’s something, but not enough. All of us agree that you would be charged with murder and accessory to murder. It would be a nightmare and it would continue even if they ever let you
go. Why? Because he would still be there, just waiting, and it would start all over.

  “So, Savich and Sherlock have agreed to keep our connection under wraps for a while. He’s getting the woman’s phone records right now. We’ll find out how long he’s been here, holding her prisoner. We’ll find out who he called besides you. All the guys are going over the house, top to bottom, right now. They’re pros. If there’s anything to find, they’ll find it. If there are fingerprints, and I’m willing to bet there are, they’ll pull those up, too. But it’s going to take time because we’ll have to clean up after ourselves. The last thing we want is to have the police notice some stray fingerprint powder. So we can’t call in her murder for another couple of hours.”

  “He knew the phone was tapped.”

  “Oh, yes, he knew, and that’s why he had the surprise all ready for you. He can’t be far away now. He’s close. Real close. It’s possible he’s watching all of us right this instant, hiding in the pine trees, but I don’t think even he is that reckless. We’ll get him, Becca. You have to believe that. He’ll pay for what he did to Linda Cartwright.”

  “Oh, God,” she said suddenly. “You’re right, Adam, he is watching. Maybe he’s a goodly distance away and using binoculars, but I don’t think so. I’ll bet he’s just over there, somewhere in those trees, and I think he watched you climb through that window, watched me come out here and puke up my guts. You said he was finally realizing who he is, what he likes, and this is it.”

  Her eyes went blank, then she said, “He’s seen Tyler and Sam. Oh God, he knows I’m close to them and doesn’t that make them targets, too? What if he goes after them?”

  “He could, but I doubt it and here’s why. He knows we’re not fools. He knows there are a lot of us. He wants you. He’s made his point. I can’t see him veering off course to kill Tyler or Sam. Why? He wants to nail me, but I’m with you, staying with you, taunting him. That’s why he wants me. Now, Dave and Chuck will start looking around here when they finish in the house.”