The Rapids

by Carla Neggers

  “I didn’t know Tom Kopac was about to be killed this morning.”

  “I didn’t say you were clairvoyant.”

  “If you have any information, I can take you to the American embassy and we can talk there.” Unless he was already familiar to everyone there—good old Bill Raleigh, yeah, that head case.

  But he was very convincing. “That won’t be necessary.”

  Maggie knew she’d lost him, that he was wrapping up, but she persisted. “I need more to go on.”

  His movements unhurried, he carefully, deliberately, stood. She noticed he had a walking stick with him, the retractable kind that hikers use. He turned to her. “There’s an inn in Ravenkill, New York. The Old Stone Hollow. I don’t know if it’s of any significance. Perhaps it’s just a pretty country inn.”

  “An inn? What—”

  “It’s good to meet you in person, Agent Spencer,” Raleigh said, easing out of the pew. “Your marshal friend is here. He’s not one to underestimate, is he? I’ll be in touch if I have anything else for you.”

  Maggie whipped around in the pew, but she didn’t see Rob.

  A trick. Damn.

  She jumped up, but Raleigh—or whoever he was—had darted into the outer aisle, moving faster than she’d thought him capable of. He kicked over a kneeler and it landed on her ankle, slowing her down as she went after him. Every fiber of her being told him that he was someone she could trust, but her common sense—her training and experience—warned her not to let herself get sucked into his story all the way.

  She wouldn’t be the first law enforcement officer to get taken in by a delusional alcoholic.

  “Mr. Raleigh,” she whispered, “please wait. Rob’s not here. You have to give me more. This inn—”

  Ignoring her, he picked up his pace. Maggie didn’t know what she was supposed to do if she caught up with him. Tackle him and drag him to the Den Bosch police? Shove him in her Mini and drive him to the American embassy? She wasn’t armed. She had no arrest authority in the Netherlands.

  She heard someone mumbling a prayer in a nearby chapel, then the far-off moan of a door, the echo of footsteps. Her hands were clammy, her fingers stiff as if they’d been in the cold.

  “Raleigh!”

  She let her voice go above a whisper.

  A woman spun around in a pew and glared at her.

  He wasn’t stopping.

  If she tried to tackle him, Maggie figured he’d whack her with his walking stick. He’d make a scene. He’d play the crazy old drunk being attacked by a religious zealot. He’d scream for help, scaring the hell out of the few stragglers in the cathedral, and run.

  Trust your instincts.

  He disappeared, hiding in one of the thousand nooks and crannies of the massive cathedral, stealing out an exit.

  Maybe he’d just gone up in smoke.

  Maybe she’d imagined him.

  Ravenkill, New York.

  Maggie had never heard of it or the Old Stone Hollow Inn.

  “Little unsteady on your feet there, Agent Spencer?”

  Dunnemore. He didn’t bother to speak in a whisper. Maggie recognized his Southern accent even before she swung around and saw him coming through a pew from another aisle.

  Obviously he’d been in the cathedral long enough to have seen her trip on the kneeler.

  That meant he’d also seen her chase William Raleigh.

  “Just a little,” she said with an edge of sarcasm. “Have I been longer than twenty minutes?”

  “I don’t know. I gave you a two-minute head start before I came after you.” He stood very close to her, not much charming about his manner right now. “The raw herring wasn’t that appealing.”

  She flexed her ankle, easing out any stiffness. “I should have remembered you track people for a living.”

  “Probably should have. Who was the old man?”

  “William the Conqueror.”

  He held his suit jacket over his shoulder with one finger, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He hadn’t had a particularly good day, either. Maggie felt herself softening as he looked her up and down. “You hurt?” he asked.

  She shook her head, wondering if he might be exaggerating his accent just to throw her off balance. “How did you find me?”

  “You said you were off to pray. This is the biggest church in the whole damn country. I figured it was a good place to start.”

  “You shouldn’t swear in here.”

  “You’re right. We can go outside, and I’ll swear out there.” His eyes—they were a dark gray in the dim light of the cathedral—fixed on her. “And you can tell me about the old guy in the madras shirt.”

  They found a table in the shade at an uncrowded café near the market square. “Get two of whatever you’re ordering,” Maggie said. “I’m not picky. I don’t even know if I can eat.”

  Rob ordered two bowls of the soup of the day, which seemed to involve chicken, and coffee for himself, a Heineken for Maggie. He’d do the driving back to The Hague.

  Their waiter brought the drinks first. Maggie touched a finger to the foam of her beer. She’d had a miserable day, and she looked more shaken than she’d want to admit, worse now that she’d finished with the investigators and the questions—and now that whatever her mission at the cathedral had been was over.

  “The old guy looked like he planned to take you out with that walking stick,” Rob said.

  “For all I know, he thought it was tipped with ricin.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  She sighed. “An attempt at a joke.”

  Rob lifted his small coffee cup. “I’d say cheers, but it wouldn’t sound right today.”

  “I suppose not.” She picked up her beer, hesitating, as if pushing back an intrusive thought, before taking a sip. “It’s been a long week. Nothing about it’s been normal.”

  Including having him thrust upon her, Rob thought, drinking some of his coffee. It was very strong, but he figured a jolt of caffeine wouldn’t hurt. He was hot from chasing after Maggie, negotiating the narrow, unfamiliar city streets in the late August heat. “Your rendezvous with the old guy at St. John’s. That’s why we’re in Den Bosch today?”

  Maggie stared at the disappearing foam on her beer. “I shouldn’t drink—”

  “Go ahead. I’m sticking to coffee. I’ll drive.” He smiled, trying to take some of the edge off her mood and maybe his own. “It’s okay. I can handle a Mini.”

  She raised her eyes from her drink. “I know what it must have looked like back there. Just forget about it, okay?”

  “Not okay. The old guy’s an informant?”

  “A wanna-be, I think.”

  “Any relation to Kopac?”

  “I don’t know that much about him.”

  Rob sat back in his chair. “That’s an evasive answer.”

  “Maybe it’s a polite way to tell you—” She stopped herself. “Never mind. It’s been a lousy day for you, too.”

  But she obviously wanted to tell him what happened in St. John’s was none of his damned business. “Better to evade than to lie outright. Okay. I get that. You don’t know anything about me except that I’m a marshal, I was shot four months ago and my family knows the president.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t trust me, either.”

  “It’s not a question of trust.”

  Then what else was it? But he didn’t ask. “This guy’s contacted you before?”

  “First time.”

  “What’d he do, call, e-mail, send a carrier pigeon? Come on. Throw me a bone. Let me think you’re starting to trust me a little.”

  She didn’t smile. “He called.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “So, after I got here.”

  Their soup arrived in heavy bowls. Cream of chicken and fresh vegetables. It was steaming and substantial, which, despite the heat, Rob welcomed.

  Maggie shifted around in her chair. “I wouldn’t make too much of this. The timing’s bad, I know, but I’m
not all that sure he’s playing with a full deck.” She picked up her beer with such force, some of it splashed out onto her hand. “It’s quiet, don’t you think? Especially for such a beautiful afternoon. People must be worried after this morning. I guess I don’t blame them.”

  “They’ll decide it’s an American thing and go on with their lives. In Central Park in the spring, people decided it was a marshals thing. It helped them get past the idea of a sniper on the loose. Someone wasn’t picking off people at random.”

  Maggie took a drink of her beer, then set down the glass and blew out a sigh. “Tom’s family must know by now what happened to him. It’s an awful experience to go through, having someone come to your house and tell you—well, you know what I mean.”

  “I called my sister from Central Park so she wouldn’t have to find out that way or, worse, see me on television.”

  “Did you know you were in bad shape?”

  “I don’t remember what I knew.”

  She looked away. “You didn’t need what happened today.”

  “Maggie, I didn’t come to the Netherlands to run away from anything. I can do my job.”

  “You’re not back on the street,” she said.

  “That’s not my decision to make. Look—”

  She faced him again, her creamy skin less pale. “You should be. You didn’t hesitate today. The shooter, Tom. You did fine.”

  He acknowledged her words with a nod. “I still want to know about this Scarlet Pimpernel character of yours.”

  This time, she smiled. “You marshals. Hound dogs on a scent.”

  Rob tried the soup, relished the normalcy of it. “Maybe I can help.”

  “That’s nice of you to offer, but there’s nothing for you to do.”

  Clever. It wasn’t as if he could order her to come clean. He could badger her for answers, but he’d already seen her help pull a dead man out of a river, deal with the Dutch police and a nervous embassy and chase a white-haired old man. She’d hold her own against anything he threw at her and tell him exactly what she wanted him to know and not one word more.

  This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he’d told Mike Rivera he wanted to go to the Netherlands.

  “You saw the man with me at St. John’s. My wanna-be informant. Did he look mentally stable to you?”

  Rob shrugged. “Down on his luck, maybe. Lost his retirement, got a little daft. Could just be on a tight budget.”

  “I suppose.” She picked up her spoon, held it in midair and sighed. “I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I just ended up putting you on high alert, got you into tracking mode.”

  “Kopac’s murder did that.”

  Her eyes shone, but she covered her emotion by dipping her spoon into her soup.

  “This guy,” Rob said. “Does he have a name? Besides William the Conqueror.”

  “That was snotty of me. I apologize.” She left it at that. “How long were you in the cathedral?”

  “Obviously not long enough.”

  “Did you see anyone else, anyone who could have been with my guy?”

  Rob remembered the scene when he’d walked into the cathedral, his eyes adjusting to the dim light, his sensibilities to the atmosphere. It was quiet, removed from the murder investigation outside its doors. When he spotted Maggie in a pew, at first he thought, guiltily, that she had, indeed, come there to pray.

  Then he’d noticed the white-haired man sitting too close to her. In the next second, she was chasing after him.

  “I should have followed your guy,” Rob said. “But I didn’t see anyone who might have been with him. Think he tipped you off about Janssen?”

  “No. I’m sure he didn’t. That message came by a free e-mail account. I doubt—” She topped herself. “I shouldn’t make assumptions. He just didn’t strike me as someone who would know the whereabouts of an international fugitive.”

  “But he chose to meet you in Den Bosch, where Janssen was picked up.”

  “Probably for dramatic effect. He could have read about the arrest in the paper and decided to give me a call. You must know how it is with sources. I’m sympathetic to mental illness—I mean it. But it’s not always that easy to sort out the cranks from the legitimate sources.” She sighed. “I didn’t expect that part of this work, did you?”

  Rob didn’t answer right away. He’d dealt with his share of delusional would-be informants, from poor, illiterate drug addicts to highly educated society matrons. Getting sucked into one of their wild fantasies and acting on it was the nightmare of every law enforcement officer he knew. “Maggie—”

  “I’ve told you what I can.”

  He could feel her tension and reached across the table, skimming his fingertips across the top of her hand. Her skin was cooler than it should have been on such a warm day. She didn’t pull away, but touching her was an instinctive gesture on his part and took them both by surprise.

  She took a breath, looking down at her soup. “It’s been a weird day. Surreal, almost.”

  “I’m not the prosecution or your boss.” Rob tried to sound reassuring, not patronizing or irritated by her unwillingness to talk. Still, he could feel his own tension and fatigue clawing at him, and the caffeine had his mind going in a dozen different directions. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  She was naturally very fair, with freckles across her cheeks—her appearance could have a tendency to make people not expect her to be an elite diplomatic security agent, not expect her to be as tough and competent as she was. She’d lost a friend today—an embassy employee—and it had to feel like a failure as well as a personal loss.

  She raised her eyes, the turquoise, he noticed, softened with flecks of gold. “I know that. But thanks. It’s a decent thing to say.”

  He sat back, letting go of her hand. “Eat your soup. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  “I never pass out.”

  But she ate more of her soup, although Rob could see it was an effort for her. She seemed far away again, caught up in something she didn’t want to think about but couldn’t stop focusing on. He noticed how drawn she looked, how closed off from him. It’d been that way at the police station. Even on a good day, getting anything out of Maggie Spencer wouldn’t be easy.

  “Want my opinion?” She looked up at Rob, more alert now, less distracted by whatever had her in its grip. “My guy picked Den Bosch and me because we’ve been in the news, and that’s all there is to it.”

  But she wasn’t willing to take the chance that she was wrong. Part of her believed her wanna-be snitch had access and information that could help her, Rob thought, or she wouldn’t have stepped foot in St. John’s. At the very least, she would have dismissed the guy she’d met there out of hand. Instead, she was thinking about whatever he’d told her, chewing on it, debating whether or not it made sense after all.

  Rob finished off his soup. “I guess it would have been tough to frisk him there in the church—”

  “Unless he had a gun strapped to his ankle, he wasn’t armed.”

  “Going to tell the Dutch police about him?”

  “Only if it’s relevant to Tom Kopac’s murder. Right now, I can’t see that it is.”

  “I’ll bet they’d like to decide that.”

  She ignored him, abandoning her soup. “We should get back. Sorry for the lousy day. Come on. Half a beer won’t affect my driving.” She got to her feet, more animated. “I’ll pay—”

  “No, I’ll take care of it.” Rob dropped some euro notes on the table, more than enough to cover their tab. “And I’ll drive.”

  “Going to fight me for my car keys?”

  An image of the two of them going at it popped into his head, but he stifled it, rising. He was taller than she was—not that she seemed to give a damn. “Sure.”

  That brought some color to her cheeks. “All right. You get to drive.” She smiled brightly, unexpectedly, with a touch of self-deprecation. “You know President Poe. Me—I know a probable paranoi
d-schizophrenic old man who needs medical treatment, not the ear of a DS officer.”

  Rob narrowed his eyes on her. “This guy got to you.”

  “This entire day’s gotten to me.”

  He had an urge to ease some of her emotional turmoil. He wanted her trust and almost asked her for it straight out. But why should she give it to him? They’d known each other for two days. She’d been stuck with him, the wounded marshal whose family was at the heart of the Janssen investigation.

  Maybe it was the effects of pulling a dead man out of a Dutch waterway. He hadn’t known Thomas Kopac, but, Rob thought as he followed Maggie out to the street, if he got to the point that murder was nothing to him, just another event in a day’s work, he’d quit.

  She glanced back at him, said nothing.

  He took a sharp breath.

  And maybe he should pull back from the effects of those turquoise eyes and that red hair and remember that she’d received the Janssen tip, that she had hidden motives for today’s trip to Den Bosch.

  Rob had less reason to trust her than she did him.

  He had his own contacts.

  He’d make a few calls and check out the old guy in the madras shirt himself, see what people knew.

  Seven

  Ethan Brooker stood next to a subdued William Raleigh on an arched bridge over the Binnendieze, the water dark and quiet with the fading sun. After the discovery of the American’s body, boat tours had been canceled for the day.

  “Ever do the boat tour?” Ethan asked.

  “Once,” the older man said, staring down at the canal-like river. “It’s fascinating. You see things you never get to see on ordinary canal tours. The waterway runs behind buildings, not in front, and it literally takes you under the city. It’s all very clean. You get an up-close view of the architecture of centuries-old buildings. There are many small surprises along the way. An unexpected window box or a pot of flowers, a statue. And it’s so quiet.” Raleigh glanced sideways at Ethan. “I take it you’ve never done the tour?”