The Rapids

by Carla Neggers

  “No, sir.”

  Raleigh looked tired. They hadn’t expected Tom Kopac to turn up dead. Scooting out of St. John’s before Spencer or Dunnemore pounced had taken some doing. Ethan had stood watch in the cathedral, in hiding, and gave Raleigh the high sign when the good marshal showed up. Dunnemore would have recognized Ethan. That meant Raleigh had to get away from the DS agent on his own. If it’d come to it, the old buzzard would have nailed her with his walking stick. It was more an affectation than a necessity, but it would have done the job.

  Instead, Maggie Spencer had let him go.

  Why? What had Raleigh told her? Their meeting was his idea.

  It was to have followed a meeting with Tom Kopac.

  “Did you tell Spencer that you and Kopac were supposed to meet this morning, but he was shot to death before—”

  “I didn’t see how that would help.”

  “I don’t know Dutch law—hell, I don’t know U.S. law—but I’m guessing they could haul you in as a material witness.”

  “I have no information about the murder today.”

  “What did you tell Spencer?”

  “I didn’t have much time. She knows my name. That I knew her father.”

  Ethan turned to his side and leaned a hip against a stone support column of the old bridge. “She thinks he was killed by Czech bank robbers?” he asked. “Or does she know you’re a suspect—”

  “I’m not a suspect. Not in his murder.”

  “In fucking up something that led to his murder.” Ethan didn’t sugarcoat his words, although he and Raleigh had never discussed just how much Ethan had managed to find out in the short months of their acquaintance. “Spencer must not know or she wouldn’t have let you go the way she did.”

  Raleigh didn’t react. He was like that. He didn’t act on emotion. Which was what made his contact with Maggie Spencer so weird—it was all emotion. That was the only explanation that made sense.

  “Right now,” Raleigh said, “it doesn’t seem prudent or necessary to alert Maggie to all of our actions. I gave her a small mission.”

  “What small mission?”

  “I’d like to keep that to myself for now.”

  The old man was getting testy. Ethan let it slide. He was thinking he should head for the American embassy and throw himself at their mercy for ever getting hooked up with this guy.

  Raleigh pulled himself away from the fence. There was a slight tremble in his hand.

  “You’re not hitting the bottle, are you?” Ethan asked, and when Raleigh didn’t answer, added, “People say you’re a bottle-and-breakdown case.”

  “People say a lot of things. They don’t know me.” Raleigh glanced sideways at Ethan and smiled, not nicely. “You don’t know me.”

  It was a fair point. “I want answers about my wife’s death. All the answers. That’s it. That’s all I’m about.”

  “We’re not about to take the law into our own hands,” Raleigh said.

  “I think we already have.”

  He regarded Ethan with paternal insight. “Is that what you think?”

  “If I had a clue who killed Kopac, I’d be knocking on the door to the American embassy and asking them what the hell to do with what I knew.”

  “I don’t have a clue, either, Major.”

  Major. Some months ago, Ethan had stopped thinking of himself as a West Point graduate, an army major who’d led covert special operations missions. In the past, he’d done his best to accomplish the mission tasked to him and his men.

  His wife’s death had changed all that.

  Char.

  The gut-wrenching anger, grief and guilt weren’t there anymore. Just the determination to expose Nicholas Janssen as the person behind her death, and why. All of it, all the answers. Her actual killer—one of the two men Janssen had sent to the U.S. in May—was dead. Nick Janssen himself was behind bars.

  It was a start.

  Ethan hadn’t seen Kopac’s murder coming that morning. He’d have stopped it if he had. It had totally blindsided him.

  He wasn’t sure about William Raleigh.

  “Tom Kopac was a good guy?” Ethan asked.

  Raleigh didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  “Raleigh…” Ethan turned away from the river. “You’d better be who and what I think you are.”

  Which was a spy. For what agency, even what country, Ethan couldn’t be sure. But he’d spent a dozen years in the U.S. Special Forces and thought he could recognize an intelligence operative when he saw one. They’d met earlier in the summer when Ethan’s personal mission of tracking down Nick Janssen and Raleigh’s mission—unknown—had converged.

  Unsettling stories about the supposed economist’s drinking and mental health problems had reached Ethan, and he hoped he hadn’t misplaced his trust. He didn’t want to be duped by a delusional man haunted by his own wrongdoings, trying to dig his way back to some measure of self-respect.

  “You’re sure you shouldn’t be in a home?”

  Raleigh’s eyes twinkled with sudden amusement, the kind of insight that made Ethan continue to work with him. “You are quite a direct man, Major Brooker. If you weren’t, I fear I wouldn’t have made it out of St. John’s today.”

  “Spencer and the marshal never saw me. If they had—”

  “You’d still have found a way out.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Ethan was a search-and-destroy specialist, not someone who hid from federal agents—they were all supposed to be on the same side. “I was just playing the hand dealt us back there.”

  “Yes.”

  Raleigh grew thoughtful, and Ethan could see he needed rest and a good meal—they both did. “Come on. I’ll buy you dinner. Our American friends are on their way back to The Hague. We’re not going to run into them.”

  “Would Rob Dunnemore have recognized you?”

  “The feds weren’t happy when I took off on them in May. I think they all had my picture tattooed on various body parts. Dunnemore was still recovering from the Central Park attack, but I lied to his sister. Told her I was a gardener.”

  “In other words he’d recognize you. You and U.S. federal law enforcement—”

  “We’re square. They’re not after me anymore.”

  “It’s difficult for me to believe anyone would take you for a gardener,” Raleigh said.

  Ethan grinned. “Why not?”

  They started off the bridge, the shadows long in the street with the waning light. “Our job is to keep more innocent people from being killed,” Raleigh said abruptly, then glanced at Ethan in that holier-than-thou way he sometimes had, despite the ancient, worn shirt, let-out pants and veins in his nose. “No matter how great our will or noble our cause, neither of us has the power to change the past.”

  Ethan laid on his west Texas accent, a contrast to the erudite diplomat and economist who’d become his partner of convenience. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, Major. It sucks very much.”

  Rob turned the Mini back over to Maggie at his hotel, waiting for her at the driver’s door before handing over the keys. “Don’t want to come in for a drink?”

  She shook her head. “Thanks, no.”

  “You could dump your car at your place and come back.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  He smiled at her. “Dinner? A walk? Another bowl of soup?”

  That seemed to penetrate her obvious preoccupation. She almost laughed. “You’re very deceptive, Deputy Dunnemore. You have this easygoing facade, but underneath? Uh-uh. Not so easygoing at all. I’m going home and taking a shower and having a glass of wine.”

  “I’m not invited?”

  “Like I said, underneath the Southern charm is a very dangerous man. See you tomorrow.”

  She slid behind the wheel.

  Rob shut the door for her and leaned into the open window. “Maggie—”

  “I’m fine. I’m sorry about today. I know it’s not what you came here for.”

&
nbsp; Rob stepped back from the small car.

  A shower and a glass of wine. Did he believe her?

  He could understand her rationale for not bringing up her clandestine meeting at St. John’s Cathedral at the Den Bosch police station, before she even knew it would come off. But now that it had? Maggie had made no mention of going to the authorities.

  Rob thought he could understand that rationale, too. If she planned to tell anyone, it’d be without him.

  When he got to his room, he showered off the river smells, feeling the scar from his bullet wound under his fingers. Tom Kopac hadn’t had a chance. His killer must have been standing next to him, unrecognized or a friend? An acquaintance Kopac had never suspected of murderous intent? Had he known, at the last second, what was happening to him?

  Rob remembered almost nothing of the shooting in Central Park. The tulips. The miserable weather. So much of his life before and after the shooting was fuzzy, some of it gone forever, due to the trauma he’d endured—the loss of blood, the complications, the long recovery. For some reason, he vividly remembered the shock and determination on Nate Winter’s face as he’d dragged Rob, injured only seconds earlier, to cover behind a rock outcropping.

  But he couldn’t be sure the memory was real, not something he’d pasted together from accounts and descriptions he’d heard and read after the fact.

  He toweled off and put on shorts and a T-shirt, walking out into his room. His window was open, and he could hear a toddler squealing. When he glanced down at the street, he saw a towheaded little guy sitting in a child’s seat secured to the handlebars of his father’s bicycle. Neither wore a helmet. They pushed off, pedaling along on the quiet street on a pleasant summer evening.

  Rob felt an urge to rent a bicycle and head off into the Dutch countryside for a few days, go up north to the polders and the lakes stolen from the North Sea. Who’d care? Just so long as no reporters followed him, no one would.

  Pushing aside such thoughts, he sat at the small table next to the window and dialed his parents’ number in Night’s Landing. He pictured them on the porch of their log home, sipping iced tea punch, the air hot, hazy with the oppressive summer humidity. There was often a breeze on the Cumberland River, and the porch was shaded by huge old oaks that beckoned family and friends to leave the comfort of their artificially cooled rooms.

  His father answered, a man who’d traveled the world but never considered anywhere but Night’s Landing home. “I didn’t expect to hear from you,” Stuart Dunnemore said. “Sarah told us you were in the Netherlands.”

  Rob felt a twinge of guilt, knowing he should have got word to his family himself. His father was almost eighty, and he liked to keep track of his only son. “I didn’t get much notice that I was going.” He hated the note of defensiveness in his voice. “I’m sorry I didn’t call. How are you?”

  “Just fine, son, just fine.”

  It was what he always said. “Mother?”

  “She’s in Nashville with friends, but she should be home for dinner.”

  His mother was twenty-two years his father’s junior, a fact Nick Janssen had tried to twist to his favor—without success.

  “The weather’s nice here. What’s it like there?”

  His father, who’d grown up close to the land, loved to talk about the weather. “We’re expecting thunderstorms late tonight and tomorrow. It’s been hot.”

  From the tone of their conversation, it was obvious he hadn’t heard about the American killed in Den Bosch.

  Rob’s room suddenly seemed claustrophobic, and he wished for a breeze; but the air was still, the street a few floors down quiet.

  “Rob?”

  “I’m okay. I wanted to tell you about something before you hear it elsewhere. An American foreign service officer was killed today in Den Bosch. A DS agent and I found him.”

  “Good God.”

  “We weren’t in any danger.” Which, of course, he didn’t know for a fact. What if the killer had decided to put a bullet in the back of his head? Maggie’s? But he kept his voice calm as he related what had happened. “His name was Tom Kopac. You didn’t know him from your time here, did—”

  “No. No, I didn’t know him. I doubt your mother did, either, but I’ll ask her. Are you all right? How—”

  “I’m okay. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Isn’t Den Bosch where Nick Janssen was found?”

  “That’s right. We were there checking out the area.”

  “You don’t think he had anything to do with what happened?”

  Rob stared down at the empty street. “I don’t know.”

  After reassuring his father that he was fine, he hung up, feeling guilty. His parents were still dealing with the aftermath of Conroy Fontaine and Nick Janssen’s assault on the entire Dunnemore family in the spring.

  I shouldn’t have come here.

  But Rob dismissed the thought before it could take root. His father would have chosen a different profession for his only son. The shooting in the spring and the murder in Den Bosch today would only add to his conviction that Rob didn’t belong in the Marshals Service.

  He dialed Nate’s cell phone. He didn’t want his sister picking up their home phone.

  “Rob. Where the hell are you? I heard about what happened.”

  “I’m safe and sound in my hotel room, about to head down to the bar for a stiff drink. My sister knows?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s—”

  “She wants to get on a plane and fly to Amsterdam tonight. You know she does.”

  The twin thing, as Nate liked to say.

  “Do you want to talk to her?” he asked.

  Rob tried to smile. “Why do you think I called your cell phone and not that haunted house you’re living in?”

  “That’s not why. You’ve never been afraid to talk to Sarah. You aren’t now. What’s up?”

  Rob pushed back from the window. “I need information. Maggie Spencer and Tom Kopac. What do you know about them?”

  A half beat’s silence. “Why?”

  “Kopac befriended Spencer when she got here. No romance, according to both of them. But it’s an odd pairing, even for a platonic relationship. I just want to be sure I’m not missing something.”

  “Talk to me, Rob.”

  The two of them had worked fugitive apprehensions in New York before the Central Park shooting and Nate’s subsequent appointment to USMS headquarters. Rob didn’t want to leave anything out. He had no intention of lying. At the same time, until he knew more, he didn’t want to interfere in Maggie’s business.

  Nate, however, would sense that he wasn’t getting everything.

  “Maggie spotted Kopac minutes before he was killed,” Rob said. “She called to him. Either he didn’t hear her, or he pretended he didn’t.”

  “Anyone with him?”

  “She says she didn’t see anyone.”

  “Any connection between Kopac and Janssen?” Nate asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I’ll check on that, too.”

  Nate wasn’t one to get carried away with speculation. Neither was Rob, although he had a thousand different scenarios and conspiracies and possibilities floating through his head, a distraction, perhaps, to stop him from thinking about Tom Kopac dead in the Binnendieze. But Kopac could have been killed today for reasons that had nothing to do with Nick Janssen—or Maggie Spencer.

  “What’s Sarah up to?” Rob asked finally, changing the subject.

  “Planning the wedding of the century and negotiating with her ghosts. Sometimes I think she believes she really is talking to Abe and Bobby Lee.”

  “Are they talking back?”

  Rob could feel Nate’s grin. “I haven’t asked.”

  After hanging up, Rob headed down to the hotel’s café and sat at an outdoor table, where an accordionist was playing for spare change and accommodating tourists were laughing and clapping, some even dancing. He ordered a beer and watched the sh
ow, dispelling images of Kopac’s body and Maggie’s horror when she realized it was her friend in the Binnendieze, even as she sucked in her reaction and did her job.

  As he drank his beer, Rob let a flashback of his first days back in Night’s Landing after he was shot roll over him, not fighting it, but not diving into it. He’d been weak and dependant and guilt-ridden, angry at having missed clues that could have spared him and his family so much pain and suffering—that could have exposed Nick Janssen sooner. He remembered staring at his reflection in the mirror and making himself acknowledge that his life would never be the same again. That the shooting had changed him forever and there was no going back to the man he’d been before Central Park.

  A fiddler joined the accordionist, then a singer, a plump woman in a ruffled skirt.

  There was more laughter, more applause, but Rob had lost any sense that he was a part of the festivities. He left a few euros for the musicians and took his second beer up to his room.

  After a simple meal at a nearby restaurant, Libby Smith retired to her room in a small tourist hotel in Brussels, a renovated mansion with antique furnishings and an oddly shaped bathroom. Unfortunately, it had only a shower; she’d have loved to have sunk into a hot tub.

  It’d been a close call that morning.

  The man she’d killed had known she was in Den Bosch. He’d known where.

  His name was Tom Kopac. He’d come to Den Bosch to find her.

  Why?

  He was the balding man in the rumpled suit she’d seen on Thursday before the Arrestatieteam had swooped down on Jannsen.

  Libby had a compulsion for checking out her surroundings. She’d recognized him early that morning at her hotel in Den Bosch, she’d heard him ask for her—by name—and she’d taken action.

  Defensive action.

  It was the man’s own damn fault he was dead.

  He was a diplomat, she’d learned later from news reports. An American. And he was friends, obviously, with Maggie Spencer, who was herself in Den Bosch for reasons unknown.

  Philip Spencer’s daughter.

  After dealing with Kopac, Libby had checked out of her Den Bosch hotel, speeking with the desk clerk, in English, about driving to Belgium. She’d played the lonely solo American traveler wanting a chance to chat with someone. A normal conversation with a woman who had nothing to hide. The clerk, who spoke little English, gave no indication he realized the balding man who’d come in that morning was the American murdered steps away on the Binnendieze. Libby didn’t bring up Kopac’s name or ask what he’d told the clerk. She’d spotted Kopac when she came down from her room and overheard him ask for her by name. He obviously recognized her—or guessed who she was—and followed her when she ducked onto the street. His mistake. Minutes later, he was dead.