Troubleshooters 09 Hot Target

by Suzanne Brockmann

“Yes, it is.”

  “No, it’s—”

  “Do you love me?” He went for it. Point-blank.

  Tears welled again in Jane’s eyes. She wasn’t kidding about that crying thing. “Yes,” she whispered.

  He misted up, too, as he kissed her. God, what a pair. “Then it is that simple,” he said, his forehead against hers. “I’m crazy in love with you, Janey. I’m in love with both of you, with all of you—however you want to define it. And if you love me, too . . . Tell me—with that on our side, what can’t we handle?”

  “I’m not sure I deserve you,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, get over it,” he told her. “Because I deserve you.” He kissed her again. “I have to go. Promise me you’ll do what Jules says. No foolish risks.”

  She wiped her cheeks with both hands. “I’ll be careful.”

  He looked at her.

  “I promise,” she said.

  “Call me if you need me,” he told her, and started for the door.

  “Cosmo.”

  He turned to look at her.

  “It does go both ways,” Jane said. She wasn’t trying to hide her worry from him anymore, thank God. “I don’t want to get a call from Tom Paoletti and Decker every Memorial Day.”

  He came back to the sofa, his heart in his throat. Jesus. “I don’t want that for you, either.”

  He could tell from her eyes that she was very aware that he hadn’t promised her that that would never happen. As a SEAL, it was a promise he couldn’t make, a promise he might not be able to keep.

  He just kissed her again, then went out the door.

  The sound of an incoming fax didn’t wake Robin, so Jules kicked the leg of his chair as he went past. “Go to bed.”

  Robin opened his eyes. “Did he call?” He pushed his hair back from his face as he straightened up in his seat.

  “Not yet,” Jules said. “Aren’t you in that D-Day scene that’s being filmed tomorrow? I thought Jane said you had a predawn call.” He glanced at his watch. “Which is in, like, an hour. Okay, forget about bed. You better go take a shower.”

  Robin shook his head gingerly, grimacing at the pain from his hangover. “No way is Janey going to continue production—”

  “She has to,” Jules said, dialing his cell phone, calling Cosmo. “Business as usual. We’ve got to assume the killer’s watching. Seriously, Robin, you better get going.”

  “Why hasn’t he called?” Robin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jules admitted. “Maybe he’s just screwing with us.”

  He got bumped right over to voice mail. “Richter, it’s Cassidy. I just received a list of names from the IRS, believe it or not. It’s standard procedure to check any list of suspects with them, see if any names stand out. I think it dates from the days when nearly all FBI agents were accountants. Anyway, I cross-referenced this list with the extras who own uniforms, and four names were flagged.” He consulted the fax. “One’s for tax evasion—Christopher Martins. Two had errors in their social security numbers, which could be intentional or not—Paul Ramirez and William Hart. The fourth’s a little odd. A Carl Linderman is marked for paying taxes last year, apparently after a few years of reporting zero income. I’m not sure what that’s about—why that’s a problem. I mean, he could be a student, right? Anyway, there it is. Call back so I’ll know you got this message—actually, why don’t you call Jane? I think she’d probably like to hear your voice. The past few hours have been pretty tense over here. Thanks.”

  He made another call to Tom Paoletti with that same information, then flipped his phone shut and glanced back at Robin, who was watching him.

  “What?” Jules said.

  “Adam’s going to be on set,” Robin told him. “I haven’t seen him since . . .”

  That night.

  Jules was too tired to do more than close his eyes in an attempt to hide his very emotional reaction to that news. What was he supposed to say? Congratulations?

  “Cos just got your message,” Jane called out from the other side of the room, her cell phone to her ear. “He just missed your call. He says he’ll put those four at the top of his list.”

  “Thanks, sweetie,” Jules answered her, then turned back to Robin. “Good luck with that.”

  “Today’s the day I die.” Robin must’ve realized that that probably wasn’t the best thing to say to the FBI agent in charge of tracking the psycho who wanted to kill his sister. “In the movie,” he quickly added. “It’s a dream sequence, a nightmare, and I actually die—Hal dies—a whole bunch of different ways.”

  Jesus, Jules needed a vacation. “Have fun,” he told Robin, and walked away.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “I wasn’t anywhere near Omaha Beach in Normandy on the sixth of June 1944,” Jack Shelton told Robin in his reedy old voice. “By the time the Twenty-third arrived, the fighting had moved quite a ways into France. But I stood on that beach and imagined what it had been like for those boys who’d leapt from the Higgins boats and rushed onto the shore. I marveled at the lack of cover—it was a beach. There was nowhere to hide from what must’ve been a rain of bullets from the German machine-gun nests in their concrete bunkers on the cliffs.”

  Robin stood with Jack now on the beach in California, where they would spend the next four days filming the battle sequence.

  “Aside from the copious amounts of water and sand, this doesn’t look all too much like Normandy,” Jack informed him.

  Instead of cliffs, there was a steep, brush-covered hillside on the south end of the beach. A jumble of giant rocks was at the bottom, forming some kind of breakwater that extended out into the ocean. The rocks looked slippery and dangerous where the waves broke over them, and just plain dangerous farther ashore.

  The set designers had scattered bits and pieces of Hitler’s famous Atlantic Wall on the sand—giant bars of twisted steel, chunks of concrete to keep tanks at bay, rolls of barbed wire to make life more difficult for the foot soldiers. Although only the barbed wire was real. The steel and concrete were foam and plastic.

  Digital effects would be added via computer—more of that wall, a more realistic-looking cliff, the massive Allied armada dotting the “channel,” aircraft overhead.

  Jack had told Robin that some of his peers—aging set designers from Hollywood’s golden era—looked down their noses at filmmakers who used digital effects. They called it cheating.

  Jack believed that digital effects were just another cost-cutting item in a filmmaker’s toolbox.

  Which was true. Without it, Janey wouldn’t even have attempted to include this D-Day sequence in American Hero. It saved a bundle on casting, too.

  Additional Marines would be added digitally, although hundreds of the real deal—well, real stuntmen and extras anyway—had already arrived, parking in the big lot and reporting for costume and makeup in a circus-size tent nearby.

  There were three other tents set up right on the beach. One was to provide shade for the actors. Another was for the production team, as well as for the special effects explosives and for special makeup and latex body parts for those doomed to “die” in particularly gruesome ways.

  The third tent was for props—battle gear as well as authentic-looking weaponry.

  Normally such items would’ve been handed out in the costume tent in the parking lot. But because of the heightened security—a chain-link fence had been hastily constructed around this part of the beach, and a metal detector was set up at the gate, through which everyone had to pass—none of the actors or stuntmen were being given a prop gun until after they were on the enclosed set.

  As Robin strolled down the beach with Jack, he saw Adam, in uniform, deep in discussion with the director and the stunt supervisor, choreographing a rush up the beach and a dive to cover behind a small ridge of sand. The ridge was rigged to explode, as if deflecting an artillery hit.


  The special effects team had also set up lines of smaller explosions designed to look like machine-gun bullets hitting the sand. Adam had to be close to them, but not too close, in order for the danger to look realistic.

  The AD was farther down the beach, talking to a large group of extras, pointing out the areas that were restricted to the stuntmen only.

  Harve was with those stuntmen, giving them a refresher course on using the squibs and blood packs that they wore hidden in their uniforms.

  Another group was already in place even farther down the beach, near the “cliff.” One of the extras was hard at work, digging a foxhole.

  “He’s a little odd,” Jack said, following Robin’s gaze. “I was talking to him earlier—he was quite keen on trying out that entrenching tool.”

  He certainly was energetic. “Some of these guys are part of a group of Civil War reenactors,” Robin told the old man. “They can be a little intense. They like to live the part—it’s kind of like having a hundred Robert De Niros as extras.”

  Jack nodded. “Speaking of living the part,” he said. “You’re looking a little worn around the edges. You really must take better care of yourself, Robin. While it’s true Harold had an unearthly quality to him, it was more angelic than dead and buried.”

  “Yeah, well, Harold never had to worry about—” Robin stopped himself. “I’ll work on getting to bed earlier. In the meantime, I better get into makeup, see if they can do anything to help.”

  “Oh, and Adam was looking for you,” Jack called after him. “He was hoping to get a chance to speak to you before filming starts. I told him I’d tell you to keep your eyes open, to watch for him.”

  “Thanks,” Robin called back. He’d watch for Adam, all right. In order to avoid him like the plague.

  The sound of the sirens in the distance was the first clue Cosmo had that his unauthorized presence in William Hart’s little stucco three-bedroom ranch had been noted.

  The second clue was a female voice coming from the shade-darkened gloom at the bedroom-end of the hall. “Drop whatever you think you was stealing, hands up, and turn around slow. I got a gun, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

  How had she heard him? He’d been silent. And invisible. Cos was tempted to ask her if she wanted a job and hand her Tom Paoletti’s business card, but instead, he kept his hands where she could see them as he turned.

  True to her word, the very young, very short woman standing there was holding a Colt .380 handgun.

  “Police are on their way,” she informed him.

  She may not have been afraid to use the weapon, but her stance was ridiculous. It was extremely likely that she didn’t know how to use the damn thing. And it sure as hell looked to Cosmo as if the Colt’s safety was on.

  With Patty’s life in danger, and Janey climbing the walls, Cosmo didn’t have time for lengthy explanations to either Charlie’s littlest angel or the nice policemen speeding their way here. Yes, the kitchen door had been unlocked when he’d let himself in, but that only meant that—if they refused to listen—he’d be facing felony home invasion charges instead of a B&E. The booking process and bail hearing would be just as time-consuming.

  But he also knew—and he had absolutely no doubt about this—that Jane would be very unhappy if he got himself shot and killed this morning.

  The sirens were getting louder as Cosmo tried to get a better look at that weapon.

  “Is that real or a toy?” he finally asked, and she slapped on the hall light.

  “It’s very real, and I will shoot you if you move.”

  Not with the safety on like that, honey.

  Cosmo dove for the dining room. He went out the ancient sliding glass door feetfirst, right through the already cracked glass—which freaking hurt, but not half as much as it would have if he’d given gun-girl the time to push that safety down.

  Bleeding from God knows where, he leapt from the back deck and raced across the backyard, staying low and zigzagging in case she decided to shoot him.

  The fact that she didn’t fire that weapon was good.

  The bleeding, however, was not so good. Although as far as he could tell, the worst of it was a couple of superficial gashes to his forearms.

  Cosmo used the bottom of his T-shirt to keep from leaving a telltale trail behind him as he circled around, heading back to his truck. As he crossed into a neighbor’s yard, he could see that there were three police cruisers parked haphazardly in front of William Hart’s little house, lights still spinning.

  He’d gotten out just in time.

  And he could probably cross William Hart off his list of suspects. At least they could be sure Patty wasn’t being held at Hart’s home. Kidnappers generally didn’t call the police for assistance.

  Cosmo moved swiftly, keeping to the neighborhood shrubbery. His left arm was bleeding a little too conspicuously, and . . . Damn it.

  Down the street, another police cruiser was stopped right behind his truck.

  Cos had parked on the main thoroughfare, some distance away, but apparently not far enough. This cop was just hanging there, keeping his eyes open, no doubt watching for someone who looked as if he’d just run through a sliding glass door.

  Someone, say, with blood dripping down his arms . . .

  Cursing, Cosmo turned and swiftly headed south.

  He needed to get out of this neighborhood before he went into a store to buy a new shirt, making a lot of noise about how he’d fallen off his bike on the way to a breakfast date with his new girlfriend and her father.

  Until he got that new shirt—preferably one with long sleeves—he had to keep a low profile, but he might as well head toward Carl Linderman’s apartment. Linderman was suspect number four on the IRS list, flagged for . . . wait for it—it was a good one . . . paying his taxes.

  This was probably a waste of time. Chances were pretty slim that the killer was a) one of the extras who owned his own uniform, or b) one of the four that the IRS had flagged, and especially c) Carl Linderman, whose apartment Cosmo had already checked out.

  Still, the fact that Linderman’s name kept showing up on so many lists made it worth another look.

  Cos would have to come back this way later for his truck.

  And—fuck!—for his cell phone, which he’d left in the slot in the dash, right above the radio.

  From somewhere down the street, a police siren whooped, and Cosmo moved through the early morning fog, cutting through backyards, as swiftly as he possibly could.

  “Holy shit!”

  Jane looked over at Jules Cassidy, who was talking to someone on his cell phone. Was that a good “Holy shit!” or a bad one?

  “Holy shit,” he said again, and this time he sounded angry. “Four hours ago? And you didn’t think your Jane Doe might be someone we’d want to know about?”

  Jane Doe.

  “No,” Jules said into his phone. “No, she was kidnapped. Yes, a federal case—”

  Jane Doe was the name the police, the hospital, or the morgue gave to an unidentified dead body. Jane stood up.

  “You do have a computer, don’t you? With—” Jules glanced over at her. “Hold on,” he ordered whoever was on the other end of his phone as he correctly interpreted the expression on her face. “Patty’s alive,” he told Jane. “She’s over at Century City Hospital. She’s safe.”

  “What?” she breathed.

  “Yeah, she was found four hours ago. From what they can tell, she got hold of her kidnapper’s rifle and blew him away—in self-defense. It’s already been run through ballistics. It’s the exact same weapon that killed Angelina and Ben Chertok.”

  “Holy shit,” Jane said. “Are you telling me . . . ?”

  “We’re pretty sure your Mr. Insane-o is dead.”

  Decker pulled up to the crime scene just a few seconds after Jules Cassidy arrived.

  Someone had already draped both the building and the car parked in the driveway with yellow tape.

  The car in the driveway
was an ancient Pontiac Catalina. White, with a peeling black top.

  Hot damn.

  Cassidy was on the verge of being led inside, but he saw Deck coming and waited for him to catch up.

  “Our guy’s name was Mark Avery,” Jules said, no greeting. Deck knew the FBI agent had been up all night, too, but he didn’t look even slightly rumpled. He was clearly a disciple of his boss, Max Bhagat, who was an impeccable dresser. Beneath Jules’ suit, his shirt looked clean. Deck would’ve bet big money that Jules kept an electric razor in his glove compartment and used it at red lights on his way over.