Hot Pursuit

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “I can’t do that, sir,” Dan said. “I’m sorry—believe me, I am, but I don’t know where she is.”

  “God damn it.” Wherever Sam was going, he was in a hurry. “You’re with me,” he ordered, and Dan had to double-time it to keep up.

  “I’d really like to keep looking for her, sir,” Dan started, but Sam cut him off.

  “I suck at this,” he said, “so I’m just going to tell it to you straight. The local police called Jules. There’s a body in the dumpster outside of the assemblywoman’s office.”

  Dan heard the words. He knew what they meant. And he knew what the trepidation in Sam’s tone meant, too. “It’s not her,” he said, but his voice sounded strange to his own ears. “Oh, Jesus …”

  “It’s probably not,” Sam agreed. “But we’ve got a missing woman, and NYPD’s got a body, so … We’ve got to go check it out, whoever it turns out to be. It’s too much of a coincidence, body turning up in that dumpster, day after Maggie and Winston’s bodies are recovered a few buildings down …”

  Sam may have kept talking. He may even have—like Izzy often did—burst into song. If he did, Danny didn’t hear him.

  All he could hear was his own heartbeat, the sound of his breathing, the rhythm of his boots on the sidewalk as the city blocks went by.

  He didn’t know whether to hurry or lag, because as long as he wasn’t there yet, it wasn’t Jenn in that dumpster. He wouldn’t let it be.

  Ah, but God, what if it was?

  Despair and loss clutched at him in a near-overpowering wave, but then he felt Sam’s hand on his arm, and he looked up, surprised to see that they’d already made it over to the office. He’d nearly walked right past the alley entrance.

  “You okay?” Sam asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Dan lied.

  Once again, there were police cruisers and unmarked vehicles, lights spinning, in the alley. Once again, a crowd had gathered.

  Dan followed Sam, and they pushed their way over to where a uniformed officer was keeping the onlookers back from the crime scene.

  “I’m Starrett, with Troubleshooters,” Sam said, but the cop was unyielding—until one of the FBI agents who’d come to Maria’s office—Carol—stepped forward. With a nod, they were through.

  But then Sam stopped Dan, his voice not unkind. “Maybe you should wait here.”

  Dan shook his head. “I’d rather not, sir.”

  Sam sighed, but he nodded. And Dan trailed after Sam as Carol led the way to the police detective who was apparently in charge.

  “The victim’s female,” the man told them, and Dan wanted to stop listening. He wanted to walk away. He didn’t want to know. But then the man added, “She’s been dead for quite some time …”

  And the rush of relief, so swift and fierce, made him lightheaded, that the rest of the detective’s words seemed to come from far, far away. “… it’s hard to tell how long exactly, because the body appears to be frozen.”

  “There’s a bag over her head,” Carol added. “We’re waiting for the photographer to get pictures before we open it or attempt to ID the—”

  Sam somehow knew Danny was on the verge of falling over, and interrupted Carol to tell him, “Why don’t you take a few minutes?”

  “Thank you, sir.” Dan stepped away to dig for his phone, to try calling Jenn again as he leaned against the side of a nearby building, grateful for its support. But he went right to her voice mail, so he left a message.

  “Please, Jenn,” he said. “Call me. I know you’re mad—you should be. What you overheard is … It’s what I do. And I pretend to be honest, but I’m not, because it’s just a game. It’s not real, it never is, except… it’s different this time. With you.” Jesus, he sounded like every lying sack-of-shit idiot on the entire face of the planet. Except this time he was telling the truth. “Look, I just had the crap scared out of me. There was a body in the dumpster and I thought it might be you and … Please, baby …” He couldn’t help it—his voice actually cracked. “Jenni, come on. Just call so I know you’re all right.”

  When Jenn woke up, she didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten there.

  She was on the floor of a dimly lit room, with dark wood paneling on the walls and an ornate hardwood floor, with what looked like an Art Deco–era chain of darker wood inlaid around the edges.

  God, her head ached and her arms and shoulders hurt, and something hard was biting into her wrists, but she couldn’t move her hands. With a flood of panic, she realized that they were tied behind her back. Her feet were tied as well, and a gag was actually in her mouth, wicking the moisture, making her tongue feel swollen and her throat sore and dry.

  She had to be dreaming. She felt strange, as if she were partially floating, and she tried to make herself wake up. This had to be a nightmare, it had to be. But try as she could, she couldn’t seem to open her eyes.

  Because her eyes were already open.

  Sobbing, she pulled herself up so that she was sitting, taking her weight off her arms and wrists. And that helped, but not a lot, because as she looked around, even with her glasses gone, she realized that there were no windows or doors—just that relentless paneling, as if she’d been put here and the room built around her.

  Around her and a huge table that sat pushed off to one side.

  And she realized, with dread, that the awful, faintly metallic smell was from the dark stains on the floor and on that table, and that the splatters on the walls …

  It was blood.

  And Jenn began inching her way around the edge of the room, searching for a crack in the paneling that would reveal a door—and a way out.

  This wasn’t a dream. Someone had brought her here—someone who was going to come back and add her blood to the floor and walls.

  “Can we get a warrant?” Alyssa asked as she and Jules picked their way carefully down the still slippery sidewalk of a neighborhood that was right out of one of The Thin Man movies. Nick and Nora definitely had lived in this quaint part of town. And while some of the owners had converted their ornate townhouses into condos, dividing the multistory mansions into four or even five separate apartments, some looked unchanged.

  Oh, to have a few million dollars in disposable income. …

  “I’m not sure I can find a judge who will agree that Alyssa has a bad feeling about this man is a sufficient reason for a search warrant,” Jules told her. “What we can do is assign a team to watch Gene’s house and as soon as anyone appears—either Gene or his parents—we bring ’em in for questioning.”

  Alyssa had been sorely tempted, while walking around the outside of Gene’s parents’ ramshackle Victorian house in Brooklyn, to tell Jules to look the other way while she did a little nongovernment-regulated investigation of her own.

  “That’s assuming they’re going to appear,” she pointed out now.

  “True,” he said. “But if they don’t, that gives us the probable cause we need, so we win.”

  “No,” Alyssa argued, “we lose because we have to wait. And if Gene is our guy? While we’re waiting, his trail is getting colder.”

  And if Sam was right—and she wasn’t yet convinced that he was—Gene Ivanov was also the vicious serial killer known as the Dentist.

  And here they were. In front of the house where Douglas Forsythe lived with his ailing, elderly parents. And suddenly, she didn’t feel quite so bad for him. It wasn’t as if he were stuck with them in some seven-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom apartment. This was one of the unaltered townhouses. Douglas had a good seven thousand square feet with which to stay well out of his parents’ way.

  “Let’s make this as quick as possible,” she told Jules as she went up the steps to the massive front door. They still had a scheduled visit with Mick Callahan and his parents, and they were running behind. The trip back from Gene’s house in Brooklyn had been fraught with traffic. Everything in New York City took three times longer than it ought to, and she needed to get back to the hotel to feed Asht
on or to use the pump or she was going to ruin yet another shirt.

  But before they reached the landing, the door was thrown open, as if Douglas had been waiting for them.

  But instead of a welcoming smile, the man looked distraught. His hair was a mess, his glasses crooked, tears on his face. He was holding a cell phone in hands that were shaking. “I’m trying to call 9-1-1,” he told them. “But I can’t get through. My mother—I think she’s having a heart attack!”

  Alyssa looked at Jules, who was already taking out his own phone. He also took the opportunity to do what she’d already done—to unfasten the velcro that locked his sidearm in place, making it easier to access, should he need it.

  “I’ll call,” Jules said. “I’ll get through.”

  “Where is she?” Alyssa asked as she stepped through the door and into a marble-tiled two-story foyer, with a chandelier the size of a Volkswagon Beetle hanging overhead, above the curve of an elegant staircase.

  “The kitchen,” Douglas told her.

  There were doors leading in all directions, not to mention that set of stairs, so she said, “Show me.”

  He led the way—Jules was right behind them—past a formal living room and through a dining room with a massive wooden table and seating for what looked like sixteen. All the shades were drawn and that, plus the gloomy day, filled the place with shadows. But when Douglas held open the swinging door into the kitchen, stepping back to let her go in first, the room was brightly lit and warm, a kettle whistling on the stove, a tinny-sounding radio playing some big band hit from 1940, and something with chocolate and cinnamon baking in the oven.

  And yes, there in an open, old-fashioned pantry, was a small figure, wearing a brightly flowered housedress, crumpled on the floor.

  Alyssa reached into her jacket and locked her weapon back in place—a safety precaution—as she crossed to the woman, who’d fallen onto her side, her face down, her legs curled almost oddly beneath her.

  Her hair was gray and strangely matted with what looked like blood. “Looks like she hit her head when she fell,” Alyssa informed Jules, but as she reached to check for the woman’s pulse, she was cold to the touch—not just cool but cold.

  This woman was dead. She had been for quite some time, and Alyssa moved to see what, as Sam would have said, the fuck … ? And she caught sight of the dead woman’s face and recoiled in horror. Someone had taken a knife to her, cutting open her cheeks and breaking her jaw so that it hung down, her mouth permanently open in a horrible silent scream.

  Her teeth were gone.

  Alyssa had seen that awful mutilation before—when she’d discovered Amanda Timberman’s body, jammed into an ancient refrigerator in a cabin in the mountains of New Hampshire.

  Dear God, Sam was right.

  She reached for her sidearm, shouting, “Jules!” but it was too late.

  Douglas tased her—but it was unlike the numbing trial blast she’d voluntarily experienced when Troubleshooters had had mandatory Taser training. It seized all of her muscles—all of them, not just her upper body, but her legs as well. And she crumpled to the pantry floor, taking out a shelf of spices and cans of soup, willing herself to move, to fight, to scream, but unable to do anything.

  Jules was on the floor, too—Douglas must have tased him first—the shrillness of the teakettle and the music masking both the electrical charge and the sound of him falling.

  And she felt Douglas groping her, taking her weapon and her cell phone.

  He looked down at her; paralyzed, she could do little more than gaze up at him.

  And he smiled and said, “Isn’t this fun?” and hit her in the head with her own sidearm.

  And the world crashed and popped and faded to black.

  He didn’t know what to do about the FBI agent.

  He’d taken both of their guns, so he could shoot him, but he’d never owned a gun, and didn’t quite know how to use it. Besides, shooting him would mean there’d be blood spraying everywhere, and he didn’t want that.

  It was bad enough that the tasering had made the man drool. He’d read on many websites—after the fiasco with the freak in New Hampshire—that it wasn’t just blood that carried the AIDS virus. It could be transmitted from other bodily fluids, too.

  He’d gotten himself tested and retested after taking the homosexual ski instructor’s teeth, after being elbow deep in his blood and gore, but luckily he was clean.

  Still he’d learned his lesson.

  He now carefully tied up the FBI agent, just as he’d done with Alyssa—hands behind his back, ankles bound. He used an extra length of cord to tie together the ropes around both his wrists and ankles, pulling it tight so that his body was bent backwards, his hands and feet touching, so that there was no chance of his working his hands around in front of him.

  The man was starting to rouse as the effect of the Taser finally began to wear off. So he quickly rummaged through his mère’s cabinet and found a plastic bag that was big enough. He put it over the abomination’s head, to protect himself from any flying spittle as he tasered him again. And again.

  But the son of a bitch now pissed himself, which was disgusting and problematic, because now he couldn’t touch him to move him, but…

  Then there it was—so obvious—the solution to his problem.

  He merely had to tie—tightly around the man’s throat—that plastic bag that was already covering his head and face.

  That would, most definitely, do the trick.

  Alyssa was still unconscious, too, but he spoke to her anyway. “Shall we go, my dear?”

  As he picked her up, he couldn’t resist pulling back her lips to touch her pretty white teeth.

  The cop that Jennilyn had a crush on—Mick Callahan—showed up just as the body was being moved out of the dumpster and onto the ground.

  The dead woman had been frozen, but apparently only after she’d started to decompose. It was awful—even just the bit that Danny could see. She was in a strange, near-fetal position, her knees bent up to her chest—probably the better to fit her into a standing freezer.

  The detectives were getting ready to cut open the bag that was over her head. It was one of those tan, plastic grocery-store bags, and it concealed her face. Dan didn’t particularly want to be close enough to see her when they took it off.

  He wanted to find Jenn, but despite his many messages, she still hadn’t called back.

  Neither had Alyssa or Jules called Sam. Danny knew that the former SEAL lieutenant was getting more and more concerned about his inability to reach them, too. And Callahan’s appearance in the alley just put the frosting on the cake.

  For Dan, too. Jenn liked this asshole. Jesus, was this actually jealousy he was feeling?

  “I can’t help but notice how the bodies didn’t start piling up until you hit town,” Mick said to Sam. He stood with his legs slightly apart, and that plus his smirk punctuated his words. The man was clearly trolling for a fight.

  But Sam kept it together. He made himself smile, even though it didn’t come close to touching his eyes. “That’s pretty funny.”

  “I’m not kidding,” Mick said, his eyes as cold as Sam’s. “You think I’m a suspect? Well, now I think you are. How do you like that?”

  I think you’re a fucking douche bag. Dan could see the words written all over Sam’s face, but he didn’t have a chance to say them, because one of the other detectives announced, “Victim’s got what looks like a wallet in the back pocket of her jeans.”

  “Her name’s Betsy MacGregor,” Sam told them, ignoring Mick. “She’s from a burb outside of Chicago and she’s been missing since August, 2007. She was abducted by a serial killer known as the Dentist, who’s still at large.”

  “Illinois driver’s license,” the other detective said, as he opened the wallet, “belonging to one … Elizabeth MacGregor.”

  “How the hell did you know that?” Mick said, even as Sam said, “Shit.”

  “I didn’t want to be right,”
the former SEAL officer added. “Betsy was this bastard’s last victim—that we know of, anyway. Before Maggie Thorndyke, that is.”

  “The Dentist,” Mick repeated, folding his arms across his chest. “I suppose you’re going to try to pin that on me, because I just happened to mention the other day that my mother wanted me to—”

  “No one’s trying to pin anything on anyone who doesn’t deserve it,” Sam said. Dan knew he was trying to be diplomatic, but he couldn’t keep his disgust from his voice. “I’m trying to help catch a killer who’s been carving up his victims since 2001. What are you doing here, Callahan?”

  “Jesus Christ,” gasped the detective who’d cut open the bag, and Jesus Christ was right. Dan turned away, having gotten only a glimpse of what was left of the poor woman’s face.

  “Alyssa and I found another of his victims,” Sam said tightly, and for once Mick Callahan had nothing to say. “A girl named Amanda. He left her looking a lot like Betsy, here.”

  One of the FBI agents vomited behind the dumpster as Dan focused on his phone, taking the opportunity to dial Jenn’s number again.

  But again, she didn’t pick up.

  “Jenni, just call me back,” Dan said. “Please.”

  “He takes their teeth,” Sam said quietly. “Believe me, seeing this is something that you’ll never forget. I never did. So if you’re done screwing with me, Callahan, I’d like to go find my wife, so we can catch this motherfucker.”

  Mick’s face was pale as he nodded. “On July 30, ’07, my father had a heart attack. It was a bad one. He was in the hospital—Mt. Sinai—for the entire month of August. I was there, with him, every day.” He cleared his throat. “But if you still think I might be the monster who did this, then I’ll make your job easier and I’ll go in right now, and I’ll sit in the police station …”

  Dan didn’t hear what Sam said to Mick, because—finally—his phone vibrated. It was Jenn, sending a text message. But the relief didn’t last as he read the words …

  Alyssa has nice teeth.

  “Lieutenant,” he interrupted Starrett, as the realization of what that message meant chilled him to the soul.