Dangerous Games

by Prescott, Michael

  His partner kept telling him he was paranoid. But the fact was, he did have enemies everywhere. His instincts had been right. Tess, Abby, Madeleine Grant—three bitches, all out to get him.

  He still couldn’t figure out how Grant had connected him with the kidnappings. It worried him, because what he couldn’t understand, he couldn’t control.

  There was a lot of stuff he couldn’t control lately. Losing his job, for one thing. And that craziness last night on the road, and the way he’d lost it today in his parked car. It was like he couldn’t stop himself, like things were spinning out of control.

  He set his jaw. He was overreacting. This business with Tess and Abby had him worked up. Well, the odds were that one of them, maybe both, would show up tonight. He would be watching. He would—

  The phone rang.

  His partner, probably. Kolb picked up. “Yeah?”

  “Hello…William?”

  He took a long moment to respond. When he did, he was smiling. “Abby.”

  “Hi. I’m glad I got through to you.”

  I’ll bet you are, he thought. He asked the obvious question, though he already knew the answer. “How did you get this number?”

  “Information. You’re the third William Kolb I’ve called.”

  Sure he was. She’d gotten his phone number and address off some database used by private detectives, he assumed. Probably his auto registration, too. She knew everything about him. Or she thought she did. There was one thing she didn’t know—that he was on to her.

  “I don’t understand.” He was playing dumb. “Why would you want to call me?”

  “So I could apologize. For how I acted this morning. You were so nice, stopping to help me like that, and I was all standoffish and, well…”

  “Scared.”

  “I’ve never known anyone who was in jail before.”

  He put concern in his voice. “Maybe you’re better off not knowing anybody like that.”

  “Look, I don’t know exactly what happened last year or who did what. It seems to me like you got involved in a personal situation that went haywire….”

  This irritated him. Bad enough she was lying. She could at least pretend to believe the lies he’d told her. “I said I was innocent.”

  “I think maybe there are degrees of innocence—and guilt. You know? Maybe you did something that was technically over the line—you got on this woman’s case a little too hard. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t mean you’re dangerous. You just showed some bad judgment.”

  He’d never showed bad judgment in his life, but he didn’t make an issue of it. “Maybe I did.”

  “I showed some bad judgment, too—the way I treated you. I acted like you were a leper or something.”

  “Kind of felt that way.” He felt like a sad sack, saying it, but he had to play along. He already knew where she was headed, and he only had to help her get there.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to say…I’m sorry. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll try to be a little less judgmental. I guess that’s all I wanted to tell you.”

  It would be funny to make her sweat on the line a little longer, but he decided to cut to the chase. She would be expecting him to think with his dick, anyway. “You got anything planned for tonight?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  Of course she didn’t. Her evening was conveniently free. He’d assumed it would be.

  “Maybe we could get a drink or some dinner or something.”

  Her hesitation lasted just long enough. “Well…sure.”

  She was a good actress. If he hadn’t caught on to her, he would have bought her bullshit, no doubt about it.

  He offered to pick her up at her place, but he wasn’t surprised when she suggested dropping by his apartment instead. She probably wanted to get a look at where he lived. It was only fair. He’d already seen Abby Hollister’s digs.

  He gave his address. “That’s right on my way home from work,” she said with the right note of surprise. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”

  Another stroke of luck. He wondered where she was really calling from. Did she have an office somewhere, or did she work out of her home—her real home, wherever that was?

  There were a lot of questions he meant to ask. He would have plenty of opportunities once he got her into the tunnels.

  “Take your time,” he said with a smile. “I don’t want you running any red lights.”

  “Not me. Safety first, that’s my motto.”

  He laughed at that. “See you soon, Abby.” He ended the call.

  Safety first. He didn’t think so. She was a girl who liked taking chances, liked pushing her luck.

  This time she’d pushed it too far.

  28

  Madeleine Grant wasn’t at home. After some reluctance her housekeeper revealed that she’d gone to “the gun place.” Further inquiries, aided by Tess’s display of her FBI creds, yielded the information that the gun place was an indoor shooting range on Beverly Boulevard.

  It was five fifteen and fully dark when Tess parked outside the gun club, under a sign that read FAMILY-ORIENTED SHOOTING. She was greeted at the entrance by an employee who wanted to see her membership ID. Again the FBI badge did the trick.

  “Ms. Grant is shooting,” she was told. “Stall six. If you’re going out there, you’ll need ear and eye protection. Club rules.”

  Tess donned shooting goggles and ear pads. She headed down the hallway, past the men’s room and ladies’ room, each said to be equipped with a baby-changing station. Family-oriented shooting, indeed.

  There were sixteen lanes on the firing range. Even wearing the ear protectors, Tess could hear the pops of pistols and small-bore rifles. The sound always reminded her of microwave popcorn. Beneath the staccato gunfire thrummed the whir of the ventilation system, low-pitched and ominous.

  She walked behind shooters aiming at bull’s-eye and silhouette targets. One guy was using the automated retrieval system to pull up his target and check his score. He’d scored over 50 percent in the A-zone, a respectable tally.

  Madeleine, in the sixth stall, was practicing with a .32. Tess hung back and observed as she ran through a double-tap drill with a silhouette target at seven yards. She started with her hands at shoulder height, drew the gun from her hip holster, took aim, expended two rounds, then reholstered the piece and repeated the procedure. Her technique was only fair. The draw was fast but shaky, and she seemed to be watching the target when she should have been focused on the front sight of her gun. Still, she was scoring kill shots often enough. Tess had no doubt who the silhouette target was intended to represent.

  Madeleine emptied her gun and removed the magazine, checking the chamber to be sure there was no unexpended cartridge inside. Tess wondered if Abby had taught her the procedure. As Madeleine was picking up the brass casings on the stall floor, she saw Tess.

  “Agent McCallum?” Her voice was raised to be heard over the gunfire from adjacent stalls. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “We need to talk.” Tess gestured toward a side hallway. “Someplace quieter.”

  “One minute, please.”

  She collected the rest of the casings and put her unloaded weapon in its carrying case. “All right.”

  “Don’t you want to check your score?”

  “I would, actually.” Madeleine brought up the target and surveyed the damage. She seemed satisfied. “Good enough, don’t you think?”

  “You would have stopped him. But you were more accurate with your first shot than your second. Recoil’s throwing you off. Take an extra moment to steady yourself before the second trigger pull.”

  “I’ll remember that. Thank you.”

  They proceeded far enough down the hall to put the worst of the range noise behind them, then took off the ear pads.

  “Now we can have a civilized conversation,” Madeleine said.

  Tess wondered how civilized it was going to
be. Madeleine wouldn’t like hearing that Abby was in trouble. She decided to ease into the subject. “Brushing up on your shooting skills?”

  “After what happened this afternoon, I felt it was a good idea.”

  “Abby told me.”

  “Did she? I’ve gotten rusty, I’m afraid. I became complacent. That was a mistake. You can’t let down your guard, ever.”

  “The man you saw was probably just a vagrant.”

  “Of course you would say that.” Madeleine rolled her eyes. “The voice of authority, forever offering faux reassurance.”

  “There’s absolutely nothing to tie today’s incident with Kolb.”

  “Then I’m just being irrational, aren’t I?”

  “You may be.”

  “Abby thought otherwise.”

  “Abby is the reason I’m here.”

  Madeleine gave Tess a shrewd look. “You don’t get along with her, do you?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “That’s not a surprise. I was reluctant to bring the two of you together. Oil and water, as they say. But she insisted.”

  “Did she?”

  “I called her after our meeting. You were right, of course—about my housekeeping staff. I’d dismissed them for the evening, right in the middle of dinner. I couldn’t have you speaking to them. They knew about Abby. Not all the details, but enough to raise questions in your mind.”

  “And you didn’t want me to know?”

  “My agreement with her was to keep her name out of any official inquiries. But”—her voice turned hard—“since you were so suspicious and so very uncooperative, I phoned her to see what I should do. She allowed me to set up a meeting between you.”

  “That was big of her.”

  “It was, you know. She took a considerable risk revealing her activities.”

  “She wanted to see the official report on the investigation.”

  “No doubt. But she also wanted to work with you. She’d followed the Mobius case. She thought you were the type of law enforcement agent she could do business with.”

  This was unexpected. “What type is that?” Tess asked.

  “Independent. A gunslinger, I believe she called you.”

  “If she took me for some sort of vigilante—”

  “She took you for someone who didn’t let bureaucratic rules and procedures get in the way of solving the case. She also said you had balls.” Madeleine grinned. “She can be vulgar, can’t she?”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with—”

  “Of course, there’s more to it than that.” Madeleine’s smile was gone. “She’s lonely, you see. Much lonelier than she lets on. Lonelier than she knows.”

  “I’m sure she has plenty of friends.”

  “You’re wrong. She doesn’t. No one understands her. I certainly don’t. And her line of work…well, it doesn’t encourage a person to open up to others. Trust is a luxury she can’t afford.”

  “It’s the life she chose,” Tess said, noting distantly how harsh the words sounded.

  “Yes, well, we all make choices, don’t we? Rarely do we see their full implications. Abby’s closed herself off to other people. It suits her to live that way—but it also pains her, I think. So, at times, she reaches out.”

  “Are you saying she was…reaching out to me?”

  “I think she was. She wanted a friend. Someone who would understand.”

  Tess didn’t know what to say to this.

  “I told her she was wrong,” Madeleine added.

  “Wrong?”

  “After meeting you, I was convinced you and she would never get along. I told her that whatever sort of rule breaker you might have been during the Mobius episode, you’d changed. You were no different from the police officers who wouldn’t help me when I was being victimized by Kolb’s e-mails.”

  Tess wouldn’t let herself be baited. “That’s not quite fair,” she said evenly.

  “Isn’t it? You’re here to complain about Abby, aren’t you? And she’s the only one who’s done anything to help me.”

  “That’s the problem.” Tess forced the discussion back into focus. “She may have done too much.”

  Behind the shooting glasses, Madeleine’s eyes fixed on Tess in a hard stare. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means bending the rules is one thing. Trashing them is something else.”

  “Trashing…?”

  “Framing a suspect with planted evidence.”

  Madeleine took a moment to absorb this. “Are you saying you think Kolb was innocent?”

  Tess shook her head. “He was harassing you over the Internet. And he was following you and taking your picture.”

  “Well, then—”

  “But I don’t think he’d made serious plans to abduct you. That part of the case was trumped-up.”

  “The things in his apartment—”

  “The things in his apartment were planted. By Abby. I’m afraid she was a little overzealous. And it’s going to prove costly to her.”

  Madeleine turned away. Her mouth moved silently, whether in rage or in consternation Tess couldn’t tell.

  “Costly,” Madeleine echoed after a moment. “How?”

  “Planting evidence is a felony, Ms. Grant. I intend to see that Abby Sinclair pays the full legal penalty for her actions. I intend to have her prosecuted.”

  Madeleine spun to face her. “You can’t.”

  “I’m afraid I can. And I’d like your help.”

  “My help?” She straightened her shoulders. “Go to hell.”

  “We can’t have people running around planting evidence just to secure a conviction. It’s wrong when the police do it, and it’s equally wrong when a private citizen does it. We cannot have anarchy in this country.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. It’s not a question of anarchy. The man was guilty. He was stalking me. He meant to do me harm.”

  “That still doesn’t justify—”

  “Doesn’t justify what? Getting him off the streets? Putting him in a prison cell where he would be in no position to terrorize anyone?”

  “He could have gone away on the e-mail evidence alone—”

  “Bullshit.” The word twisted her face into an angry mask. “He’s a cop. They protect their own. If all they’d had against him were the e-mails, they would have charged him with a misdemeanor. As it was, he got only a one-year sentence.”

  “Because the DA knew the evidence was planted.”

  Madeleine blinked. She hadn’t known the reason. But the information stymied her for only a second.

  “The DA,” she said, “also knew that Kolb was a rogue policeman following me, threatening me. And he let him off with a year in jail. Not even a year—ten months. Without the evidence that he was planning to abduct me, they wouldn’t have gotten even that much. They wouldn’t have put him away at all. They would have let him walk.”

  Tess studied her. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  “Of course I have. It was my life at stake.”

  She decided to take a shot. “Is that why you let Abby plant the evidence?”

  “You stupid bitch.” Madeleine expelled a long, hissing breath. “Abby didn’t plant anything. I did.”

  The words were clear, but at first Tess couldn’t take them in. “You?”

  “I told you I take care of myself.”

  It was impossible. A clumsy attempt to protect Abby. “You’re lying,” Tess said. “You couldn’t have done it. You didn’t even know Kolb’s address.”

  Madeleine smiled, a mischievous, superior smile. “Not until Abby gave it to me in her initial report. She also reported Kolb’s work schedule. He was working the day shift that week. She informed me that she would look inside his apartment the next morning while he was on patrol.”

  “You’re saying you went to Kolb’s apartment before Abby did?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you wearing?”

  “How can that possibly
be relevant?”

  “There’s a witness, a description. What were you wearing?”

  “Sunglasses. And a baseball cap to hide my hair. And I carried a shopping bag with the items I’d brought, the items—”

  “The items Kolb mentioned in his e-mail to you.”

  “That’s right. I wanted him put away, you see—not slapped on the wrist.”

  Tess sighed. Things never were simple. She should have learned that lesson by now.

  “How could you possibly get into his apartment?” she asked, though she had no doubt Madeleine could find a way.

  “I’m not entirely helpless—or entirely inexperienced in that sort of thing. My parents were hardly ever around when I was growing up. Daddy was off making crappy movies. Mommy was always in the middle of a nervous breakdown or an affair—usually both. I had a great deal of unsupervised time on my hands. I got into an occasional spot of trouble.”

  “Breaking and entering? That kind of trouble?”

  A shrug. “It was nothing serious. Pranks, you might say. Or perhaps it was a cry for help. The lock on an apartment door wasn’t going to stop me from taking steps to protect myself.”

  “You picked the lock.”

  “It was easy.”

  “But you left tamper marks. Scratches.”

  “Did I? Well, I’m not a professional, you know.”

  “No, you aren’t.” But Abby was. She wouldn’t have left signs of tampering. And she wouldn’t have allowed herself to be seen by the maintenance man. She was too experienced, too capable, to make those mistakes.

  “I broke in,” Madeleine was saying, “hid the things I’d bought in the kitchen cabinet. Duct tape, handcuffs—it was rather embarrassing having to purchase those. And a map of my neighborhood with my address circled in red. I locked up when I left. Abby must have entered only a short time later. She found the evidence and arranged for it to come to the attention of the authorities.”

  “And she never knew it was planted?”

  “Of course not. Why would she? I certainly didn’t tell her.”

  “You used her.”

  “Everyone uses everyone else, all the time. When you grow up in this city, you figure that out pretty early.”