Dangerous Games

by Prescott, Michael

  “I want to know who you are.”

  If he wanted to know who she was, then he couldn’t have found out much. She might be able to snow him.

  “I already told you—” she began.

  “Don’t give me any bullshit about how you work for a company that makes stationery. I know that’s a load of crap.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Because I went to your apartment. Your phony apartment, the one you never visit.”

  He’d been to her Abby Hollister address. That was bad, but not necessarily fatal.

  “I haven’t been to my apartment in a few weeks, that’s true. I’ve been staying with a friend.” She allowed an edge to creep into her voice. “So what? Why does that matter?”

  “You’re not staying with any friend. You keep the apartment as a blind. What are you, a private detective?”

  “Private detective? William, I don’t know where you got this idea, but the reason I haven’t been at home is, my best friend just went through a bad divorce and she needs somebody to stay with her, hold her hand. I’ve been sleeping on her couch. That’s all.”

  “You’re full of shit. Am I supposed to think it’s a coincidence, you showing up now? Coming back into my life after a year, and it just happens to be right now?”

  “What’s so special about right now?”

  “You goddamn know. You’re lying to me.”

  Careful now. He was on the verge of losing control. “William, I’m not telling any lies. And you’re really, really scaring me with that gun. I wish you’d put it away so we could talk and work everything out.”

  “Yeah, because you’re so easily scared, right? Think I bought that bullshit about how you’re a wimp and a fraidycat? I see right through you, bitch. I see what angle you’re playing. Setting yourself up as the perfect victim. Using yourself as bait.”

  “I don’t want to be bait. I don’t want to be a victim. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay, you want to play that way? I’ll get the truth out of you. By the time I’m done, you’ll tell me everything. I’m going to learn all your secrets.”

  “I don’t have any secrets.”

  “I know how to make you talk. And when you’re done, you get to go into the storm drains. You like that plan, Abby? You up for it?”

  So that was it, then. Madeleine had been right. Kolb was the Rain Man.

  She put bewilderment in her voice. “Storm drains…?”

  “Yeah, that’s a big surprise, isn’t it? Sure it is. You know who I am. You knew, or suspected, all along. I kidnap women, and I put them down in the tunnels when it rains. I make good money at it. I’m going to make a fortune on you.”

  Everyone in the city had followed the case. She could no longer feign incomprehension. “You’re…him?” she whispered, striking what she hoped was the correct note of fear and astonishment.

  “That’s right, Abby. I’m him.”

  “Oh, God…”

  “Right, act like it’s a news flash. You’re giving a hell of a performance, I’ll give you that. Performance of a lifetime, I guess you’d say.”

  “I’m not acting, William.”

  He wouldn’t listen. “Hell, maybe I’ll up the ante to twenty mil. If you’ve been working with the feds, you’re worth it. They’ll try their damnedest to get you back.”

  “I haven’t been working with anybody. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’ve been working with McCallum. Probably counting on her to back you up if things got hot.”

  He even knew about Tess. Where he’d gotten hold of that information, she couldn’t imagine. “I don’t know anyone named McCallum.”

  He ignored her. “Guess what, Abby. McCallum’s not here. If she was tailing me, I lost her.”

  “I said, I don’t know anyone named McCallum!”

  “Yeah, and you don’t know Madeleine Grant, either. You don’t know anything. You’re just a babe in the woods, aren’t you?”

  He leaned closer. She could smell his sweat, feel the mist of spittle from his mouth when he formed sibilant sounds.

  “Listen to me, Abby. It’s just you and me now. You’re all alone, not a friend in the world, and your lies aren’t cutting it. You’re not buying yourself anything but pain. Now I’m going to ask you straight-out, and if I don’t hear some facts coming out of you, I am going to be royally pissed. You understand me?”

  She took a breath. “I understand.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear it. Now, who are you? I want an answer. You lie to me again, and it’s going to go hard on you, Abby. Who are you?”

  She tried to calculate the best response. If she continued stonewalling, he might pull the trigger in sheer frustration. But if she told the truth, any part of the truth, he could become enraged and shoot her in a spasm of anger. There were no good options. And she was running out of time.

  Kolb shifted in his seat, crowding her, the gun pressing even harder against her skull. “Tell me, Abby.”

  She was out of answers. Lies had failed her, and the truth would get her killed.

  “Who are you?”

  She heard the mounting violence in his voice.

  “God damn it”—he was almost screaming the words—“who are you?!”

  The car exploded.

  For an instant Abby was sure the gun had gone off. The explosion was the blast of the bullet in her brain.

  Then she fell against the dashboard as the car lurched forward, rocking on its shocks. They’d been hit from behind, struck by another vehicle. Kolb was off balance, taken by surprise, the gun swinging down.

  She pivoted in her seat and delivered a sideward fist hammer blow, aiming for his neck, but missing and chopping only his shoulder. The blow momentarily delayed him from realigning his weapon. She seized his gun hand, fully extending her arm to lock her elbow for maximum leverage, and held the gun away from her as she threw a backfist to his face, hoping to catch him in the nose—a broken nose was a painful and disorienting injury—but again he dodged the attack, taking the hit on the cheek.

  Limited room to maneuver. Kicks, knee smashes—they were out. She followed up the backfist with a foreknuckle fist strike to his throat, a potentially lethal assault that could crush the Adam’s apple and induce asphyxiation. He warded off the blow with his left arm. She grabbed his sleeve and yanked down the arm, exposing his face, then executed a knife-hand strike to his neck, connecting this time.

  He groaned. She’d hurt him. She tried for another strike to the face, but he brushed aside the attack and launched a punch at her head, which she evaded by inches, his fist sinking into the headrest. But the movement cost her control of Kolb’s gun hand. He tore free, and now the gun was circling toward her. She ducked under his right arm, squeezing close, making it hard for him to shoot without the risk of hitting himself, and grabbed his right wrist, using her thumb to apply painful pressure to the scaphoid bone. His grip on the gun loosened, but he didn’t let it go.

  He would be expecting her to go for his face or neck again, so she changed her tactics and went low, driving an elbow strike into his ribs with enough force to make him jerk forward with a release of breath. His head briefly dipped, and she took the opportunity it presented, springing up to land a chopping blow to the back of his neck.

  There was another groan, and an expulsion of watery puke from his mouth. She seized the gun and twisted it out of his grasp, his lax fingers no longer resisting. She held the gun on him while he sat blinking, his face a pale mask.

  And Tess was there on the driver’s side, her SIG Sauer pointing at Kolb. “FBI, don’t move!”

  Abby, breathing hard, managed a smile. “He can’t move. He’s only half-conscious. Anyway, I’ve got him covered.”

  Tess’s gun didn’t waver. “We both do.”

  Carefully, Tess opened the door on the driver’s side and secured Kolb’s hands behind his back with plastic handcuffs, then patted him down, finding some items i
n his jacket pockets that she tossed to Abby.

  Flashlight, duct tape, handcuffs, chloroform. He’d had plans for her, all right.

  “Out of the car,” Tess ordered.

  Kolb, still groggy, let his head fall back against the headrest.

  “I said, out!”

  “Let me help you with that,” Abby offered. She retrieved her purse, then went around to the driver’s side. Together she and Tess hauled Kolb out of his seat and pushed him down to his knees, then forced him to lie alongside the Oldsmobile.

  “Stay there,” Tess said, cuffing him. “Don’t move.”

  She took the keys from the Olds so Kolb wouldn’t get any ideas about attempting an escape. Then she motioned for Abby to step away from the car.

  By this time Abby had noticed Tess’s Bureau car, bumper-locked with the Olds. “You rammed us,” Abby said. “Headlights off so he wouldn’t see you coming. Pretty slick.”

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

  “I’m in a mild state of shock after nearly getting a bullet in my noggin. Come to think of it, what are you doing here?”

  Tess kept her voice low, obviously worried Kolb would overhear. “I put a tracker on his car. It led me to you.”

  “That much I figured out on my own.”

  “You did?”

  “The evasive maneuvers he performed would have thrown you off if you’d been tailing him visually. The bumper beeper was unauthorized, I presume.”

  “Yes.”

  “Agent McCallum breaks the rules. I’ll turn you to the dark side yet.”

  “I’m not proud of it.”

  “You should be. You saved”—my life, Abby wanted to say, but she wasn’t very good at thank-yous—“the situation. But you’d better get rid of the tracker before your colleagues examine the vehicle.”

  “Not necessary. The damn thing fell off about a mile west of here. That’s why I was almost too late. I made visual contact with the car just as it pulled off Washington.”

  “Your timing was perfect. Of course, I seem to remember you saying I’d be on my own tonight.”

  “I changed my mind about that. Had a talk with Madeleine. She persuaded me you didn’t plant the evidence last year.”

  “How’d she pull off that miracle?”

  Tess hesitated. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just say I owe you an apology.”

  “And I owe you”—she still couldn’t say it—“a cheeseburger. On me, this time.”

  “Before we make any dinner arrangements, we need to decide how to handle this. How much does Kolb know?”

  “A surprising amount, actually. He knew or guessed I was some kind of private operative, and he knew I’d been working with you.”

  Tess bit her lip. “That’s bad. He’ll repeat all those claims when he’s interrogated.”

  “So what? Nobody’ll believe him. He’s a paranoid wack-job, always seeing conspiracies. And he doesn’t know my real name or anything about the real me. To him, I’m Abby Hollister. That’s who I’ll be to the feds, too, when they talk to me.”

  “You’re going to stick around to deal with them? With us, I mean?”

  “Got to. It’ll look suspicious if I walk away.”

  “You’ll be interviewed.”

  “No problem. But you’d better take my gun till I’m done with the interview. I might have trouble explaining why I was carrying a concealed weapon.”

  Tess took the gun and stuck it into the pocket of her trench coat. “I think you’re underestimating the degree of your involvement.”

  “Wait and see,” Abby said with a smile. “The real question is, how do you explain showing up here? We need a story. Something too simple to be disproved.”

  Tess considered it. “We’re near the river, aren’t we?”

  “Couple blocks away.”

  “Okay, then. I was cruising the area on the chance that the Rain Man might use an entrance near the river. I happened to see this car parked on a side street and I noticed a struggle going on inside.”

  Abby ran the scenario through her mind and saw the plot holes. “No good. Kolb’s connection with Madeleine will come out as soon as they run a background check. She’ll be called in, and she’ll have to admit she met you.”

  “You’re right.” Tess looked chagrined. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “You don’t have enough practice at this sort of thing. Now here’s the story. You admit you interviewed Madeleine. You were running down a lead on the side. You followed Kolb tonight because you thought he might be the Rain Man.”

  “Followed him visually,” Tess said. “I can’t admit to using the tracker.”

  “Sure, that’ll work.”

  “I don’t know.” Tess looked away. “Michaelson will suspect there’s something more going on.”

  “He’s the director, right?” Abby shrugged. “So let him suspect. Suspicions don’t matter as long as there’s no proof. Anyway, you’re forgetting the most important thing. You got him. You got the Rain Man.”

  “We got a man who assaulted you in his car. Whether or not he’s the Rain Man remains to be seen.”

  “You saw what he had in his pockets.”

  “Duct tape, handcuffs—it’s good, but not enough. He could just be a regular nutcase.”

  “Could be, but isn’t. He’s our guy. He told me so himself.”

  “He did?”

  “In plain English. Said I was going into the storm drains like the other two.”

  Tess took this in, and her face cleared. “Then it’s over,” she said quietly. “It’s really over.”

  Abby frowned. “Well, there’s still his partner to worry about.”

  “I’m not convinced there is a partner.”

  “He said I was working with you. Someone had to give him that information.”

  “Nobody could have. Nobody knows. He was bluffing, Abby. He was working alone.”

  Abby let it go. The partner angle was something she could pursue on her own. “Whatever. Anyway, we got the guy we wanted. We ended the crime wave. Saved the day, in the best tradition of Mighty Mouse.”

  Tess stared at Kolb, prone on the pavement.

  “We did, didn’t we?” she said. “We really did.”

  Abby smiled. “I told you we’d make a good team.”

  33

  An outsider would have assumed that bagging the Rain Man would merit an enthusiastic reception from the staff of the LA field office. Tess knew better. When she arrived with Abby, she was met with uncomfortable silence from Larkin, Crandall, and the others. No one seemed to know what to say—except Mason of the DWP, who clapped her on the shoulder and boomed, “Great work, you got him!”

  “See?” Abby said in a low voice when they’d moved on. “You have some friends among your fellow federales.”

  “He’s not a fed. He’s our liaison with DWP.”

  “Oh.”

  “Thanks for trying to cheer me up, though.”

  “That’s me, always looking on the bright side.”

  After that, they’d been separated. Abby was to be interviewed. Tess was called to the AD’s office.

  As she’d predicted, Michaelson was unhappy with her on a variety of levels. The fact that she’d apprehended the city’s most wanted killer hardly compensated for her flagrant disregard of his orders. She’d pursued the Madeleine Grant tip without authorization. She’d kept secrets from her superior. She’d failed to return to the field office or to accept Larkin’s subsequent phone calls.

  “And I’m still not convinced you’re telling me all you know,” Michaelson ended ominously. “I think you’re hiding something, Tess. That’s a mistake. You’ve practiced enough skullduggery as it is.”

  She just gave him the same thousand-yard stare that Detective Goddard had used on her earlier in the day.

  The stare unnerved Michaelson. He looked away. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said.

  “I look forward to it.” Sure she did. She was a masochist.
/>
  “For the time being, you’re off this case. Restricted to your desk.”

  “It may be difficult to explain to the media why the person who cracked the case is no longer involved in it.”

  “The media have not yet been alerted to this arrest. We are keeping this story under wraps until we know exactly what we’ve got.”

  “They’ll find out eventually. Then they’ll come to me for comments.”

  “Which you are not permitted to give.”

  “Which will only heighten their curiosity.”

  Michaelson surrendered. “All right, you can continue to participate, but in an observational capacity only. You take no action. You just watch. I’ll do all the heavy lifting.”

  “That should be interesting to see.”

  Together they went to the observation room, where a bank of closed-circuit television monitors displayed the image of Kolb, next door. He sat unmoving at a long table, his wrist chained to a steel eyelet embedded in the wood. Tess thought of Angela Morris and Paula Weissman, both of whom had died with their wrists shackled. She wondered how Kolb liked it.

  For the moment he was alone in the interrogation room. Tess assumed Michaelson would send in one of the squad supervisors and a profiler. He surprised her, announcing to the small crowd of agents in the observation room that he was going in alone.

  “I took over this investigation,” he said, “and I’m responsible for handling the suspect.”

  In other words, having had nothing to do with the Rain Man’s capture, he could at least finagle a way to take credit for his confession.

  Tess watched the monitors. On the far end of the table where Kolb sat, a few items had been placed out of his reach. The duct tape and flashlight from his pockets. The notepad and marker found in the trunk of his car. The cell phone in his glove compartment. The idea was to unnerve him, obviously—to show him there was no way out.

  He didn’t look unnerved. He looked oddly serene, almost smug. But of course serial offenders were often sociopaths, incapable of emotion.

  As she watched, Michaelson appeared on the sweep of TV screens, pulling up a chair at the table. Standard procedure would have been to crowd Kolb, get in his face, but Michaelson hung back, keeping a safe distance between them. It would be nice to think he had some clever psychological strategy in mind, but Tess figured he was just scared.