by Tami Hoag
Ellen jerked her head up. “Excuse me?”
“Slater. Adam Slater.”
A chill washed over her. Adam Slater. Oh, my God.
“Uh—uh—could you describe Erik Evans for me?”
“Last time I saw him, he was five four, five five, slim, blond.”
Blond. The part of her brain that specialized in denial grabbed hold of the detail.
“Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Munson,” she stammered. “You've been very helpful.”
She dropped the receiver before she could recradle it. Erik Evans. The kid in the newspaper photo standing beside Wright. Blond, smallish.
Kids grew. People dyed their hair.
She hurried to the conference room and homed in on the file lying among all the others. Her hands were shaking so badly, she could hardly pick through the reports and clippings. She dug front to back, back to front. The article was gone.
Adam Slater.
Reporter for an inconsequential paper. No one had bothered to check press credentials. There were too damned many reporters to sort through. Besides, all they were after was news. They were nuisances, irritations, nothing more.
Perhaps it was just coincidence that Adam Slater the reporter from Grand Forks shared a name with a child dead eleven years. A child who had been playmates with a future Sci-Fi Cowboy.
“You don't believe in coincidence, Ellen,” she muttered.
Adam Slater was romancing Phoebe, charming her, winning her over. Ellen had warned her he had an ulterior motive. God, she had never dreamed it could be this.
In her mind's eye she saw the note that marked the very page she needed in the book of Minnesota case law in the third-floor library. it is a SIN to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
Sin. So many of the notes had included references to sin.
Erik Evans was the son of a Methodist minister.
They had been turning over every rock they could find, hunting for Garrett Wright's accomplice, and he had been standing there the whole time, right beside them, taking it all in. He had been along the roadside in the predawn gray the morning Dustin Holloman's body had been found. If she was right, he was the one who had strangled the boy and propped him up against that signpost with a note pinned to his chest. some rise by SIN, and some by virtue fall
Erik Evans. Adam Slater. Garrett Wright's protégé.
She had to call Mitch. Slater was likely at the victory celebration, privately gloating. Probably with Phoebe. Oh, God, Phoebe. What if the party was over? What if she was with him? What if Adam Slater decided she wasn't useful anymore?
Dropping the papers she held, Ellen reached for the phone and stopped cold.
Lying across the base of the telephone was a single red rose, its stem entwined with the cord that should have been plugged into the wall jack.
“My sources tell me you've been asking too many questions, Ms. North.” He stood in the doorway to the conference room, his dyed hair drooping over one eye. “I think it's time you stopped. Forever.”
CHAPTER 35
Light that and you're a dead man,” Megan said.
Jay paused, lighter halfway to the cigarette dangling from his mouth.
“Haven't I been abused enough?” she said. “Did I survive that beating only to die of lung cancer contracted through secondhand smoke while trying to crack the case?”
Jay pulled the cigarette and set it on the table beside the pack. “Do you realize tobacco is a substantial part of the southern economy?”
“Uh-huh,” Megan said without sympathy. “Y'all might try joining the age of enlightenment sometime in this century. Until that magic moment, you can take your filthy little death stick outside and kill yourself with it.”
They had already had this argument three times. Jay had lost each round. He knew he could have pulled rank on her—it was his house, after all—but every time he had ended up taking himself out onto the deck in the frigid fucking cold to stand at the front window glaring in at her. He blamed his ingrained southern manners but knew the truth was that he liked Megan, and she sure as hell had suffered enough.
“You could let me have my way just once,” he pouted.
“Quit your whining. I could hit you in the head with a hammer just once, too,” she said. Her eyes focused on the file spread out before her. “Have you got any answers back yet on that AOL bulletin board?”
He hit a series of keys, calling up the proper screen on the computer. It had been his suggestion to go into America Online and hit the bulletin boards of alumni groups from the colleges where Garrett Wright had taught. They were hoping a former student might come forward with a nasty long-dead rumor or a memory of some peculiar incident that would give them a starting point.
“Only good stuff from UVA,” he said, scanning the replies to his innocuous question—Were you ever a student of Dr. Garrett Wright (psych) and how did you like him? “Salt of the earth. Prince of a guy.”
“He's a fucking madman,” Megan snapped, throwing down her highlighter. “Can't anybody see that?”
Embarrassed at losing her cool yet again, she glanced at Brooks sideways and tried for humor. “Gee, honey, maybe I need an Excedrin.”
He didn't smile. The look in his eyes was too astute for comfort. “Maybe you need a break,” he said. “You've been going hard for hours, Megan, and you know you're not up to it.”
The tenderness in his voice slipped around her guard. She'd never had any defense against tenderness. Looking away from him, she gathered together the threadbare scraps of her composure.
“I see him slipping away,” she said quietly. “He said he would win, and I can't stand the thought of that happening. Don't tell me I need rest. I don't need anything more than I need that bastard's head on a pike.”
Jay heaved a sigh and ignored the craving for nicotine. He could see the pressure of this case squeezing Megan like a vise. She was a perfectionist, proud, a control freak like half the cops he'd known. Garrett Wright had broken her physically, and the posttraumatic stress was breaking her mentally.
Garrett Wright, who was a free man tonight.
Ellen was likely taking the news only slightly better than Megan. Ellen, too conscientious, too focused on what she perceived as her responsibility—justice for all. She would take this defeat as a personal affront and dive back into the fight with single-minded determination.
He had wanted to be there for her after the news of the dismissal had come. But it had seemed even more important to stay here with O'Malley, to think harder, dig deeper.
He who skated across the surface of life, never getting involved, always standing back to observe from a distance.
Unbidden, his gaze strayed to the rug in front of the fireplace where he and Ellen had made such sweet, hot love Saturday night.
“I need a drink,” he growled, pushing himself up from his lawn chair. “Want one?”
“As well as that would go with the narcotics I'm taking, I'll have to settle for a Coke,” Megan said. “With ice, please,” she called as he disappeared into the kitchen.
She looked at the sea of paper she had spread out across the long table. Notes, faxes from the colleges Wright had taught for, faxes from half a dozen law-enforcement agencies local to those colleges, faxes from NCIC. And in it all, she had found nothing.
“We can't lose,” he whispered. “You can't defeat us. We're very good at this game.”
An involuntary shiver rattled through her. The will it took to shut that black box of fear left her feeling weak.
Focus. She needed to focus. Concentration kept her on an almost even keel. She dug out her list of calls and ran down the names, awkwardly marking the ones she would call back in the morning. Contacts she'd made at law-enforcement conferences and in the agents' program at Quantico. Not for the first time since all this had begun, she wondered what kind of life she would be living if she had accepted the FBI field post in Memphis all those years ago. Memphis was a long way from Garrett Wright. But it w
as also a long way from Mitch and Jessie, and she wouldn't have given them up for anything. Not even for a climate without the word “windchill” in it.
The NCIC request for unsolved child abductions, and abductions/murders, in the geographical areas where Priest had taught had yielded them little. Nothing that matched the macabre game that had played out here. It hadn't struck her until after the bad news of the dismissal had come from the courthouse that they might be looking on the wrong side of the win-lose column altogether. It didn't appear Wright wanted this case to go unsolved. It appeared he had every intention of framing Paul Kirkwood. If he framed Paul, who was to say he hadn't done the same thing before?
Maybe they didn't need information on unsolved crimes. Maybe they needed to look at cases that had been closed. Unfortunately, no one in law enforcement was as eager to share information on cases they believed to be tied up, neat and tidy, as they were to share information on cases they wanted to clean up. Megan knew it would take days of hounding to get anything.
Newspapers were the place to go. Newspaper-morgue librarians, and public-library reference-desk librarians. She had started calling immediately, requesting any stories found be faxed to Jay's machine ASAP. She had wheedled and begged, pleaded and lied and tossed around a rank she no longer held, then crossed her fingers and hoped that in the end the story of Josh and Dustin Holloman was enough to compel complete strangers in other states to do work they didn't really have to do.
Several faxes had rolled in late in the day. None of them were the piece they needed. Jay had put out the same request over a number of computer networks, using his name and his fame as a lure. Nothing had come of any of it yet.
Except to dispel her sense of powerlessness and uselessness. Garrett Wright had taken so much from her, but he hadn't taken the most important things that made her a good cop. Her mind. Her heart. Her determination. She could still do the job. She would just have to go about it differently, that was all.
“Christ,” Brooks muttered, staring at the computer screen. “Everybody in the damn country has a story to tell. Here's a woman in Arkansas who claims her Welsh corgi was abducted by space aliens.”
“Sounds like a book to me,” Megan said, easing herself up out of her chair, moving carefully against the stiffness in her aching muscles. “Have you attracted anyone besides lunatics?”
He scrolled down through the responses, skipping over states outside the regions they were searching and past stories of S-and-M queens and visitations from alternate dimensions. Megan watched over his shoulder, amazed and disappointed at once.
“You're a wacko magnet, Brooks. Is that the price of fame?”
“I don't mind paying the price,” he drawled. “Just so long as I get reimbursed.”
He blew out a sigh and rubbed his eyes. “I need a break. I gotta get out of here for a while.”
“Sure, go ahead,” Megan said. “I'll hold the fort.”
“You sure you don't want a breather, too?” he asked, shrugging into his parka.
“I'm sure.” She gave him a sly smile as she slid down into his chair in front of the computer. “Three's a crowd. Say hi to Ellen for me.”
She heard the kitchen door close, listened dimly to the muffled rumble of his truck's engine as she continued to go over the responses. His taillights were still visible heading east on Mill Road when she hit pay dirt.
She read through the scant few paragraphs regarding a crime that had been solved nearly ten years past. Her sixth sense—her cop sense—was humming on high voltage. Logic told her it was a long shot, but it was the first shot they'd had.
Sandwiching the telephone receiver between her shoulder and ear, she punched the number for the Pennsylvania state police. “Mr. Brooks, I think maybe we just caught a break.”
“We didn't think you'd dig that deep,” Slater said, stepping casually into the room, his hands in the pockets of his black ski jacket. “The investigation isn't your job, after all.”
“My job is to prove my case,” Ellen said, using her peripheral vision to search out a usable weapon within reach.
He shook his head and smiled slowly. “If you'd left the investigating to the cops, we might not have had to kill you.”
“Kill me and you'll be found out anyway.” She was amazed that she could sound so calm, so rational, when every alarm inside her was screaming. “It won't take long for the cops to put two and two together. They'll follow the same trail I did.”
“I don't think so. They'll be more apt to follow the same trail they followed with Enberg.” Feigning sadness, he said, “Poor guy, he just couldn't take the pressure.”
The scene from Denny's office flashed through Ellen's mind. The blood, the gore. Brain matter clinging to the wall behind his body. His head mostly gone, blown away. Nausea swirled in her stomach.
“No one will buy that,” she challenged, her fingers surreptitiously curling around the shaft of one of Cameron's fountain pens. She slipped her fists into the deep pockets of her heavy wool coat. “I don't own a gun. I wouldn't have one.”
Slater took another step forward into the room. “Don't be so literal. There are lots of ways a person can commit suicide. Hanging. Carbon monoxide. Pills. Razor blades.”
Ellen stepped back. If she could keep enough distance between them, get on opposite sides of the conference table . . . If she could just get to the outer hall . . .
“All I have to do is scream,” she said. “There's a security guard—”
“Nice try, Ms. North, but I happen to know Mr. Stovich no longer saw the need, what with the charges against Dr. Wright being dropped.” He flashed a quick grin and chuckled. “According to my good friend Phoebe, ol' Rudy was pretty steamed about the way you blew the case.”
“You should be proud of yourself,” Ellen said, refusing the bait. “Your efforts paid off. Keeping the cops busy running from one incident to another. Planting that evidence in Paul Kirkwood's storage locker. The credit is yours, not mine.”
He grinned again and tossed his hair back out of his eyes. “Yeah. I done good.”
“You murdered an innocent child.”
“Nice touch, huh?”
“You don't feel anything?”
He shrugged, looking all of sixteen, innocent, oblivious to the consequences of his actions. “Sure. It was a rush choking him.”
“Then why didn't you kill Josh?”
“Because that wasn't the plan.” He shook his head. “You still don't get it. The game is more fun when you spot the other team points.”
“You're not worried about his talking?”
“No,” he said flatly, moving forward. “And I'm tired of you talking. Let's get on with it, Ms. North.”
Ellen had rounded the end of the table, putting it between them, but Slater was nearer the door. He stood quietly, without the bouncy energy she had come to associate with him. As if he had pulled that energy inward and held it at the core of him, burning hot and intense. His dark eyes were bright with it, watching her with predatory anticipation.
“If you think I'm just going to let you kill me, you're not as smart as I thought,” she said. “I have every intention of fighting. Defense wounds will raise eyebrows.”
“There won't be any.”
She inched along the table, passing the stacks of files, the reports, the notes—none of which would have pointed to Slater. He was right. If it hadn't been for her own digging, if it hadn't been for her calling on old contacts in the world she'd left behind, no one would have looked at him twice. Christ, she hadn't looked at him twice. The only reason she had kept searching for information on the past Cowboys was that she had the connection and was desperate enough to play a long shot.
“When did Wright single you out?” she asked. “Did he find out about the Slater boy when you came into the Cowboys?”
Pride and amusement glowed in his too-young face. “He built the Cowboys around me,” he bragged. “I'm the reason the Cowboys exist. Ain't that a kick in the head? The
program exists because Garrett wanted me.”
The irony was as twisted as barbed wire. A program heralded nationally for turning so many young lives around had come into being as a cover for the utter corruption of one.
“Is it just Wright?” Ellen asked, her fingers clenching and unclenching on the pen in her coat pocket. She stood directly across from him now. Equal distance to the door. He had fifteen years on her, but she would be running for her life. “Or is Priest in on it, too?”
“I won't tell you everything, Ellen.”
“Why not? I'll be dead anyway.”
“True, but I don't want you to die satisfied. I want you to die wondering. That's just another point for my team.”
“What a waste,” she said, focusing on her anger instead of her fear. “To take someone as bright and talented as you and turn you into a common criminal.”
“There's nothing common about me, Ms. North.” His expression turned stony. “Garrett searched a long time to find me—a child who understood the game, someone as superior as he is.”
“Superior?” Ellen arched a brow. “He's nothing but a bully and a coward and a murderer.”
His eyes narrowed above reddening cheekbones. From his left jacket pocket he pulled a stun gun, a black plastic rectangle that didn't look any more menacing than a television remote control. “No more talk, bitch.”
Ellen bolted for the door. Slater caught her at the end of the table, grabbing hold of her left arm and swinging the stun gun to her chest. She twisted away from him, and sixty thousand volts of electricity went dead against the thick wool sleeve of her coat. Screaming, she pulled the fountain pen from her pocket and stabbed with all the wild fury of the survival instinct.
Slater shrieked as the pen sank into his face through the hollow of his cheek and tore downward. The blood came in a gush as the soft tissue ripped open. Ellen wasted no time looking. She pushed off and lunged for the door, shouting for help, knowing the building was empty, knowing the sound would never reach the deputies in the building next door.