“I need to get home,” Cobb said to Maggie. “I just wanted to make sure Victoria hadn’t—”
Jack watched Cobb cut himself off before he revealed too much. Only, it was too late for that.
“Brian is fine, Uncle Porter. I’d appreciate it if you’d speak with Victoria about—”
“Say no more,” Cobb said. “It’s done.”
Jack watched the byplay between Cobb and Maggie and felt something click inside. He had a gut feeling that Victoria Wainwright had done a lot more back in Minnesota than simply lie to her daughter-in-law and steal away with her grandson. Jack was convinced Porter Cobb knew the whole of it. But considering the fact Victoria was his sister, Jack doubted Cobb would ever tell what he knew. Still, Jack wondered just how much the old man was keeping from Maggie.
“Goodbye, Mr. Kittrick,” Porter said.
“I’d keep a close an eye on my sister if I were you,” Jack said quietly.
“I do,” Cobb said as he slid behind the wheel of the boatlike Caddy. “I do.”
“Let’s walk,” Maggie said. She pushed Brian’s chair ahead of her along a winding asphalt path.
The trail they took was covered by a latticed arbor so overgrown with heavily scented wisteria and bougainvillea and man-devillea that it reminded Jack of the perfume aisle at a mall department store. Bees whisked among the lavender and fuschia and pink flowers, while patches of diamond-patterned sunlight heated Maggie’s flesh until Jack could see a faint sheen of sweat on her skin. When he leaned close, his nostrils flared for the scent of her, and it was sweeter than any flower.
Jack would have been happy to lay her down in that shaded bower and make love to her. But there was the small matter of a little boy—well, not so little anymore, a woman who could not be trusted with him, a brother who kept her secrets, and Maggie . . . who knew a great deal and hadn’t told him all of it. Yet.
Maggie had waited all afternoon for Jack to ask her about Uncle Porter’s peculiar visit to the nursing home, but he hadn’t uttered a word. He had entertained Brian until her son had actually been reluctant to let Jack go when they left.
She had kissed Brian on the forehead, a signal that her visit was over, and reluctantly left him to the care of his nurses. If she tossed out the brief contretemps with Victoria, it had been one of the nicest afternoons Maggie could remember having with her son. Having Jack with them had made all the difference.
She and Jack had already been waved through the gate at 200 Patterson, and they would be arriving at the portico any moment. She wondered if Jack still wanted to come upstairs and make love to her. She wondered if he still considered her a possible serial killer. She wondered—
“I’m coming up, Maggie,” he said as he stopped his pickup at the etched glass doors.
He was telling her, not asking for permission, Maggie realized. She shot him a sideways glance. She had been aware of a simmering undercurrent between them all afternoon. Even so, Jack didn’t look like a man in the mood for love. But it had been ten years. She might be a little out of practice recognizing the signs.
“All right, Jack.”
Maggie felt nervous, edgy, excited. She had wanted Jack to pass scrutiny with Brian before she allowed him any further into her life, and he had done so with flying colors. She wasn’t so sure she had done as good a job convincing Jack she knew nothing about the murders of all those children. The entire incident with Victoria must have looked particularly havey-cavey.
Yet Jack hadn’t asked any questions. He hadn’t said much of anything on the ride back to San Antonio from New Braunfels except, “Your kid’s all right.” And much later, “I like the smell of wisteria . . . the way the blossoms look like a bunch of grapes hanging from the stem. I’d like to plant some in my backyard someday.”
He’d seemed lost in a world of his own. It wasn’t until they arrived at her condominium that he had begun showing signs of life. First the statement he was coming up, and then his hand on her back urging her toward the elevator-very much like a policeman escorting a prisoner to the interrogation room.
Maybe Jack wasn’t in the mood for love, after all.
Maggie found out how wrong she was when the elevator doors opened onto the tenth floor. He quickly backed her up against her door. In the same instant he plunged the key into the lock, he plunged his tongue into her mouth. The piercing stab of his tongue was matched by the thrust of his hips against hers, leaving no doubt about his state of sexual readiness.
Jack barely got her front door open, shoved her inside, and slammed it behind them before he yanked her shirt out of her trousers and pulled it up over her head.
“Jack—”
His hands cupped her breasts through her cotton bra, and Maggie thought she would swoon as his thumbs and forefingers turned her nipples into small knots of pleasure. Dear God. It feels so good. I can’t believe how good it feels.
She grabbed Jack around the waist to have something solid to hang onto as her knees buckled. She latched her mouth onto the first flesh she could find, which happened to be Jack’s neck, and suckled hard. She heard him groan and reached for his mouth with hers.
“Maggie,” he rasped. “I want you. I need you.”
She didn’t say what she was feeling. She couldn’t have described it if she’d tried. It was all too confusing. The want and need were mixed up with guilt and shame. But desire—raw animal lust-stood head and shoulders above everything else.
It had been too long, Maggie realized. She had denied herself for so many years that she had forgotten what it was she had given up. Jack’s basic, animalistic drive to put himself inside her fitted her needs exactly.
He broke the zipper on her slacks getting them off and left her underwear hanging off her right ankle as he stripped her naked. He barely managed to get himself unzipped and his jeans flayed wide before he shoved her against the wall and thrust himself inside her.
It hurt.
The cry of pain was out before she could stop it, and she felt Jack’s shudder as he realized what he’d done. But he was already seated to the hilt by then, and the pain, she knew, would pass.
“It’s all right, Jack,” she whispered against his throat, her hands knocking his hat off and tangling in his hair. “It’s been a long time. I’m all right.”
“Maggie.”
She heard regret in his voice and an agony of need. “Please, Jack,” she whispered. “Don’t stop.”
She felt the taut muscles in his shoulders and hips and buttocks as she ran her hands over him, urging him back to the frantic love-making she had craved so much, testing the restraint he was forcing on himself, wanting him to lose control. And at last driving him over the edge.
“Come on, Maggie,” he urged, as he drove into her. “Don’t leave me now.”
Maggie wasn’t thinking anymore. She wasn’t even there with him. She was on some selfish plane of her own, searching for the feelings she knew were out there somewhere. Feeling the ripples of ecstasy slide through her. Feeling the heat and hardness of Jack in-side her, unbelievably aware of the exquisite way their flesh met and separated as he became a part of her and withdrew.
She would have settled for less if he’d let her. But she heard his guttural voice in her ear, urging her to take what he offered her, urging her to come with him, urging her to feel, to feel, to feel.
The shattering cry of joy came from deep within her, a grating, gravelly, animal sound that could as easily have been of pain as pleasure, because it rode the border between the two.
Maggie held herself perfectly still while the resonating shudders rolled through her, leaving her totally enervated, then collapsed against Jack’s chest, panting for breath, clinging like a limpet to the last thing standing between her and the ground.
Chapter 15
At 5 A.M. on Monday morning, the stairwell of seventeen-story San Antonio General felt as deep, dark, and deadly as a mine shaft. The full concrete stairwell lighting didn’t come on until six, and Jack felt the hai
rs stand up on his neck as he traversed the menacing shadows. He paused at the fifth-floor stairwell door, wondering whether stealth was really necessary.
Evil undeniably lurked somewhere inside. Someone was killing children. Quickly, painlessly, but definitely leaving them dead.
The echo of a voice and footsteps far above him gave Jack the impetus to move inside to the fifth floor hallway. He crept down the hall, feeling a little silly. There wasn’t anyone to hide from. Amazingly, all the worker bees in the huge hospital, which buzzed like a productive hive during the day, seemed to have disappeared.
Jack stopped at a linen closet down the hall from the pediatric ICU. A sign done in Magic Marker that was stuck to the door with two ragged strips of masking tape said “Linens moved to 5th Flr. West.” Jack tried the knob and found it locked. He knocked.
Plainclothes San Antonio Police Detective Philip Fuentes opened the door looking rumpled in an open-collared blue cotton shirt, pulled-down tie, Western-belted navy blue trousers, and scuffed black cowboy boots. He had looked the same way—except in brown—the previous Friday afternoon, when Jack had met with him at the police department and discussed what surveillance the San Antonio police were able to provide at the hospital. Jack figured the haggard-looking detective worked a second job, maybe as a security man somewhere, because the bags under his eyes looked more like steamer trunks.
“Good morning,” Fuentes whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” Jack said in a regular voice. “There isn’t anyone—”
Detective Fuentes grabbed him by his bolotie, hauled him inside, and eased the door closed behind him. “Nurse Cole went to the john. Be out any minute,” he said quietly.
“Oh,” Jack said, feeling even more foolish for not being cautious.
“It’s a little tight in here,” Fuentes said with tremendous understatement as he backed his way farther inside the narrow rectangular space. The odor of some strong detergent permeated the place.
Besides a great many linens on wire racks, the tiny, hospital-green space also contained a metal folding table jam-packed with video surveillance equipment to monitor the pediatric ICU. A phone that flashed instead of ringing connected Fuentes to the outside world and to Jack, who was wearing a beeper so he could roam the hospital.
Monitoring had gone on-line at midnight so the ICU was covered on the inclusive calendar days of the previous murders. Jack knew the graveyard shift must have been boring and perhaps seemed a waste of time, since none of the previous murders had occurred during the early morning hours. But he wasn’t taking any chances. He planned to spend a lot of time at the hospital over the next week.
“How’s it going?” Jack asked, studying the monitors. Three scanning video cameras had been set up at various angles in the ceiling of the pediatric ICU to be certain every bed could be seen.
Fuentes slumped into the metal folding chair closest to the wall, gesturing Jack into the one by the door. ” I was hoping you’d show up with coffee,” he said in a whiskey-rough voice.
Jack reached inside the Levi’s jacket he had buttoned at the waist and pulled out a thermos of coffee and a bag of Krispy Kremes. ” I figured you’d be hungry, too. These are all yours. I ate mine on the way over.”
Fuentes grinned. “You Texas Rangers aren’t half—”
“Who’s that?” Jack asked as a nurse appeared on the center screen at the bedside of a sleeping, blond-headed child.
Fuentes glanced up and said, “Nurse Cole. She’s on the same hours as me. Pretty good at what she does, from what I can tell,” he said through a mouthful of jelly doughnut. “Does regular checks, administers medication as called for. Gentle with the kids.”
“How do you know she’s doing what she’s supposed to be doing?” Jack asked.
Fuentes held up a clipboard. “Have a list here of all the prescribed meds and which bed gets them when. She’s the only nurse on duty in the ICU and visiting hours don’t start till nine, so anyone else is a suspicious person.”
Jack grimaced. The surveillance seemed too little, and he was very much afraid that if they weren’t able to identify the killer when he—or she—came into the ICU, their efforts would be too late to save the next victim. But he didn’t know what else to do.
They could sit in the ICU and guard the kids for the next seven days, but that would tip off the murderer, who could easily go somewhere else. Dr. Hollander had medical privileges in more than a few hospitals in the city. Isabel likely had friends who were nurses all over town. And Maggie . . . Maggie represented every hospital in MEDCO’ s system.
It’s not Maggie, Jack thought. No way could I feel what I feel when I’m with her, if she was the evil I’m trying to destroy. Jack wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans. But after what she’d revealed to him last night in bed, he wasn’t willing to bet on anything.
While Fuentes ate doughnuts and drank coffee, Jack went over the events of the past evening in his head. It should have been a matter of reliving a glorious evening in the sack with a beautiful woman. But nothing about his relationship with Maggie had been the least bit typical.
Jack had never lost control with a woman like he had with her last night. He’d acted like some beast in rut. Maggie had told him she hadn’t been with a man in ten years, and he’d believed her. Yet once he had her in his arms, his animal instincts had taken over, and he wasn’t sure anything could have stopped him. Thank God she’d been willing. Thank God he hadn’t hurt her.
She had reassured him the second time they’d made love—this time in her queen-sized bed—that she was fine. In fact, she’d been so fine he’d found himself slowing down to enjoy touching her and tasting her. She had met every touch as though she had never been touched before . . . as though it were all happening to her for the very first time. And maybe it was.
Afterward, he had put his arms around her and held her close. Not that she’d demanded it, or anything like that. He had wanted to do it, which surprised him. They had fit together as precisely as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and Jack hadn’t been about to deny himself the enjoyment of her soft, feminine warmth.
Things got a little tense when he started asking her the questions he should have asked before he’d gotten distracted by her rosy nipples and her bony shoulders and other interesting sites.
Lying in the darkness beside Maggie, he’d murmured, “Why is Porter so afraid to let Victoria be alone with her grandson?”
Her whole body had gone rigid in his arms, and he’d almost wished he hadn’t asked. Except he needed to know. He was a Ranger, and someone was killing kids. So he’d repeated the question. “Why is he so afraid, Maggie?”
“I don’t know,” she answered.
He had tightened his arms around her until his sweat and hers were so mixed up they smelled like the same person. “That’s not the right answer, Maggie,” he whispered in her ear.
“It’s the only one I have for you, Jack. If you want a better one, you’ll have to ask Porter Cobb yourself.”
“Do you think Victoria would ever try to hurt Brian?” he asked.
“I think Uncle Porter believes she would.”
“Is she capable of murder, Maggie?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said agitatedly. “I just don’t know!”
He hadn’t asked her any more questions, because he’d wanted to believe her. Maybe she didn’t know any more than what she’d told him. It was possible she was totally ignorant of whatever it was Victoria Wainwright had done to make her brother so leery of leaving her alone with her grandson.
Jack had held Maggie until she fell asleep, but he’d been awake long afterward, because he wanted to savor the experience in case it never happened again. And because he was worried about Brian Wainwright.
Over the past twenty-four hours, Jack had come to the conclusion that Victoria Wainwright could very well be the serial killer he was seeking. He knew the idea of society doyen Victoria Wainwright committing coldblooded murder was farfetched. For that matter
, none of his suspects seemed like the kind of person who’d kill a kid. But one of them was doing it.
And while Jack had made provisions to watch and protect the children in the hospital’s ICU, if Victoria was the murderer, Brian Wainwright was very much at risk during the coming week. What Jack needed to ease his mind—or to justify surveillance on Brian—was a way to tie Victoria to the killings at the other hospitals.
He had left Mazggie alone in bed, covering her with a sheet so she wouldn’t catch a chill—and so he wouldn’t be tempted to make love to her again—and gone to call Harley Buckelew.
“It’s the damned middle of the night, Jack. This better be good.”
“I think Victoria Wainwright is the one killing kids.” Jack heard silence on the other end of the line. “Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. I’m trying to decide whether I should’ve let you take that thirty days’ leave, after all.”
“Listen to me for a minute, Captain. Then if you’re not convinced, I’ll take that leave, and you can bring someone else in here to take over.”
Jack outlined everything he knew about Victoria Wainwright and finished, “I need you to have someone follow up on whether Victoria was on the scene at the time of the murders in Dallas and Houston. Maybe she went there for some charity function or to visit Maggie. What I need is some proof she was around when the first five kids died.”
“I guess you aren’t crazy,” Harley said. “Get some sleep, Jack. You’re going to need it.”
“What about surveillance on Brian Wainwright?” Jack asked. “Can we get that authorized?”
“I don’t know, Jack. I’ll work on it.”
“I need it yesterday, Harley.”
It wasn’t until he’d spoken the urgent words that Jack realized he’d called the captain by his first name. He knew Harley had realized the same thing, because he said, “Is everything all right, Jack?”
“I’ve met Maggie’s kid, Harley,” Jack said, accepting the captain’s invitation to talk.
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