Finding herself once again sandwiched in the middle of the procession, Maddie was suddenly all too conscious of the cold weight of the bulletproof vest dragging at her shoulders. Knowing that she was wearing it made her jumpy. Just being back in the car again made her jumpy. McCabe had said that the new glass was all bulletproof, but knowing she was safe and feeling like she was safe were, she was discovering, two entirely different things. The awful moment when that shot had exploded through her windshield had been indelibly etched on her mind, and finding herself back in the catbird’s seat, as it were, was nerve-racking. She caught herself glancing around nervously as she drove. Now that she knew how it happened—fast, bang, out of nowhere, and you’re dead—she didn’t think she’d ever be entirely comfortable in any open area again.
By the time she reached the Anheuser-Busch Building, where Creative Partners had offices on the sixth floor, her palms were damp.
The trickiest part, of course, she realized as she parked in the lot behind the building, was getting from her car into the building. Without the shell of the Camry for protection, Maddie felt hideously vulnerable as she got out and headed for the chrome-trimmed glass double doors of the rear entrance. Juggling briefcase and purse, breathing in the tarry smell of the asphalt underfoot and the fishy odor of the Mighty Mississippi with every step, she scrunched up her shoulders protectively and hotfooted it across the pavement while trying to project a business-as-usual air to any and all onlookers. But she was hideously conscious of every passing car, every pedestrian, every metallic glint in a high-up window. Sounds seemed to be magnified—the swoosh of tires on pavement, the rumble of a city bus as it passed, the slamming of car doors near and far. Her minders were fanned out all around her—McCabe and Cynthia in a parking spot a dozen feet or so to her left, the two unknown agents circling the lot near the back, Gomez and Hendricks pulling to the curb on the street near where she’d parked—but for those three hundred or so yards, she felt as alone as she ever had in her life. Even so early in the morning, it was already hot as a steam bath, typical August in St. Louis, with the promise of yet another miserably sultry day to come. But by the time Maddie had made it halfway to the door, she was freezing.
It was chilling to know that the hit man could be anywhere. Even now he could be lifting a rifle, lining up the crosshairs, targeting her.
Pushing through the door, Maddie practically fell into the building’s air-conditioned gloom. She had to pause for a second in the small rear vestibule, pressing her hands to her face, trying to get her breathing under control. Her fingers felt as cold as ice. Her heart pounded as though she’d just run a marathon. Her mouth was dry.
Get a grip, she told herself. Dropping her hands, she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and carried on. The marble-floored lobby that the vestibule opened into was crowded, which was typical at this time on a Monday morning as her fellow tenants headed up to their jobs. Several people greeted her as she joined a group waiting for the elevators. Acutely conscious of the bulletproof vest herself, she was surprised when no one seemed to notice anything unusual about her appearance. Still so on edge that she jumped when someone in the crowd sneezed, Maddie smiled and chatted to a couple of people without even knowing what she was saying or being aware of to whom she was talking. She was, she supposed, operating on autopilot, which might or might not be a good thing. It kept her from attracting the curious attention of her acquaintances, but it might also work against her if she was too out of it to notice something that might give the hit man away before he could strike.
Just as she was stepping into the elevator, her cell phone rang. Maddie jumped before she realized what it was, then glanced nervously around to see if anyone had noticed her reaction. It seemed as though no one had. The blasted thing kept on ringing. It was in her purse, and she had to dig for it. When she finally found it and answered, the elevator was shuddering to a halt on the third floor.
“You’re doing great,” McCabe said in his patented dark-chocolate drawl as two women squeezed out the door. “There’s a short, pudgy bald guy carrying a newspaper on the elevator with you. Do you see him?”
Alarmed, Maddie glanced quickly around as the elevator doors closed and they started up again. Was McCabe describing the hit man, warning that he was near? The elevator was still almost full, but it took just seconds to spot the man standing behind her on the left. Her heart kicked up a notch. As her widened eyes met his, the pudgy guy gave her a slight smile. Heart in throat, Maddie hastily looked forward again.
“Y-es,” she said into the phone on a slightly squeaky note.
“Well, pretend you don’t. That’s Special Agent George Molan. I want you to ignore him, act like he’s not even there. He’ll see you safely into your office. Gardner’s on her way up.”
Maddie practically passed out with relief right there in the elevator. “Okay.”
“You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. We’ve got you covered so tightly that a mosquito won’t be able to bite you without us swatting it first.”
Good to know, Maddie thought, but before she could say anything, he disconnected.
Sure enough, Molan got off on the sixth floor, trailed behind her as she walked briskly toward the seven-room suite that Creative Partners occupied on the northwest side of the building, then stayed behind to bend over the water fountain as she went inside.
Louise was not at her desk just inside the door. Maddie frowned as she realized that. Her gaze swept the reception area. It was a large room, sleekly modern like the rest of the office, with pearl-gray walls and carpet, and chrome and black furniture. Sunlight streamed through a row of tall windows to cast bright rectangles across the blown-up stills from their most successful advertising campaigns that adorned the walls. Magazines highlighting Creative Partners’ campaigns and clients were arranged neatly on various tables. Bold and functional, it was an attractive space, if she did say so herself. Of course, she wasn’t exactly an impartial source: She’d designed and decorated it.
Since buying the business, she’d put every spare penny and every spare minute and every spare thought she’d had into making Creative Partners a success. And the look of the place was an important ingredient in impressing clients. Achieving the right look on a piggy-bank budget had been a challenge. She’d scrounged office furniture closeout sales to find new chairs and tables for the reception room, and the modular black leather couch had come from a yard sale. She and the rest of the staff had painted the walls themselves. They’d made the blowups to hang on them. They’d—well, they’d done everything. In the last year and a half or so, they had totally remade Creative Partners in every way to reflect the more dynamic company that they all hoped it would become. Every single change bore Maddie’s personal stamp, and she couldn’t have been prouder of the result if the company had been her child. In a way, she thought, it was her child.
The little advertising agency that could. The hand-painted slogan hung on the wall behind Louise’s desk. That was how they thought of themselves, and they’d labored as tirelessly as ants to make it true.
Then, on Friday, they’d won the Brehmer account. And just like that, the world had changed. All the hopes and dreams that each of them had put into the rebuilding of the company now trembled on the brink of coming true.
Or not.
The thought that she might be going to lose it all hung over Maddie’s head like a dark cloud as she looked around. She ...
Someone pushed through the door behind her. Maddie jumped, cutting her eyes nervously toward the newcomer.
“Yo,” Cynthia said, then, responding to something she must have seen in Maddie’s face, added, “Everything okay?”
Maddie breathed again. “Fine. It’s just—Louise—the receptionist—isn’t at her desk.”
“Is she usually?”
“She usually comes in, sits right down at her desk, and has her breakfast.” Maddie shrugged, and started walking. Besides the reception area, there were four offices—one eac
h for Jon, Judy, Herb, and herself—a conference room, and a workroom with office machines, file cabinets, and a desk for Ana. “She’s probably in the restroom. Or making coffee.”
All right, so having a babysitter was a little irksome, Maddie reflected as she glanced in Jon’s, Judy’s, and Herb’s doors in turn on the way to her own, only to find their offices deserted, too. If Cynthia hadn’t been right behind her, her hand moving beneath her jacket to rest on what Maddie hoped was a very large gun as they progressed, she would have been freaked to the point of running out of the office by the time she’d made it to the end of the hall.
“Louise? Jon? Anybody?” she called, sticking her head into the workroom.
Nobody answered, and for a very good reason: Nobody was there.
“Let me open it,” Cynthia said, moving in front of her as Maddie reached her office door and started to grasp the knob. “I know this place is secure; we had it searched before the building opened and we’ve had it staked out since, but ...”
Her voice trailed off as she turned the knob. Maddie knew just what she meant. Finding the office silent and empty was unnerving.
Cynthia threw the door open wide.
“Surprise!” screamed five voices in unison, echoed by a chorus of loud pops that made Maddie jump and Cynthia take a hasty step back. A shower of glittery confetti filled the air. Brightly colored balloons bounced against the ceiling. A big banner stretched across the windows, proclaiming We got the Brehmer account! A small sheet cake took center stage in the middle of her desk. Glancing around, Maddie sucked in air.
They were all there—Jon, Louise, Judy, Herb, and Ana. As Maddie looked from one grinning face to the other, they began to clap.
“You guys,” she said, her heart swelling, and walked into her office.
SAM SLEPT, only to be startled awake what could have been minutes or hours later by the ringing of a phone. His phone. His heart jolted. Lifting his head from the pillow it was buried in, fumbling for his cell phone, which he’d left on the bedside table, he found it and squinted at the message window. The damned thing was impossible to read in the gloom. Blinking at it, still groggy, he realized even as he flipped the thing open that he was in the dark because the curtains were drawn tightly over the windows, and he had been asleep in his room at the Hampton Court Inn.
“McCabe,” he growled into the phone.
“What the hell are you doing in St. Louis?” a voice boomed at him. It took him a second to recognize Smolski’s bluff tones. “Last I heard, you had the UNSUB pegged to head west from New Orleans.”
“There’s a woman ...” Sam began, still trying to collect his wits enough to be coherent, only to be interrupted.
“Isn’t there always?” Smolski sounded faintly bitter. “Every damn trouble man has ever gotten himself into in this world seems like it begins and ends with a woman.” He sighed. “So how is it that you’re in St. Louis because of a woman?”
By that time, Sam was sitting up, and felt slightly more capable of intelligent thought. He filled Smolski in on the state of the investigation.
“I hear you’ve commandeered about half the St. Louis field office’s available agents,” Smolski said when Sam had finished. “They called up, griping about how they’re shorthanded to begin with. Hell, I hear you’ve got agents mobilized in three damned states working on this. I’ve had calls from Virginia to Texas. You want to explain this to me?”
“I’m pretty sure that Walter—the next victim—is going to be hit in Texas. It fits the geographical pattern. The chances that we’re going to find out who he or she is before our guy does his thing is remote, I grant you, but I feel like we’ve got to try. And there are people doing some background work where the previous victims were hit.”
“And you feel like your best move right now is sticking to that woman in St. Louis,” Smolski said. Something in his voice made Sam think he might disagree.
“Yeah, I do.”
That was nonnegotiable, he realized, even as he said it. Sam was surprised to find just how nonnegotiable it was. If Smolski flat-out ordered him elsewhere, he wouldn’t go. There was no power on earth that was going to get him to leave Maddie before the sick bastard was taken out.
“Your case, your call. They’ve all got other cases of their own under way. I just ask you to keep that in mind,” Smolski said, and Sam guessed that the complaining from certain quarters—Lewis in New Orleans came to mind—was getting fairly loud. Smolski’s tone changed. “The woman you’re with—would she be that pretty little chickie I saw you hustle into a car when I watched that TV news fiasco?”
“That would be her.”
“Tough job we’re paying you to do,” Smolski observed dryly, and after a few more remarks hung up.
Sam yawned as he set the phone back down on the bedside table, glanced at the clock—it was not quite two p.m.—and got up. Sleep, though necessary for optimum functioning, felt like a waste of urgently needed time, and he had things to do. The fact that the sick bastard hadn’t called him for going on three days now was weighing heavily on his mind. This was a change—and as far as this case went, he had the feeling that change was not good. Crossing to the window, he pulled the curtains open and immediately shut his eyes as the dazzling afternoon sunlight blinded him. Opening his eyes again cautiously, he found himself looking down at the parking lot two stories below. It was only about a quarter full—this was the kind of hotel that people checked into at dark then left early in the morning—and he could see the Blazer parked on the opposite side of the lot from where he had left it. From that, he deduced that Wynne had been out and about and was now back again. Even as he had the thought, Wynne himself came into view. Sam watched in slack-jawed disbelief as his partner, clad in a sweat-stained white T-shirt and flimsy blue bike shorts, trotted slowly across the parking lot to the sidewalk, where the overhang hid him from view. It took a few seconds for his mind to accept the truth of what he had seen: Wynne was jogging. Will wonders never cease? Sam thought, and grinned. Then, feeling a lot more wide awake than he had five minutes before, he headed for the bathroom to grab a shower.
DESPITE THE PARTY, the morning could not be said to have been an unqualified success. First, Maddie snuck off to the bathroom no fewer than three times to try to reach her pal Bob, but all she got was an automated answering machine announcing that A-One Plastics was unable to answer the phone. Not wanting to leave a number in case her call was returned at an inopportune time—such as any time she wasn’t in the bathroom—Maddie was left in limbo to stew. Second, she saw no alternative to introducing Cynthia and explaining to her increasingly wide-eyed staff why an FBI agent was shadowing her every move. They had already heard that her car windows had been shot out—both Louise and Jon had left messages on her answering machine Saturday, which she had returned the next day—but when Maddie confessed that she had been shot, too, and mentioned that the FBI thought that the New Orleans mugger might actually be a hit man who was now trying to kill her, the resulting babble of horrified exclamations and questions had been so loud that she’d clapped her hands to her ears to drown out the cacophony. By the time she’d answered all their questions, listened to their loudly expressed horror, and shown off both her wound and the bulletproof vest, her whole staff had been jumping at unexpected noises. Then Judy and Herb had to hurry off to appointments with clients, Ana had to rush off to class, and she and Jon had to put the final touches on the presentation they’d put together for Happy’s Ice Cream Parlors, which was scheduled for one-thirty in the conference room. And, not incidentally, everybody who was left had to pitch in to clean up the mess from the party.
The promised four-star lunch turned out to be takeout deli sandwiches fetched by Louise and augmented by the rest of the cake, which they gobbled down in the workroom. Not that Maddie was particularly sorry. Between the bulletproof vest that she had to wear if she stepped outside the door and Cynthia’s ubiquitous presence, lunch out was clearly going to be more of a production than
she felt prepared to handle.
Word that Creative Partners had landed the Brehmer account had spread through the small advertising community with jungle-drum speed, and Louise reported happily that she was fielding calls left and right. After the Happy’s people left, Maddie started putting together a tentative schedule for implementing Creative Partners’ plans for Brehmer’s. Her gut feeling, given Mrs. Brehmer’s capriciousness, was that the sooner they got going on it, the better. Jon was in his office, and she went over to talk to him about the logistics of getting camera crews and actors and everything else they needed lined up ASAP. Leaving that in his capable hands, she made a quick bathroom trip—still no answer at A-One Plastics—and returned to her office. Unnerved by not being able to get in touch, she suspected that she would have had a total meltdown at her desk had it not been for Cynthia’s almost equally disquieting presence—and the panacea of work. The things that she needed to be doing were seemingly endless, and she threw herself into them with something approaching relief. Then Louise started putting calls through, and she spent the next hour and a half on the phone, talking to clients and competitors and giving interviews to reporters for BusinessMonthly and Advertising Age. When she finally stood up, Cynthia, who’d been parked in a chair in a corner leafing through magazines for the past hour, stood up, too, and stretched.
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