Bait

by Karen Robards

  “Good to know.” Wynne shot Maddie a slightly less uneasy look.

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said, giving Maddie a little smile. “We like her. And looks like McCabe loooves her.”

  “Shut up, Gardner,” Sam said good-naturedly, and the arm around Maddie tightened fractionally.

  “I like you, too,” Maddie said to Gardner and Wynne.

  Sam made an impatient sound. “Go on, Wynne. You found Maddie’s ...?”

  “Her jacket. And her vest. Kind of scared us, to tell you the truth. She’d been there—and we were pretty sure you were with her—but when we got there, she wasn’t. That kind of thing is enough to give you cold chills.”

  “He was picturing you guys buried out in a field somewhere,” Gardner said. “But then we found the wrecked truck, and that gave us something to go on. After that it was easy. A couple of helicopters, a few dozen heat-seeking devices”—Sam smirked at Maddie here—“half the law-enforcement officers in Missouri, and the thing was done.”

  “Of course, it helped a lot that they were shooting at you there at the end,” Wynne added. “Made you kind of hard to miss.”

  “Yeah.” Sam grinned. “I bet it did.”

  The mist was starting to thin now, and Maddie could see the man walking toward them quite clearly. It was Gomez. And at his feet trailed Zelda.

  “Lose something?” Gomez called as he got closer.

  “Zelda,” Maddie said thankfully, accepting the proffered leash. She was ashamed to realize that she had forgotten about the little dog in the last few hectic minutes.

  “You can have french fries when we get home,” she told Zelda, who gave a feeble wag of her tail as if in acknowledgment.

  “You guys didn’t walk all the way here from the truck, did you?” Sam asked as Gomez fell in beside them.

  “If you’d kept on going the way you were going, you would have hit a road in about another quarter-mile,” Wynne said. “That’s where we’re parked. You almost ran right into us.”

  “Way to conduct an investigation,” Sam said and grinned.

  Sure enough, in another few minutes they emerged from the piney woods onto the narrow blacktop road that curled around the mountain. The sun was rising directly ahead of them now, painting the horizon in bold shapes of purple and red and gold. A fleet of marked police cruisers, unmarked cars, paddy wagons, and an ambulance were parked partly off the road, strobe lights flashing. Uniformed cops and plainclothes law-enforcement officers of various stripes herded miscreants into the backs of various vehicles. It looked like a cast of hundreds. Probably, Maddie thought, it was a little less.

  Given the number of head blows she’d suffered, Sam insisted that she go to the hospital to be checked out, and Maddie didn’t feel like arguing, so she agreed. She had half feared being arrested by him or someone else as soon as they were out of danger, but it didn’t happen, and she started to relax a little. With Wynne driving, Gardner riding shotgun, and Zelda, pacified by a pit stop through a McDonald’s drive-through, on her lap, Sam rode with her back to St. Louis, which was about half an hour away. On the way, he gave Wynne and Gardner the abbreviated version of Maddie’s story, and told her that he was fairly certain that, given the circumstances, he could talk to the district attorney’s office in Baltimore and get the charges dismissed. That left Maddie feeling a whole lot better than she had in a long time.

  By the time Sam left her in the emergency room in favor of the urgent press of work, Maddie felt as though her life was moving in a more positive direction than it had for some time. Of course, the fact that Sam insisted that Gardner stay with her, and his warning that until they had positively identified the hit man, they couldn’t be sure they had him, was a little daunting.

  But still, Maddie realized, she was happier than she had been in years.

  The whole staff of Creative Partners, agog, converged on her at the hospital. Maddie was relieved to discover that they knew no more of what had happened than that the man who’d been trying to kill her had made another failed attempt, and that he now seemed to be under arrest. The truth about her identity, the secret she’d kept for so long, was personal, and she didn’t want to reveal it, even to these trusted friends, unless she had to. If it was possible, she wanted to remain the woman she had made herself into. Leslie Dolan was her past. Maddie Fitzgerald was her present, and her future.

  With that in mind, she handed Zelda off to Louise with instructions to rush her right off to the groomer. And she sent Jon, who with true presence of mind had kept Susan Allen from learning anything at all about Maddie and Zelda going missing by hurrying her away from the factory as soon as he’d realized something was amiss, to babysit Susan for another day. And then she’d hugged the others, promised them that she was fine and would be back on the job without fail the next day, and sent them off to work. Finally, when the hospital had finished with her, she had headed home with Cynthia, taken a shower, eaten a meal, and fallen into her own clean, comfortable bed.

  And slept like a log. No dreams at all.

  Until she woke up to a dark apartment, and the feeling that something wasn’t right.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Maddie sat up. It was ten-forty p.m., she saw with a glance at the bedside clock, and the apartment was dark because night had fallen while she’d slept. The flickering blue light from the living room told her that the TV was on. It was, apparently, the only light in the apartment. Now that she was fully awake, she could hear it. It wasn’t quite as loud as she was accustomed to, because Cynthia was watching it rather than Sam. The thought made her smile a little. Sam would be there soon enough.

  Swinging her legs out of bed, she got up and padded barefoot to the doorway. Since it had been the middle of the afternoon when she’d fallen asleep, she was wearing loose, gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. No bra, but otherwise, she was fully dressed. Cynthia was sitting on the couch with her legs curled up beside her, watching something on TV. Unlike Sam or Wynne, she wasn’t flipping channels. She, like most sane people, actually watched a program all the way through.

  A glance around the room confirmed it: Everything was fine. That uneasy feeling that had awakened her was probably the result of the adventures she’d been having lately. Her mind, like her body, had clearly not yet fully recovered from the trauma.

  She went into the bathroom, came back out, and stood for a moment beside the couch. Cynthia was watching QVC. Why that seemed funny, Maddie couldn’t have said. She had already learned that Cynthia was far more feminine than she looked.

  “How you feeling?” Cynthia asked.

  “Hungry, but otherwise okay,” Maddie said, although the list of her aches and pains was long. The pain pill she’d taken before falling into bed was supposed to be operational for another two hours. Maddie shuddered to think what she would feel like when it wore off.

  “McCabe’ll be here soon.” Cynthia gave her a little smirking smile.

  “I know.”

  “You guys make a cute couple.”

  Maddie paused en route to the kitchen to look Cynthia over searchingly. She was wearing stretchy black pants and a soft pink T-shirt, and her hair was softer looking than when Maddie had first met her.

  “Do you mind?” Maddie asked.

  “About you and McCabe?” Cynthia grimaced. “Nah. I decided that sexy hunks of burning love aren’t my type.”

  “Really?” The description made Maddie grin. Sam would love it—not.

  “Yeah. But you go for it, honey. I can see he really likes you. I’ve never seen him that lovey-dovey with anybody.”

  This thing she had with Sam—it was too new and too precious for her to easily talk about. It had to sink in for her first.

  “I’m going to get something to eat. You want anything from the kitchen?” she asked.

  Cynthia shook her head.

  Maddie walked into the kitchen, which was dark except for the filtered glow of the streetlight behind the curtain. The sounds of a woman hawking a pantsuit for $29.95
followed her. She was thirsty rather than hungry, she decided, and opened the refrigerator to get some orange juice. She would’ve preferred milk, but she was fresh out. Sam had seen to that.

  The thought made her smile, and she was still smiling and reaching for the juice when a hand clamped down hard over her mouth, yanking her backward while the mouth of a gun jammed painfully into her temple.

  She jumped, instinctively started to struggle, to scream, while her heart went from zero to sixty in under a second and every tiny hair on her body stood upright.

  “Make a sound, and I’ll put a bullet in your head where you stand,” a man’s harsh voice whispered in her ear. The hand over her mouth had her in what was basically a head-lock, clamping her close to the burly body behind her. He was wearing gloves, Maddie realized, and her blood went cold. This was the man from her hotel room—the hit man. Gun or no gun, she was going to have to scream, to fight, to get Cynthia in here, because no matter what she did, he was going to kill her.

  “We can do this one of two ways,” that terrifying voice whispered. “You and I can walk out this back door and down these steps together quietly, and settle our differences between ourselves. Or you can make a commotion that gets your friend in here, and I can kill you first and be ready to kill her when she walks through the door. Your call.”

  Maddie went very still as she thought about Cynthia in the next room, watching TV all unsuspecting. She remembered the night in her hotel room in a burst of terrifying detail. His gun had a silencer—he could put a bullet in her brain that second and Cynthia wouldn’t even hear the shot.

  She nodded once, jerkily, then went very still while her heart slammed against her rib cage like a wild animal trying to escape and cold sweat broke out over her body in waves.

  “Smart girl.” He was already shoving her toward the door. Maddie thought about the security system with a wild burst of hope. It was on, she was sure it was on, she was almost positive she’d seen its little blinking red light on the living-room wall when she’d been talking to Cynthia. But then she realized that he was inside; if it was on, how had he gotten inside?

  “Open the door,” he said. She turned the lock, turned the knob, opened the door—and nothing happened. No tinny little beeping. No sound at all.

  Except the pounding of her heart as he shoved her through the door onto the little platform at the top of the stairs.

  “Close it,” he said, and she did, her hand slippery with sweat as she pulled the door closed behind her, very softly, no point in getting Cynthia killed, too. “Now walk very carefully down the stairs.”

  Then as he shoved her forward, Maddie caught a glimpse of his face, and terror rose like bile in her throat. He had changed a lot, and if she hadn’t seen him up close, she might not even have recognized him. But there was no mistaking the shape of his nose and mouth, or those cruel eyes.

  It was Ken Welsh.

  LIKE THE TRUTH, the killer was out there. Sam knew he was close, felt it in his gut, could almost taste it. But he couldn’t quite find him. The problem with the number of Mob goons they’d arrested last night and that morning was that there were a lot of them, both in St. Louis and Baltimore. A lot of goons meant a lot of processing, a lot of background checks, a lot of interviews. Just a lot of crap to wade through, with no guarantee that the kernel of truth he was seeking was anywhere in that particular dung heap.

  His gut told him that it wasn’t.

  Not that he didn’t trust the new owner of his heart, but Sam had checked—skepticism was a trait highly prized by the FBI—and every verifiable detail of Maddie’s story had proved to be true. He’d traced Leslie Dolan from birth to the moment she had “died.” Records showed that a small shotgun house in a rundown section of Baltimore had indeed been blown apart by a bomb seven years ago, killing everyone inside. The inferno had been such that only minute amounts of human remains had been found. IDs had been based on certain personal effects that had been recovered from the periphery of the blast site—in Leslie Dolan’s case, it had been part of a burned jacket and a shoe—and the identities of people known to be inside. A neighbor had seen her going in. No one had seen her leave.

  The general feeling was that it was a hit, but not much of an investigation had been done. It was a poor neighborhood, and the victims were known to have ties to the Mob. The sad truth of the matter was that no one had much cared about their fate.

  Sam was waiting for a records check to come back with the names of the agents who had been working in the Baltimore field office at that time. He was really interested in learning the true identities of Ken Welsh and Richard Shelton.

  Wynne came up behind him. Sam knew who it was without even having to look around. The smell of grape bubblegum was a dead giveaway.

  “Anything?” Wynne asked.

  They were in the St. Louis field office, the better to process the reams of information that had come in over the course of the day. It was late, getting on toward eleven p.m., but the office was still bustling. Like he’d said earlier, when that many crooks went down, it made a lot of work for everyone involved. But Sam, personally, was dead beat—he’d had no sleep the night before—and he was ready to call it a day.

  The thought of going home to Maddie—because that’s what his upcoming stint of night duty felt like—made him smile.

  “Not yet.” Sam pushed back from the desk. What he’d been doing was cross-checking, comparing material from the hit man’s victims with material from Maddie’s past with material from cases he’d worked on, seeing if he could find a common thread. So far, nothing jumped out at him. He had a feeling that it was there, though. He just wasn’t seeing it. Maybe tomorrow, when he wasn’t so tired.

  “You ready to go?” Wynne asked, and Sam nodded and stood up. It was a big room, beige and nondescript, divided into small cubicles with walls that didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling. People were coming in and out, and a few had gathered in a conference room to the rear. Computers glowed in a number of cubicles around the room. Gomez was seated in front of one of them, typing away. He and Hendricks were supposed to be on duty, staking out Maddie’s apartment starting at dark, and the sight of him sitting there made Sam frown.

  “Yeah,” Sam said, and walked over to Gomez. “I thought you were supposed to be on surveillance.”

  Gomez threw him a distracted look over his shoulder. “I’m coming. Just let me finish this and get Hendricks, and we’ll be there. God, did you ever see so much paperwork in your life?”

  “The paperwork can wait. You need to get your asses over there.”

  “We’re coming, we’re coming.”

  “You don’t think we’ve got our boy yet?” Wynne asked as Sam rejoined him and they headed for the door.

  “Who the hell knows? But I’m not willing to chance it.” Not when Maddie’s life was at stake.

  Wynne had just come back for him after being gone for about an hour, and Sam got his first good look at him since his return as they rode down in the elevator together. Sam’s brows twitched. He was so tired he was almost punch-drunk, he had a lot on his mind, and his nose was giving him some pain. But he didn’t think Wynne had been wearing a jacket and tie, to say nothing of a white shirt and pressed khakis, the last time he’d set eyes on him.

  “You change clothes?” he asked, slightly amazed, as the elevator delivered them to the ground floor.

  “Yeah.” Wynne looked almost embarrassed.

  “Why?”

  “I got a date, okay?”

  They were out in the parking lot by that time. It was a postage stamp-sized square of asphalt next to a large silver rectangle of a skyscraper. Halogens glowed yellow overhead, holding back the night.

  “A date?” Sam’s mind boggled. Wynne all dressed up for a late date in St. Louis? Who ... A lightbulb clicked on in his mind. “Gardner.”

  Puce was starting to creep into Wynne’s cheeks. “Yeah. We’re going to Morton’s. We were going to go last night—it would have been our first
date—but, ahem, circumstances intervened.”

  Circumstances meaning the frantic search for him and Maddie, Sam knew. They had reached the car by that time. Opening the driver’s door—he’d had enough of scary-ass drivers now to last a lifetime—Sam grinned at Wynne over the roof. “Way to go, dude.”

  “Yeah.” Wynne grinned back, and they got in the car.

  Sam’s cell phone started to ring just as they were pulling out of the lot.

  He tensed reflexively, fished it out of his pocket, looked at the ID window, and relaxed.

  “McCabe,” he answered, turning right into a steady stream of traffic. It was late for so much traffic downtown, and he guessed a ball game or a concert or something must have just let out.

  “She’s gone,” Gardner yelled in his ear. She sounded distraught, frantic even. “She’s gone. She’s not here. McCabe, are you hearing me? Maddie’s disappeared from the apartment.”

  MADDIE’S STOMACH was cramping, and she was so frightened that she was light-headed. They were in his car, something big and black. She was pinned in the front passenger seat, her hands cuffed behind her back, the seat belt pulled tightly across her body to hold her in place. Behind them, her apartment building was fast receding into the distance. She had kept expecting the cavalry to show up—Gomez and Hendricks, or whoever was supposed to be staking out her building; Cynthia, having realized that she was gone; Sam, who was due back at the apartment any minute—somebody. Anybody. But nobody had come, and he’d taken her down the stairs and cuffed her and put her into the car and she hadn’t even resisted. And the chance of rescue was growing more remote with every yard of pavement that passed beneath the wheels. He hung a left on Big Bend, and she went into shock as she faced the truth: She was on her own with a killer.

  “What do you want with me?” she asked. The light from the streetlights flickered in and out of the car as it passed beneath them, and she was able to see him clearly. She hated to look—the terrible familiarity of his profile was enough to make her break out in a cold sweat—but she couldn’t help herself. There was a horrible fascination to seeing this face out of her nightmare in the flesh again.