Bait

by Karen Robards

  “I want that strongbox of Charlie’s. And you’re going to tell me where it is.”

  Oh, God, nobody had ever called her dad Charlie but him. ... It had been a way of cutting Charles Dolan down to size, of letting him know who was in charge. The lights and passing trees and buildings blurred as tears sprang to her eyes.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re going to find out, aren’t we? Believe me, dollface, if you know, you’ll end up telling me.” He sent her a mean little smile that sent an icy finger of fear sliding down her spine. “Actually, you’re lucky I want it. You get to live a little longer. I would have whacked you right there in your kitchen if I hadn’t. Last time we met, in your hotel room—’member that, baby? You fucking stabbed me in the leg, didn’t you?—I didn’t know about it. Nice of you to start calling up all your old friends and warning them about what you had.”

  He sent her a look that made the hairs prickle to life on the back of her neck. He was going to make her pay for that pencil in the leg. He was going to hurt her—and then he was going to kill her. Maddie wanted to scream. She wanted to bang her head against the window in a futile attempt to attract attention, to smash it, to try to escape. She looked out the windows, hoping desperately to see a passing cop car. If she did she would—what? She couldn’t reach the horn, the lights, the accelerator. She couldn’t even roll down the window. And ...

  “Oh, look,” Welsh said. “There goes your boyfriend’s car. Want to talk to him, baby? How about we give him a call?”

  Maddie looked, and sure enough, there went the Blazer, speeding in the opposite direction with Sam at the wheel. There was no mistaking Wynne’s blond Brillo-pad curls shining in the glow of the streetlights.

  “HE JIMMIED the security system.” Sam’s blood raced. His heart pounded like a trip-hammer. He had just run up to the apartment, taking the stairs two at a time, ascertained that Maddie was not there and that the security system was still armed, and run down the back stairs to check the box outside the building. The system was designed so that if anyone tried to tamper with it, an alarm immediately sounded and a call was routed to the police. But it had been rigged with a double loop of wires that tricked the system into thinking it was still armed, even though it wasn’t. Sam looked at it and felt bells go off in his head.

  Not many people knew how to circumvent a system like that. He did, though. It was exactly the kind of rerouting legerdemain that he might have used himself if he wanted to break into a secure building.

  He’d learned it from the FBI.

  “He’s a fed,” Sam said, trying to stay calm, trying not to think of what might be happening to Maddie at that very instant as he turned to look at Wynne and Gardner, who were behind him. Gardner was ashen with guilt, her usually confident demeanor shattered. Wynne was protective and grim at the same time. Sam spoke to Gardner. “Get on the computer, get on the phone, I don’t care how you do it, but get me the names of the agents who worked in the Baltimore office seven years ago now.” Gardner nodded and started running toward her car. Sam looked at Wynne. “You stay here and take charge of things.”

  The alert had already gone out to the St. Louis field office, to the local cops, to everybody Gardner could think of to call. Sam could already hear the sirens in the distance.

  Sam had one foot on the stairs when his cell phone started to ring.

  He froze, then dug in his pocket and pulled out the phone. He knew, he already knew, before he saw the ID window: Error, it said.

  “McCabe,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady as icy terror flooded his veins. His gut clenched. He already knew what he was going to hear.

  “Hey, asshole,” the digitally altered voice said. “Welcome back to the game.”

  “THERE IS no game.” Maddie could hear Sam’s voice clearly. It was strong and steady, and she yearned toward it, aching, willing him to feel her through the phone, to be able to somehow divine where she was.

  “Sure there’s a game,” Welsh said. His expression was gloating, triumphant, and Maddie hated him so much that she shook with it. He used to look at her like that, at her father like that. When he thought he had them under his thumb. “I took your little girlfriend. The tables are turned, my friend. You thought you were going to use her to trap me?” He gave a brutal little laugh. “Now I’ve got her. You come find her. You better hurry, though.”

  “We can work something out,” Sam said, and Maddie thought his voice sounded hoarse. “If you don’t kill her. A plea bargain for the others. Take the death penalty off the table, maybe.”

  “Oh-ho.” Welsh sounded delighted. He cast a glance at Maddie, clearly eager for her reaction and enjoying the fact that she was there to see him gloat. “Now you are playing. Just one problem, asshole. Why should I worry about a plea bargain when you’re not going to catch me?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Sam said. “I am going to catch you. I’m close. Closer than you think. Right on your tail.”

  This made Welsh frown and cast a quick, furtive look in the rearview mirror. For a moment, Maddie felt a wild rush of hope. But then Welsh’s face cleared and his smirk returned.

  “You’re blowing smoke out your ass, dickhead. You’re nowhere near catching me.”

  “You’re a fed,” Sam said.

  Welsh stiffened. “Not even close.”

  “Yeah, it’s close. And I can get even closer. I got two names for you. Want to hear them?”

  “More smoke.”

  “Richard Shelton. Ken Welsh. Those ring a bell?”

  Welsh cast Maddie a glance that made her shiver. He looked positively evil, driving through the night with his teeth clenched and his eyes hard and his cheeks flushed with growing rage.

  “Remember, last time we talked, how I told you I was going to up the ante? Remember how I told you that next time I whacked someone, I was going to let you watch? Well, here’s what your threats got you, asshole. I’m going to take your girlfriend here somewhere and shoot her. And I’m going to get it on videotape. Then I’m going to send it to you and let you watch.”

  “Wait,” Sam said sharply, but Welsh wasn’t listening. He held the phone in front of Maddie’s face. She stared at it, heart racing, falling apart inside, wanting to scream, to cry, to beg. ...

  “Say bye,” Welsh said to her.

  “Sam,” Maddie said instead. And couldn’t help it if her voice shook.

  She heard a sound as though he inhaled.

  Then Welsh disconnected.

  “DID YOU get it? Did you get it?” Sam was sweating bullets. His heart was pounding as hard as if he’d just run for a hundred miles. For a moment, Maddie had been there, on the other end of the phone, and he’d wanted to reach down in there and pull her through it, to grab her, to save her—and he couldn’t. The bastard had disconnected.

  He was going to kill her. Sam had talked to him enough that he recognized the rising excitement in the sick bastard’s voice, the escalating violence, the anticipation of causing pain, of causing fear.

  He was getting all psyched up, like a predator toying with its prey before the kill.

  Gardner was sitting beside him, in the front seat of her car in Maddie’s parking lot, with the laptop she always kept in her car open on her lap. The screen glowed up at him, all digital lines and images.

  Please, he thought. Please.

  Gardner looked up at him, her face white.

  “Not enough time,” she said.

  “YOU,” WELSH SAID, looking at her with loathing. “You told him, didn’t you? You gave him my name.”

  “Yes,” Maddie said, hating him, not seeing any point in lying because he knew, and he was going to kill her anyway.

  Welsh swore, his face dark and ugly now, his eyes cutting toward her with a viciousness that made her cringe. Then he backhanded her across the face, snapping her head back against the whiplash guard. The blow hurt, and she cried out.

  “If I had killed you, that night in your hotel room, none of this would have happened. Bu
t I made a mistake, one damned lousy little mistake—who would have thought that there’d be two damned women staying there under the name Madeline Fitzgerald? What are the chances of that?—and look what happened. The whole thing. The whole thing’s going to hell because of you.”

  He backhanded her again. Maddie whimpered and cringed against the door.

  Then, as her eyes watered and her vision blurred in reaction, she saw that the phone, which he’d dropped onto the console, had been knocked into her seat.

  It rested between her butt and the seat back, and if she moved forward a little, just a little, it might drop behind her back.

  She couldn’t let him realize ...

  “Why didn’t you just leave me alone in the first place?” she asked, to cover what she was doing. “I wasn’t bothering you. Leslie Dolan was in the past. I made a whole new life.”

  Blinking to clear her vision, she tried wriggling forward just a little, and the phone did just what she had hoped: It slid behind her back. If she could just manage to pick it up ...

  “Because I made a whole new life, too. I’m going places now, big places, and I can’t have little pissant nobodies popping up out of the woodwork everytime I turn around. One day you might have seen me, recognized me, said something—and there it would all go. Same thing for the others, too. You are all part of my past that I want to keep in the past. Skeletons in my closet, and I’m cleaning the closet out.”

  “I wouldn’t have told on you,” she said, easing her cuffed hands sideways, touching the phone, fumbling with it. “I still won’t, if you let me go.”

  That was bullshit and she knew it, and knew he knew it too, but she wanted to keep him occupied so that he wouldn’t realize what she was trying to do.

  “Give it up.” He was breathing hard now, and she got the feeling that he was growing more agitated. Heart pounding, stomach churning, terrified that he might notice the phone was missing at any moment, she finally managed to pick up the phone. “I already got a plan for you. I think McCabe was bluffing. I think he just picked those names out of some little sob story you told him and used them to rattle me. There’s no way he can find out who I am. Not if I get rid of you, and Thomas Kerry. Then it’s all done. Except for McCabe, I mean. I meant to save him for last. But I don’t think I will.”

  His voice turned thoughtful, and he glanced at her. Maddie froze, feeling the blood pumping through her veins. Did he know what she was up to? Did he guess? She had one shot at this, and one shot only.

  But he looked back out at the road again. “I’m going to kill you, then call him and tell him where you are. When he comes to find you, I’m going to kill him. He was going to use you as bait to catch me? Watch this: I’ll use you as bait to kill him.”

  Welsh had held the phone up to her face when he’d told her to say good-bye to Sam. She had stared at it, imagining Sam on the other end, trying to conjure him up through the phone—and that might stand her in good stead now. Clutching the phone, she concentrated, trying to visualize the arrangement of the buttons.

  Her fingers slid over the buttons. She said a little prayer, then hit what she hoped was the redial button.

  SAM WAS in the car with Gardner, driving her toward the hotel that they were using as a command post, when the phone rang again. He snatched it from the console where he’d placed it and looked at the ID window.

  Error, it said.

  His heart stopped, the world receded, and when he flipped the phone open, he realized his fingers were shaking.

  There was only one reason why the sick bastard would be calling him back, he feared.

  He’d never considered himself a particularly religious man. But as he lifted the phone to his ear he found himself praying like he’d never prayed in his life.

  Please, God, don’t let him kill her. Please, please, please ...

  “McCabe,” he said.

  “YOU HATE HIM, don’t you?” Maddie said, continuing the conversation. She had to keep him talking, had to keep talking to him, because it had occurred to her that if she’d been able to hear Sam’s voice, Welsh would probably be able to hear it, too, and Sam would surely answer with his customary McCabe even if he said nothing else.

  “McCabe?” Welsh glanced at her. “Hell, yeah, I hate the bastard, damned workaholic Boy Scout. He’s incorruptible.” Welsh’s tone made this a bitter sneer. “He never lets up, never quits, never fucking goes home. You know what he did? He started looking into some old cases. Years old. Closed. Gone. And he started trying to solve them in his free time. You remember how it was back in the day. Shit happened, and one of these cases was about some of my shit that happened. He was digging into it, too. I had to distract him, to get his fucking mind off it, before he dug deep enough to find out I was the one who whacked Leroy Bowman.”

  “Leroy Bowman?” Maddie said faintly. She hadn’t heard a thing from the phone, but then again, Welsh’s voice was growing louder the longer he talked. All she could do was pray she’d pressed the right button.

  “Another fucking incorruptible special agent,” Welsh said with disgust. “You deal with guys like that, they don’t see reason, they don’t look at the big picture, what are you gonna do? He was easier than McCabe, though. Just boom, one night, and that was it. I was afraid that if I whacked McCabe while he was digging into the Bowman case, which everybody knew he was doing, somebody else would pick it up, thinking that maybe that was the reason. So I had to get him out on the road, provide a distraction, another reason why he’d get hit. And I needed to clean up some previous messes, too, like I told you. So I decided to combine it all, take care of the people I needed to take care of, lure McCabe out onto the road until I could whack him, and put a tidy little end to the whole problem at once so I could move on with my life.”

  “Just like you put an end to your problems when you blew up that house my father was in?” Maddie could feel sweat running down her spine. They’d been driving on back roads that had grown progressively darker and less busy, and she had completely lost all sense of direction some time back. Now he seemed to be peering out through the windshield, like he was looking for something, a landmark or something, that he was afraid he might miss in the dark.

  Maddie had a feeling that this was not a good sign.

  “You’re smart, aren’t you?” Welsh sent her a glance filled with venom rather than admiration as the car topped a rise and came down the other side. “Yeah, I did that. And it almost put an end to my problems. Except for you. Again. Always you.”

  They were at the bottom of the hill now. He pulled off to the side of the road. Glancing around with widening eyes, realizing that this might be it, Maddie saw that they were in a bowl-like depression with hills rising all around. The area was rural, with no lights visible at all. To her left, across a field of scraggly, knee-high weeds, she saw the gleam of water. It was a small pond, a farm pond, peaceful under the sky, which was vast and black and covered with endless stars. On the other side of the pond was a dilapidated-looking barn. Beyond that, the land rose up into rolling hills covered with scrub pine.

  The tires bounced over grass and gravel. And then he stopped the car.

  “I found this place yesterday,” he said, looking at her with a terrifying smile. Just having him smile at her like that made her blood run cold. “Just for you.”

  He turned off the engine and the lights and got out.

  Oh, God, this was it.

  I don’t want to die. Please, please don’t let me die.

  He was coming around the front of the car toward her. She was suddenly so frightened that she seemed to be disassociating from her body. She felt weird, light-headed, queasy. Her palms were sweaty, her fingers like ice. Was there nothing she could do? She struggled against the seat belt, but it held her fast. Could she somehow manage to twist her arms around and unlatch it? She tried—he was almost at her door—she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it.

  He reached for the door handle. The starlight gleamed off something meta
llic in his other hand—a gun.

  All of a sudden, with hideous clarity, she remembered the sounds of Carol Walter being murdered. Now she was getting ready to find out what it felt like to die that way. Would she beg, too? Would she cry?

  The door opened. The sweet smell of summer grass reached her nostrils. The chorus of insects was suddenly loud.

  “C’mon, dollface, time to get out.”

  Maddie’s stomach twisted itself into a knot. Her heart threatened to pound its way out of her chest. Cold sweat poured over her in waves.

  No.

  He reached in around her and unfastened the seat belt. Then he grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her from the car.

  And saw the cell phone on her seat.

  “What the hell?” He looked back at her, his face ugly, scary. Maddie’s legs went all rubbery.

  Then a helicopter topped the rise and plunged toward them. A bright searchlight caught them in its beam.

  “FBI! Freeze! Drop your weapon!”

  The order boomed through the air. Glancing up as the chopper hovered over them, Maddie saw a sharpshooter armed with a rifle. His weapon was pointed at Welsh. Then, over the rise, she saw a whole convoy of headlights speeding toward them, and heard the distant sound of sirens.

  “Drop your weapon! Now!”

  Welsh did. With a single deadly glance at her, he let go of her hair and raised his hands. Then the ground troops were there, and it was over. Maddie’s knees gave out, and she collapsed in a little shivering heap on the ground.

  LEAPING FROM the first car as it screeched to a stop, Sam saw her collapse and thought, for one heart-stopping moment, that the bastard had shot her. Icy terror ricocheted through his veins. His life passed before his eyes. He raced toward her, crouching beside her as the rest of the cavalry rushed to take control of the suspect.