Hunted

by Karen Robards

  “Crayfish,” he told her, and, leaving his water to boil, went out to check the trap. Sure enough, the cat food had done the trick, he saw with satisfaction, and he quickly disentangled the dangling creatures and carried his catch back into the shanty. Caroline was sitting at the table now, poring over the phone, but she looked up as he headed toward the kitchen.

  “Oh, wow, you can catch crawly things,” she marveled when he held up his haul for her to view.

  “One of my many talents,” he replied, and she grimaced.

  “Just so you’re aware, not all of them are that impressive,” she sniped with clear meaning, and as he grinned involuntarily he had to face it: Caroline with attitude was what was turning him on.

  Suppressing the urge to go over there and scoop her up in his arms and make love to her until she ate those words required real effort.

  “So, find anything interesting?” he asked, nodding at the phone, once the crayfish were added to the pot.

  She shrugged. “I was checking to see if there’s any way to identify the gunman.”

  “There’s not.”

  “There might be,” she insisted.

  “Think I haven’t tried?” He snagged a can of coffee and the coffeemaker from one of the two upper cabinets, both of which he had installed around the time he’d made the bathroom functional. The lower cabinets, like the counter, predated him. “Feel like coffee?”

  The look she gave him then was friendlier than anything she had directed his way since they’d gotten out of bed. “Coffee? Really? Oh, yeah.”

  He plugged in the pot, opened the can, and put the coffee on, inhaling the smell like a drug. He needed coffee. He hoped the caffeine jolt would help clear his mind.

  He needed to be able to think without getting all tangled up in X-rated visions.

  “You know what they say about fresh eyes,” Caroline said. It took him a second to understand that she was referring to fresh eyes looking at the pictures, which she was busy studying. The shanty kitchen didn’t run to glassware, but there were some Styrofoam cups, which he got out, along with paper plates and packets of nondairy creamer, sugar, and plastic silverware, complete with napkins and tiny paper salt and peppers. “That’s an NOPD badge, I’m almost positive, but the angle’s not good: I can’t see the number on it. Or the face of the man holding it.” He knew which picture she was referring to. She continued, “In fact, all the pictures with the gunmen in them show them with their backs to the camera.”

  “Yeah, well, Holly was hiding across the alley behind some garbage cans at the time,” Reed said wryly. The burbling of the coffee pot made a nice, homey sound, and the smell was enough to make him inhale deeply with anticipation. In the pot, the crayfish, bright red now, were just starting to pop to the surface of the water.

  “Why would he take such a risk?”

  Reed just shook his head as he got busy scooping out the crayfish. Piling them on paper plates, he carried them to the table, placing one in front of her and the other one in front of his chair.

  “Looks good.” Clearly no stranger to boiled crayfish, she was already snapping off tails and cracking shells with dexterity as he poured two cups of coffee, carried them and the rest of what they needed to the table, and sat down. She looked up at him, her expression several degrees softer than it had been before he had plied her with food. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Grabbing a couple of slices of bread from the loaf, he passed the bread to her and began his own shell cracking. He was starving, he discovered as he wolfed down a mouthful of succulent meat. Obviously hungry, too, Caroline was eating daintily but greedily. With her fine-boned face washed clean of makeup and her dark hair tucked behind her ears, she didn’t look a day older than the infatuated seventeen-year-old of that long-ago summer. Well, maybe minus a couple of degrees of infatuation. Looking at her, he felt a pang somewhere around the dangerous region of his heart. “Merry Christmas, by the way.”

  The arrested look in her eyes told him that she had at least momentarily forgotten what day it was.

  “Merry Christmas,” she replied. Then, in a clear effort at making neutral conversation, she added, “Did you have big plans?”

  He shook his head. He’d quit celebrating Christmas, after—An instant vision of a little boy in blue-footed pajamas kneeling beneath a Christmas tree, chortling gleefully as he opened a pile of presents, rose up in his mind, and he almost winced. He closed that window down in a hurry, and focused on the present and Caroline. “Back when I was making plans, when I still had a job, I had today off. So, sleep in. Watch some football. Go out and grab something to eat.”

  The look she gave him was impossible to interpret. “Alone?”

  “Yeah.” He took a swallow of coffee, then went to work on more meat. “What about you?”

  “I was on call, but I was supposed to have dinner with a group of friends.”

  “Not family?”

  She shook her head. “My mother’s in Florida with Emily. Sarah”—Emily and Sarah were her two sisters, as he knew—“is skiing with her boyfriend’s family. So, no.”

  “No plans with the superintendent?”

  The look she gave him answered that: no. Well, he wasn’t surprised.

  “Speaking of my father—” She picked up her mug and sipped at her coffee. “You’re supposed to call him tonight. I presume to set up a time and place to trade me for Ant?”

  Swallowing a section of crayfish, he met her gaze. It was cool and controlled. He was starting to know her expressions well by this time, and he interpreted that one to mean that she wasn’t on board with the idea.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Want to explain to me how that’s going to work?”

  He sighed. He couldn’t see any harm in telling her. In fact, it was something that sooner or later she was going to have to know. “When I talk to the superintendent, I’m going to tell him to bring Ant to the Quarter tomorrow night at eleven, and that I’ll call him then. When he’s in the Quarter, I’m going to call and tell him that he has ten minutes to get Ant to Andrew Jackson’s statue in Jackson Square and let him go there. There’s a Boxing Day pirate festival scheduled for then in the square, where everybody wears costumes. I’m hoping to be able to grab Ant, clap pirate hats on our heads, and disappear in all the confusion.”

  Her face stayed composed in its careful mask of neutrality. “You know they’re going to have the square surrounded and grab you the instant you set foot in it, right?”

  He grimaced. “See, the thing is, I’m going to leave you somewhere else. Somewhere safe, but well away from there. The arrangement I’m going to make with the superintendent is that I’ll call and tell him where you are when Ant and I are safely away.”

  Her brow furrowed, and he discovered that he liked watching her changing expressions as she thought it over.

  “That could work,” she said finally. “But it’s chancy. They could just decide to grab you and torture my whereabouts out of you. Or they could know you well enough to know that you’re not just going to let me die wherever you’ve left me, so they can feel pretty confident that if they grab you you’re going to tell them where I am before I come to harm.”

  “But they can’t be sure of that.” Reed had already gone over all those arguments himself. “Plus, Jackson Square will be full of people, so they can’t just shoot Ant and me out of hand and there’ll be plenty of witnesses if I get arrested. And then there’s Holly, who will still be on the loose, a wild card they’ll also need to take into account.”

  “Even if it works—and that’s a big if—you know it won’t be long before you’re caught or killed, right? Practically the entire planet will be looking for you. You’ll probably make the TV show America’s Most Wanted.” She said it almost casually. But her eyes were clouded with worry for him. Registering her worry—damn it, he didn’t want her to care—he felt his gut twist.

  The last thing on earth he needed now was to be forming some kind of d
amned emotional tie with her. At the thought, what was left of the crayfish suddenly lost its appeal. He picked up his coffee mug, drank.

  “I know that,” he said as he set the mug back down. “That’s why I scheduled my first phone call with the superintendent for tonight at eight, and the handoff for tomorrow night at eleven. I needed to buy some time. I’m trying to get the Justice Department on board, get them to launch an investigation into what’s going on down here. Failing that, or even if that does work out, I’m hoping to be able to get a handle on who the bad guys are before I have to show up in Jackson Square. It can’t be the whole damned department. There’s got to be a limited number of cops out there killing people. If I know who they are, and I can figure out why they’re doing it, then that’ll open new doors for people to turn to for help.”

  Caroline looked away from him. Her hands were curled around her mug, but she didn’t lift it to her mouth. Instead, she appeared to study the dust motes captured by a stray beam of sunlight slanting through the nearest window, while she frowned thoughtfully and bit down on her lower lip.

  Reed found his eyes riveted on those small, square white teeth digging into that full lower lip.

  When she looked back at him, it was with the cool, level gaze of a cop. Meeting her eyes, he was reminded that a lot had changed with Caroline in ten years.

  “I’ve got a stake in figuring this out, too, you know,” she said, her voice as level as her gaze. “What you seem to keep forgetting is that I’m a cop, just like you. Leaving out anything to do with our personal relationship, or lack of it, I can’t just turn my back on murders when I’ve seen proof of them with my very own eyes. Could you?”

  She had him there. He had to admit the answer was no. But still—he was afraid for her. That was the damned crux of the matter. He’d pulled her out of her nice, safe life without fully considering the consequences, and now he was scared shitless that he was going to get her killed. She must have been able to read his thoughts in his expression because her mouth twisted impatiently and, pushing her plate out of the way and planting her forearms on the table, she leaned forward to glare at him.

  “Reed. Quit being an overprotective idiot and tell me what you damned well know.”

  “Hell,” he said tiredly, after a moment. What she already knew was enough to get her killed, so he might as well fill her in on the rest in hopes that maybe she could shed some insight that had escaped him. “All right, fine. Maybe you can help. Remember I told you that Holly and Ant’s mother was dead? Her name was Magnolia. She was murdered a few months back. Single gunshot wound through the forehead, just like the victims in those pictures. Official word was that she was the victim of street crime, but Holly’s been telling me cops did it ever since. He’s been trying to find proof, by doing things like hiding behind garbage cans and taking pictures of bad shit going down. Finally, a couple of nights ago, he did.” He nodded at the phone in her hand.

  Caroline sucked in air, her eyes widening. “Oh, my God.”

  “Yeah,” Reed said grimly, and told her the rest.

  “So what do you think is happening?” she asked when he had finished.

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure. Some kind of protection racket? Cops horning in on the drug trade? I don’t know.”

  “But my father knows about it?”

  He hated to confirm it, but at this point there was nothing else to do but be honest. “I told him everything I just told you. Took him a file full of evidence to back up what I was saying. You know the rest.”

  “Then he does.” Her voice held no inflection at all. Her eyes held . . . pain. Skin around them contracted. Shadows at their backs.

  He hated like hell to see her in pain. Hated it so much it told him something. Something he couldn’t even bring himself to acknowledge.

  “Maybe there’s another explanation,” he said, just to give her hope.

  She shook her head: no. “So what’s your best lead?” she asked briskly, no trace left of the emotion that had splayed across her face at the suggestion of her father’s potential involvement.

  “The cops who arrested Holly. They deliberately targeted him, planted crack on him. Somebody told them to do it. If I can identify them, and get them to tell me who sent them after Holly, then follow that up the food chain . . .” He didn’t continue. He didn’t have to. He could see from her expression that she understood.

  “You have no idea who they were?”

  Reed shook his head. “Holly said one guy was bald, one guy had dark hair. Both big, burly dudes.” His tone was dry.

  Caroline’s mouth curved into a smile. For that, Reed thought, he owed Holly thanks.

  “Very helpful,” she said.

  “What I need is the duty roster, to see who was working in that area that night.”

  “You think they were on duty and not freelancing?”

  “I think so. Holly said they were in uniform and pulled up in a squad car. Plus they took him to the jail.”

  Just as he had, she appeared to accept that as fairly conclusive proof. “You don’t have the duty roster?”

  He shook his head. “Ever since Holly got arrested, I’ve been on the move. I tried finding it online, but I got shut down. My user ID and password wouldn’t work. Apparently I don’t have access to those files.”

  Caroline’s brow knit. “Would my father?”

  “The superintendent? I would imagine he’d have access to every file in the system.”

  “I know his user ID and password. He’s used the same ones for everything for years: hellraiser and grangier. Both with a q at the end. No caps.”

  “Holy hell,” he said, staring at her, awestruck.

  She shrugged. “Hellraiser was the name of his first boat, and grangier is his mother’s maiden name. He puts a q on the end of both of them because he thinks nobody will ever figure that out.”

  “He may be right.” Reed watched with some fascination as she started typing into the phone: Caroline continued to surprise him. “What are you doing?”

  “If I can get Internet access—” She broke off, frowning at the small screen, then said yes! in a jubilant way under her breath before continuing—“which I just did, I think I can get into the files. I used to work part time down at police headquarters when I was in college. I spent a lot of time inputting information into the computer system.”

  Reed’s respect for her knew no boundaries. “I’m impressed.”

  She flicked a look at him. “You should be.”

  Since there wasn’t anything he could do except watch, he got up and started to clear the table.

  He had everything finished except taking the trash and the remains of the food outside when she said triumphantly, “Look at this. An arrest report for Hollis Bayard was filed by Officer Sean Stoller.” She glanced up at him as he moved behind her and bent to look at the phone over her shoulder. “Do you know him?”

  Her eyes were bright with interest. The green tinge in the hazel was pronounced, which he had noticed happening before when her attention was fully engaged. Framed by those long, sooty lashes, they were breathtaking eyes, and he found himself getting lost in them. Beautiful, sexy, smart: the woman was something special. Not that it made any difference to anything at all, he reminded himself sternly. He looked down at the phone, shook his head. “Good work. Does he have a partner?”

  “Hang on a minute.” A minute of flurried typing later, she said, “Officer Eddie Rice. Want to see their pictures?”

  She held up the phone. Reed took it from her. The officers’ ID photos were on the screen: Stoller had short dark hair. Rice was bald as an egg. Stoller was six feet, 200 pounds; Rice was six one, probably around 205 pounds. Big, burly dudes.

  “Holly nailed it,” he said. “Wonder who sent them after him?”

  “I can find out the chain of command,” she offered. “Plus do a search for associates.”

  “Cher, you are a wonder.”

  “Remember that,” she told him, and, tak
ing the phone back from him, starting typing again.

  “Want more coffee?” he asked, and when she nodded he took her cup and refilled it. She was so engrossed in what she was doing that she barely looked up when he set it in front of her, and he smiled a little wryly as he glanced down at the top of her glossy dark head bent over the phone. Leaving her to it, he took the trash and the pot full of scraps outside. The trash he dropped on the burn pile, although considering that putting up smoke was probably a bad idea under the circumstances he didn’t light it up. The remains of the bread and crayfish he dumped for the fish. There was a brief feeding frenzy, and then the scraps were gone.

  The afternoon had grown downright sultry. The sun was out, shining down through a steamy haze as misty tendrils of condensation from the recent rain floated up toward it. The bugs were bad, and the smell of muddy water was strong, but still he was in no hurry to go back inside. Having Caroline’s help was both a blessing and a curse. Without her, there was no way he could have gotten access to those files. Hamstrung as he was by not being able to physically go anywhere near headquarters or any police station, he might never on his own have discovered the names of the officers who had arrested Holly. At least now he had gotten hold of a string he could pull to unravel the skein of tangled yarn, which, thanks to his grandmother who’d been an avid knitter, was how he always visually pictured his more complicated cases. On the other hand, knowing that Caroline was now actively on board and working to help him figure this thing out felt good. Like he could count on her. Like she had his back. Like they were partners, almost. Which was bad.

  The last thing he needed was to get any more involved with Caroline.

  That thought was sliding through his mind when he walked back into the shanty to find her standing in front of the armoire. Above the massive piece of furniture’s four bottom drawers were two doors that opened into a compartment that had been designed to hold something like a small TV. Caroline had opened those doors. As soon as he saw that, he stopped dead. His heart started to slam against his ribs. His gut clenched.