Once Hunted

by Blake Pierce

  Perfect, he thought.

  She hurried across the lot toward an SUV that was parked near his. As she opened her car door, he headed casually toward her. He arrived at the car just as she was closing the door.

  He smiled through the window and waved as if to ask a question. She smiled back and rolled down the window.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  Now it was time to turn on the charm that had gotten him released from prison.

  “Hey, you’re Amber, right?”

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “You waited on my table.”

  She nodded, pleased that he remembered her. “Oh, yeah,” she said.

  “I’m Tony,” he said, pulling the name randomly out of his head.

  “Pleased to meet you, Tony,” she replied. She looked and sounded on the verge of being flirtatious. She had obviously taken an immediate liking to him.

  He said, “I just drove in from New Orleans, and I’m going to be here for a couple of days. I was wondering if you might be able to suggest a good place to stay.”

  “Hmm, let me see …”

  As the woman knitted her brow in thought, Orin glanced toward the bar. The situation was perfect. There was no one in sight or within earshot, and if anyone did come out of the bar, he was shielded from view by the parked SUV.

  He pulled out the pistol and stepped back just enough to put himself at point-blank range. He fired a shot square through the open window into the center of the woman’s abdomen. The crack from the suppressor was even less audible than it had been at the lake.

  The woman’s body jumped exactly as if she’d gotten a sharp electric shock. Her eyes opened wide and stared at him. She opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. Instead, she made strange gagging noises. Orin guessed that the bullet had hit her in the diaphragm, paralyzing her breathing.

  Orin was fascinated. After the old fisherman’s desperate pleading, this was going to be an entirely different kind of experience. But he was going to have to work fast in order to fire the eighteen remaining rounds while she remained conscious. He wanted her to be fully aware of every last bullet.

  He opened the driver’s door so that her whole body was a target. He fired shot after shot into her extremities, relishing the look of stunned and silent pain and horror on her face.

  He wondered—would Riley Paige have a similar delicious expression when her own time came to die? Killing her would be the only death that he would deliberately plan. Once that was done, he’d be free to kill however he pleased—or however chance would have it.

  He smiled that charming smile of his as he aimed the gun straight at the woman’s forehead for the final and fatal shot. He hoped that somewhere, somehow, Heidi was watching and enjoying all this as much as he was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  When the landlady let Bill and Riley into the small apartment, Riley was chilled by what she saw. A bed was unmade, an open soft drink can sat on a table with a half-full glass next to it, and some fast food wrappings were lying around. The place looked like somebody was living here right now.

  Maybe Orin Rhodes just stepped out for a moment, she thought.

  Could she and Bill be on the verge of catching him?

  Riley walked over and looked at the liquid in the glass. A dead fly was floating there. No, the drink had been left here for several days.

  Riley sighed. Catching Rhodes wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d hoped.

  The Philadelphia apartment had been easy to track down—perhaps too easy. Riley had called the number on the ad they’d found in the library book. The landlady, an elderly woman named Andrea Parisi, answered and confirmed that she recently had rented an apartment to a man named Orin Rhodes.

  Bill had immediately called Quantico. He’d told Walder that they needed to fly to Philadelphia to check out a clue left by Shane Hatcher.

  Well, it wasn’t completely untrue, Riley thought as she remembered. At least, it was true that Hatcher had led them to the clue left in the Sing Sing library book.

  She and Bill had come straight here on the FBI jet. They’d met Mrs. Parisi, shown her a photograph of Rhodes, and explained that he was a killer at large. She’d quickly agreed to let them search the apartment without a warrant.

  “When did you last see him?” Riley asked as she searched between sofa cushions.

  “Let’s see,” Mrs. Parisi said. “He took the room on Thursday. So I guess Friday morning was the last time. He didn’t say where he went. I liked him so much, I hoped he’d come back.”

  The woman looked anxious and fretful.

  “I had no idea there was anything wrong with him,” she said. “He was so pleasant and polite. Are you sure you’re looking for the right man?”

  “We’re sure,” Bill said, looking inside a closet.

  “Did he give you any kind of identification?” Riley asked.

  “Yes, he showed me a driver’s license. Now that I think of it, I’m afraid he fooled me about payment. When I asked for a deposit and proof of income, he promised to bring it in a couple of days. He said he had a brand new job and that he’d be getting paid soon. He paid in cash for a week, and I thought everything was all right.”

  Riley didn’t say so, but she suspected that Mrs. Parisi was lucky to be alive.

  Meanwhile, she wasn’t finding anything of interest, and she could see that Bill wasn’t either. Had this trip been a bust? Knowing that Orin Rhodes had been in Philadelphia last week told them absolutely nothing about where he might be now.

  Then a possibility occurred to her.

  “Could you check his mail?” she asked Mrs. Parisi.

  “Certainly,” she said. “I’ll take you to the mailboxes.”

  Bill and Riley followed her down to the building’s front entrance with its rows of metal mailboxes. Mrs. Parisi unlocked the one for Rhodes’ apartment. Sure enough, there was an envelope inside. Mrs. Parisi handed it to Riley.

  It was addressed to Orin Rhodes, printed neatly by hand. There was no return address. But Riley noticed that it was postmarked from Ossining, New York, on Tuesday of last week.

  Riley opened the envelope and found a single sheet of paper inside. Also hand-printed was a short message.

  Glad you like the house in the picture. It will suit your purposes well. You’ll be expected there very soon.

  The note was unsigned. Even though the printing was deliberate and meticulous, Riley wondered if perhaps it could be analyzed. But she doubted very much that the writer had left any fingerprints.

  Bill stood next to her looking at the note.

  “Sounds like someone arranged for a hideout for Rhodes,” he said.

  Riley nodded in agreement. “Did you find a picture of a house when you searched the place?” she asked Bill.

  “I didn’t find any pictures at all,” Bill said.

  “Neither did I. He must have taken it with him. Or thrown it away.”

  Riley stood puzzling over the letter for a moment. It seemed that Orin Rhodes had left the apartment before the letter had arrived. Did that mean that Orin Rhodes hadn’t gone to the house in question? And even if he had, where on earth might it be?

  “It looks like he’s got an accomplice,” Bill said.

  Riley silently agreed. The possibility worried her more than she wanted to say.

  At that moment, Bill’s phone rang. He answered it, then said to Riley, “It’s Walder. He wants to talk to both of us.”

  Bill put his phone on speaker. Walder sounded even more irritable than usual.

  “There’s been another murder,” Walder said. “Down in Florida, in a little town near Jacksonville called Apex. A woman this time, shot nineteen times like Kirby Steadman.”

  Bill gave Riley a questioning look. Riley knew what he was thinking. Why was Walder calling them about another Rhodes killing? As far as Walder was concerned, they were tracking down Hatcher and only Hatcher.

  “The body was found pretty quickly in a parking lot,” Wal
der said. “But before the police could even get to the scene, they got another phone tip. From Shane Hatcher.”

  Riley and Bill stood staring at each other in silence.

  Walder sounded angrier. “Paige, Jeffreys, I think we’re getting played. Hatcher and Rhodes are in on this together. They’re killing as a team—both the murder in South Carolina, and now this.”

  Riley didn’t reply. She couldn’t prove otherwise, and she wasn’t going to argue with him over the phone.

  “You two should have figured this out,” Walder said. “You should have caught Hatcher by now. And so we’ve got another death. What the hell are you doing in Philadelphia? Get on the damn plane and fly straight down to Jacksonville. I’ll have agents from the local field office meet you at the airport. And I’m sending Creighton and Huang to keep you two from screwing things up more than you already have.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Walder ended the call.

  “Congratulations,” Bill said. “You’re back on the Rhodes case.”

  Riley understood the note of irony in Bill’s voice. As far as she was concerned, she’d never been off the Rhodes case.

  At least Walder’s sending me where I want to go, she thought.

  *

  It was late afternoon by the time Riley and Bill were back on the jet flying down to Jacksonville. Sitting beside Bill, Riley stared out the window at the landscape below.

  “What’s on your mind?” Bill asked.

  Riley just shook her head. She didn’t want to drag Bill into the morass of trouble she was getting herself into. Apparently sensing this, Bill patted her gently on the hand.

  “Look, I know you’re doing some things that aren’t by the book,” he said. “I get that. And I know you’re trying to protect me. But I think it’s time to stop. We’re never at our best together when we’re keeping secrets.”

  Riley felt a lump in her throat. Bill was not only her partner but also her best friend. Not telling him the whole truth didn’t seem right.

  Bill added, “If you’re going rogue, I’ll just have to go rogue with you. That’s the way it is. We’re partners.”

  Riley’s eyes stung a little. At last she knew that Bill’s loyalty toward her trumped even his loyalty to the FBI. And for the first time, she realized that she felt the same way about him. The time really had come for her to tell him the truth.

  “I’ve been in closer communication with Hatcher than I’ve been letting on,” she said. “And my relationship with him is getting kind of … well, complicated.”

  Bill nodded. “Tell me,” he said.

  “When I encountered him back in Syracuse, he told me more than I told anybody else—including you. I know this sounds crazy, but he seemed to be genuinely concerned about me. He told me about Rhodes, and how he was out for revenge against me. And he was right. The attack on April proved it.”

  Riley paused for a moment.

  “He said he felt some kind of special connection with me,” she said. “He told me we’re ‘joined at the brain.’”

  “Jesus,” Bill said.

  “But there’s more. I got a package from him in Quantico, just before you and I went to Sing Sing. He wanted me to know he didn’t kill the driver of the book truck. He rewarded him with a handsome retirement somewhere.”

  Bill looked a bit skeptical.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I think so. It’s consistent with what I know about him. And he gave me the clues that helped me find that ad in the library book.”

  Riley felt relieved to be able to talk things out like this. It helped her to sort out her own confusion.

  “But he’s doing some things I don’t understand. It turns out that Rhodes left a note on Kirby Steadman’s body. Rhodes wrote, ‘Dedicated to Riley Paige … I’m just getting started.’”

  “Why didn’t the local cops find the note?” Bill asked.

  “Because Hatcher took it. He picked it up off the body before the police got there. And he sent the note to me in the package. I don’t know why. If he’s trying to help me, why is he teasing me like that? Why is he playing games? Why is he communicating in riddles? He acts like he wants me to learn something about myself. I have no idea what.”

  Riley sat staring out the window for a moment.

  “And now I’ve got something new worrying me,” she said. “That note somebody mailed to Rhodes—the note about the house. Who sent it? Might it have been Hatcher? Maybe I’ve got this all wrong, Bill. Maybe Walder’s right. Maybe Hatcher’s been in cahoots with Rhodes all along. Maybe Rhodes even helped him escape. And if that’s true …”

  She couldn’t bring herself to finish the thought. What worried her now was that both Hatcher and Rhodes were manipulating her. Maybe she was nothing but Hatcher’s dupe. If that was true, she’d completely lost her way as an agent. Perhaps she’d even lost her way as a human being.

  Bill patted her hand again.

  “We’ll work this out,” he said. “We’re in this together.”

  Riley wanted to take comfort in Bill’s words. But worries were gnawing away at her. Who was she really hunting—Hatcher, Rhodes, or both?

  Or maybe I’m the only one being hunted, she thought with dread.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  When April’s father showed up at the motel, April quickly shut the door that separated her from Darlene Olsen, the agent who was on duty that night. Breathless with excitement, she spoke to her father in a low voice so Darlene couldn’t hear.

  “Daddy, you’ve got to get me out of here,” she said.

  Her father’s eyes widened.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “What do you think I mean? This place is the pits. Everything about it sucks. Even the food sucks. You said so yourself, remember? It’s not so bad when Lucy is here. I know her and she’s fun to talk to. Tara’s OK too. But Darlene is a bore. She doesn’t do anything except sit over in the other room and watch stuff on her computer.”

  April’s father looked all around the room with a look of distaste.

  “I know how you feel,” he said. “I can’t imagine why they picked this place. Surely they have some better accommodations for people who need protecting. But this is all about keeping you safe.”

  “I don’t see why staying safe has to be so boring.”

  Her father didn’t look at all convinced. He just sat down and commented, “April, it is what it is. There’s a good reason for keeping you well guarded.”

  “I’ve been here five days. Nobody has tried to hurt me.”

  “That just proves the point,” he replied. “It is safe here.”

  April rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” she said. “I could be safe anywhere if you’re around. I mean, you own a gun, right? You could protect me if you had to.”

  “That’s not really the point.”

  “Then what is?”

  Her dad didn’t answer. April decided to play to his sense of guilt.

  “I haven’t had much of a holiday, being cooped up here. I’m sure I’ve missed some parties with my friends from school.”

  “There will be other holidays,” he said. “And you and I have had some nice visits.”

  “But you’ve only got time to come by and see me for maybe a half hour every day. Sure, it’s the same old story—the story of my life.”

  Her father looked hurt now. Her tactic was working.

  “That’s not fair,” he said. “I know I’ve been like that in the past, but I’m trying to change. If I thought it would do any good, I’d cancel everything I’ve got going on. I’d do it right now.”

  “Well, why don’t you?”

  April’s father paced the room uneasily as April sat on the bed.

  “These FBI people are professionals,” he said. “They do know what they’re doing. Where do you think you and I could go where you’d be safe? You weren’t safe at your mother’s house, that’s for sure. And this guy who attacked you s
urely knows where I live.”

  “But you’ve got a gun!” April said. “Are you scared or something?”

  “You bet I’m scared. You should be scared too. We’d both be crazy not to be scared. Even the FBI doesn’t know where the man who attacked you is right now. He could be looking for you at this very minute. Where do you think he’d look next?”

  Her father sat down on the bed next to her. They both said nothing for a moment.

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” she finally said. “Let’s go take a vacation together. We can go tonight. We can start the New Year off better than this.”

  April’s father shook his head.

  “It wouldn’t be safe for you to go out in public,” he said.

  “It’s night, Daddy. No one would see us go. And how would the bad guy ever guess where we’d gone? Even we don’t know where we’re going yet!”

  Her dad smiled a little. April could feel that she was weakening his resolve. She knew that she could never manipulate her mother like this. Her father was an easier sell.

  “Daddy, when I was little, you and Mom took me to Chincoteague to see the pony roundup.”

  Her father’s smile widened.

  “I remember. You wanted us to buy one for you. But we didn’t have a place to keep a pony.”

  “They were so adorable.”

  April paused a moment, then added, “We could go back there right now. We could drive there tonight.”

  Her father’s brow knitted with thought. April could see that he was seriously thinking it over.

  “But it’s winter,” he said. “There’s no pony roundup in February.”

  “But that means the whole place will be pretty much deserted. No one would look for me there right now. And the scenery will be nice. We could be on the water. And don’t worry, I wouldn’t ask for a pony this time.”