The Rapids

by Carla Neggers

  “You shouldn’t be listening to rumors.”

  “Rob Dunnemore. He’s here?”

  “He’s freshening up at his hotel. He’s a marshal. We’re not supposed to think of him as Poe’s surrogate son.”

  Kopac grinned. “Says who?”

  “Says me. Anything I can do for you? Or do I get to do a little work before Dunnemore gets here?”

  “Nothing you can do for me, Special Agent Spencer.” He leaned in toward her, adding in an amused conspiratorial whisper, “I’ll be in my office if you need a place to scream. It’s in the bowels of the building. No one’ll hear you.”

  “Very funny.”

  He laughed. “I thought so.”

  When she got back to her desk, Maggie checked her e-mail, hoping for another tip, something that would force Bremmerton to find someone else to stick Rob Dunnemore with. The guy put her nerve endings on edge. It wasn’t the Poe connection, she decided. It was the gray eyes.

  But there was nothing.

  Her mobile phone rang, almost as if it knew she was looking for distractions.

  A private number.

  “Maggie Spencer—”

  “St. John’s Cathedral is the finest example of Gothic architecture in the Netherlands.”

  The voice was male, the accent East Coast American, and the words had her sitting up straight. St. John’s was in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the same city where Dutch police had picked up Nick Janssen yesterday.

  “Who is this?”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon. It’s important that we talk.”

  “I understand, but I need more information—”

  “Just trust your instincts.”

  “My instincts tell me this is a crank call.”

  She thought she heard the start of a laugh. “I doubt that. Do people still call you Magster? Your father did when you were small, didn’t he?”

  Magster.

  Her stomach flip-flopped, but she warned herself that using her childhood name could just be a good guess, a way to manipulate her. It didn’t mean he knew anything about her father’s death. She couldn’t let herself think it was anything more.

  “Who are you? I need a name.”

  It was as if she hadn’t spoken. “Come alone. If you don’t, I’ll disappear, and you’ll have missed an important opportunity.”

  “An opportunity for what?”

  But he was gone, the connection dead.

  A meeting. Was the guy out of his mind?

  He must have prepared every word in advance. Of course her father called her Magster. What father with a daughter named Maggie didn’t?

  Some days she couldn’t believe it’d been eighteen months since his murder; other days, it was as if her father was more a dream than anything else, lost in a fog of memories and lost possibilities.

  Had the caller known him?

  Maggie felt a sudden rush of tears that she immediately fought back, impatient with herself.

  But Rob Dunnemore materialized behind her, startling her with his good looks. The ends of his fair hair were still damp from his shower. He hadn’t wasted any time in getting cleaned up and settled in.

  She smiled quickly, hoping there was no sign of even one damn tear in her eyes. “Have a seat, Deputy. We can get started.”

  “Bad day?”

  “What? Oh.” She made herself smile. “No, not yet.”

  He didn’t seem to believe her. “That’s good.”

  Maggie wished she’d indulged in chocolate sprinkles that morning, because it was going to be a very long day.

  Magster.

  She’d figure out what to do about her anonymous caller when she didn’t have Deputy Dunnemore’s gray eyes on her.

  Wide awake despite his overnight flight and long day, Rob sat on a wooden chair at a small table in his room on the top floor of his hotel, a renovated eighteenth-century building. It had low, slanted ceilings and no air-conditioning, but it wasn’t a hot night, at least by middle Tennessee standards.

  He heard laughter through his open window and looked down four floors at a young couple standing under a linden tree, its branches carefully trained.

  Rob turned away from the scene.

  His eyes were heavy, scratchy, from fatigue and jet lag.

  Maggie Spencer had walked with him back to his hotel, turning down a quick after-work drink.

  A woman with things on her mind, Special Agent Spencer.

  He’d gone into the dark, quiet bar by himself, but in a few minutes another man joined him, introducing himself as Tom Kopac, an embassy employee. Maggie’s friend.

  They’d had a beer together. It was clear word had gotten out that the wounded marshal from the Janssen mess in May—the marshal who was friends with the president—was in town and Maggie was stuck with him.

  Kopac had decided to check him out.

  Their conversation was cordial but superficial. Rob had smiled at the older man. “Maggie’s a DS agent. She protects you. You don’t protect her.”

  “She’s also a friend.”

  After Kopac left, Rob had a spicy, meat-filled kroket with mustard, then went up to his room.

  Why the hell was Kopac suspicious of him when Spencer was the one who had received the damn anonymous tip about Janssen? Not even an hour afterward, he was under arrest. Tips like that didn’t happen often, even with minor nonviolent fugitives, never mind with violent fugitives with international warrants out on them.

  Was it someone wanting to collect the reward for information leading to Janssen’s arrest?

  No one had come forward.

  Rob put aside his questions and picked up the phone, dialing his future brother-in-law’s office in Arlington.

  “What do we know about the DS agent who got the Janssen tip? Maggie Spencer.” Rob didn’t mention her rich red hair, her turquoise eyes, her creamy skin, and chastised himself for his gut-punched reaction to her. “She’s gritting her teeth, but she’s not complaining about getting saddled with me. At least not to my face.”

  “Her name’s familiar,” Nate said.

  “Because she’s the one who got the Janssen tip—”

  “No, it’s something else.”

  “You want to see what you can find out?”

  “Sure.”

  “She’s fetching me up in the morning and carting me to the town where Janssen was picked up.”

  “Her idea?”

  “She’s finding things to do with me.”

  The alternative meanings of what he said struck him like a junior high student. Jet lag.

  “I’m not touching that,” Nate said with a chuckle. “I’ll check her out, let you know if I find out anything. Has she given you any idea of who she thinks gave her the tip?”

  “She’s not a talker—she’s not easy to read.”

  “All right. I’ll see what I can do. Isn’t it midnight there?”

  “Just about.”

  “Go to bed. Take a sleeping pill.”

  “I don’t want to oversleep and miss my field trip.”

  Then again, Spencer was probably the type to throw a brick through his window to wake him up.

  “I’ll tell Sarah you called,” Nate said.

  “And the president?”

  Silence.

  “He wanted to know how I reacted to Janssen’s arrest, didn’t he?”

  “It’s not that simple—”

  “It never is with Wes. Yeah. Say hi to Sarah for me.”

  When he hung up, Rob glanced down at the street and saw that the laughing couple was gone. The street seemed empty, almost too quiet. He lay atop his bed in his shorts. No shirt, no shoes. He’d visited his parents in Holland in April, when Nick Janssen was just wanted for failing to appear in court to face tax evasion charges. He’d made a move on Rob’s mother, and Rob hadn’t even known it.

  So much had happened since then.

  But his parents were back in Night’s Landing, permanently, and his father, in his late seventies, was finally easing up
on his schedule. His mother seemed more at peace than she had in many weeks. Neither had wanted Rob to go back to work after the shooting—they hadn’t wanted him to become a marshal in the first place.

  “Should have called them before you left New York,” he said to the ceiling. But he hadn’t talked to them at all since Janssen’s arrest.

  He let his eyes close, pushing back an image of Night’s Landing and the old log house his grandfather had built, thinking instead about Maggie Spencer and Tom Kopac and what it was about the diplomatic security agent that bothered him.

  Five

  Maggie pulled up to Rob’s hotel in her Mini at eight. She didn’t know what else to do except drag him to ’s-Hertogenbosch with her.

  He greeted her with a charming smile and two espressos and folded himself into her small car without complaint, handing her one of the espressos. “What is it, about two hours to ’s-Hertogenbosch?”

  He pronounced the full name of the southern city the same way her Dutch friends did—flawlessly. It translated as “the duke’s forest” and was typically shortened to Den Bosch, which Maggie could pronounce easily enough. “Should be,” she said, pulling out onto the street.

  As he sipped his espresso, Rob dug out a pocket map and checked their route. “Den Bosch was founded in the twelfth century by Hendrik I of Brabant.”

  “Ah.”

  “Biggest attraction there is Sint Jan’s Kathedraal.”

  Maggie didn’t let herself react to his use of the Dutch name for St. John’s Cathedral, where she was supposed to meet her anonymous caller, her ulterior motive for going to Den Bosch on a warm Saturday morning. “You’ve been reading tourist brochures, I see.”

  “We might need something to do after we look at the spot where the Dutch police picked up Janssen. Do you know the address of his safe house?”

  She nodded. “We could go there, too.”

  “Maybe it has window boxes.”

  His sarcasm was barely detectable, which, Maggie decided, only made him more dangerous. She’d underestimated him. Dismissed him as not serious, indulged in stereotypes because she hadn’t wanted to deal with him—she’d had better things to do than take care of a deputy marshal who counted among his friends the U.S. president. But Deputy Dunnemore was proving himself to be a much more complicated case than she’d anticipated.

  She got onto the motorway, the traffic relatively light on a Saturday morning. “If you don’t want to go to Den Bosch, I can drop you off somewhere else.”

  “I’m into the idea now. Have you seen many sights since you’ve been here?”

  She reached for her espresso and took too big a sip, nearly burning her mouth, then shook her head, putting the coffee back in the cup holder. “I’ve only been here three weeks. I haven’t had much time. I vary my run just so I can see more of the streets in The Hague.” She made herself smile through her tension. She didn’t like hiding her real purpose for going to Den Bosch from him. “I could get into castles.”

  “All work, no play,” Rob said, looking up from his map. “Does that describe you, Maggie?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not that introspective.”

  “Interesting, since you’re the new kid, that you should be the one to get the tip on where to find our guy Janssen.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?”

  “Where were you before here?”

  “Chicago.”

  “And you grew up in…”

  “South Florida, for the most part. We moved around a lot before my parents were divorced.”

  “They still live there?”

  “My mother does.” She left it at that.

  But Rob persisted. “Your father?”

  “He died a year and a half ago.”

  “I’m sorry.” No hesitation, no awkwardness. He had the social graces down pat, when he wanted to use them. “Any theory why Janssen was in Den Bosch?”

  She shook her head, reminding herself that Rob’s family had nearly all been killed because of Nick Janssen and she should cut him some slack. But he wasn’t going to change the subject, obviously. He’d keep grilling her about Janssen and Den Bosch and the tip until she put a stop to it. She didn’t know if he was suspicious of her because of the tip or just tenacious—or both.

  “Why do you think the marshals sent you here?” she asked casually. “Given your personal connection to Janssen—”

  “No one sent me. I asked to come here.”

  It wasn’t the answer she’d expected. “They let you?”

  Janssen’s arrest stirred up the media. “I had a lot of reporters on my tail. This way I’m out of sight, out of mind.”

  “Or out of sight and they’ll all want to know why and show up here next?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think so. Have you had many reporters contact you?”

  “Not directly. A few have contacted Public Affairs.”

  “I guess it’s not nearly as interesting to have an international fugitive arrested as a presidential connection exposed.”

  She tried more of the espresso. Rob had done fine yesterday at the embassy. He was good at small talk, at ease with people. His connection to President Poe made people eager to meet him and be on their best behavior, but in the end, Maggie thought, it hadn’t made that big a difference. The guy was likable. The mistake, she suspected, was to assume that translated into being a soft touch.

  He again consulted his map. “Janssen was picked up on a canal?”

  “The Binnendieze. I wasn’t sure of what it was, either. It’s a shallow river, but it looks and feels like a canal. Den Bosch is located in a triangle where the Aa and the Dommel join to form the Dieze River, which eventually runs into the Maas.”

  “Ah. So I see on the map.”

  “Water’s a big deal in the Netherlands. About a third of the country’s below sea level. We tend to think in terms of the North Sea, but river flooding is a concern, too.”

  “Binnendieze—does that mean ‘little Dieze’?”

  “Aren’t you the one who speaks all the languages?”

  He finished his espresso without answering.

  “I heard it was seven,” Maggie persisted.

  “Well, one of them isn’t Dutch.”

  She laughed. “Binnen means inner, or inside. It’s the section of the Dieze that runs within Den Bosch’s original city walls—it’s sort of a natural moat. They’ve cleaned it up and run boat tours on it these days.”

  “Bet it used to be the town sewer.”

  “That’s what I understand. The tour’s unusual because it takes you under the city, actually under people’s houses. For safety reasons, centuries ago, people could only build inside the city walls. When they ran out of room, they started building over the waterway.”

  “Very clever.”

  “It sounds like a fascinating tour, doesn’t it?”

  “Better than the cathedral, if you ask me.”

  Maggie got off the A2 motorway and drove toward the city center, Rob pointing out a stunning fountain featuring a gold dragon in the middle of a roundabout. Remembering directions she’d gotten from a Dutch police inspector, who hadn’t questioned her reasons for asking, she found her way to the boat-tour entrance and parked nearby.

  It was a pleasantly warm morning under a clear Dutch-blue sky, a perfect day to play tourist—except that wasn’t why she and Rob were there, Maggie reminded herself as they walked along a shaded street. The narrow, shallow waterway flowed next to them, below street level. Steps lead down to a small dock for the boats, a crowd gathering for the next tour.

  “Janssen had two dogs,” Rob said, stopping along the open black-iron fence above the waterway. “Rhodesian ridgebacks.”

  “Big dogs.”

  “Do we know what happened to them?”

  “They weren’t with him when he was arrested. I doubt he had them with him when he took off in May.”

  “How long do we think he was in Den Bosch before you got the tip?”

  From his tone, Magg
ie knew he didn’t expect her to have an answer. “Not long, but that’s not a guess at this point. Den Bosch strikes me as an unlikely place for the leader of an international criminal network to turn up. It’s possible he—”

  She stopped. Who was that? A man in front of a café just down the street…balding, rumpled.

  Tom Kopac?

  Rob was instantly alert. “What is it?”

  “I think I recognize someone. Hold on.”

  Maggie started toward the café, but Tom had disappeared. She pushed past the outdoor tables, where a few tourists were enjoying coffee, and checked inside, her eyes quickly adjusting after being in the bright sun.

  Nothing.

  Had she mistaken someone else for Tom?

  No. She was positive it’d been him.

  He must have continued past the café or cut down another street.

  She headed back outside and scanned the scene.

  Rob stood behind her. “What’s going on?”

  “A colleague at the embassy is here. Maybe he’s like us, just checking out where Janssen was picked up.”

  “Did he work the case?”

  She shook her head. “No. But he’s a good guy. A friend.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Kopac. Tom Kopac. He works in economic relations.”

  Rob frowned at her. “He came by my hotel last night.”

  “Tom did? Why?”

  “Checking me out. Are you two—”

  “No.”

  She thought she detected a flicker of amusement at her forceful answer. “You DS agents are the expert drivers. Could he have followed us out here?”

  “It’s not like I’m on a secret mission or driving around the secretary of state. I wasn’t paying that close attention, but I doubt—” She realized she sounded very serious and deliberately lightened up. “I’m sure he didn’t follow us.”

  “Did he see you just now?”

  “You mean, was he running away from me? I don’t know.”

  At the same time, they noticed a change in the crowd at the entrance to the boat tour. A sudden tension, gasps.

  Screams.

  Maggie and Rob charged back down the street, heading for a half-dozen people who were standing at the open fence, pointing into the water. A woman was screaming.