Hot Pursuit

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Sam shifted in his seat, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt, glad he didn’t have to answer her, that he could just sit there and look pretty.

  The hotel had upgraded them to this super-fricking-deluxe suite that actually had a separate conference room they could use for these preliminary interviews of both Maria and Jenn. The upgrade had been all on account of Robin being an Emmy-winning TV star, and hadn’t cost him an additional dime.

  There was an irony there, in that once you got famous and rich enough, people started to give you all kinds of shit for free. But only after, of course, you were rich enough not to need it.

  Alyssa was tired. Sam could hear it in her voice, and he could relate. He was tired, too, and his side was hurting badly enough to make him wish he’d gone to the drugstore and picked up an Ace bandage and about a truckload of ibuprofen.

  Not that either of those things would help.

  “It’s standard procedure, ma’am,” Alyssa was telling Maria, “in any murder investigation. It’s more often the case that victims are killed by people they know, so—”

  “I’m aware of that, yes,” Maria said. “So, okay. How do we get me off the suspect list as soon as possible? How do we clear me?”

  “We’ll need a record of your whereabouts from the time Ms. Thorndyke went missing on Friday morning, to this afternoon,” Jules said, “when the, um, evidence appeared in your office desk drawer.”

  Evidence?

  Jules caught Sam’s eye and shrugged, his movement almost microscopically miniscule.

  Not that Maria would have noticed had Jules done a full Fonzie, complete with two thumbs up and an Ey. She was a little wrapped up in making sure her political career didn’t end before it started.

  “That’s easy,” she said earnestly. “I was in Albany for most of that time. My schedule of meetings is posted on my website. It wasn’t nonstop, but it’s close. I attended a dinner party that got me back to my hotel late. I still haven’t found an apartment in Albany, so I’ve been getting a room at one of those extended-stay hotels. I checked out early this morning, to drive back to Manhattan—I spoke to the desk clerk when I left. You can also check my EasyPass account for the exact time I came in over the bridge. I drove straight to the garage where we keep the car, and I walked to the office from there. When I arrived, Jenn was already in, along with several of our interns and volunteers.”

  “About what time was that?” Jules asked.

  “Probably … nine? Maybe a little after. Oh, I stopped at the Starbucks on the corner, and used my credit card, so I can get that time for you, too. It should be posted online by now.”

  “Do you recall which of your interns were in your office when you arrived?”

  “Ron,” she said, “and Gene. Wendy … And Belinda,” she recalled. “Oh, and the new UPS man, Hank something, was delivering a package. I chatted with him and the interns, had a brief schedule update with Jenni, then went into a meeting with Douglas. Forsythe. He was there, too. He’s a volunteer—the way Maggie was. He’s also a major donor.” She looked at Alyssa, alarmed. “Should we warn him? Is it possible that whoever killed Maggie is targeting the big donors to my campaign? Oh, my God, has Savannah been told?”

  “Savannah’s safe,” Alyssa reassured her. “As for Douglas… I don’t think we have enough information to come to any conclusions, but…” She looked at Sam. “Have we called him?”

  Sam nodded, checking the list he’d made. “Yeah. We’ll be meeting him, tomorrow afternoon, in the office.” He deferred to Jules. “If you want to stick to that schedule. Mr. Cassidy. Sir.”

  “Yeah, that’s good,” Jules said, ignoring him. “We’re going to want to talk to him, as well as all of the interns. And the UPS man.”

  “To corroborate my story?” Maria asked. “They’ll all confirm what I’ve told you.”

  Jules smiled at her. “I don’t doubt they will. But since they were there before you, one of them may have seen something or someone suspicious.”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry if I seem ignorant. I was a lawyer for quite a few years, but I never practiced criminal law. It was all taxes and insurance and real estate.”

  Alyssa looked at Sam and nodded—which was his cue to leave. It was, she’d said, “time to give the assemblywoman some privacy,” but he suspected her real goal was to get him into bed. And not in the good way.

  “Now we get to the hard part,” she told Maria as he went to the door, trying not to scream or walk bent over. Damn, he hurt. “Past relationships. Ex-boyfriends—”

  “Ex significant others,” Jules interjected.

  “Or maybe even current significant others,” Alyssa continued, using his more PC language. “Any enemies, any incidents that you may have made note of, both during the campaign or since you’ve taken office?”

  Sam closed the door behind him and—holy fuck. In just the short time he’d been sitting there, his body had further stiffened to the point that walking had made him see stars.

  He had to take a moment, leaning back against the wall and closing his eyes, breathing through the pain—something valuable that he’d learned from Alyssa’s Lamaze class, not that he’d ever tell anyone that.

  There was a low dresser type thing with a mirror above it, right there in the foyer to the suite, and he pulled up his shirt to look at his ribs and—

  “Holy shit!”

  Sam dropped his shirt and turned to see Robin standing there with Ash in his arms. Jennilyn was standing slightly behind him, still looking a little shell-shocked that she was in TV star Robin Chad-wick Cassidy’s hotel suite.

  Or maybe the real reason she was looking shell-shocked was standing behind her—Danny Gillman, fuckhead extreme. Rumor had it Gillman had seduced sweet little Jenn in record time, and that they’d been too busy going at it to answer either of their phones.

  “Don’t say shit in front of the baby,” Sam reminded Robin, then pointed at Gillman. “You and me, later. In the conference room.”

  “With the candlestick or the rope?” Robin quipped, but then answered his own question. “I suppose, Colonel Mustard, that either one will do.”

  “Da,” Ash said gleefully, holding out his arms.

  “Hey, Little Bit,” Sam told his son. “You’re gonna have to stay with Uncle Robin for a while longer, okay?”

  “Yeah, Daddy can’t hold you when he’s on the verge of falling over,” Robin said, then addressed Sam directly. “Shouldn’t you go to the hospital when your body starts inventing new colors like that?”

  “And have them tell me what? Your rib’s broken. Don’t take a deep breath for the next two weeks. Fifty dollar co-pay, please. No, thanks.”

  Jenn pushed her hair behind her ear. “Mind if I, um, see?”

  “What am I?” Sam asked. “A freak show?”

  She didn’t back down. In fact, she laughed, which made her eyes come to life and sparkle, and he understood—a little—why, out of a city filled with millions of women, Gillman had chosen her. Other than the fact that she was convenient, which she certainly was.

  “One of my brothers wanted to skateboard, you know, professionally,” she said. “Extreme sports. He never qualified, but he did break his ribs five, no, six times. I used to tape him up. I got pretty good at it.”

  “Yeah, tape doesn’t really help,” Sam said, but he lifted his shirt again for her to see.

  She drew in her breath through her teeth at the sight of the rainbow-hued bruise that covered his entire side. “That’s a broken rib, all right.”

  “Thank you, Dr. House,” Sam said as he lowered his shirt again.

  “When I broke a rib,” Gillman volunteered, “it helped me to wrap it. Having the bandage on reminded me not to jar it, or move too fast.”

  “Or to cough or sneeze,” Jenn said. “Or laugh. Don’t laugh,” she told Sam. “You’re breathing okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said. Broken ribs could puncture lungs, so in the big picture, he was absolutely doing fine.

&
nbsp; “You should let Lopez look at it,” Gillman said, then called, “Hey, Jay. C’mere.”

  “I should start charging admission,” Sam grumbled.

  “We were actually coming to find Jules and Alyssa,” Robin said. “But you’ll do.” He looked at Jenn. “Show him.”

  She held out the photo of Alyssa that Sam had taken from the homeless man he’d dubbed Don Quixote.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked. “I saw it on the table out in the living room and …” She looked back at Robin. “He really needs to sit down.”

  The he she was talking about was Sam, and damned if she wasn’t right. His knees were pretty fucking wobbly. But Lopez was there, and he and Gillman helped him into the living room, like he was some kind of ancient grandpa. But when Lopez looked at Sam’s side, he tsked and then called in a drugstore order to Izzy and Tony, who were out tracking down a bug-sweeper.

  “Tell him what you told me,” Robin prompted Jenn, now that Sam was sitting down and no longer in danger of face-planting on the carpet.

  An act that would have further pissed off Alyssa.

  “It was months ago,” Jenn said. “In September. I remember because it was actually the night that Savannah’s husband Ken got shot.”

  Sam remembered that night. In vivid detail. Ken, who was a chief in his old SEAL team, and a good friend, had nearly died.

  “Maria called me,” Jenn continued, “because she and Van needed a ride to the airport, so they could go to California. She told me to get the car.”

  Robin was nodding as if these details were both interesting and important to the story that Jenn was telling. So Sam didn’t interrupt. He just let her tell it as she got a bottle of water from the mini-fridge.

  “I’d parked it out on the street,” Jenn continued, as, in a surprise move, she handed the bottle to Sam, “a few blocks from my apartment, and when I got there, I got in and started it, and I looked into the rearview—and saw a man sitting in the backseat. It was this homeless man I’ve seen around. I still see him around. Not all the time, but every now and then.”

  Okay. Sam was now extremely interested. “Black guy?” he asked. “In his sixties or early seventies?”

  “Crazy hair and funky beard?” she said, nodding.

  “Puffy purple coat?” he asked.

  “That’s him,” Jenn said. “He didn’t have the coat then, but I’ve seen him with it since. He broke into the car—it was raining and he was going to spend the night in the backseat. I startled him as much as he startled me. Okay, maybe not, but he got out of there fast, and one of the things he left behind was that picture. Of Alyssa. It’s funny, I knew when I met her that I’d seen her somewhere before—and I was right.”

  “He’s where we got that,” Sam pointed to the picture of Lys. “We were just walking down the street, and he comes at us. At me, really. He was screaming don’t touch her. Crazy shit.” He looked at Ash who was laughing as Robin bounced him on his knee. “Stuff. Her being Alyssa. We ran, and he tripped and knocked himself cold. We went to see if we could help, you know, get the police there, or… That was when we found the picture. Talk about weird. But he was pretty drunk. He never regained consciousness, at least not before they took him to the hospital.”

  “Which hospital?” Jenn asked, her eyes somber.

  “St. Sebastian’s,” he told her. “You know it?”

  She nodded.

  Gillman had picked up the picture and was looking at it. “If he left it in the car,” he asked Jenn, “how’d he get it back?”

  “I gave it to him,” she said. “He left some other things, too. A sock filled with … well, treasure, but probably only to him, you know? Military ribbons, some marbles, buttons—things like that. I saw him a few days later at the dumpster behind the building—the window from the ladies’ room looks out over it. I guess he goes through it pretty regularly. But he was gone before I got down there. I actually ended up tracking him to a men’s shelter at a church not far from here. I never actually spoke to him—I think he was afraid I was going to get him into trouble or something, you know, for breaking into the car. So I left the sock and the picture with one of the workers at the shelter. He must’ve given it back to him.” She took the picture from Gillman. “I’m pretty sure this is the same photo. It’s a little more ragged, but…” She looked from Gillman to Robin to Sam, her eyes wide. “Do you think he killed Maggie?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “But you better believe that Alyssa and Jules both are going to want to bring him in and ask him a whole lotta questions.”

  Jennilyn was nervous as she went into the conference room to talk to the FBI agent and Alyssa. Dan knew this, because she’d told him as much.

  “They have to make sure that I’m not the one who killed Maggie,” she said, dead serious, “and I don’t have an alibi.”

  He tried not to laugh in her face. “Jenn, they know it wasn’t you.”

  “But… I can’t prove it. I could have made up that story about finding that photo of Alyssa, and—”

  He leaned forward and kissed her, right there in the living room of the hotel suite, and she looked at him as if he’d taken a crap on the coffee table, then furtively looked around to see if anyone had seen them.

  He lowered his voice to say, “Sorry, that was stupid. I didn’t, um, realize you didn’t want anyone to know you’re, you know, seeing me.”

  She stared back at him. “What? No! I didn’t think you wanted anyone to know. I mean, the whole thing with your sleeping bag back at my apartment… ?”

  Had she really thought… ? “Jesus,” he said. “Jenn. No, I was trying to protect you. That didn’t have anything to do with me. It was all about you.”

  No wonder she’d been distant and weirdly too-polite ever since they’d left her place—always moving to the other side of the hotel suite whenever he approached.

  And here he’d thought she was just horribly embarrassed because it was pretty obvious that everyone knew they’d hooked up. Lt. Starrett definitely knew. That comment he’d made about talking to Dan later…

  Danny was not looking forward to that.

  And talking about future unhappiness, the bedroom count in this suite was definitely lacking—despite it being the biggest suite Dan had ever been in, in his life. There were rooms for the Cassidys, for Alyssa and Sam and their baby, and a third room that Jenn would be sharing with Maria.

  Everyone kept stressing that it was temporary. Which meant what? Just for tonight or for the next week? Dan couldn’t get anyone to say.

  The SEALs were grabbing any available sofa or floor space, and fucking Izzy had already laid claim to the conference room—which was the only other room with a door.

  Which meant that the hard-on that Dan was walking around with wasn’t going to go away any time soon.

  It was screwed up—the fact that having sex again, after going without for a long time, got him instantly revved up for more sex. Most of the locker room talk that he’d ever listened to—and he tried to avoid it whenever possible—had been about the huge relief that came with finally getting some.

  Not so much for him. He could go months without getting laid, and be fine with self-delivered maintenance, a mere couple times a week, as the need arose.

  But as soon as he got the real thing, all he wanted was more. Which was another reason why the two-week plan worked best for him, rather than one-night-and-good-bye.

  And finding a woman as enthusiastic as Jenn had been … ?

  Danny could imagine, had they been allowed to stay in her apartment, them tearing through all of the condoms he’d put into his pocket earlier this evening. And buying plenty more in the morning.

  Before breakfast, even.

  Jenn now smiled, and he looked up, realizing that he’d been sitting there, staring at her mouth. As he met her gaze, it was clear that she knew exactly what he’d been thinking about, and she was both amused and perplexed. But mostly perplexed.

  “You know what really
bothers me?” he asked. “Like, to the point of adrenaline rush? And adrenaline rush is testosterone-talk for near panic, I might add.”

  She shook her head, one of her dimples coming briefly out to play. It vanished quickly, because she was still vastly uncertain as to where their relationship stood.

  It was hard not to smile back at her, and what he really wanted to do was talk her into going into the bathroom with him, perching up on that granite counter, and wrapping her long legs around him.

  But this was pretty serious shit, and he needed to talk to her about it.

  “It bothers the hell out of me, that that guy was in your car, and you just got in,” he told her. “It’s a basic safety rule, Jenn. Especially for women. You always make sure that opening the door triggers the overhead light, and you always, always check the backseat. Even if you just got out of the car for a half a second.”

  “I was in a hurry,” she tried to explain.

  Danny shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. He was in there, and you didn’t know it. Do you know how lucky you are—”

  “I know,” she cut him off. “Believe me, I’ve been thinking about that. A lot.”

  “I like your heart right where it is,” he said, and it didn’t take much for his voice to ring with sincerity. In fact, it didn’t take any extra effort at all.

  If they’d been alone, he would’ve reached for her, pulled her close, and kissed her. He’d have gently tugged her shirt over her head and kissing away any protests she might make, he’d have unfastened her bra and …

  “You gotta stop looking at me like that,” she whispered. She was laughing a little, but she was also looking around again to see who might be watching.

  No one was. Maria was still in the conference room with Alyssa and Jules. Sam had vanished—probably into his room to take a hot shower, to try to loosen up his injured muscles. Robin was putting Ashton to bed. Izzy and Vlachic were still out and about playing counterspy, and Lopez was over by the door and out of sight.