Hot Pursuit

by Suzanne Brockmann

  But Sam turned to stop them and put a finger to his lips. He wanted silence.

  “Jesus,” Dan said, but he followed them because the alternative was to stand there on the sidewalk with his thumb up his ass.

  “I just want to find Jenn,” he whispered to Tony, who was right behind him.

  “I think that’s what we’re doing,” Tony whispered back, pointing to the bolt on the door that Sam had been talking about.

  The kitchens too small—so what if the kitchen was too small?

  But Sam and Mick and Jules were walking silently back and forth between it and the dining room and the living room, turning on all the lights.

  Which was when Dan saw it, too. The kitchen was too small. It should have extended another ten feet from the back of the pantry.

  There was another room—a hidden room—here on the first floor of this big house.

  But how the hell were they going to get in? They didn’t have time to explore and find the equally hidden door. That psycho could be carving up Jenn and Alyssa right now, right behind those very walls. …

  Sam motioned for Tony to bring the weapons case over, and Tony snapped to it, opening it up. Whereupon Sam reached—yes—for the small chunk of C4 explosives.

  For what he was going to do, they wouldn’t need a lot.

  Except these walls were old. God only knew what was behind the plaster. Possibly horsehair. They had to assume they were plenty thick.

  One blast might not be enough.

  But Danny remembered seeing a pickax in the basement.

  He ran to get it while Sam set the charge.

  He liked it when they bit him, hard enough to draw blood, so he always gave them a chance to do so. He had his Taser in the event that they latched on too tightly, so he was never in real danger.

  But here they were, hidden away in his kill room, where he’d brought Monsieur Henri, Tinkerbell, Jolie, and Maggie Thorndyke all to their magnificent, snarling ends.

  He wished there was a drain in the floor, and a shower so he could wash. After killing Maggie, he’d had to wipe himself down very carefully, so as not to get blood on Mère’s carpeting in the hall outside his bathroom.

  And he also wished he could remove Jenn’s gag, so he could see and feel her sharp little teeth, as she felt the bite of his knife.

  But he couldn’t, because there were still people in the house, moving quietly around, no doubt putting the gay FBI agent, Mère et Papa in body bags. He wondered, briefly, what the FBI would do with the freezers that he’d bought upon his return home. They were still almost new. Barely used.

  He liked the idea of some unknowing person buying one of them and using it to store their ground beef and frozen vegetables—never realizing that this freezer they’d gotten at such a great bargain had been used, for months, as a tomb.

  He also liked the fact that Alyssa was pretending that she wasn’t afraid. Or maybe she really wasn’t—he liked to think that was possible, too. That she was, in fact, as strong as he was.

  But it was far more likely that she would crack when he took his knife to Jennilyn.

  If Alyssa’s gag was off, she’d beg. And plead. And bargain. And cry.

  He was going to make her cry before this was over, before this ended.

  And it would end, one way or another.

  If the house emptied, he’d kill Jenn here and leave her body for them to find, while he and Alyssa drove west. He would keep her alive a little bit longer. It was not his original plan, but he liked having her watch him work.

  And he wanted to hear her scream.

  Of course, there was always a chance that someone would find them—that someone would realize they hadn’t left the city after all. In which case he would kill Alyssa immediately, even as his own life ended.

  Either way though, Jenn was going to die right now.

  It was time to do it—to see if he could make Alyssa Locke cry.

  Sam was coming back.

  He was going to come back.

  Alyssa knew it. She believed it, believed in him.

  He would realize that she and Jenn and this monster were all still here, and he would …

  Come …

  Back …

  But she was also terrified because she knew that they were out of time.

  He was going to start cutting Jenn, and she would not let that happen.

  Alyssa rolled, pushing herself toward Jenn, getting in front of her, next to her, but he just laughed and kept coming.

  They backed up, together, Alyssa’s shoulder against Jenn’s, until they finally hit the wall and there was nowhere left to go.

  He reached down, still laughing, and easily—with his left hand, because his right held that knife—took hold of the ropes that bound Alyssa’s ankles, and he dragged her back, away from Jenn, to the other side of the room.

  She flailed, trying to kick him, and he laughed again.

  “Oh, I knew you’d make this fun,” he said, and he turned back toward Jenn—and the world exploded.

  The explosion threw Jenn back, and she hit her head against the pedestal base of the big table hard enough to see stars.

  Her ears were ringing, and chokingly thick smoke and dust was everywhere, but light—bright light—was shining through.

  She could see the shadowy, backlit shape of a very big man, wielding what looked like some kind of ax, swinging it and crashing through what was left of the wall.

  She turned, looking for Alyssa. Where was she?

  And there she was—she’d been flung back into the far corner of the room, where she lay motionless.

  But there was Douglas, in the middle of the room, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, shaking his head as if to clear it from the confusion and chaos, pushing himself even further up onto his feet. And the light glinted off of the knife he still held in his hand.

  As Jenn watched from beneath the table, he turned toward Alyssa and threw himself at her.

  Jenn tried to move, tried to get between them, tried to do for Alyssa what Alyssa had done for her, but she wasn’t fast enough.

  But she didn’t have to be.

  Because Sam was there, with that pickax. He’d broken through the wall, yet he still swung just as hard, one more time. He connected with Douglas, stopping him literally dead in his tracks before that blade touched Alyssa.

  She had to turn away, because, God …

  “Jenn!”

  And there was Dan. He, too, had come through the wall, part of the cavalry, to save the day.

  He pulled off her gag, and he grabbed one of Douglas’s bottles of water—they were rolling all over the floor—and gave her some to drink.

  “Thank you,” she said as she started to cry.

  “It’s okay now,” he told her. “Everything’s okay.” And he picked her up. He actually picked her up in his arms and carried her out of there, out of that room, out of the house and into the cold, welcoming fresh air of the late afternoon.

  She could hear sirens—ambulances and fire trucks both were on their way.

  But Dan just sat down on the steps leading up to Douglas’s house and, after making sure that she truly was unharmed, that she hadn’t been injured either by Douglas or that blast, he kissed her. And kissed her.

  And kissed her.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Alyssa was going to be all right.

  They were all in the hospital—Alyssa and Jenn and Jules.

  Jules—who’d been both electrocuted and nearly asphyxiated by a notorious serial killer, and was acting as if it were all in a day’s work.

  Robin sat at the side of his husband’s bed in the ER, grateful that this had happened in New York City. If this were a hospital in Cleveland or New Orleans, he’d be forced to sit out in the waiting room, because his marriage wouldn’t be recognized and he wouldn’t be considered a family member.

  But this was New York, and Jules had neither been electrocuted nor asphyxiated to death, all of which was
extremely good news.

  The doctors had hooked Jules up to an EKG, to make sure the blasts from Douglas Forsythe’s illegally altered Taser hadn’t done any damage to his heart.

  It hadn’t, thank God.

  Alyssa and Jenn had both gotten their hearts checked, too. And Alyssa was having a CAT scan, because she’d hit her head in the explosion that had saved her life and Jenn’s.

  But she was conscious and cognizant, and with Sam’s help had taken a shower. Robin had brought clothes from the hotel for Sam and Alyssa both. Apparently Sam taking a pickax to the serial killer’s head had had extremely messy results.

  “What I don’t get,” Robin said, “and believe me, I’m not complaining, but—”

  “Why didn’t he kill me,” Jules finished for him. “Why a bag over my head instead of cutting my throat? And it wasn’t a very thick bag—it was one of those produce bags from the grocery store. I tore it easily with my teeth.”

  “But if you had been unconscious,” Robin started. It would have killed him.

  Jules squeezed his hand. “I wasn’t.”

  “Thank God.”

  They sat there for a moment, then Jules said, “It was because I’m gay. I mean, I don’t know that for sure—we’ll never really know. But I think he was, I don’t know, afraid of me … ? It sounds crazy, but… You know, maybe he was one of those people who think that everyone who’s gay has AIDS and … He was something of a germophobe, that we do know. Lots of bottles of hand sanitizer around the house.”

  “Well hooray for ignorance,” Robin said.

  “He kept the place really clean, too,” Jules told him. “I mean, usually when you think serial killer, you think of someone insane, living in a cave or a basement, in their own filth.”

  Robin laughed. “That’s the difference between the two of us,” he pointed out. “I don’t generally think about serial killers.”

  “That’s a good thing,” Jules assured him.

  “So he was clean,” Robin said, “but he was still insane. I mean, keeping mom and dad in freezers in the basement? How come no one noticed they were gone?”

  “Carol told me that when he came home back in May, he terminated the contracts with his parents’ hired help, and told them his folks were going to winter in Florida. No one checked to find out if that was true. I guess they didn’t have many friends.”

  “That’s kind of sad,” Robin said.

  Jules nodded. “Our theory is that he brought Betsy’s body home with him—that he carried it with him since he killed her, buying a freezer to store it wherever he went. Apparently he had access to a significant trust fund. We could probably figure out where he stayed over the past year and a half, by finding the properties across the country in which the tenant paid in cash and bought and left behind a full-size freezer.”

  “So he spent all that time,” Robin said, “targeting Alyssa?”

  “That’s Sam’s theory,” Jules said. He had three suitcases with him in his secret room. Two were filled with money, but the other held photos and information—a lot of stuff about Alyssa. He had details about Sam and Ashton, too. Scary.

  “He was definitely behind that forged letter that was sent to Frank Bonavita,” Jules continued. “He had samples of Frank’s handwriting and some earlier drafts of the letter in his suitcase. Along with a pretty big bag of meth, probably to keep Frank supplied … We’re doing an autopsy, but I don’t think we’re going to find he was a user himself. I’m guessing he had it to control Frank—in case he needed someone to take the blame or create a distraction.”

  “What about the teeth?” Robin asked.

  “They were in that suitcase, too,” Jules told him. “Although he did have a few in the pockets of his pants. Lab is going to do DNA tests on all of them—see if there are any victims that we didn’t know about.”

  “He’s definitely the one who killed Maggie, right?” Robin asked.

  “Yeah, and Winston,” Jules said.

  “I figured,” Robin said. “I mean, otherwise you wouldn’t have let me leave the hotel.”

  Jules shook his head, apology and regret in his eyes. “Some vacation this turned out to be, huh?”

  “The you-not-being-dead part ranks it right up among the very best.”

  Jules sat up and reached for him, and Robin went into his arms.

  Izzy stayed behind at the hotel with Ashton.

  That was the plan. He’d hang with the baby, while Lopez escorted Maria to the hospital, to see Jenn.

  It was crazy, everything that had gone down—Sam Starrett blowing the shit out of a wall and then splitting open some deviant serial killer’s skull with a single well-placed blow, in order to save the life of his wife and another innocent woman.

  It was the kind of thing that, if this were some B-grade horror movie, Sam would have gotten there a heartbeat too late, and Alyssa would have died. And then, in killing the killer so gruesomely, Sam would have become possessed by the man’s evil spirit, and thus would begin his own horrific killing spree, offing all of his victims in the very same way, with a brutal blow to the head with a pickax.

  But this wasn’t a horror movie. Alyssa was very much alive, although the story of her rescue wasn’t one either of Ash’s parents would be telling their little boy anytime soon.

  Izzy had just put the munchkin down for a nap and was looking forward to a little shut-eye himself, when there was a knock at the door.

  Grateful that he no longer had to enforce Sam’s shoot-to-kill order, Izzy went to the peephole and …

  Hmm.

  It was Lopez—and Maria Bonavita.

  He opened the door, thinking that Lopez had forgotten something, but it was Maria who said, “Hi, may I come in?”

  “Uh,” Izzy said. “Sure? Come on in. Please come in.” He looked at Lopez pointedly.

  But the bastard shook his head. “I’ll wait in the hall,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Maria said—it was clearly something they’d worked out in advance.

  Which left Izzy awkwardly closing the door behind her. “S’up?” he said, playing the stupid card—as if he didn’t know why she was here.

  “May we sit?” she asked, not waiting for him to respond as she went into the living room of the suite. She was still dressed down in jeans and a sweater. She’d taken her coat off before she’d knocked on his door and she held it over her arm.

  He let her sit first, then took a seat as far from her as possible.

  “I want to apologize,” Maria said, “for my inappropriate behavior this morning. I know you’re still married and … I should have kept my distance.”

  “Apology accepted,” he said, standing up.

  But she didn’t get to her feet, which was a rather huge clue that there was more to come.

  So he beat her to the punch. “I won’t tell anyone,” he promised her. “I know that as a politician you’ve got to be careful about this kind of thing, and I will absolutely keep my mouth zipped and—”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not… I don’t care about that. Well, I do care, but it never even occurred to me that you’d …” She exhaled hard. “Wow, okay. Thank you. For not telling anyone. I appreciate that. But I wanted to …” She stopped again. Crossed her legs. Tapped her fingers on the armrest of the sofa as she looked at him. “Will you please sit?”

  “I’m good standing,” Izzy said.

  So she stood up, too. “Look,” she said. “Here it is: I want to have a family. But my political career is taking off, and I work 24/7 and … I’m heading to Albany and probably Washington—I mean, If I survive this thing with the Dentist being one of my major donors and volunteering in my office—which, granted, is better than my brother being a murderer—”

  “Spin that you helped catch him,” Izzy said. “Don’t be the victim, be part of the team of heroes who caught the bad guy.”

  Maria looked startled, but then nodded. “Yeah,” she said. She smiled. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “You want a fam
ily,” Izzy asked her, “or you need one?”

  She didn’t answer right away, but when she did, it was with honesty. “Both,” she admitted. “But you’re right. Need more than want.”

  Izzy nodded. He’d been thinking about it since she’d hit on him, and he now knew exactly what this was about.

  Maria was still young but, like she’d said, her career was kicking into high gear. Right now it was clear that she had no time for a baby, or even for a husband or boyfriend—which was a perfectly fine choice for her to make. Still, as a politician, having a family was perceived to be important.

  That had to be a weird consideration, even though male politicians married trophy wives—usually those with money—all the time.

  But a woman with political aspirations … ?

  It would definitely serve her better to have a kid soon, and get through those early childhood years before running for governor or senator or whatever she had in mind.

  “I assume you’re looking for more than a sperm donor,” Izzy said.

  Maria laughed. “I’ve got plenty of volunteers for that. So, no. I’m looking to get married.”

  “The polygamy thing could be a problem,” he pointed out. “During the vetting process, someone will probably find out.”

  “Obviously,” she said, “if it ever got to that point, you’d have to get a divorce.”

  The word hit him, like a punch to the gut.

  “Look,” she said again, “I’m not talking about running off to Vegas tomorrow. Obviously we’d need to get to know each other better. And maybe it wouldn’t work. But… maybe it would. What I do know is this—I like what I’ve seen, enough to think it’s worth a try.”

  He started to speak again, but again, Maria cut him off.

  “I know you still hope to reconnect with Eden,” she said, “and I really hope, for your sake, that you do, but if you don’t—”

  “This is crazy,” he said.

  “No, it’s not,” she countered. “I like you, you like me—and you’re great with kids.”

  She was serious.

  She was also gathering up her jacket and purse. “That’s all,” she said. “That’s what I came here to say. I’m not looking for an immediate answer. I just wanted to put the idea out there, and make you realize you have other options if your plans fall through. So, think about it. And, you know, call me, if you find yourself unmarried.”