It was best not to let his thoughts stray down sexual paths. She might notice. He cast about for a neutral topic.
“So, do you still have that ugly car?”
Larabeth bristled. “My car was never ugly. It was a classic Mustang, playboy pink with a black interior. A real ‘girl car’ from the ‘Sixties. I have another one just like it now.”
“What happened to the old one? Did you finally run its tires off?” How many times had he baited her about that silly car?
“Oh, I still have it.”
“You have two identical ugly pink cars.”
“They're getting old, you know. I drive one while the other visits my mechanic for pampering. I pay a fortune in maintenance, but what's money for?”
Oh, he did prefer her attitude to gotta-drive-a-brand-new-Beamer snobbery.
“Good Lord,” he snorted. “I suppose they have matching vanity plates: “LARABETH1 and LARABETH2?”
“No. I hate vanity plates. They're so. . .vain. Jean-Pierre thinks their license plates should say SALLY1 and SALLY2. He named them after that song ‘Mustang Sally.’”
J.D. groaned. ”Jean-Pierre. Would he be your Parisian lover?”
“No. My Cajun auto mechanic. I think he'd work on the Sallies for free, but he doesn't. My maintenance bills will probably put his kids through college.”
“She pays a fortune to keep two identical ugly cars,” he said. “I wish I had that kind of money.”
“I notice that you're still driving an anonymous beige car. Where's your imagination?”
“Where's your common sense?” he grumbled. “Detectives have to drive anonymous cars. You can't do surveillance in a car that glows in the dark.”
He liked the way she laughed at him. There she sat, toying with her food, looking just as poised and graceful in her jeans and loafers as she did in her business suits. She had even looked comfortable in the cornfield in that damnable protective jumpsuit. She looked so charming and he was so pleased to see her again after the terrible way they had parted, that he spoke without thinking and said precisely the wrong thing.
“You haven't aged a day, Larabeth. You could be Cynthia's age. You always did look more like her sister than her mother.”
Larabeth had a lot of control. She gave no visible response to his thoughtless comment. At least, there was no response that a casual acquaintance would notice. J.D. knew he was the only person in the world aware of the pain she hid, and he regretted his part in making that pain worse.
She didn't tremble or cry or flush. She just acquired a sort of glacial stillness as she sat there and stared at him. He opened his mouth to apologize, but she had returned to herself, thrown her napkin on the table, and signed the check.
“We've been tiptoeing around each other long enough,” she said briskly. “Why don't we go outside and deal with our unfinished business?”
He followed her out and looked around. The hotel wasn't that cheap. The pool was attractive, if small, and the surrounding landscaping was quite nice, with a number of benches nestled beside tall shrubbery. There was no one else around, and J.D. was grateful for the privacy of the quiet courtyard.
“I'm sorry I mentioned Cynthia,” J.D. began.
“It's understandable,” she responded quickly. “For seven years, we talked of nothing else.”
“I suppose you haven't contacted her. I guess you would have said something about it by now, if you had.”
“I've probably started hundreds of letters to her in the years since I saw you, trying to explain why I gave her up. I'm beginning to accept that there will never be a right way to intrude on her life. Maybe it's for the best.” She flashed him a rueful smile. “But you did a damn fine job of keeping up with her for me. Too bad I don't have any way of keeping up with her any more.”
J.D.’s eyes squinted for just a second. Why did he feel that Larabeth wasn't being completely straight with him? She cocked her head, obviously waiting for him to respond, and the moment passed. It just felt good, being together again.
“Well, finding her was no big trick,” he said. “Not when your father left you the adoptive parents' address in his will. The rest of the assignment wasn't hard, but it was strange.”
J.D. paused as a woman passed on the sidewalk near them, and they both fell silent. He had never, before or since, been asked to tail someone indefinitely, especially when that someone didn't owe his client money and wasn't sleeping around behind his client's back. All Larabeth had wanted at first was to find out whether Cynthia's parents were good ones. They were.
As the assignment wore on, she asked him to keep her posted on the little ups and downs in the girl's teen-age life. He'd made black-and-white glossies of Cynthia with braces on her teeth and Cynthia after the braces came off. He'd compiled dossiers on her boyfriends. He'd gotten newspaper clippings of her athletic exploits and academic awards, even her adoptive father's obituary.
Larabeth's thoughts were evidently running along the same lines. She fumbled in her purse, drew out her wallet, and opened it to a photograph. “Look, I'm still carrying her senior portrait around. I didn't even have to give you instructions. You just seemed to find out the things a mother would want to know.”
J.D.'s laugh was sudden and inappropriate. She raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Oh, I was just thinking about those years. Do you know how hard it is to snag an illicit copy of a high school yearbook? I should write an article for P.I. Magazine. I'd call it ‘I Staked Out the Junior-Senior Prom.’”
As Larabeth laughed, the frozen look left her. On her face, even the little smile lines looked youthful.
“It was an odd assignment,” she said, “but it gave you something to do between normal clients. I knew you weren't happy. You didn't really have to give me an impassioned speech about how wrong it was to tail an innocent girl. I was just surprised old Mr. Sanders let you throw away the easy money his firm was making off me.”
“Mr. Sanders always had a stranglehold on the bottom line, but he respected integrity. I explained my position to him before I resigned from your case. He approved.”
“You speak of him in the past tense.”
“He died a couple of years ago. Heart attack.”
Larabeth laid her hand on his for a moment, then drew it away. “J.D., I'm sorry. He was a kind old man, even if he did disapprove of me. But I understand you're still working out of the same office.”
“He never had any children, so, for lack of a better option, he left the business to me.”
”The thought of you having to balance debits and credits warms the cockles of my businesswoman's heart.” Larabeth looked so smug, J.D. wanted to pinch her. “I presume you're doing well?”
“I've got several employees, even someone to balance my debits and credits for me. How else do you think I can drop everything and come running when you call? Somebody's got to take care of my normal clients. You know—the ones who are spying on their soon-to-be-ex-spouses.”
“I'm glad you're successful. You deserve it.” She brushed the hair back from her damp forehead and rose from the bench.
“It's been a long, hot day, and I want to shower and go to bed,” Larabeth said. “But before I do, I want to say one thing. You were right. From the very beginning, you were right. I treasured every photograph, every scrap of news you brought me about Cynthia. I still do. But I was fooling myself when I thought that having those things would make it easier to face her. If my daughter looked me in the eye today and asked me why I gave her away, what would I say? How would you like knowing that you were born because your mother was a brutalized child?”
Larabeth was doing a good job of controlling the tremor in her voice but, when it came to human frailty, J.D. was practiced at reading between the lines. It was how he made his living.
She talked fast, as if the words would come easier if they came in a single breath. “I don't know how to be a mother. My own mother died when I was born. I promised you that I would contact Cynth
ia when she was twenty-one. I said it to make you feel better about spying on her, and I meant it at the time. But I couldn't do it. Even now—now that both her adoptive parents are dead and she might be happy to suddenly acquire another mother—I'm not strong enough to do it. I owe you an apology, J.D. I'm sorry I made you a part of my weakness.”
She hurried to her room. J.D. sat on the bench and watched her let herself in and close the door behind her. In all the years he'd known her, Larabeth had never once allowed him to see the tiniest crack in the shell of her dignity. J.D. wasn't fooled. He knew that sometimes the most invincible people were more vulnerable than any garden-variety weakling. He ached to protect Larabeth from her demons.
“Apology accepted,” he said. “And you're wrong, Larabeth. You're the strongest person I know.”
Chapter 6
Babykiller luxuriated under the downy blankets. He was always cold these days, even here in the sunny South. He'd lost some weight he didn't need to lose, but why should he eat when he wasn't hungry? The oncologist called it cachexia and said that many cancer patients lost their appetites. The quack urged him to eat anyway.
Babykiller could see no reason to nourish the rogue cells that had taken over his gut. Let the tumor starve.
He pictured the tangled network of blood vessels the tumor had built to feed itself. No wonder he was always cold. His blood was being diverted to his belly, so the interloper could have food and oxygen. There was no warmth left over for him.
Babykiller tucked the covers under his chin and decided to think about something else. His plans were going well. They distracted him from the pain. They gave him a reason to get out of bed in the mornings. He would be gone soon enough, but first he would make his mark. The world would know that he existed, and all its people would feel his outrage.
He was almost too weak to make it happen, but he had Gerald. Gerald was the perfect employee—competent, courteous, discreet, and damn intelligent. He'd been with Babykiller's organization since he was a fresh-faced college boy.
Gerald had started at the bottom, as a runner. Every Friday, after class, like all Babykiller's lowly campus runners, Gerald pulled a set of car keys and an envelope out of his post office box. After pocketing the cash and reading the directions, Gerald got on the road and drove, sometimes for 24 hours straight, until he reached the rendezvous. Then he put the keys under the mat, got into the waiting car, pulled its keys from under its mat, and drove home. That was all.
Gerald was a runner for three years and the easy money had paid for his education and more. He was never late, he never got a speeding ticket, and he never once peeked in the trunk with its tamper-evident seal. During that time, he moved literally tons of assorted drugs into the reach of bored college students. When he graduated, his dispatcher recommended that he be retained in the organization. Within a year, the dispatcher was out of work and Gerald was doing his job.
Gerald never forgot the rules. Babykiller's organization dealt in shipping and nothing else. Its members bought and sold no drugs, no weapons, no child pornography. They laundered no dirty money. They just moved it, then charged a hefty fee for the service.
Gerald learned that expensive goods should never languish in a warehouse for long. It made the client unhappy. He learned to schedule his drivers so that their trunks and truck trailers were full, going and coming, because running empty vehicles cut deeply into the profit margin.
He learned to deal quickly with problem workers. Once, early in his career, he fired an unreliable employee who couldn't manage a simple inside job at the post office. The guy, faced with losing both his real job and his illegal second job—and panicked by the thought of being arrested for tampering with the mail—had flipped out. He'd shown up at work with an assault weapon and blown four people away, including his ex-girlfriend.
If Gerald felt any remorse, no one around him could tell. He just tightened his hold on his remaining employees and concentrated on avoiding similar problems in the future. Thus far, he had been successful.
From a safe distance, Babykiller watched Gerald's steady rise through the ranks and calculated the man's trajectory. He would be Babykiller's number-two man by the time he was thirty. Or he would be dead.
When Gerald was directing all operations in the Northeast, Babykiller decided it was time to take the man's measure. It was time to meet him in person.
He had browsed at a newstand outside Gerald's Manhattan apartment and watched his employee walk to work. Gerald had worn a frighteningly well-tailored dark suit and a tie that had been knotted with care. He'd looked like a divorce attorney for the well-heeled. Babykiller knew that was what Gerald claimed to be.
After paying the landlord a healthy entrance fee, Babykiller had toured Gerald's home. The spacious penthouse was decorated with the passion-free elegance of an Architectural Digest cover. There was no sign that a woman had ever lived there, but the drawer in the bedside table was chock-full of condoms.
Babykiller had picked up the phone and called Gerald for an appointment, knowing full well that Caller ID would tell his quarry that the call originated only a short walk from the office where Gerald did Babykiller's business. Babykiller had walked deliberately, nursing his bad leg, so that Gerald would have time to think about what he wanted and what he planned to do.
Gerald had passed the first test by greeting him calmly at his office door, saying only, “I've waited a long time to meet you.”
“Most people are afraid of me.”
“I've done a good job. I've never stolen from you. I've made you a great deal of money. Why should I be afraid?”
Why, indeed, should Gerald be afraid? Because they both knew that even the perfect employee wasn't safe when Babykiller was the boss. The two men had looked at each other for a heartbeat while that fact hung, acknowledged but unsaid, in the air.
Gerald had passed the last test. He'd shown guts, even when face-to-face with death on two legs. Babykiller had come straight to the point. He wanted Gerald to handle the day-to-day business of his empire so he could be free for more creative pursuits.
Gerald had been amenable, but he'd asked for a pile of money. Babykiller, who had long since determined that Gerald was motivated by money and only money, had paid it. It had been a small price to pay for freedom from day-to-day drivel.
Now Gerald was poised to accomplish his most amazing organizational feat yet. The logistics astounded even Babykiller. But Gerald was a genius when it came to moving things and getting people to commit felonies. It was going to be an intriguing Monday morning for so many people.
* * *
The motel walls were thin and J.D. could hear Larabeth getting ready for bed. She'd just finished a long shower and he could hear her faucet running in a cozy on-off pattern. On. Wet the toothbrush. Off. Brush the teeth. On. Rinse. He swore he could hear the clinking of little travel bottles being retrieved from a makeup bag, then the faucet went on again for a while. When the water was warm, she washed her face in silence. The faucet came on one last time, she rinsed her face, then there was silence again. Except for the faint creak of a tired set of bedsprings.
J.D. wondered if he was getting old, because all he wanted at that moment was a woman to talk to while he brushed his teeth. He didn't even want sex. Well, yes, he did. But after his lover had brushed her hair and slipped on a cute but comfortable nightgown. And only after they'd discussed the day's triumphs and disappointments—which in Larabeth's case might mean signing a multi-million-dollar contract to restore the Everglades.
He wanted someone to listen when he spent all night on a stake-out and nothing happened. He wanted someone to cry when he recovered a kidnapped child.
He might as well tell himself the truth. He didn't want just anyone to listen to him. He wanted Larabeth.
He met women all the time, at the gym, at clubs, even at the grocery store. They asked him out. He took them to dinner. Sometimes he took them home with him. They were all the same. They talked a lot, but they ha
d nothing to say.
Before they argued, all those years ago, he hadn't really considered romance with Larabeth. He'd never once dated a client, before or since, but that wasn't the real obstacle. She'd had plenty of money and he was eking out a bare living, but that wasn't the problem, either.
When J.D. first laid eyes on Larabeth, he was a few years out of college and she already held three patents. She had made him feel like a little kid. No, she didn't. He had made himself feel like a little kid.
Then they'd argued and he hadn't seen her since. He missed her and he thought of her often, but it was years before he realized that he held every potential lover to Larabeth's standard. They all fell short.
That was when he realized that he wasn't a kid any more. He'd tripled his business in two years. Even he was surprised at the size of his profit margin. Maybe BioHeal's net service fee still dwarfed his, but that didn't bother him. He was a success. He was finished with being intimidated by the beautiful Dr. McLeod.
That was when he started watching the business pages and the society pages to see if she had married. He started keeping an eye out for her silly pink car. He had nearly worked up the nerve to call her when his secretary handed him the blessed message slip that said Dr. Larabeth McLeod had called. She wanted his help. Well, it had taken many years, but he was ready.
Chapter 7
Dirk Hogood walked in his bathrobe through the front hall of his father's Washington townhouse. He liked spending his summers here, away from his mother's expectations and away from Eastover Prep's rules. Dirk hoped the current presidential administration approved of the way his father ran the EPA, because Dirk loved D.C. With a high school diploma from Eastover and a couple of degrees from someplace equally snooty, he'd be well on his way to a happy life inside the Beltway.
He turned the front doorknob, intending to step onto the front stoop, nab the morning paper, and relax with the sports page. The door felt heavy, as if a big man were leaning against it with all of his weight. Dirk put his shoulder to the door and shoved. He heard something heavy slide across the stoop and the door opened another notch, just enough for him to slide through.
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