Bait (10 page)

“You don't think she was the intended target?” Wynne caught up to him again, and they headed toward the parked Saturn, paying scant attention to the mix of tourist- and business-types that crowded the sidewalk around them. The shuffle of dozens of moving bodies was almost drowned out by the cacophony of traffic sounds. Whiffs of something sweet and doughy—a quick glance identified a mobile beignet stand on the nearest corner; the sizzle of dough being dropped into hot grease added to the ambient noise—overlay the combination of coffee, sugar, and humidity that made up The Big Easy's distinctive smell.

“One thing's for sure: They both weren't.”

Reaching the car, Sam saw the Day-Glo orange slip of paper tucked beneath his windshield wiper and groaned. The Bureau was tightening up on expenses as part of its big push to make itself leaner and meaner in this era of the extremely expensive war on terrorism, and Smolski had interpreted that to mean that miscellaneous expenses like parking tickets were basically the problem of the agent who incurred them. A quick glance at the parking meter showed the red flag up.

“Didn't you feed the meter?” he asked Wynne in a tone of purest disgust, plucking the ticket from its berth as he walked around the front of the car.

“Didn't you?” Wynne countered. They exchanged measuring looks over the Saturn's roof, then opened the doors and got in. The car was white with black vinyl upholstery, which meant that the interior was hot as an oven. Sam immediately pulled his 9mm free of his waistband and placed it on top of the console between the seats. Without a jacket, a shoulder holster was no good; without a shoulder holster, the most convenient place to carry a weapon was nestled into the small of his back. Wynne followed suit, then flipped a section of newspaper that was in the car for just that purpose over their mini-arsenal while Sam turned the ignition on. As hot, stale air blasted from the air-conditioning vents, he and Wynne both choked and hit the buttons that lowered their windows.

“So, you planning to turn that in on expenses?” Wynne asked. The strong scent of grape Dubble Bubble was slowly weakening as the suffocating air inside the car was displaced by the sweltering air outside.

Sam glanced down at the ticket in his hand and snorted expressively. Then he crumpled it up and tossed it out the window.

“Never saw it.”

“Good call,” Wynne said. The air coming out of the vents was actually cooler than the air outside now, so they both rolled up their windows.

Sam dug around in his pocket for his cell phone. “Keep your eye open for the Fitzgerald woman. I don't think she'll be out this soon, but you never know.”

Wynne nodded and settled back in his seat, his eyes on the building they'd just left, as Sam punched buttons.

“Hey, handsome,” Gardner said.

“Way to answer the phone,” Sam groused. “Real professional. Listen, I need a quick background check on this other Madeline Fitzgerald. She owns an advertising agency in St. Louis. Name's Creative Partners.”

“Creative Partners.” Gardner sounded like she was writing it down. “Okay, I'll check her out.”

“And I want to make sure that somebody took an evidence kit over to the hotel room she was attacked in, did a test for blood on the rug, fingerprints, hairs, that kind of thing. Also, check on the whereabouts of a pencil. Possibly bloody.”

“A possibly bloody pencil?”

“She claims she stabbed the UNSUB in the leg with it. For all I know, New Orleans PD has it. Or maybe it's still just lying around in the room. Wherever it is, I want it found, and if there's blood on it, I want the DNA test results back quick.”

“Yes, oh, master.”

Sam ignored that. “What about the security cameras in the hotel? They get anything?”

“Unfortunately, they're the kind that tape over themselves every thirty minutes. Apparently nobody got to them in time.”

“Way to run an investigation.” Sam puffed out air. “You turn up anything on the dead one?”

“Just what I told you before: longtime resident of Natchitoches, forty-six years old, grown daughter, saleswoman for Davidson-Wells, a pharmaceutical firm, been with the company for four years, in New Orleans for just the one night on business, messy divorce finalized three months ago. Liked to gamble. Regular at the horse tracks, casinos. Oh, yeah, there is one more thing: Her husband's served time for aggravated assault.”

“So how's his alibi for last night holding up?”

“So far it's holding.”

“We got a time of death?”

“Same as before: between ten p.m., when she was last seen, and three a.m., when the body was found.”

“Is that the best they can do?” On TV, forensic specialists managed to nail the time of death almost to the minute. In real life, at least in his real life, nothing was ever that simple. Or that exact.

“ 'Fraid so.”

“Let me know when you get something on the other one.”

“You got it,” Gardner said. Then, as Sam pulled the phone from his ear, about to break the connection, he was almost sure he heard her add, “Sweet cheeks.”

Wynne, clearly having heard the same thing, grinned at him as Sam stared at the phone for a beat before recollecting himself and clicking it closed.

“Woman wants it bad,” Wynne said. “When you planning to put her out of her misery?”

Sam shook his head. “Not anytime soon.”

“Hey, you haven't had a girlfriend since Lauren dumped you last year. Why not give Gardner a whirl?”

“Lauren didn't dump me”—actually, she had, after six months of increasingly acrimonious complaints about the amount of time Sam spent on the Job—“and anyway, I got a rule about sleeping with women I work with. Why start something when you know going in that it's gonna end up being nothing but bad news?”

“Because Gardner's built like a brick shithouse.”

“Yeah, and she's got the personality of a pit bull.”

Wynne's grin widened. “Who cares?”

“So you give her a whirl.”

“It's not me she wants to hook up with. It's you.” Wynne gave him an exaggerated leer. “Sweet cheeks.”

“All right, give it a rest, would you?” Sam wasn't in the mood for Wynne's teasing. He was so tired that his eyes felt grainy, and his stomach was leaving him in no doubt that it didn't appreciate the breakfast he'd commandeered on the fly. “Can we get back to work here?”

“Sure.” Wynne was still grinning.

Sam refused to notice. “Okay, here's what I think we've got going on: Obviously, one of our Madeline Fitzgeralds was attacked by mistake. How could the killer have guessed there would be two women with the same name staying at the same hotel on the same night? I don't think he realized. I think he went to one of their rooms, killed or tried to kill whichever one was inside, somehow found out that he had made a mistake, and went after the other. The question is, which one did he mean to kill?”

“Good question.” Wynne, pondering, smacked his Dubble Bubble thoughtfully. “At a guess, I'd say the one who's dead. Gambling's a red flag. Maybe she owed somebody money. Hell, maybe they all owed somebody money. Maybe that's the link.”

“We got no evidence that Judge Lawrence”—the esteemed judge had been the first victim, found with two bullet holes in his temple in his family's mansion in Richmond, Virgina; the fact that he was a longtime acquaintance of Smolski's was what had brought Sam into the case— “ever gambled, much less owed anybody money. Or Dante Jones, either, for that matter.”

Dante Jones, a used-car dealer from Atlanta, had been the second victim. Allison Pope, a retiree in Jacksonville, Florida, had been the third.

“If Dante Jones didn't gamble, it's the only vice he didn't have.”

“True,” Sam said.

“Anyway, that girl in there—Madeline Fitzgerald—she doesn't seem like the type that would merit a professional hit. Too young, for one thing.”

“What you mean is, too attractive.” He and Wynne had been together for going on five years now, and Sam knew how his partner's mind worked.

Wynne grinned. “Actually,
hot
is more the word I was thinking of.”

“Yeah, well, being hot doesn't mean you can't get yourself whacked, you know.”

Wynne hooted. “There you go, I knew it. You think she's hot, too. So don't go bustin' my balls, pard.”

“Whether she's hot or not isn't the point. The point is, she's alive.”

“Yeah, baby.”

Sam slid down a little in his seat, resting his head back against the headrest and folding his arms over his chest, and considered his options. Getting comfortable was probably a mistake, but to hell with it. He was so tired he felt practically boneless. So tired he felt practically brainless. It took real effort just to stay awake.

“Which is another reason I think she wasn't the intended target,” Sam said. “But whether she was or wasn't—and we just don't know at this point—the fact remains that she was attacked and is still around to tell the tale. And our guy won't like that.”

Wynne's eyes widened. “Good point. So what are we going to do?”

“For now, keep our distance and watch our survivor. And pray that the bastard doesn't like to leave loose ends.”

 

“... AND GIVE FIDO something to bark about,” Maddie concluded on an upbeat note that belied the throbbing in her head. Standing in front of the room, she looked at the video of the pink tutu-attired Jack Russell terrier balancing on its hind legs while it barked at a bag of Brehmer's Dog Chow that was being lifted away by an elephant's trunk, and thought,
This is good. They've got to like this.

The thought was revivifying.

Then she turned away from the screen to glance around the table and got a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Or not,
she concluded. Forget the chuckles she'd been hoping for. Not one of the six people present besides herself and Jon had so much as cracked a smile since the two of them had entered the room.

Time to face the truth: The presentation wasn't going well. Maddie could sense the flatness in the air as Jon turned off the projector and clicked the lights back on. Someone hit a button and the blinds that covered the windows slid up with a motorized
whirr,
flooding the room with bright sunlight. Beyond the windows, New Orleans baked. The sun glared off the steel sheathing of the skyscrapers that crowded the skyline like unevenly spaced teeth. In the distance, she caught the merest glimpse of the deep marine blue of the Gulf of Mexico, where it met the azure sky.
Blue sky, blue water, blue steel—all that blue was a good match for her mood,
Maddie thought glumly. Glancing around the conference table again, waiting with bated breath for a comment, any comment, that might give her a little badly needed encouragement, she realized that no one was meeting her gaze.

The quartet of suits, which was how she'd quickly come to think of the four sixtyish, buttoned-down businessmen who actually ran the company, appeared underwhelmed. Howard Bellamy, Brehmer's Pet Food's tall, distinguished, silver-haired president and chief operating officer, was fiddling with his pencil. Emil White, the bald, hook-nosed executive vice president in charge of marketing, who was sitting beside him, had turned sideways in his seat and was staring past his beach ball-sized belly at the shiny tip of his cordovan wing tips. Lawrence Thibault, executive vice president in charge of product development, who was seated across the table from White, was already typing something into the laptop that rested on the table in front of him and appeared completely oblivious to what was going on in the rest of the room.
Forget trying to decipher his expression,
Maddie thought despairingly. He was slouched so far down in his chair that all she could see of him over the laptop's monitor was the top of his head, which was covered by an expensive-looking jet-black rug. Seated beside Thibault, stocky, grizzled James Oliver, executive vice president in charge of finance, pushed his wire-rimmed glasses down his nose, steepled his fingers under his chin, and looked at Bellamy. From the beginning, he'd made Maddie think of a basset hound with his worried frown and small, sad brown eyes, and he was looking sadder than ever now, which could not be considered promising. Standing not far from Maddie, Susan Allen absently chewed a fingernail and frowned as she watched Mrs. Brehmer, who was, of course, sitting at the head of the table. Following Susan's gaze, Maddie decided that the old lady looked a lot more formidable on her own turf than Maddie remembered her. Of course, they'd met only once previously, three months before at an awards banquet sponsored by the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, where Mrs. Brehmer, herself a former winner, had presented Maddie with the St. Louis Young Woman Business Owner of the Year Award. It was at that dinner that Maddie had suggested to Mrs. Brehmer that hiring Creative Partners might be the solution to the growth problems the old lady was complaining that her company was experiencing. Today's meeting was the result of that conversation.

But if Maddie had been expecting that, because of their mutual ties to St. Louis—all Brehmer's manufacturing was still done there, at the plant that had served the company for half a century, and Mrs. Brehmer retained the original family home there—Mrs. Brehmer would be inclined to look on Creative Partners favorably, she was discovering that she'd been sadly mistaken.

Mrs. Brehmer alone met Maddie's gaze. Her eyes were a soft, faded blue—and as sharp as twin knives.

“Is that circus thing it?” she barked in her hoarse smoker's voice. A tiny, stooped woman, she was dwarfed by her oversized black leather chair—the largest at the table. A triple strand of pearls circled her neck, and she was dressed in a powder-blue suit that Maddie wasn't sure, but suspected, was a genuine Chanel. Her hair was white, short, and perfectly coiffed. Her skin was almost as white as her hair, with the overly taut look that came with too many plastic surgeries. In fact, it had been pulled so tightly that it seemed molded to the bones beneath. Heavily made-up, with lashings of mascara and blush and a bright scarlet mouth, she reminded Maddie irresistibly of the Joker in the Batman movies. Only, Maddie thought, right about now the Joker seemed positively warm and fuzzy in comparison.