Bait (31 page)

They were all there—Jon, Louise, Judy, Herb, and Ana. As Maddie looked from one grinning face to the other, they began to clap.

“You
guys,
” she said, her heart swelling, and walked into her office.

SAM SLEPT, only to be startled awake what could have been minutes or hours later by the ringing of a phone.
His
phone. His heart jolted. Lifting his head from the pillow it was buried in, fumbling for his cell phone, which he'd left on the bedside table, he found it and squinted at the message window. The damned thing was impossible to read in the gloom. Blinking at it, still groggy, he realized even as he flipped the thing open that he was in the dark because the curtains were drawn tightly over the windows, and he had been asleep in his room at the Hampton Court Inn.

“McCabe,” he growled into the phone.

“What the hell are you doing in St. Louis?” a voice boomed at him. It took him a second to recognize Smolski's bluff tones. “Last I heard, you had the UNSUB pegged to head west from New Orleans.”

“There's a woman ...” Sam began, still trying to collect his wits enough to be coherent, only to be interrupted.

“Isn't there always?” Smolski sounded faintly bitter. “Every damn trouble man has ever gotten himself into in this world seems like it begins and ends with a woman.” He sighed. “So how is it that you're in St. Louis because of a woman?”

By that time, Sam was sitting up, and felt slightly more capable of intelligent thought. He filled Smolski in on the state of the investigation.

“I hear you've commandeered about half the St. Louis field office's available agents,” Smolski said when Sam had finished. “They called up, griping about how they're shorthanded to begin with. Hell, I hear you've got agents mobilized in three damned states working on this. I've had calls from Virginia to Texas. You want to explain this to me?”

“I'm pretty sure that Walter—the next victim—is going to be hit in Texas. It fits the geographical pattern. The chances that we're going to find out who he or she is before our guy does his thing is remote, I grant you, but I feel like we've got to try. And there are people doing some background work where the previous victims were hit.”

“And you feel like your best move right now is sticking to that woman in St. Louis,” Smolski said. Something in his voice made Sam think he might disagree.

“Yeah, I do.”

That was nonnegotiable, he realized, even as he said it. Sam was surprised to find just how nonnegotiable it was. If Smolski flat-out
ordered
him elsewhere, he wouldn't go. There was no power on earth that was going to get him to leave Maddie before the sick bastard was taken out.

“Your case, your call. They've all got other cases of their own under way. I just ask you to keep that in mind,” Smolski said, and Sam guessed that the complaining from certain quarters—Lewis in New Orleans came to mind—was getting fairly loud. Smolski's tone changed. “The woman you're with—would she be that pretty little chickie I saw you hustle into a car when I watched that TV news fiasco?”

“That would be her.”

“Tough job we're paying you to do,” Smolski observed dryly, and after a few more remarks hung up.

Sam yawned as he set the phone back down on the bedside table, glanced at the clock—it was not quite two p.m.—and got up. Sleep, though necessary for optimum functioning, felt like a waste of urgently needed time, and he had things to do. The fact that the sick bastard hadn't called him for going on three days now was weighing heavily on his mind. This was a change—and as far as this case went, he had the feeling that change was not good. Crossing to the window, he pulled the curtains open and immediately shut his eyes as the dazzling afternoon sunlight blinded him. Opening his eyes again cautiously, he found himself looking down at the parking lot two stories below. It was only about a quarter full—this was the kind of hotel that people checked into at dark then left early in the morning—and he could see the Blazer parked on the opposite side of the lot from where he had left it. From that, he deduced that Wynne had been out and about and was now back again. Even as he had the thought, Wynne himself came into view. Sam watched in slack-jawed disbelief as his partner, clad in a sweat-stained white T-shirt and flimsy blue bike shorts, trotted slowly across the parking lot to the sidewalk, where the overhang hid him from view. It took a few seconds for his mind to accept the truth of what he had seen: Wynne was jogging.
Will wonders never cease?
Sam thought, and grinned. Then, feeling a lot more wide awake than he had five minutes before, he headed for the bathroom to grab a shower.

 

DESPITE THE PARTY, the morning could not be said to have been an unqualified success. First, Maddie snuck off to the bathroom no fewer than three times to try to reach her pal Bob, but all she got was an automated answering machine announcing that A-One Plastics was unable to answer the phone. Not wanting to leave a number in case her call was returned at an inopportune time—such as any time she wasn't in the bathroom—Maddie was left in limbo to stew. Second, she saw no alternative to introducing Cynthia and explaining to her increasingly wide-eyed staff why an FBI agent was shadowing her every move. They had already heard that her car windows had been shot out—both Louise and Jon had left messages on her answering machine Saturday, which she had returned the next day—but when Maddie confessed that she had been shot, too, and mentioned that the FBI thought that the New Orleans mugger might actually be a hit man who was now trying to kill her, the resulting babble of horrified exclamations and questions had been so loud that she'd clapped her hands to her ears to drown out the cacophony. By the time she'd answered all their questions, listened to their loudly expressed horror, and shown off both her wound and the bulletproof vest, her whole staff had been jumping at unexpected noises. Then Judy and Herb had to hurry off to appointments with clients, Ana had to rush off to class, and she and Jon had to put the final touches on the presentation they'd put together for Happy's Ice Cream Parlors, which was scheduled for one-thirty in the conference room. And, not incidentally, everybody who was left had to pitch in to clean up the mess from the party.

The promised four-star lunch turned out to be takeout deli sandwiches fetched by Louise and augmented by the rest of the cake, which they gobbled down in the workroom. Not that Maddie was particularly sorry. Between the bulletproof vest that she had to wear if she stepped outside the door and Cynthia's ubiquitous presence, lunch out was clearly going to be more of a production than she felt prepared to handle.

Word that Creative Partners had landed the Brehmer account had spread through the small advertising community with jungle-drum speed, and Louise reported happily that she was fielding calls left and right. After the Happy's people left, Maddie started putting together a tentative schedule for implementing Creative Partners' plans for Brehmer's. Her gut feeling, given Mrs. Brehmer's capriciousness, was that the sooner they got going on it, the better. Jon was in his office, and she went over to talk to him about the logistics of getting camera crews and actors and everything else they needed lined up ASAP. Leaving that in his capable hands, she made a quick bathroom trip—still no answer at A-One Plastics—and returned to her office. Unnerved by not being able to get in touch, she suspected that she would have had a total meltdown at her desk had it not been for Cynthia's almost equally disquieting presence—and the panacea of work. The things that she needed to be doing were seemingly endless, and she threw herself into them with something approaching relief. Then Louise started putting calls through, and she spent the next hour and a half on the phone, talking to clients and competitors and giving interviews to reporters for
BusinessMonthly
and
Advertising Age.
When she finally stood up, Cynthia, who'd been parked in a chair in a corner leafing through magazines for the past hour, stood up, too, and stretched.

“Now I know why McCabe assigned me to the day shift,” Cynthia said, her voice wry. “It's the one where nothing ever happens.”

“You say that like that's a bad thing,” said a familiar drawling voice from the doorway. Still standing behind her desk, Maddie glanced up in surprise to see McCabe walk into her office with Wynne behind him and Louise, looking a little flustered, behind them. The rush of pleasure she felt at seeing McCabe caught her by surprise, and the smile with which she greeted him was big and spontaneous.

“Guess it's okay for them to come in then,” Louise said to no one in particular, apparently in response to Maddie's expression, and retreated. Maddie barely noticed. With the best will in the world for it not to be so, she was focused almost exclusively on McCabe.

“Hey,” he said, meeting her gaze and smiling slowly back at her so that his eyes crinkled and his dimples showed. Her heart beat faster and she suffered an instant flashback to that mind-blowing kiss. Feeling her face—and other, more private places—start to heat, she forced the memory from her mind. It therefore took her a few seconds to realize that he was clean-shaven and clad in gray dress slacks, a white shirt, a navy patterned tie, and navy sport coat. Everything was slightly rumpled—Jon's crown as king of the dandies was definitely not in jeopardy—but McCabe actually looked like a bona fide FBI agent for once. With his black hair and swarthy skin and athlete's powerful build, he was always second-glance-worthy, but now that he was all gussied up, he looked so handsome that Maddie was momentarily bedazzled. Wynne, too, was Bureau-worthy in a jacket, tie, and khakis. Although his bedazzlement quotient did not quite equal McCabe's, the look was a big improvement on his usual.

“Whoa, aren't we looking spiffy?” Cynthia looked the pair of them up and down. “What—or rather who—is this for?”

McCabe shot her a quelling look.

“We had to go into the field office here to have a chat with Tom Finster, who's the acting agent-in-charge while Needleman's on vacation,” McCabe said. “He was wanting to pull his guys off the case.”

“So did you persuade him?” Cynthia asked.

“Finster ended up telling him to get the hell out of his office.” Wynne's voice was dry. He was, Maddie noticed, once again chewing gum.

“Chalk up one more victory for those people skills of yours,” Cynthia said, grinning at McCabe.

“Hey, I got him to let us keep Gomez and Hendricks, and to agree to provide backup on an as-needed basis, so it wasn't a dead loss,” McCabe said. “We're just a little leaner and meaner than I consider optimal, is all.” His gaze met Maddie's. “We got you covered, don't worry.”

“I'm not worried,” she said, truthfully as far as it went. About his ability to keep her safe, she wasn't worried at all. It was the rest of the sorry mess that was concerning her.

“They're out in the parking lot now, sweeping your car. We're here to escort you from the building whenever you're ready to go.” He grinned at her. “So, are you ready to go?”

It was only then that Maddie glanced at the clock and realized, to her surprise, that it was five minutes until five. Although five o'clock was the company's official quitting time, Maddie—and the others, too, when necessary—often stayed until six or later.

Before Maddie could answer, Jon appeared in the doorway. An hour before, he'd been looking dapper. Now the jacket to his charcoal suit was missing, his shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, and his tie was askew. His gaze swept the room and it was clear from the flicker in his eyes that he registered the newcomers' presence. It was an indication of the magnitude of the stress he was apparently laboring under that he didn't acknowledge them at all. He spoke directly to Maddie.

“I just got off the phone with Susan Allen,” he said. “Houston, we've got a problem.”

SEVENTEEN

Maddie felt her stomach tighten as she stared at Jon. “What sort of problem?”

“She's on her way here.” Jon walked toward her, making a helpless gesture with his hands, clearly agitated. “Susan. With the dog. I tried to tell her that we didn't have things quite set up yet, but she wouldn't listen. She said that Mrs. Brehmer wanted us to get started right away. Like tomorrow. If we can't, they're going to be taking their business elsewhere.”

“You've got to be kidding me.” Maddie's heart lurched, and she folded her arms over her chest. Shaking his head, Jon planted both hands on the opposite side of her desk and leaned toward her as they looked at each other in mutual consternation.

“I wish I was,” Jon said. “Crap, Maddie, what are we going to do?”

“Oh my goodness,” Louise said from the doorway, having apparently followed Jon down the hall and overheard. “I knew us landing a ten-million-dollar account was too good to be true. And I've already sent out the press releases. Oh my goodness.”

Maddie looked at Louise, who was standing in the doorway, wringing her hands. Her plump body was clad in polyester pants—today's were pale blue—and a matching floral blouse. An open cardigan, pale blue like the pants, hung from her shoulders. Giant clip-on daisies hugged her ears. Her curls looked iron-gray rather than silver in the unforgiving fluorescent light, and her soft, round face sagged with dismay. Her gentle blue eyes were wide behind her spectacles, and, just like Jon's, they were fastened on
Maddie.
For a moment, Maddie felt like closing her eyes and throwing up her hands and yelling
I give up
at the top of her lungs. Capricious clients, on top of predatory hit men and prowling FBI agents and the balancing act she was having to do just to survive, were almost more than she could deal with at the moment. Then she remembered: She owned the company. If it was Creative Partners' problem, it was her problem. She had to deal with it.