Bait (39 page)

Just like that her loins clenched, her breasts tightened and swelled, and she felt a sudden, unmistakable upsurge of heat.

Her eyes met his, and her breath caught, and she knew: For her, this was already more than a quickie love affair.

Turning on her heel, clutching her nightgown in suddenly nerveless fingers, she headed for the bathroom and sanctuary. But even as she closed the door and turned on the taps, she could not escape the refrain that beat endlessly in her brain. It was one word, repeated over and over again:
Stupid.

IT WAS the scent of strawberries that was to blame. Sam came to that conclusion as he walked into the bathroom five minutes later and inhaled it along with a lungful of steam. The security system was on, the bathroom door was unlocked, and his firm intention not to fuck his bait was blown all to hell. He was nuts, and he knew it, and that was the only explanation he could find: The faint, insidious smell that had been haunting him since he had first met Maddie had finally driven him totally insane.

That being the case, he was going to go with it.

She was still in the shower, and he was still naked. Seemed like destiny to him.

Pulling the curtain aside—she jumped and squeaked, and he had to grab her arm to steady her—he stepped into the tub and moved under the warm spray with her. Crowded, she backed up and looked up at him, wide-eyed, the shampoo bottle clutched in her hand. Her face was shiny wet and suds were in her hair and water sluiced over her drop-dead body and dripped from her delectable rosy-tipped breasts. His gaze touched on creamy shoulders and those perfect round breasts, then slid over the slender curve of her waist and the satiny flatness of her belly to the soft, sable triangle of curls between her truly gorgeous legs.

She was so damned beautiful that his stomach clenched. Along with several other notable body parts.

“What are you
doing
?” she demanded.

So far, he realized, he hadn't said a word, and she was looking at him like he was crazy. Not a surprise, since he clearly was.

“I forgot to tell you something.” He took the shampoo bottle from her hand and reached around her to set it back in the white wire rack that hung from the shower nozzle. That brought him so close to her that he could feel the jiggle of her soft, warm breasts against his chest.

He looked down at the strawberry-tipped, creamy pale globes nudging into his chest hair and felt himself getting the mother of all hard-ons.

“What?”

“I'm crazy as hell about you,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him and kissed her. Then he proceeded to do what he could to prove it.

 

LATER, MUCH LATER, they were in her bed. All three of them. Sam lay on his back with one arm curled beneath his head and Maddie draped across his chest. That damned nuisance of a dog sprawled at their feet. He and Maddie were naked, and she and the dog, whom he'd given up trying to kick off the bed, were asleep. One of them was snoring, delicate rattling gasps that were as rhythmic as the tick of the bedside clock. He was pretty sure it was the dog, but he was too tired to look and see.

The pretty little strawberry-scented thing on top of him had just about worn him out, Sam reflected, and he would have grinned if he could have mustered the energy. He wouldn't have believed such a thing was possible if he hadn't just experienced it.

She'd been surprising him since they'd met, and she had surprised him between the sheets, too.

Just as he had foreseen, he'd played with fire and had gotten burned. Or, rather, gone up in flames. Not that, with the wisdom of hindsight, he was thinking that was such a bad thing.

She'd made him hot. She'd made him crazy. He'd made her his.

Seemed like a pretty fair trade to him.

Sam was just thinking that, except for a few minor problems like a killer on the loose, all was nearer to being right in his world than it had been for a long time, when his cell phone started to ring.

It was on the bedside table, along with his gun. Tensing, he reached for it. Maddie lifted her head. The dog looked up.

“Sam?” Maddie said on a questioning note, even as he picked the thing up and it continued to ring.

“It's my phone.” He fumbled with the bedside lamp. Turning it on, he looked at the ID window.

Error,
it said.

“Shit.” He was suddenly as juiced as if he'd just taken a hit of speed.

“What?” she asked, scooting off to lie beside him, her eyes wide on his face.

“Don't make a sound,” he warned her, and, sitting up, flipped open his phone. “McCabe.”

“Hey, asshole,” the familiar voice said. “Miss me?”

“Like a bad case of the clap.” It hit him that he was talking to the sick bastard who had tried—was trying—to kill Maddie, and he felt a murderous spurt of rage. She was staring at him, propped up on her elbows beside him, flushed with sex and naked, and he felt a fierce, hard rush of protectiveness and possession. “Where you been?”

I'm gonna take you down,
he promised the guy silently. He listened hard, heard something in the background. He couldn't quite make out what it was. The computers would automatically pick up the call, he knew. Later they could get the background sounds enhanced....

“Busy. I've been busy.” The son of a bitch sounded almost affable. The sounds in the background—Sam still couldn't quite place them. But he was getting a bad feeling about this. Something was wrong. “You quit playing the game, McCabe.”

“What are you talking about?”

Time. He had to play for time. One of these days, the sick bastard was going to talk too long and they'd have him. Just one second too long, and it would be all over. The computers would be busy now, trying to locate him. Gardner would have heard the call come in. She would be up and listening....

“Our game. The game we've been playing. You quit on me. So I've decided to up the ante.”

“We're not playing any game.” Sam hoped the alarm he was beginning to feel wasn't audible in his voice.
Cool. Stay cool.

“Say hello to Carol Walter, asshole.”

The sounds in the background were getting louder, like they were coming closer to the phone, or the phone was coming closer to them. It sounded like—
sobs.
Someone sobbing.

Someone who was now weeping into the phone. He could hear gasping sounds, sniffles....

“Help. Please help me. Please. Please.” A woman's voice, terrified, shaking, the words interspersed with sobs.

Jesus.
Sam's gut clenched. He knew. He already knew....

“I'm going to kill her now. And you're going to listen.”

“No!”
Sam yelled, catapulting out of bed, but he was helpless, he couldn't stop it, he could only stand there beside the bed and listen as the woman wept and begged, at a slight distance from the phone now, “Please don't, please don ...”

The first shot echoed through the phone, through his head, through his soul.

“No!”
Sam yelled again, and then, his voice shaking, “You sick fuck, we're going to get you. We're going to ...”

The second shot rang out, stopping Sam in full spiel. Insurance, of course. The woman was already dead. He knew it, but he still felt that shot like a body blow. His heart slammed against his rib cage. Sweat streamed out of his pores.

“Now you're playing again.” The bastard was back on the line, sounding delighted. “That's good. I'm in Dallas, by the way. 4214 Holmsby Court. And once again, you're too late.”

“I didn't know we were playing a game,” Sam said, trying to clamp down on every emotion except the need to catch a killer. It required the effort of a lifetime to sound cool, sound dispassionate.

“Now you do. And now that I'm having so much fun, I'm going to up the ante even more. Next time, I might even let you watch.”

“Next time ...” Sam began. He was interrupted.

“Here's your first clue. Where in the world is—Kerry?”

Sam thought he could hear, very distantly, the sound of sirens coming over the phone.
Keep him talking.

“I don't ...”

“Better hurry, asshole.”

There was a click, and suddenly Sam found himself talking to air.

“Shit,” Sam said, feeling as if he were bleeding inside. “Shit, shit, s
hit.
”

He looked up and saw that Maddie was staring at him. She was sitting up now in the middle of the bed, her eyes wide as saucers, her mouth open, her skin paper-white. The covers were clamped under her armpits, and the dog was huddled against her legs. She'd heard everything, it was clear. Probably she'd been traumatized for life.

But he couldn't worry about that now.

“Sam ...” she said in a thin, high voice. “Who ...?”

“Wait.” He was already punching numbers into the phone. “One minute.”

Gardner answered, sounding wide-awake despite the fact—he glanced at the clock—that it was 3:28 a.m. Probably she'd been goosed by adrenaline, too.

“Did you get that?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, rock-steady as always. “The cops should be pulling into the driveway of 4214 Holmsby Court any minute now.”

Too late,
Sam thought.
Too fucking late.
Snapping the phone shut, he nearly crushed it in his fist.

Then he looked at Maddie and thought,
That could have been you.
At the image that thought conjured up, he felt as if all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. It required real physical effort on his part to force himself to breathe.

TWENTY-ONE

I'm in mourning,
Maddie thought.

That was the only way to describe how she felt as she basically sleepwalked through the following day. Listening to that poor woman being murdered last night had been a horror almost past bearing. She'd been up the rest of the night, unable to sleep, unable to get the sounds and the terrible images they had conjured up out of her mind. It was almost as if she'd been there and seen what had happened—and she knew why. She
had
been there, once upon a time. She had seen what had happened. Seven years ago ...

Then it had occurred to her with a rush of icy fear that she had almost shared Carol Walter's fate in that hotel room in New Orleans.
That
was the death her attacker had planned for her.

Still had planned for her.

At that realization, Maddie had broken into a cold sweat.

Seeing her fear, Sam had pulled her into his arms and buried his face in her hair and sworn to her that whatever happened, he would keep her safe. And then he'd kissed her, a deep, fierce kiss, before putting her away from him and getting to work.

Curled in a corner of the couch, she'd watched him pacing restlessly through her small apartment, tracking the progress of the investigation over the phone. She'd been forcibly reminded that he was an FBI agent, and it hadn't mattered. He was, simply, Sam to her now. He had assumed a veneer of hard professionalism. She had seen through it, though. Seen his guilt. Seen his pain.

Just like he had seen her fear.

It had been then, as they waited for Wynne, who had immediately rushed over to babysit her while Sam headed for their hotel to take long-distance charge of the frenzied hunt for the killer, that Sam had told her the whole thing, in quick bits and pieces interspersed between phone calls. Maddie had listened, appalled, to the story of how he had chased the killer across the country, of the phoned-in clues and the rising body count and the constant race to save yet another life. And by the time he had finished, she had realized something: She was going to have to tell Sam the truth.

She didn't know who the killer was, but she knew where to start looking. With seven people already dead and another life on the line, the price of keeping her secret had suddenly grown too high.

She'd almost told him last night. The words had trembled on the tip of her tongue as they had waited for Wynne. But then she'd looked at Sam, and the truth had stuck in her throat. She was crazy about him—no, face it, she was crazy in love with him—and what she was going to tell him would blow this shiny, new, wonderful thing between them sky-high.

Imagining how Sam would look at her once he knew made her feel like she was shriveling up and dying inside.

And there was Creative Partners, too. And Jon and Louise and Judy and Herb and Ana. The Brehmer account. Her apartment. Her
life.

If she told the truth, it was gone, all of it. The clock would strike midnight. Her fancy coach would turn back into a pumpkin. Her glittering gown would revert to rags. As for her handsome prince—well, he would stay a handsome prince.

She was the one who would be turning into a frog.

“WHAT THE HELL are you still doing in St. Louis?” Smolski bellowed over the phone. “You're supposed to be in charge of this investigation, so get your ass down to Dallas and take charge of it.”

“I'm staying put,” Sam said. It was shortly after three p.m. He and Gardner were in the hotel room that served as their base of operations. The curtains were open, and they had a prime view of brilliant blue sky, busy interstate, and the nearly empty parking lot two floors below. The air conditioner hummed, working hard. The files he'd been reviewing when the phone rang—the most recent of the cases he'd been working on—were spread out across the bed. Gardner was seated at the desk, working at her laptop. A printer attached to another laptop across the room was spewing out pages of composite photos based on witness descriptions of suspicious persons observed in the vicinity of last night's crime scene. Unfortunately, the witness descriptions were all over the map, and so far none of the resulting photos matched composites from the previous crime scenes, making it unlikely that anyone who'd been interviewed so far had seen the actual killer.