Hotter Than Wildfire (21 page)

Ellen could actually feel her heart swelling with pain. “Oh God.”

“But Sam and then Mike were there and they had his back. They couldn’t look out for him in Afghanistan, though. He came back in pretty bad shape. Was blown up by something called an RPG—I guess sort of like a flying bomb. When I first met him, Harry could barely stand. He’s done miracles since then, mostly because Sam and Mike forced a physical therapist on him he called the Norwegian Nazi.”

“He told me about the Norwegian Nazi.” The Norwegian Nazi was very, very good at his job because Ellen could remember the steely muscles under her hands, lean and hard. The grace with which he moved. You’d never have known he’d been grievously wounded, twice.

“Of course, you helped, too.”

She’d been thinking of Harry’s muscles. How hard he was all over. Intense heat had crept into her thoughts. “Um, yes, he said he listened to my music quite a lot.”

Nicole wasn’t smiling. “They say Harry listened to your two CDs obsessively, over and over and over again. He couldn’t sleep at night, so he listened to you, and somehow your voice pulled him through. Sam and Mike were really worried about Harry, about his will to live. I think thanks to you, he found the will to put himself back together.”

Oh God. Ellen blinked the tears back. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

“I do.” Nicole leaned forward, incredibly serious. “Last year, some bad guys came after me. It’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you some day. Even worse, these guys came after my father, who was very ill—dying, in fact. They kidnapped him,
hurt
him.” Her blue eyes blazed with what Ellen recognized as hatred, so strange on her beautiful face. “Sam saved me with the help of Mike and Harry. Sam said that when he and Mike set off to rescue me and Dad, Harry’d have done anything, given anything to be able to come with them, even though he could barely stand. As it happens, he helped Sam and Mike find me even if he wasn’t there at the showdown. He’s one of the good guys, Ellen. A really good guy. He’s had more than his share of tragedy. He loves you. I know he’s completely on your side and he’ll protect you with his life. I couldn’t bear to see him hurt in any way. So think about this carefully. Because if you hurt him in any way, if you break his heart, you’ll have me to answer to. And Sam and Mike. But trust me, I can be meaner than Sam and Mike. I’m the one you should be afraid of. Is that clear?”

In that instant, Ellen understood completely why Sam loved Nicole so much. Not for her beauty—though that was off the charts—but for her fiercely loving heart.

“Completely,” she answered. “And for the record, I think it’s more likely that Harry will break my heart instead of the other way round.”

Nicole was still watching her intently. At Ellen’s words she suddenly broke into a smile. “Okay.” The smile broadened as she sat back. “Okay. That’s settled, then. Well.” She rubbed her hands briskly. “Now that that’s taken care of, I say we all have takeout pizza tonight and a salad to make it officially healthy. And afterwards—you’ll sing for us? For Harry?”

There was only one possible answer. “For you guys and for Harry? Sure.”

 
Seattle

  “Fuck fuck fuck!”

Montez paced around the small rental storage unit muttering, walking in circles around the dead body of the woman, all but tearing his hair out.

Piet watched him emotionlessly. This was a real waste of time and energy, but the
fokken gek
—fucking moron—clearly had to get it out of his system. Some operator, wasting time on this shit.

But—he was the boss. Though really, he wasn’t the boss of anything, least of all himself. Still, Piet always followed the client, even when the client was stupid.

It wasn’t his problem. If it had been, he sure as hell wouldn’t be walking around in circles with a dead girl at his feet. He’d have already taken care of the girl and moved on.

After a while he got tired of watching Montez. It was one thing for Montez to piss away his time in theatrics. But every second in which Piet was with that dead body was another second in which he could be caught.

Doing time in a U.S. prison for this asshole was not in the cards.

“Calm down,” he said finally.

Montez whirled. “Calm down? Calm
down
? This—” His shaking index finger pointed at the girl lying on a tarp in the middle of the small space. “This is a disaster! Goddammit, this should never have happened! Now we’re left with nothing but dead meat!”

Piet tuned him out and studied the girl’s face. He’d laid her down on her back. Whatever poison she’d taken had acted incredibly quickly. The only poisons he knew that worked so fast were neurotoxins. Only an autopsy with a tox screen would tell exactly which one, but she sure wouldn’t be getting an autopsy.

He studied the face carefully. A pretty woman, pretty even in death. Death had come for her so quickly her features weren’t distorted. She looked like she was sleeping quietly, in a better place than she’d be right now, because he’d have inflicted a lot of pain and he’d have made her talk.

Montez had been getting hard looking at her, thinking of the pain to come. He hadn’t realized it, but Piet had seen. Those guys were the worst, the ones who got wood during interrogation.

It amazed Piet that Montez had been in the army at all, though he knew the Yanks had become less selective about the boots they were putting on the ground. Back in the day, qualifying for South African Special Forces as a Recce, that kind of sick fuck had been weeded out right at the start. No place for them in a man’s military. Violence was a tool, not an end in itself.

For just a second, Piet allowed himself a brief flash of regret, a short, intense wish that he could roll back the clock and be with his mates in the bush again. Good men, all. No sick fucks, just warriors.

While Montez was ranting, Piet continued observing the body. The girl’s skin still held a faint flush, which was of course fading fast as the blood drained away from the skin. She’d dropped dead ten minutes ago. Right now, gravity was draining the blood in the capillaries from the front of her body to the back, which soon would turn dark red.

He’d made very, very sure that there was nothing underneath the tarp that could make an imprint on the skin. The pooled blood would show any object up as clearly as an image on a negative. Montez wasn’t thinking straight, but Piet was.

The capillaries were draining the blood right now. They had a little window of opportunity…

He kneeled and started skinning her, making a sharp, straight surgical incision along the midbody line of the torso from base of neck to sternum and stripping away the skin on the left from her breast and shoulder. Like field-dressing a deer. No blood spurted, of course; the heart wasn’t pumping anymore. But there was still enough blood in the arteries to pool sullenly around the body. Piet made sure none of it touched his shoes or trousers.

He had to get this done before rigor set in. Handling a body in the throes of rigor mortis was hard. Not to mention the fact that the internal organs had already begun decomposition. He’d seen bodies explode with the force of built-up internal gas in the intestines, though that took a while.

Montez was watching, slack-jawed. He’d stopped his ranting and stared. “What the fuck?”

Piet didn’t sigh, though he wanted to. This guy was supposed to be
smart
. He headed up a multimillion-dollar company.

“We’re going to do with her what we did with the agent, only this needs to be scarier. This has to be a real message to Palmer:
Look what we can do.
Do you have the tape?”

“Yeah.” Montez held up a Flip camcorder the size of a USB key.

They’d filmed the first part of the interrogation.

The idea had been to film the entire session and send it to Palmer. But instead of an hour-long session, they’d had about ten minutes.

“Didn’t last long, so we’ll use stills,” Piet said. He cut a fine incision on her forehead along the hairline and started pulling back the skin.

“Jesus!” Montez shouted. He held a hand to his mouth. “God, you’re scalping her!”

No shit, Sherlock.

Montez wouldn’t have been averse to torturing this woman to death, but scalping her after death made him retch.

Piet couldn’t wait to finish the job and get away from this moron.

He finished scalping and stood back, assessing the effect. Should scare the shit out of this Ellen Palmer. He waited for her to bleed out then lifted the woman in his arms. He settled her back in the chair, wrapped the duct tape around her chest again. The woman slumped, head down, red skull gleaming, looking like she had on a patchwork red shirt. “Take a couple of stills of her. We’ll add it to the still of her screaming and send it to that bulletin board.”

Montez took out his cell, took several snapshots and downloaded them onto his laptop.

Piet put together the stills into a narrative anyone could understand. The woman bucking against his hand on her, mouth open in silent screams, then the stills of her now, after what Palmer would think was horrible torture. It worked. He switched on the laptop’s mike and digitized his voice.

“Ellen Palmer. Look at your friend Kerry. She’s still alive but won’t be for long if you don’t get in touch with us. Send us a message with your location right now or we’ll keep on hurting her. Eventually she’ll die, but it will take her a while. Get in touch with us and we’ll take her to a hospital right now. If you don’t get in touch, you’re signing her death warrant. It’ll be on your head.” Piet sent the file with the stills and the digitized voiceover to the message board.

It was in the lap of the gods now. Palmer would open it when she opened it. But when she did…they’d have her.

Montez watched and didn’t speak until Piet powered the laptop down. “Now what? We need to be close to where she is when she opens the laptop. Where is she?”

Piet thought about it.

He’d had Montez take him to Palmer’s apartment and leave him alone in it for an hour. The human equivalent of giving a hunting dog the prey’s shirt to sniff.

In an hour, he’d gotten her measure. No drugs, no alcohol beyond a dusty bottle of whiskey in a cupboard with half a glass missing. No fancy clothes, no fancy jewelry, very little makeup. Basic cable. Lots of music CDs, bought and not pirated. Lots of books, paperbacks.

Montez said she hadn’t missed a day’s work in two years working for him.

The singing was a surprise because she had apparently kept her talent hidden, which was interesting. She’d only put her voice out there when she needed the money. Otherwise it looked like she’d been perfectly happy being a waitress, earning minimum wage.

She was a perfectly ordinary woman who’d been on the run for a year, who’d been flushed out of one safe haven, who’d found another in San Diego, and found a protector with it. She wasn’t a warrior or an operator. Protection would be welcome.

She wouldn’t leave where she’d found it.

“She’s still in San Diego,” Piet said. “I’d bet anything on it. Let’s bury this”—he flicked a thumb at the redly gleaming corpse on the chair—“and get down to San Diego fast. I have an idea.”

In flight, over Sacramento, California

  A private jet is a good way to travel, Piet reflected. It beat military transport hands down. He’d been around very rich men for a long, long time now, but their luxuries still fascinated him.

He was a man who’d been flown halfway around the world on retrofitted C-130s for personnel transport, sitting on canvas seats, strapped to webbing for thirty-hour flights. No food, no water, and you pissed in a bottle. If you had to shit, tough shit.

The South African Armed Forces for a while had used beat-up Vietnam-era Hueys. The noise level penetrated even the cheap ear baffles. It had been like riding inside a huge, metal shaker with sharp edges designed to rip you to bits if you didn’t hang on.

Miles and millions of dollars away from this Learjet 45. They’d flown in style and comfort from Georgia to Seattle and now were flying in style and comfort from Seattle to San Diego.

The cabin smelled of new leather and lemon polish. The captain and his copilot had welcomed them aboard like royalty and they’d taken off from the General Aviation section of Sea-Tac ten minutes after they’d boarded.

No waiting, no fuss, no inspections.

Piet would never be this rich, and even if he were, he wouldn’t have a private plane. Keeping a plane like this meant leaving a huge footprint in the world. You had to hire pilots and maintenance crews, file flight plans, hire a hangar to keep the damned thing when you didn’t need it. It was a giant fist in the face of society—
Look how fucking rich I am.
Montez clearly needed to wave that fist, make the point.

Piet didn’t.

They sat across from each other in ergonomic seats covered in soft, butter-colored leather with a designer fiberglass table between them. Piet was peering into his computer monitor when Montez spoke.

“So why the fuck are we heading back to San Diego?” Montez’s voice was sullen. He was still mad at having lost the girl before he could have his fun, the moron. “She could be anywhere by now.”

“Mm.” Piet finished what he was doing before answering. Montez, being Montez, would find it a sign of disrespect, but he didn’t give a shit. “It’s a question of psychology. She’s been on the run for a year and she’ll be tired of that. She went across the country and settled in the last city you can be in before falling into the ocean and stayed there until you flushed her out.”

And lost her.

The words were unspoken, but a dull flush appeared under Montez’s dark skin. “For some reason she goes straight to San Diego. And it turns out that the reason she’s there is because she’s got a protector of some kind. Girl’s not ex military, doesn’t have a martial arts background. Near as I can tell, she’s just an accountant who sings. She’s got someone—I think she’ll keep him. As long as he’s around, she’ll stay.”

“Even if you’re right, San Diego’s a big town. We’re looking at three million people in an area that’s almost four hundred square miles in size. And that’s not counting Tijuana just across the border.” Montez slapped the expensive leather of the seat. “Shit! We’d know where she was now if that bitch hadn’t offed herself!”

Piet doubted that. But whatever. The woman was dead and indulging in theatrical outbursts wasn’t going to bring her back to life, and more important, it wasn’t going to help them find Ellen Palmer. Cool, calm logic would do that.

“Look at this.” Piet turned the laptop so that both of them could see the monitor. It was a map of a section of Seattle. Red lines connected dots of different sizes. It was the same map with the same data points that had helped them find Kerry Robinson.

Montez’s jaw muscles clenched. “Yeah, so? We found her friend and now she’s dead. How’s this going to help us?”

Piet didn’t sigh, but he did want to punch that childish pout off Montez’s face. “Look at these routes.” Piet ran his finger from the Blue Moon to where Ellen Palmer had been living to Kerry Robinson’s apartment. The lines made huge dog legs. “What do you see?”

Montez fixed him with a hard, black stare. “I don’t like guessing games, Van der Boeke.”

Geeste bul,
Piet thought. Damned idiot.

“This,” he indicated with his finger, following the dogleg routes, “is how she got to work and how she went to visit her friend Kerry.”

Montez stared at the monitor, scowling.

“And this,” Piet continued, pulling up another online map, “is a map of the bus routes in Seattle.” He manipulated the images until he found the section of town on the first map. The bus routes followed the doglegs exactly.

Montez wasn’t getting it, and that made him angry. “Get to the point,” he growled.

“I think Palmer ditched her car before she arrived in Seattle or else ditched it in Seattle. I don’t think she had access to a car. I think she took the bus everywhere she went. And look at this…”

He brought up another map, a tangle of streets. Montez leaned forward, staring at the map with narrowed eyes. “So? What am I looking at?”

“A map of San Diego.” Piet tapped two points. “This is the hotel she booked and this is the Greyhound bus station.” The two were a block apart. “I think she took the bus from Seattle to San Diego and checked in to the first hotel she found.”

“Okay, okay.” Montez sat back. “I get it. She’s without a car. How does that help us?”

“When she came back to the hotel where your men were waiting for her, how did she get there?”

Montez was paying attention now. “The last word I had from my men was she was getting out of a cab.”