US Marshall 03 - The Rapids (19 page)

“Hang on,” Maggie called to her. “You’ll drown if you try anything else.”

She heard a thrashing sound behind her. Rob identified himself as he emerged from the woods and
joined her on the riverbank, nodding toward the struggling killer. “She was trying to get to the other side of the river?”

“Apparently. She hit her head on a rock. I don’t know how long she can hold on—”

“I’ll get her.”

Maggie shook her head. “She gets money for killing you. She doesn’t get a dime for me. Motivation.”

“Shoot her if she tries anything.” Rob jumped onto a boulder that jutted above water a yard into the creek. “That’ll take care of her motivation.”

“I don’t know if she has another weapon on her—”

“Well, if she lets go of her rock to get it, she’ll drown. Then we won’t have to worry about her trying to shoot me.”

And Maggie would use deadly force if it was called for.

But when he got to Libby, she tried to scoot away from him. Rob gave her a chop to the carotid artery with the side of his hand, a move that would render her unconscious for five or ten seconds—enough time for him to pull her out of the water and toss her over his shoulder.

By the time he made his way back to the riverbank with her, she was conscious. He dumped her onto the ground just in time for her to vomit into a bed of brown pine needles.

She looked so small and helpless, Maggie
thought. Yet Libby Smith was a woman who killed people for money.

Rob got Libby’s arms behind her back, cuffed her and checked her for any other weapons, but there were none. She sat up, blood pouring from the gash on her right temple.

Maggie still hadn’t lowered her own weapon.

Rob eyed her. “It’s okay, Maggie. We’re good.”

But she stared at the woman who’d killed her father and couldn’t make herself move. “Did my father know what you were before you shot him?”

“Yes,” Libby said calmly. “I was in the nick of time. He’d have told Raleigh. He’d have betrayed me.”

“Maggie,” Rob said.

She ignored him. “You weren’t lovers.”

Libby smiled, blood from her head wound seeping into her mouth, between her teeth. “Almost.”

“And Tom—”

“I saw him before the Dutch police arrested Janssen and recognized him the next day when he showed up in Den Bosch.”

“You were in Den Bosch to get your list of victims from Janssen?”

“Not victims,” she said. “Targets.”

Rob took a step toward Maggie, his clothes soaked with river water, stained with Libby Smith’s blood, perhaps William Raleigh’s blood. “Maggie, she wants you to kill her. She knows the party’s over. Maggie—”

She lowered her Glock. “I’m okay. I’m not like her. I don’t kill for pleasure.”

Libby glared at her. “Neither do I. I kill for money.”

“You didn’t get paid for my father. Or for Tom.”

“That was self-defense.”

In a few minutes the police descended. Rob, relaxing now, gave a mock shiver. “The water’s a hell of a lot colder up here than it is down home,” he said, laying on his Southern accent.

Maggie stared at Libby as the local cops took her away. “She didn’t get to kill you. We stopped her. Finally.”

“Yeah. We stopped her.” When Maggie made a move to start back up the riverbank, Rob touched her cheek. “I didn’t like it when I thought you were dead.”

She tried to smile. “I didn’t like it when I thought I was dead, either.”

Chief Deputy Mike Rivera arrived at the Old Stone Hollow Inn not long after the ambulances had left. The local police had cordoned off the entire property as a crime scene—including the car, complete with a ticket to Washington, D.C., and a New York license in a new name, that Libby had stashed on the other side of Ravenkill Creek. She’d lived in Ravenkill all her life—she knew all the places to hide things.

“Smith wouldn’t have succeeded in killing your sister,” Rivera said, plopping down next to Rob on
a bench in front of the blunt-nosed fairy statue. “Nate would have stopped her.”

“Nate was on Libby’s target list, too.”

“Then Sarah would have stopped her. You Dunnemores are a resourceful lot.”

“Vengeance. That’s the only reason Nick Janssen put our names on his damn list.”

“He’s not one to let bygones be bygones,” Rivera acknowledged. “But we’ve got him now. He’ll stand trial for murder.”

The acrid smell of the burned house hung in the summer air. Incongruously, Rob’s gaze landed on a sunflower, untouched by the violence that had gone on around it that morning.

Firefighters were still inside, making sure they’d gotten out the last of the flames.

“House is a goner,” Rivera said.

“Libby wanted it that way, more than she even realized. It was still burning when the paramedics loaded her into the ambulance. She started laughing.”

“Creepy.” Rivera feigned a shudder, as if he hadn’t heard it all before—the excuses, the reasons, for killing and maiming and setting houses on fire. “The Franconias can rebuild. They’re a mess, those two. Clinging to each other, sobbing like a couple of teenagers about how much they love each other. I guess they got their priorities screwed up for a while.” Rivera shrugged. “Happens.”

“Where’s Maggie?” Rob asked.

Rivera let the barest smile escape. “Bitching out Brooker for letting Raleigh sneak out of here.”

“Longstreet was the one with the gun.”

“She says he got away when Andrew Franconia started coughing up blood and she went to help him.”

It was bullshit, and both men knew it. If Juliet Longstreet hadn’t decided to let William Raleigh go, he’d still be there.

“She’s a pain in the ass lately,” Rivera said. “PTSD. But you’re all right? You look cold to me.”

“I had a change of clothes. It’s gone up in flames.”

Rivera grunted. “Whose room? Yours or the DS agent’s?”

For the first time in hours, Rob let himself laugh. But he didn’t answer Rivera’s question, just walked with the chief deputy out past the sunflowers and the herbs, to where Maggie Spencer was standing with the sun on her hair. She was all alone, which wasn’t, Rob decided, really the way she liked it. But it was what she was used to.

He’d have to convince her there was another way.

M
aggie arrived back in the Netherlands on Friday morning. George Bremmerton met her at Schiphol himself.

He eyed her as she dragged her suitcase behind her. “You don’t look so good, Spencer. Any other luggage?”

She shook her head. She’d bought a few things to replace what she’d lost in the fire. Sarah Dunnemore, as beautiful as her twin brother was handsome, had flown to New York to check on her marshal brother and insisted on taking Maggie shopping in New York, somehow talking her into buying fuschia shoes and a ridiculously expensive nightgown.

“Anything happen while I was in the air?” she asked, trying to stop thinking about the Dunnemores—but she’d been trying for hours.

“No.” Bremmerton gave her a grudging smile.
“Somehow we all managed with you out of commission for seven hours.”

Her laugh sounded tired even to her.

“You got back here alive,” her boss said. “That’s what counts.”

“I appreciate the thought, but Libby Smith kept meticulous records that all went up in smoke. I should have grabbed her laptop, at least.”

“You did fine.” He paused as they walked out to his car. “I’m just not sure I like having you come to William Raleigh’s attention.”

Maggie stopped. “Then you do know him.”

He shrugged. “I know everyone.”

As they continued to his car and she dumped her suitcase in his trunk, Maggie felt the same kind of uneasiness she’d felt the entire flight across the Atlantic—as if the other shoe was about to drop. As if Ravenkill was the beginning, not the end of what had been set into motion with the Janssen tip a week ago.

On their way to The Hague in the crush of Friday-morning traffic, Maggie sipped the last of the bottled water she’d had on the plane.

Finally she sank her head back against her seat and shut her eyes. “Raleigh told me he had contacts in Prague who notified him that Tom was asking questions about my father’s death.”

“Did he?”

She opened one eye and observed Bremmerton. “I don’t think that’s the whole story.”

“Probably not.”

“Goddamn it. There were no contacts in Prague who tipped him off.” She had both eyes closed again but wasn’t even close to relaxed. “It was you. You got in touch with him and told him to find out what Tom was up to.”

But Bremmerton wasn’t going any further. “You’ve had a hell of a week. You must be exhausted. Get some rest.”

After he dropped her off at her apartment, Maggie unzipped her suitcase and dumped it out on her bed, wondering what had possessed her to buy pink shoes. Sarah Dunnemore’s influence. She was so damn pretty, Maggie had felt compelled to go a little feminine.

But where the hell was she going to wear fuchsia sandals?

Her mind racing, Maggie checked her one orchid and was surprised to find it had revived in her absence. It was still alive after all.

She went down to the bakery and bought herself two soft white rolls and took them back up to her apartment. She had butter and
hagelslag.
She applied both liberally to one roll and sat in her tiny living room, thinking of Tom and Krispy Kreme doughnuts and how and why he’d done what he’d done.

Ah, Tom.

He’d been to Den Bosch
before
Janssen’s arrest. Libby had said she’d seen him there.

Had Tom e-mailed Maggie the tip about Janssen?

But why her? He knew everyone at the embassy—why not alert Bremmerton?

And why was Tom in Den Bosch in the first place?

Why had he chosen it for his Saturday meeting with Raleigh? Why go to the Binnendieze when they were meeting at the cathedral?

Maggie finished her bread and chocolate sprinkles and warned herself not to do serious thinking while she was jet-lagged and dehydrated from the long flight.

So she thought of Rob and his apartment in Brooklyn and how she’d stayed with him, and they’d made love. She wondered if he’d been thinking what she had—that it’d been a great fling, a temporary thing, of the moment…something they’d both needed and wanted and would look back on without regret.

But it wasn’t what she
really
felt. It was what she told herself. She wanted to convince herself that she didn’t care about Rob as much as she did.

After her lunch and shopping extravaganza with his twin sister, he took her to Central Park and showed her where he and Nate Winter had been shot four months ago.

Damn.

Adjusting to being back in The Hague, on her own, wasn’t going to be that easy, Maggie thought, tearing
open a dresser drawer. She pulled out fresh work clothes and peeled off her travel clothes, changed, then headed off into The Hague’s picturesque streets.

How could anything be so right and so wrong at the same time as she and Rob were?

More serious thinking.

It wasn’t to be done.

She remembered the excitement and energy she’d had in her first days in the Netherlands. Meeting legendary George Bremmerton. Tom.

Her serious mood wasn’t going to abate and being at the embassy didn’t help. After a couple of hours, George Bremmerton caught her and kicked her out.

She needed rest.

Time to calm her mind.

But even in the morning, after a solid night’s sleep, two cups of coffee and more
hagelslag,
she couldn’t push back the questions and the over-whelming sense that her life was at a crossroads.

She ducked into her Mini and drove out to Den Bosch on a Saturday morning as glorious as the one Tom Kopac had died on.

She parked in the shade and walked to the Binnendieze, stopping at the open fence and staring down at the shallow, ancient waterway. Tourists eagerly climbed onto the flat-bottomed boats, carrying on as usual, no matter that a coldly calculated murder had taken place here a week ago. But the killer had been caught. That, at least, had to pro
vide them some reassurance—if even they were aware of the murdered diplomat, the solitary assassin.

“I bought us two tickets.”

Maggie recognized the Southern accent, the mix of humor and charm in the male voice. She looked behind her, and for a moment thought the events of the past week—the emotions, the jet lag, the physical demands—had affected her mind.

Rob stood next to her along the fence. “You DS agents do tend to forget what we marshals are good at.”

“Tracking fugitives. I’m not a fugitive. I’m—” She broke off and frowned at him. “How?”

“It wasn’t easy. Yours isn’t the only red Mini in this country. I almost had my cabdriver follow an old woman and her dog.”

She smiled. “You did not.”

“Don’t try to tell me you knew all along I was tailing you.”

“I wouldn’t want to bruise your marshal ego.”

“You didn’t know,” he said. “Your mind’s on figuring out what Tom Kopac was up to last Saturday.”

She glanced at the river again and tried not to see Tom’s body floating toward the dock, to hear the people screaming. “When did you get in?”

“This morning.”

“So you haven’t slept—”

Something sparked in his eyes. “I figure there’s
time for that. You want to see what we can do without alerting the Den Bosch police and getting them all pissed off?” He seemed relaxed, but Maggie knew he wasn’t. He had the same questions she did. “Then we can do the boat tour.”

She looked back down at the still water, longing, suddenly, for nothing more than normalcy in her life. But she’d rejected normalcy at every turn. And what was it, anyway? Her father had tried to discourage her from a foreign service career not, she realized, because of the dedication and sacrifices and many rewards it offered her, but because of the choices
he’d
made. He’d let his work take over his life. He’d lost his family because of it.

Tom had never had a family.

But it didn’t have to be that way. No one was more dedicated to his work than George Bremmerton, and he had a full, rewarding family life.

Maggie winced at herself. How had her mind gone off in
that
direction?

Because of Rob, she thought.

She shook off her rambling thoughts. “I don’t know if I can do the tour.”

“I can always give the tickets away.”

He needed a shave, but that only made him sexier. And he wasn’t armed—that had to feel strange when he was standing yards from a murder scene. Maggie moved away from the fence. “I never saw Libby. I’ve replayed every moment of last Saturday
a hundred times. She must have acted fast for us—for someone—not to have seen her.”

“She was brazen, that’s for damn sure.”

“But I can’t see how she actually believed she’d take over Janssen’s network.” Maggie sighed, listening to the tour boat on the river below them, the guide explaining, in Dutch, what they were seeing. “Presumably Libby was in Den Bosch to get her target list from Janssen, but when did she get here? And Tom—why was
he
here last Thursday?”

“Your father was on to Libby months ago. Maybe Kopac was on to her, too.”

Maggie pointed down the street toward the café where she’d spotted Tom last week. “I wonder if that’s where Tom was when Libby saw him before Janssen was arrested. It’s not far from where the police picked him up. He could have been drinking coffee, spying on him—”

“You think he sent you the tip,” Rob said.

“Who else?” She started walking toward the café. “I just don’t understand why.”

Rob fell in beside her, naturally, without any protectiveness or posturing—he had nothing to prove. “Libby must have stayed around here somewhere.”

“Not with Janssen at his safe house. That would have been too provocative.”

They found a small hotel around the corner from the café. It had its own café, a scatter of tables on the sidewalk. A good-looking kid of about twenty
was working both the front desk and the café. He spoke halting English, but recognized the description of Libby Smith.

“She was here last week,” he said, filling two small cups with strong espresso.

“Did you see another American—a man?” Maggie asked.

“He asked for her. Mrs. Smith. Like you.”

The clerk seemed not to make any connection between his American and the American who’d ended up in the Binnendieze, never mind that Tom’s picture must have been flashed on Dutch television and appeared in every Dutch newspaper.

Of course, Maggie thought, he could simply have decided not to get involved in a murder investigation if he didn’t have to.

But he was struggling with his English to continue what he had to say, and Rob stepped in with his seven languages. In two seconds they were speaking French. Maggie, whose French was respectable but didn’t roll off her tongue the way it did theirs, followed along haltingly.

The American had left a package at the hotel Saturday morning and asked the clerk to hold on to it.

He delivered his two coffees, then came back and plucked the package from behind the counter. It was a large yellow envelope both clasped and taped shut, with no writing on the front or the back.

“I give to you?” he asked tentatively.

Maggie smiled at him and showed him her badge. “It’s fine. Thank you.”

He handed over the package. He didn’t even seem that curious about its contents or why the American hadn’t returned for it. Employing all his natural charm, Rob asked the young Dutchman if they could have coffee. He pointed them to a small outdoor table.

Maggie sat facing the sunlit street and placed the package on the table. “I don’t know if I should open it.”

“The desk clerk says Tom left it right after Libby came down from her room. He followed her out and never came back.”

“Did she?”

“Yes, but he didn’t give her the package. He was waiting for her to ask for it. Then she checked out.”

“The police—”

“I asked. The kid says the police haven’t talked to him.”

The young clerk walked toward them with two cups and saucers.

“Did he know about Tom’s murder?” Maggie asked.

“He’s pretending it never occurred to him the package and the two Americans he saw here that morning had anything to do with it.”

“It’s understandable. I wanted to think Ravenkill had nothing to do with it. I’m sure he’s nervous. Think he’s calling the local police?”

Rob gave a small smile. “I would.”

The clerk delivered the coffees and withdrew without a word.

Maggie tapped the package with her fingertips. “It could be argued Tom meant whatever’s in here for me.”

“It could be argued he meant it’s evidence in a murder investigation.”

“It’s been sitting behind the desk here for a week. We don’t even know for sure it’s Tom’s, never mind whether or not someone’s tampered with it. What if it’s tourist brochures on Den Bosch?”

“You’re going to open it,” Rob said.

“As our friend Raleigh says, sometimes you have to break the dishes.”

“Finders keepers?”

She frowned at him. “What would you do?”

“Me? I’d have been into the thing by now.”

Maggie peeled off the tape and unfastened the clasp, then carefully pulled out the contents of the envelope. There were four or five separate paper-clipped stacks of papers and photographs, she realized, all held together, in Tom’s typical meticulous fashion, with a larger paper clip and a fat rubber band.

On top of the first batch was the printout of the Old Stone Hollow Inn’s Web site home page. “No wonder the police didn’t find it in his apartment,” Maggie said, pulling off the rubber band and paper clip.

The rest of the paper-clipped stacks appeared to
be in chronological order, beginning with two days after Maggie’s arrival in The Hague.

It was a journal entry, handwritten on pedestrian yellow lined paper. Leave it to Tom not to trust a computer, she thought, her throat tightening, his precise, easy-to-read handwriting making her feel his presence, the loss of a good man. She scanned his words.