Bait (2 page)

The most likely point of egress was through the kitchen.

Wynne pulled a tiny digital camera out of his pocket and started taking pictures of the crime scene. Sam, meanwhile, headed for the kitchen.

“What the
hell
do you think you're doing?” From the corner of his eye, Sam saw that Eigel was looking from one to the other of them. By now his face was as red as the blood-soaked carpet, and his eyes were starting to bulge out of his head like a pug dog's.

“Our jobs, man. Just like you,” Wynne said soothingly. As usual, he was playing good cop to Sam's bad cop. The roles suited both of them to a tee.

“You got no jurisdiction here. This is our case.”

Eigel had elected to follow him, Sam registered absently as he glanced around the kitchen. It was gleaming white, wall-to-wall cabinets, an island, the latest appliances. State-of-the-art, fit to grace one of those women's magazines. An ice-cream scoop had been left in one of the pair of stainless-steel sinks. Other than that, it was immaculate.

Sam headed toward the patio door at the far end. Its bright floral curtain wasn't shut all the way. An approximately eight-inch-wide, floor-to-ceiling slice of glass was visible, black with the darkness of the night beyond. The door was closed and locked. Careful not to touch it, he studied the handle. It had a self-locking mechanism, so the killer could have exited this way as well. Turning slowly, he stared at the pale oak floor.

A thin sliver of grass nestled near the foot of the island.

Bingo.

“He entered and exited here,” Sam said. “You can dust for fingerprints, but you won't find any. Footprints are a better bet, especially if the ground's soft outside. He would have had to walk around the house. Maybe he got careless.”

Eigel bristled. “Listen, smart guy, I'm right now officially askin' you and your pardner in there to leave. Nobody here called you, nobody here wants you, and you got no call bustin' in and tryin' to take over.”

Sam ignored the comment as he turned and headed back toward the great room, retracing the killer's path. Twenty steps to the great-room door, where he paused to try to visualize the scene through the killer's eyes. The couch faced away from the door. If Tammy Sue had been sitting on the couch, eating ice cream and watching TV, she probably wouldn't have seen him coming.

At least, not until it was too late.

Feeling his stomach tighten, Sam glanced at Eigel, who was behind him again. “You got roadblocks up? Say, five miles out in all directions, access to expressways blocked, vehicles being checked as they attempt to exit the area, that kind of thing?”

“Don't tell me how to do my job.”

“I take that as a ‘no.' ”

As Sam spoke, more people rushed into the great room from the front hall: paramedics making an unholy racket as they rolled in a pair of stretchers, a grumpy-looking man in a rumpled suit and tie, and a mid-thirties brunette in white jeans and a black T-shirt, crying, “Daddy! Oh my God, where's my daddy?”

“Janelle!” Eigel abandoned him to rush to the brunette's side, reaching her just as she stopped, clapped her hands to her cheeks, and, eyes riveted on the corpses, let out a shriek that could have cracked windows as far away as Atlanta.

Holy Christ,
Sam thought, wincing as his head gave another excruciating pang.
Somebody pass the Excedrin.

“Get somebody on the door!” Clumsily patting the screeching Janelle on the back, Eigel turned to bark the order at the skinny officer in the corner, who was looking appalled. “Nobody else gets in here unless I personally clear it, understand?”

“Yes, sir!” The kid hurried toward the door. Eigel glared at Sam, muttered something that looked like “Goddamn fucking zoo,” and turned back to deal as best he could with Janelle's hysterics.

Following the kid with his gaze, Sam saw that the elaborate front door, which had been just slightly ajar when he and Wynne had pushed through it moments earlier, was now standing wide open. Beyond it, he could see the ambulance that had joined the pair of police cars that already had been parked in the driveway when he and Wynne had pulled up—their first concrete indication that they were too late. The ambulance's siren was off, but its flashing blue lights lit up the night. At the bottom of the small, manicured front yard, more cars were parking hurriedly, haphazardly. A TV truck was arriving; people were charging up the yard.

Wynne joined him, pocketing his camera. “Hey, at least this time we were right behind him.”

“Yeah.” Sam watched as deputies started to stick tape to the carpet to mark the positions of the bodies. The guy in the suit—from an overheard snatch of conversation, Sam gathered that he was the coroner—knelt beside Tammy Sue, carefully lifting a section of long, bleached hair, now wet with blood, away from her face. Even in death, she was a pretty woman, fine-featured, carefully groomed. As he had expected, a pair of black, oozing holes the size of dimes adorned her right temple.

Like all the others, she'd been shot twice in the head. From the look of the dark stippling surrounding the wounds, it had been at point-blank range.

He was hit by a wave of weariness so strong it almost made him stagger. Seventy-two hours without sleep, seventy-two hours spent frantically racing the clock—and it ended like this.

“Hell, let's go,” he said dispiritedly to Wynne. “We can get everything else we need tomorrow.”

“Yeah.”

Sam headed for the door. Raising a hand in farewell to the sheriff, who had managed to get the now-sobbing Janelle into a chair, Wynne followed. Without saying so much as a word, they passed by the kid and another deputy who were holding down the doorway and slid, unnoticed, around the knot of people standing on the stoop, arguing heatedly for their right to be admitted into the house. The unaccustomed buzz of activity along with the stroboscopic lights from the ambulance had drawn the neighbors from nearby houses. Groups were congregating on nearby lawns, talking among themselves while they craned their necks to see what was going on. The TV camera crew raced toward the house. Even at that time of night, it was as steamy hot as a sauna. Stars winked lazily overhead above a canopy of feathery charcoal clouds. The moon was a distant, pale ghost of itself. A slight breeze, humid and unrefreshing, blew in from the lake across the street, rippling its moonlit surface. Walking down the golf-course-caliber lawn toward their rented Sentra, Sam took a deep breath and wished he hadn't. Flowers were everywhere, massive banks of them bordering the streets, the driveways, the walks. Their colors were muted by the darkness, but their perfume was not, lending a nauseating sweetness to the heavy air that didn't mix well with the death-scene smells that still lingered in his nostrils.

“He's watching us,” he said suddenly, stopping dead and glancing at Wynne. “You know that, don't you? That son of a bitch is out here somewhere watching us. I can feel him.”

“Sam ...” Wynne began, and Sam knew from his tone that he was about to get lecture number 257—the one on not taking cases so personally—again.

Yeah, but this one
is
personal, Sam started to remind him, but before he could get the words out, his cell phone rang.

His heart jumped. Adrenaline shot through his blood like an injection of speed. Fumbling to get the phone out of his pocket, he suddenly wasn't tired anymore.

Error,
the ID window on his phone read. He stiffened even as he flipped the thing open.

“McCabe,” he growled.

“Close but no cigar.” It was him: the sick fuck who had just whacked Wendell and Tammy Sue, who had killed at least three times previously that Sam knew for sure about, who was leading him and his team on a murderous wild-goose chase that had started with the killing of a retired federal judge in Richmond three weeks before and was proceeding south and westward, around the skirt of the country. The voice was distorted, digitally masked as usual, but by now Sam knew it better than his own.

“Where are you, you bastard?” Sam's fingers tightened on the phone as if they were gripping the caller's neck. He scanned his surroundings—the artfully placed groves of trees, the nearby houses, the shining black lake—without success.
“Where are you?”

A chuckle was his only answer. “Ready for your next clue?”

“Just help me understand,” Sam said, desperate to keep him talking. “Why? What do you want? What's the point of ...?”

“Here goes,” the voice said. “Where in the world is—Madeline?”

“Look—” Sam began, but it was no use: The phone went dead. Whatever else he was, the guy wasn't stupid; he would know they were trying to trace his calls, just like he would know they were recording them. Cursing under his breath, Sam pressed a button.

“You called, master?” Gardner answered. The technical expert of Sam's team, she was back at the Comfort Inn just off I-264 that was serving as their temporary local headquarters.

“You get that?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything?”

“Working on it. But I doubt it. He's probably using a prepaid phone card just like before.”

“Sick bastard beat us again. We got two more dead.” Sam's voice was glum. He could hear the flat tone of it himself. “Call the locals, would you, see if they can set up a roadblock around the perimeter, say, five miles out, check IDs, look out for suspicious characters, that type of thing. I'd handle it, but the guy in charge here doesn't seem to like me too much.”

Gardner chuckled. “Big surprise.”

“Love you, too,” Sam said sourly, and hung up. Wynne was looking at him, tense, frowning, his eyes narrowed.

“Madeline.” Sam was suddenly bone-tired again. “This time he's going after some woman named Madeline.”

Wynne expelled his breath in a whistling sigh. “Shit.”

“Yeah.”

They headed for the car and got in without another word. After all, what was there to say? They were back on the clock again and they both knew it. If the pattern held, they had exactly seven days to find out who this Madeline was and get to her before the killer did.

If they lost this race like they'd lost the last three, Madeline, whoever the hell she was, was dead.

TWO

Thursday, August 14

 

 

Okay, so she was afraid of the dark.

It was stupid, Maddie Fitzgerald knew, but she just couldn't help it: Lying there in her hotel room bed, staring up into nothingness, her hand still in the process of withdrawing from the lamp she had just turned off, she felt as shivery as if she'd just plunged headfirst into a pool of icy water.

“Pretty pathetic,” she said aloud, hoping that hearing her own voice might provide an antidote to the cold sweat she could feel popping out along her hairline. It didn't. Instead of being reassuring, the sound made her cringe as she immediately wondered who or what might be lurking there in the darkness with her to hear—and pounce.

“You're on the twentieth floor, for God's sake. Nobody's coming in through the window. The door is locked. You're safer here than you are at home,” she told herself firmly.

That didn't help, either. Bravado was useless; logic clearly was, too. She was simply going to have to sweat it out. This time she was
not
going to give in. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes. The relentless drone of the air-conditioning unit under the window suddenly seemed as loud as an 18-wheeler barreling along beside her bed. The bed itself—a king-size—was huge. Huddled on the side nearest the unreachable-from-the-outside window, she felt increasingly small and vulnerable. Which was ridiculous. She was five feet, seven inches tall; one hundred twenty-five well-toned pounds; a smart, competent, twenty-nine-year-old, soon-to-be-wildly-successful businesswoman, for God's sake—and yet here she was, heart boogeying like a whole dance floor full of hyperactive teenagers because she'd just turned off the bedside lamp. Maddie silently acknowledged that humiliating fact even as she fought the urge to grab for the switch, click the lamp back on, and put herself out of her misery.

If she turned on the light, she'd be able to sleep.

Her eyes popped open before she managed to put a brake on runaway temptation.

Turning over so that she was facing the door, Maddie gritted her teeth and mentally groped for pleasant thoughts. She lay on her side, knees tucked almost under her chin, head propped on a pair of too-soft pillows, clutching the blankets tightly around her shoulders as she stared sightlessly into stygian darkness—darkness into which she had deliberately plunged herself. Closing her eyes a second time required real physical effort. Squinching up her face, she squeezed them shut. Moments later, when none materialized, she gave up on pleasant thoughts and instead began counting toward a hundred in her head. At the same time, she worked to control the physical symptoms brought on by the absence of light: ragged breathing, racing pulse, pounding heart, cold sweat.

By the time she reached fifty, her heart was thundering like an elephant stampede and she was breathing so fast she was practically panting. Even as she kept her eyes clenched tightly, despair filled her. Would she never be free of the specter that had haunted her for the last seven years? Every single time she tried to go to sleep alone in the dark, was she going to suffer a replay of that night? Would her dreams always be haunted by the sound of ...?

Shrill as a siren, a shriek split the darkness close beside her head.

Several seconds passed before Maddie realized that what she was hearing was the phone ringing. Peeling herself off the ceiling, taking a deep, steadying breath, she reached for the lamp, fumbled with the switch—oh light, blessed light!—and picked up the receiver.