Bait (23 page)

“So where is she?” he asked Gardner when his visual sweep turned up no sign of Maddie.

“Taking a shower. We all should be so lucky.” Gardner had dropped into a corner of the couch while Sam had been looking out the window. Her legs were crossed and she had twisted herself into a position that he suspected was calculated to show off her eye-popping figure. Now she nodded at the closed door on the left to indicate where Maddie could be found, then let her head drop back to rest on the high, rolled back of the couch. Sam immediately realized exactly how half of her hairdo had ended up flat. “Come sit down. I think this is where we do that thing called hurry up and wait.”

Gardner made shameless eyes at him from beneath half-closed lids, and patted the couch beside her invitingly. Wynne frowned, while Sam caught himself leaning backward just a little, probably an instinctive result of his determination to stay well out of harm's way.

“You checked the bathroom out before she went in there, didn't you?” Sam asked, ignoring Gardner's gesture in favor of walking toward the closed door. Beyond it, very faintly, he could hear the sound of water running.

Gardner gave him a look that said yes, she definitely had. For his part, Wynne headed toward the couch, then veered off at the last minute and lowered himself into the green armchair. Lips thinning in exasperation, Sam had to fight the urge to walk over and smack him upside the head.

“So, what's the plan?” Gardner asked, just as Wynne had minutes before.

“Same plan.” Restless, Sam prowled toward the kitchen. “We keep watching Miz Fitzgerald until we catch our UNSUB.”

The kitchen was old-fashioned, with white Formica countertops and tall wood cabinets and a gold-speckled linoleum floor. The refrigerator and stove were white, freestanding rather than built-in. There was a stainless-steel sink in front of another window. As he glanced out, he saw that the squirrel thing applied to this one, too. A rectangular oak table with four chairs occupied the center of the room. On the counter beside the sink, a draining board held a single white cereal bowl.

Looking at it, Sam wasn't all that surprised to feel his stomach rumble. Jesus, how long had it been since he'd eaten? He tried to remember. Not today. Yesterday. Fast food in the hotel room. If he was lucky, sometime today he might snag more of the same.

The only area of concern was a rear door. Sam crossed to it, looked out the multipaned window in the upper half, then opened it and stepped out into the muggy morning. He found himself on a small wooden stoop, which was connected by three zigzagging flights of open wooden steps to the ground. Clearly a do-it-yourselfer's version of a fire escape, probably added when the house was converted to apartments. He checked the lock—it was a deadbolt, but flimsy—and made a mental note to do what he could to make the rear entrance more secure.
Pronto.

Retracing his steps, he returned to the living room and found Wynne watching Gardner, who had cut her eyes toward him as soon as he had reentered the room. With an inward roll of his eyes, Sam gave up on the whole match-making thing and started pacing again.

“Okay. We need sleep, we need food. We also need to keep Miz Fitzgerald under a twenty-four-hour watch. Which means for the time being we'll be taking shifts.” He glanced at Gardner. She smiled at him.
Christ.
“I assume you've got the computer working on locating possible targets?”

“Oh, yeah. By now we probably have a database of about a hundred thousand people with Walter for a first or last name in the cities the computer deems most likely to be the location for the next killing. Without anything more specific than a single name to go on, though, it's pretty useless. Take our girl in there, for example. She didn't even live in New Orleans, so her name didn't come up on any of the searches I ran. Neither did the dead one's, for that matter.”

“Yeah.” Sam was already well acquainted with the ways in which their attempts to locate the next victim could get screwed up before the sick bastard did his thing again. And just to complicate matters more, now that his plans had been thrown off by Maddie's survival, the parameters of the game might well have changed. They could no longer take anything for granted.

Except, Sam was almost certain, that he'd be coming after Maddie again.

“You're something with that computer,” Wynne said admiringly to Gardner.

“Thanks.” She smiled at him, and Sam watched with fascination as a flush the color of Maddie's couch started to creep over Wynne's face.

“Right,” he said by way of a distraction. “First thing is, we need to establish a base here. There's bound to be a hotel somewhere nearby. Next ...”

He outlined the way he expected the next few days to play out. By the time he finished, the atmosphere was strictly business all around. Also, he'd circled the room about ten times, and there was still no sign of Maddie.

Pausing outside the closed bathroom door, he frowned at it. What the hell was she doing in there?

“Why don't I take the first shift with her? At least I got a couple hours of sleep on the plane,” Gardner suggested. “And I have trouble sleeping during the day anyway. You guys go on, get us a hotel, get some sleep.”

Sam nodded absently. It was a good suggestion. He didn't expect another attack to come today; the UNSUB was as human as the rest of them, and if he was the shooter—and Sam was fairly positive that he was—he had to be suffering from lack of sleep, too. He seemed to like to work under cover of darkness, and by the time night fell again, Sam had every intention of being personally back on the job. But he didn't say any of that. Instead, he was concentrating on the sounds he could hear beyond the closed door.

Water still running? Yes, but something else, too.

His brows snapped together. Was she talking to someone?

He glanced sharply at Gardner.

“She have a pet or anything?”

“Not that I saw. Why?”

“She's talking to someone.” Could the UNSUB somehow have gotten into the bathroom with her? Sam could feel his muscles tensing even as he rejected the thought as unlikely.

Unlikely, but not impossible.

He rapped sharply on the door.

Just like that, she shut up.

“Miz Fitzgerald?” He banged again. He didn't know why, exactly, but he was getting the feeling that something about the situation wasn't quite right. “Could you open the door, please?”

He could no longer hear water running. Just as he registered that, the door opened a few inches. Sam found himself looking down into narrowed honey-colored eyes. With straight black brows furrowed into a V above them.

Even frowning at him, she was pretty, he registered against his will. Tired-looking. Pale as paper. Face marred by a faint, blue-tinged bruise angling across her left cheekbone. But still very, very pretty.

The last time he'd looked down into those eyes, they'd been big and scared. Now she just looked annoyed.

“Did you want something?” she asked.

Sam had expected her to be all damp and dewy, maybe wrapped in a bath towel and showing more skin than it was probably good for him to see. And she was, indeed, wrapped in a bath towel, a fluffy blue one. And she was, indeed, showing some skin. The towel fit snugly up under her armpits and was tucked in between her breasts, he saw as his gaze swept her. He could see a nice amount of cleavage, her bare shoulders, and the neat white bandage on her back the paramedics had left her with. Below the towel, which ended at approximately mid-thigh, her legs were long and slender and shapely. They were, as he had noticed before, great legs.

The thing was, though, she wasn't all damp and dewy. In fact, she was dry as a bone. Her hair still hung in tangles around her face. There was a faint smear of blood on her jaw, and another down her arm where the paramedics hadn't quite gotten her all cleaned up. She'd traded her bloody clothes for the towel, but otherwise, as far as he could tell, nothing about her except her expression had changed a lick from when he had last set eyes on her.

In other words, she hadn't been taking a shower.

“What on earth have you been doing in there?” Surprise probably rendered him something less than diplomatic. She'd been in the bathroom a good twenty minutes that he knew of, with the water running the entire time. And she wasn't even wet.

Maybe she'd been answering nature's call? He toyed with the idea, rejected it. Not for that long.

She smiled way too sweetly at him. Oh, God, the attitude was back.

“Maybe you want to tell me how that's any of your business?”

He remembered then why he'd banged on the door in the first place. “Were you talking to someone?”

The too-sweet smile faded. “How to put this? Not your business.”

She had let the door fall open a little wider as they'd talked, and he was able to see past her into most of the bathroom now. His gaze swept the room. It was a typical bathroom, smallish, with a tub/shower combo, toilet, and vanity sink. A big mirror covered the wall behind the sink. Lots of white tile, trimmed in a kind of sea green. Clean. Empty except for her.

There was a cell phone on the vanity. Light dawned.

“You were talking on the phone.”

Her lips compressed as she followed his gaze.

“What, are you my keeper now? So I was talking on the phone. Big deal.” Her eyes met his again. They were less than friendly. “Why are you still here, anyway? You've done your thing. Not wanting to be rude or anything, but it's probably time you toddled off on your way now.”

His eyes narrowed. “What happened to
don't leave me
?”

“I got over the shock,” she snapped.

He almost smiled. There was that hostility of hers again in spades. He wasn't sure if it was directed at him personally, if she just didn't like men in general, or if there was something else going on here that he hadn't quite tumbled to yet. Not that he minded it particularly. It was kind of cute, kind of different. The thing was, though, right at the moment it was damned inconvenient. Then another odd thing hit him. The mirror. It was clear as a summer's day. Not steamed up a bit. The water she'd been running since before he'd entered her apartment had not been hot.

Either she was into cold showers—and she didn't seem like the type—or a shower had not been on her agenda when she'd turned the water on. Which meant she'd been running the water for some other reason. To cover up a sound. Of using the toilet? Maybe, especially if she was shy. But the water had been running a long time. To cover up the sound of her voice as she talked on the cell phone?

“Mind telling me who you were talking to?”

“My boyfriend, okay?” Her eyes flashed at him. “What's it to you?”

Maybe somewhere deep in his subconscious, he'd suspected she was talking to a boyfriend all along. Maybe that was what was bugging him.

Because something was. He was definitely getting one of those little niggles of his again. Hell, maybe it was just knowing that she was naked under that towel that was throwing his thought processes off. The thing was, he was so damned tired that he couldn't think straight enough to reason out the whys and wherefores of this feeling he had that something here was not quite right.

“If you really want to know, I was calling my insurance company about my car,” Maddie said, her tone a little friendlier now. “And the reason I'm not in the shower yet was that I can't quite figure out how to do this without getting my shoulder wet, too.”

“Plastic bag,” Gardner said from her position on the couch, and Maddie looked past McCabe to where the other two were, clearly, taking in every word.

Since Maddie had appeared in the towel, Sam realized with some chagrin that he had completely forgotten that they were even in the room.

“You got trash bags?” Wynne asked her. When Maddie nodded, he heaved himself to his feet. “I'll get you one. Where are they?”

“In the kitchen under the sink.” Maddie looked at Sam again. “Is there anything else you want to know?”

“Since I'm going to be leaving in a minute”—he watched her face brighten—“we need to talk about a few things.”

“Such as?”

“What you can and can't do. The kinds of precautions you need to take. Wynne and I are going to be taking off for a few hours, but Gardner's going to be here with you. We probably won't have outside backup until tonight. That means you ...”

Maddie's brows snapped together again. “Whoa. Hold on just a minute.
What?
”

Wynne came up behind them and held a white plastic trash bag out to Maddie. “Just poke a couple of holes in it for your arm and your head, then scootch it up everywhere you don't need protection. It should keep the water off that wound.”

Momentarily distracted, she took it, giving Wynne a quick smile and a
thanks.
Then, as Wynne retreated, her eyes immediately refocused on Sam. And the frown returned.

“What are you talking about?”

“One of us is going to be with you twenty-four hours a day until this guy is caught. Gardner's on for the next few hours, and it would probably be best if you stayed inside your apartment. I don't really expect anything to ...”