Bait (5 page)

He was moving like he feared not making it to the john in time.

Sam glanced back at the body on the tilted metal table, followed the proceedings for a few more minutes, and gave it up. There was no absolution to be gained by watching, and no new knowledge, either.

The truth was, he was almost too tired to stand up, let alone think. And he was bugged, big-time, by the fact that the killer had not made contact since calling with the last clue. Up until now, there had been a clear pattern: a partial name first, called in not long after their arrival at the scene of the previous murder. Then two or three random clues that only made sense in retrospect. Finally, a hint to the city was always last, called in just a few hours before the next killing occurred. This time, they'd had to scramble to hop a plane from Houston, where they'd been en route to interview a Madeline Peyton who worked for Fitzgerald Securities, one of at least a hundred Madelines on their list who met the parameters of the information they'd been given so far, when the last clue had come in and they'd pinpointed New Orleans. It was as if the killer wanted to make a game of it—to see if he could pull off the crime while Sam's team raced to make sense of the clues, raced to locate the victim, raced to stop him. So far, the killer was winning. The stats were grim: FBI 0, Insane Bastard 5—no, 6 if you counted Tammy Sue Perkins, which, since she was dead and he had killed her, you had to do. With this last victim, they'd been a good two hours behind the killer. Sam had barely gotten a glimpse of the victim as she was taken away, just enough to know that she was a woman, dark-haired, attractive, and dead. The crime scene was her hotel room. Apparently, the attack had occurred as she slept.

Sam hated to admit even to himself that he had no clue.

His last contact with the killer had come—he glanced at his watch; it was 9:17 a.m.—at five minutes until seven p.m. the previous day. That was more than fourteen hours ago. Before, the bastard had always called him within no more than an hour of Sam's arrival at the death scene to gloat—and to provide the first lead to the next victim.

This time there'd been no contact.

Maybe, this time, there was no next victim? Maybe the bastard had gotten it all out of his system? Maybe the game was over?

Yeah, and maybe he was going to get a raise in his next paycheck, too, but he didn't think so, Sam concluded gloomily.

Still, he had to ask himself: What was different about this one? Why hadn't the killer made contact afterward? There was a reason—there was always a reason. He just didn't know what it was.
Yet.

The questions that crowded into his mind in the wake of that were so urgent and the answers so elusive that Sam banged his fist against the Plexiglas in frustration. Deland and her assistant glanced his way, their eyes frowning at him above their surgical masks.

The message was clear: He was disturbing their work.

Sam didn't even bother mouthing an apology. He turned on his heel and went in search of Wynne.

He found him outside, to the left of the frosted-glass front door, leaning against the four-story building's grimy stucco wall. Located just off Canal Street, the coroner's office was in a seedy area heavy on small shops and ethnic restaurants that swarmed with activity even this early in the day. Pedestrians clogged the sidewalks. Vehicles of all descriptions crawled bumper-to-bumper in both directions, creating a continuous background buzz that sounded like a swarm of angry wasps. The heat wrapped around Sam's face like a hot, wet towel the moment he left the air-conditioning behind. Inhaling was like breathing in soup. The smells—car emissions, decaying plants, various kinds of spicy food cooking—would have been nauseating if he'd let himself pay attention to them, which he didn't. Two tortured-looking palmetto trees struggled to survive in wrought-iron cages set into the sidewalk. Wynne—or at least as much of Wynne as could fit, which was about a fourth—stood in the spindly shadow of one of these. His arms were crossed over his massive chest, his head was bent, his eyes were closed. His mouth worked as he chewed something very slowly and deliberately. Bubble gum, Sam assumed, because of the faint grape smell and the fact that Wynne had bought a six-pack of grape Dubble Bubble along with the doughnuts he'd scarfed down earlier. Since quitting smoking six weeks ago, Wynne rarely went longer than fifteen minutes without putting something in his mouth. As a result, he was gaining weight like a turkey in October, enough so that his baggy shorts were growing less baggy by the day and his shirts—today's model was vintage Hawaiian, featuring a big-bosomed girl doing the hula on the front—strained at their buttons.

“Okay?” Sam asked, surveying him.

Wynne gave a single slow nod.

Despite the nod, Sam continued to eye him skeptically. Sweat beaded Wynne's forehead, his face was flushed red, and his curly, fair hair had frizzed in the heat until it looked like a brass-colored Brillo pad. To put it mildly, Wynne was not, at the moment, a poster boy for FBI spit and polish.
But then, that's what four weeks on the road chasing a murderous nutjob did to a man,
Sam thought. He himself was a case in point. He was sporting a couple of days'—he'd forgotten exactly how many—worth of stubble, faded jeans, and a T-shirt that had once been black but had been washed so often and so haphazardly over the past month that it was now a kind of tie-dyed-looking gray. The jackets and ties that Bureau protocol called for had been left back in their hotel rooms. This particular August, New Orleans was a hundred degrees in the shade with a sticky humidity that never seemed to let up.

In other words, it was just too damned hot.

Wynne opened one bleary eye. “I need a cigarette. Bad.”

“Chew your gum.”

“Ain't helping.”

In front of them, a black Firebird pulled over to the curb and stopped. Both doors opened at almost exactly the same moment, and two men got out. Tensing automatically, doing a quick mental check to make sure his Sig Sauer still nestled in the small of his back where he could get to it in a matter of seconds if need be, Sam squinted at them through the shimmer of heat that rose from the sidewalk, watching, narrow-eyed, as the pair headed purposefully toward him and Wynne. Their initially brisk pace slowed as they drew closer.

“You guys learn anything in there?”

Sam relaxed as he recognized the speaker as Phil Lewis, an FBI agent from the local field office whom he had first met some six years previously, when Sam had come to town to spearhead an investigation into a hashish-smuggling ring that was using the port of New Orleans as an entry point to the U.S. drug market. Despite the camouflage provided by the inches-high blond pompadour the guy tended like a girlfriend, Lewis was short, maybe five-nine or so beneath the hair, stocky and cocky in the way small men often are. Today he was decked out in a pale yellow sport coat, a gleaming white T-shirt, pressed jeans, and Ray-Bans. The African-American guy with him was taller, thinner, and a little more conservative in a crew cut, navy sport coat, and khakis. And Ray-Bans.

“Nah,” Sam replied, leaning a shoulder back against the building and folding his arms over his chest. “Long time no see, Lewis. I see you're still a fan of
Miami Vice
.”

“What?” Lewis looked bewildered and suspicious at the same time. Beside Sam, Wynne snickered.

“Forget it.” Sam jerked a thumb at Wynne. “This is E. P. Wynne. Phil Lewis. And ...?”

“Greg Simon,” Lewis's partner said. Perfunctory handshakes were exchanged all around, and then Sam looked at Lewis.

“You got anything?” Sam meant anything he needed to know, which Lewis perfectly understood.

“Nothing but a call from Dr. Deland's office about two suspicious-looking characters claiming to be FBI agents forcing their way into the Fitzgerald autopsy.”

“That would be us,” Sam said. Wynne nodded.

“Yeah.” Lewis frowned. “You want to tell me why we're interested in this case?”

Ordinarily, murder investigations were left up to local police forces in the jurisdictions in which they occurred. The FBI was called in only on certain extraordinary cases.

“Possible link to multiple homicides with the UNSUB crossing state lines,” Sam said. Bureau policy was to share information on developing cases with local field agents, but in this case Sam interpreted that to mean on a strictly need-to-know basis. At this point, in Sam's estimation, what he'd just said was about all Lewis needed to know. He remembered all too vividly how the details of the last investigation they'd worked on together had gotten leaked to the
Times-Picayune
within hours of the investigative team uncovering them. For all its population, New Orleans was a small town that way, and unless something had changed, Lewis had a way-too-cozy relationship with local reporters.

Having this thing turn into a media circus was something they did not need. Especially when they were no closer to making an apprehension today than they had been when Sam had gotten the first call at the first murder scene four weeks ago.

“Hot damn,” Lewis said, rubbing his hands together in transparent glee. “You mean we got ourselves a serial killer?”

“Nah. Looks like a series of professional hits.” Sam slouched against the wall again. “ 'Course, it's too early to say for sure.”

Lewis gave a nod toward the building. “What was she into to get herself whacked?”

“Could be a lot of things. At this point, we don't really know.”

“But you've got an idea,” Lewis said, watching Sam.

“Actually, I've got no fucking clue,” Sam said, which had the double virtue of being the absolute truth while at the same time visibly annoying Lewis. Beside him, Wynne was working on blowing a big purple bubble. The sickly sweet grape smell wafted beneath Sam's nose.

“Bullshit,” Lewis said.

Sam shrugged. “Think what you want.”

“You're operating in my neck of the woods now.” Lewis's voice was sharp. “Whatever you've got on this case, I have a right to know it.”

“You're absolutely correct. You do.”

“So?”

“When I find something out, I'll send you a memo.”

“You ...” Lewis went red with anger but swallowed the rest of what he'd been going to say. Sam gave him the faintest of smiles. Wynne's bubble popped with a loud
smack.

“You got a problem with memos?” Sam asked innocently. “I can do e-mails.”

“You suck, you know that?” Lewis said through his teeth, and started walking. “Come on, Greg, we need to head on in and tell Dr. Deland's staff that, hard as it may be to believe, the creeps they were complaining about really are FBI agents.” As Simon started to move, Lewis glanced back over his shoulder at Sam. “You gonna hang around for a few minutes? When we come back out, maybe we can give you a lift over to Goodwill, help you pick out a couple of sport coats.”

“Sounds good.”

“Dickhead.” If that was meant to be a mutter, Lewis blew it big-time. Sam heard and gave him a jaunty little farewell wave.

“So when are you planning to start writing your book on winning friends and influencing people?” Wynne inquired with a sideways glance when Lewis and company had disappeared inside the building.

Sam grinned. “Anytime now. I'm just working on building up the fan base first.”

“You know he's probably gonna call Smolski”—Leonard Smolski was the head of the Violent Crimes division and their boss—“and complain that we're holding out on him. And Smolski's gonna go ape-shit.”

“Last time I shared details of an investigation with Lewis ...” Sam began, meaning to fill Wynne in on the ins and outs of the media blitz that nearly derailed the drug-smuggling case. But he was interrupted by the sudden strident peal of his cell phone.

Sam became instantly alert at the sound, and he straightened away from the wall. Wynne watched him like a dog with a squirrel in view as Sam thrust a hand in his jeans pocket, yanked the phone out, and glanced down at it. A number flashed on the ID screen. It made him frown.

“Yo,” he answered, already knowing that the voice on the other end was not going to be the one he both wanted and dreaded to hear.

“Something weird,” Gardner said in his ear. “We've turned up another Madeline Fitzgerald. Attacked last night at the same hotel.”

“Yeah. Only this one lived.”

“You're shitting me, right?”

“Nope. She signed into the emergency room at Norton Hospital at 3:12 a.m. with unspecified injuries, was treated and released.”

“What? What?” Wynne demanded, balancing on the balls of his feet now as he stared at Sam and tried to make sense of the conversation. Sam waved him off.

“And we're just now finding this out?” Sam felt like slapping his palm to his forehead
duh-
style. They were the FBI, after all. Consistently being a day late and a dollar short was not how they were supposed to operate.

“Hey, not my fault. Apparently a friend drove her to the hospital. Hotel security notified the police, who called us. Ten minutes ago.”

Sam took a deep breath. Lack of timely cooperation from the local police was nothing new, of course. But it was still maddening as hell. “Where is she now?”

“I knew you were going to ask me that.” Gardner sounded smugly self-satisfied. “She caught a cab in front of the hotel fifteen minutes ago. The driver took her to the Hepburn Building. One-thirty-six Broadway.”

“Gardner, you da man,” Sam said, and hung up with Gardner's pert “not in this life, lover,” echoing in his ears.