BATON ROUGE (10 page)

“Those phone calls will be his downfall,” she said. “Somehow, someway, I’ll get him to give up some useful information that will lead to his arrest.”

Alexander frowned. “Not at the price you paid yesterday.”

“Whatever it takes for success,” she replied. “He won’t get into my head again, but I need to keep the conversation with him going. It might be our only chance.”

He glanced at her long enough to see the tension that tightened her features and then looked back at the road. “Why didn’t you tell me about your childhood?” It had been a question that had plagued him since he’d listened to her talking about it to Bob.

“It was ugliness I hoped I had left in my past. I certainly didn’t want to bring it into our marriage,” she replied. She looked out the passenger window as if in an attempt to disengage from the conversation.

However, it was a conversation Alexander intended to have. “It was important for me to know about, Georgina. Your childhood is so much a part of what you become as an adult.”

“I didn’t want you to know that part of me. I just wanted to forget the way I was treated as a child. I left it behind when Child Protective Services took me away from my parents when I was sixteen.”

Alexander shot her a look of surprise. “You went into foster care?”

She sighed and turned to look at him. “For two years I lived with a family who taught me what normal life was supposed to be like. They explained to me that what I’d suffered was called scapegoat child abuse. It’s over and done with, and I survived and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

I survived.
Alexander played her words over and over again in his mind. She said that it was fine, that she’d survived, but had she really?

He thought of all the times in their marriage when she’d been emotionally distant, as if she was afraid to trust him, afraid to love him with all her heart and soul.

If he’d known this information, maybe he would have been able to figure out exactly what she needed from him. Maybe he would have been able to find the core of pain that must still reside inside her and soothe it, override it with all his love. Maybe if he’d known what she’d been through in her early life, he would have been able to stop her from leaving him.

Too late now,
a little voice whispered in the back of his head. He’d obviously let her down, not been enough, and she’d made it clear to him that there were no do-overs where the two of them were concerned.

He’d always believed her to be one of the strongest women he’d ever known. Learning about what she’d endured had only solidified that belief. Still, he knew that everybody had a breaking point. He’d seen Georgina momentarily break yesterday, letting him know that she was vulnerable.

Now not only did he have to worry about catching Bob and finding the missing, he also had to be concerned about Georgina’s physical safety and her mental state.

He didn’t want the price of cracking this case to be damage to Georgina’s fragile state of mind while playing a game with the killer.

Chapter Ten

The afternoon crawled by. Georgina once again found herself going through the files pertaining to the disappearance of Sam, Daniella and little Macy in Bachelor Moon, of Amberly and her husband Cole from Mystic Lake and everything they had about the disappearance of Jackson and Marjorie from Jackson’s home.

She flipped the pages, looking for something, anything they might have missed, all the while acutely aware of her cell phone on the table before her.

As the afternoon progressed, the members of the team that Alexander had tasked with checking alibis began to return to report back what they’d found.

Although Michelle lived on the outskirts of New Orleans, she and Jax had spent the night in a hotel not far from the bookstore where she would be signing books tonight. They both had been seen in the New Orleans hotel dining room around seven the night before, but then hadn’t been seen by anyone again until this morning. According to them, they had retired to their room and hadn’t left, which meant neither of them had been cleared concerning the attack on Georgina.

The report on Roger’s whereabouts at the time of the attempted kidnapping of Georgina was also not a solid alibi. According to Roger, he’d had dinner with a couple of friends at the Pig Roast, a barbecue place near the campus, but they’d parted ways around seven and Roger had gone home, where he said he worked on notes for his next newscast and then went to bed.

The agents had confirmed that Roger did, indeed, meet friends for dinner at the Pig Roast, but couldn’t confirm that he was at his apartment for the rest of the night.

So nobody had been cleared and the frustration of the team was evident in the silence that prevailed in the war room. The silence was broken only by the occasional cracking of Matt’s knuckles.

“For crying out loud, stop that,” Frank finally said when Matt popped his knuckles for the fifth time. “Don’t you know that’s not healthy.”

“It’s not hurting me,” Matt protested.

“It’s hurting me,” Frank exclaimed. “It’s making me freaking crazy.”

“Okay, why don’t we call it a day,” Alex said. “It’s after five, and I’m sure some of you would like to actually eat dinner with your families. We’ll meet again at seven in the morning.”

There was a stampede to the door as the men took off. It had been a long stretch for all of them without much time off.

“It’s a good thing I wasn’t standing near the door when I told them to take off for the night,” Alex said dryly. “I would have been nothing but roadkill.”

Georgina laughed, despite her general feeling of disappointment. She picked up her phone from the table and dropped it into her purse. “I’d hoped to hear from him today.”

“You still might,” Alex replied.

“I don’t know. All the calls have come in during the afternoons.” She started for the door, but paused as Alex didn’t move.

She looked at him and he raked a hand through his hair and stared at her for a long moment. “Have you noticed that whenever you get a call from Bob, Nicholas is never around?”

She looked at him in stunned surprise. “As much as I dislike Nicholas, surely you aren’t suggesting that he has anything to do with all of this.”

“Crazy, right? I’m having crazy thoughts.” He ushered her out of the room and into the hallway. “Just forget I said anything about it. You want to grab something to eat out or fix something at home?”

“Let’s just cobble something together at home,” she replied. “I don’t really feel like going out. I’m ready for comfy clothes and an early night.”

“Sounds good to me.”

As they rode the elevator down to the first floor and then left the building and headed for his car, Georgina couldn’t forget what Alex had said about Nicholas.

She brewed his words around in her head while they drove home and once there while she changed into a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt.

She was in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open, trying to decide what to fix to eat when Alex joined her. He’d also pulled on a pair of black sweatpants and a matching T-shirt. He looked more relaxed than he had all day.

“Finding anything worthwhile in there?” he asked.

“We’re looking at a soup and sandwich night or omelets with bacon and toast,” she replied. She grabbed the bacon package. “And I know your love affair with bacon.”

He laughed and grabbed a frying pan from the cabinet and set it on the stovetop. “Remember how we used to wrap bacon around hot dogs, or water chestnuts for a little cocktail snack in the evenings?”

She handed him the package of bacon. “I remember a lot of things we used to do.” She consciously willed away the memory of those impromptu cocktail hours that almost always ended with the two of them making love. She didn’t want to remember the good times. It hurt. The memories of being with Alex were almost as painful as her childhood memories, although for much different reasons.

She turned back to the refrigerator and pulled out the eggs, milk, cheese, a green pepper and an onion. For the next few minutes the only sound was the sizzling of bacon cooking and her cutting up the vegetables.

She couldn’t let Alex get into her head, with memories of happiness and passion, with memories of laughter and love. There was no way she would return to his bed again tonight no matter how hard he subtly worked to turn her resolve into capitulation.

They worked in an easy companionship. Once the bacon was crisply fried, Alex made coffee and then moved to the toaster while she poured the omelet mixture into the waiting skillet.

It wasn’t until they were seated across from each other at the kitchen table that she brought up what he’d said to her earlier. “What do we really know about Nicholas’s background?”

“Not much,” he admitted. “He doesn’t talk about his past.”

She crunched into a piece of bacon and then followed it with a drink of coffee. “He’s very ambitious,” she said as she set her cup back down.

Alex raised a dark eyebrow. “Ambitious enough to commit these crimes, then get himself on a task force and then what?”

“I don’t know, set somebody else up to take the fall. Be the hero. You’re the one who put the idea into my head in the first place.”

He grinned. “I know, but I really expected you to tell me I was crazy. I didn’t expect you to actually entertain the idea.”

She cut into her omelet and then met his gaze once again. “Unfortunately, I don’t much like Nicholas and maybe it’s my negative feelings toward him coming into play. But, truthfully, I’m not sure I trust him. I’m not sure what he might be capable of in an effort to make a name for himself in the department.”

Alex grimaced. “I hate thinking that he could in any way have anything to do with this, but the fact that he’s never been with us when you’ve received a phone call from Bob, the fact that he has a tendency to disappear by himself for long periods of time makes me wonder.”

“Maybe you should look at his personnel file, find out what’s in his background,” she suggested. As somebody who had been so private about her own past, she felt bad even suggesting it.

The grimace turned into a frown. “You know a case is bad when you start looking askew at your own team members.”

“You know you won’t be satisfied until you check him out,” she replied. “You know as well as I do, you never know what package evil comes in. Who is to say it doesn’t come in the package of an overly ambitious FBI agent who committed the crime and now is determined to somehow solve the crime on his own, gaining glory and respect among the ranks.”

“You’re right, I won’t be satisfied until he’s vetted. I’ll check in with Director Miller first thing in the morning and see what I can do without it coming to Nicholas’s attention. And now let’s talk about something else because otherwise I’m going to lose my appetite before I finish my bacon.”

“That will never happen,” she said teasingly.

“Probably not,” he agreed with a wry grin.

They finished the meal, talking about the weather, which was predicted to cool off a little bit in the next week, and what else Georgina had learned from reading Michelle’s book. After cleanup, they each carried a fresh cup of coffee into the living room and the case was once again the topic of conversation.

“It’s too bad we couldn’t confirm alibis on either Roger or Jax during the time I was fighting with Bob on the front lawn,” she said as she eased down on one end of the sofa.

“It’s too bad we only have two names on our persons of interest list—three if we count Michelle.” Alex sank down on the opposite end of the sofa.

“I feel like we’re missing something, but I can’t figure out what it might be,” she admitted. “I’ve read over all the files a dozen times and I can’t find anything that the initial investigators missed.”

“I’ve seen plenty of terrible things in my job, but I can’t wrap my mind around somebody who would kidnap FBI agents in order to pick their brains on how to become the best serial killer in the world.”

Alex shook his head and picked up his cup from the coffee table. He held the cup before him as his eyes bored into hers with intensity. “We have to get this guy, Georgina. We have to get him before he kills those people.”

She saw the torment in the depths of his blue eyes, knew that he had to be thinking about the loss of Kelly Gilmer under his lead.

“We’re going to get him, Alex.” She couldn’t help herself. She leaned over and placed her hand on his arm in an effort to ease some of his torture. “You have to let her go. You have to know that you did all that was humanly possible to save her.”

The haunting in his eyes eased somewhat. “You know, when I have one of my nightmares about her, I still reach out for you in the bed. Even after all this time, in my sleep-muddied mind I’m always surprised to find that space next to me empty.”

His words caused an ache in her heart, even as she pulled her hand away from him and moved closer to the edge of the sofa. She couldn’t be pulled in by his needs, his wants, because ultimately she’d never live up to his expectations.

“I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry you’re still having nightmares and that you have to go through them alone. Maybe you should talk to somebody professionally about that case, somebody who could help you find the closure that you deserve.”

“I don’t need a damn shrink,” he scoffed. He downed his coffee and stood. “I think I’m going to call it a night. I’ll make sure the alarm is set. Just turn off the lights when you go to bed.”

He didn’t even bother to take his cup into the kitchen but rather headed straight down the hallway to his bedroom. She’d made him mad.

She wasn’t sure what he had expected of her. If he’d expected her to volunteer to sleep in his bed with him so that she’d always be there when he had one of his nightmares, he was delusional.

As she sipped her coffee, she decided it was good that he was angry with her, that surely the conversation and her lack of a response would solidify the fact that she was not coming back to him.

She was only here now because she knew she was marked by a killer. She was only here because she trusted Alex to do everything in his power to make sure she stayed safe.

She wasn’t here to hold him after he suffered from a bad dream. She wasn’t here to jump back into his bed for more amazing sex or to become a partner in life once again.

Once this case was over and Bob was behind bars, things would go back to the way they had been for the past two years. She’d see Alex in passing in the building, they might exchange a few words in greeting, but that would be it.

What she didn’t understand as she picked up their cups and carried them into the kitchen was why her heart ached so badly at the thought of leaving him once again.

* * *

A
LEXANDER
WAS
IN
A
FOUL
MOOD
. He’d been in a foul mood all morning. He’d barely spoken to Georgina as they’d shared coffee and then ridden to work together.

It wasn’t so much that he was angry with her. He was angry with himself for wanting her, for needing her when she’d made it clear she was done. And maybe he’d always retained a little bit of anger toward her because she’d walked away from him so easily, without any real explanation.

His mood hadn’t improved when they got to work and he’d gone in to Director Miller’s office to discuss Nicholas Cutter with him. Miller had been surprised by Alexander’s request to see Nicholas’s personnel file, but had agreed to provide it to Alexander before the end of the day.

The mood in the war room seemed to reflect Alex’s. Everyone appeared to be in a bad mood, sniping at each other when anyone spoke.

He’d finally sent several of the men home for the day, knowing that working seven days a week and the long daily hours were probably part of the problem.

When he was done, it was just himself, Georgina, Nicholas, Tim and Terry left in the room. He’d tried to send Tim home, but the young agent had refused, telling Alex he had nothing waiting for him at home and would much rather keep working on locations to search.

Georgina sat with her laptop open in front of her and her cell phone by its side. When she’d first begun work, she’d gone to Michelle Davison’s web page and had discovered that the author was now using the disappearance of the three FBI agents for publicity, a fact that had put a star next to Jax’s name on the whiteboard.

She was now surfing the web to find out any minute information about Jax White that she could find, but Alexander noticed how often her gaze fell on her cell phone.

Waiting for a call from Bob—that’s what she was hoping for. Alexander’s stomach tightened as he thought of how shattered she’d been with the last phone call. Could she handle another one? Was Bob done talking and instead now plotting on a new way to get her in one of his cages?

And what the hell had little Macy meant by saying they were in cages? He got up from his chair and began to pace the length of the room, his thoughts whirling with suppositions.

“Tim, check for old prison or jails,” he said to the redheaded agent. “Macy said they were in cages. Maybe that in itself is a clue that they’re being held in some old prison facility that was abandoned years ago.”