Pursuit (20 page)

Yes, she could. No, she couldn’t. Charlotte stared angrily at him. His grip on her elbow finally loosened. He hadn’t hurt her in any way, but she massaged her arm, out of principle.

“You don’t want to think about this. You’d like it all to disappear. None of this is part of your world, and you’d love for it to be some kind of nightmare that will just . . . go away.”

Charlotte shuddered. He’d just spoken her deepest desire out loud.

“The nature of guys with guns is that they don’t go away, honey,” he said in the gentlest voice possible. “They don’t disappear because you find them distasteful. I know because I’m one of them, only I’m one of the good guys. You won’t tell me anything about what happened, but if your troubles were over, you wouldn’t be here in San Luis, hiding out. You’d be back in the States, wherever it is you come from, happily painting your heart out. Instead you’re here, in a place where broken soldiers and people on the run come. This isn’t where you belong,” he continued, his voice even more gentle than before. “You belong somewhere else, surrounded by friends and family, with no cares other than to paint and draw.”

Charlotte stared at him, muscles tense. Tears pricked behind her eyes.
Surrounded by
friends and family.
Her father, her family, was gone. She couldn’t contact her friends without embroiling them in the danger that had reached out to snare her. She was alone. A sudden, fierce, deep longing for her old life swamped her. What she wouldn’t give to turn the clock back to two—no, three years ago. Before her father’s illness. Back to when her greatest worries had been chiaroscuro and perspective.

“Ah, honey,” Matt said, and stepped forward to fold her in his arms. “I can’t even say it’ll all be okay, because that’s not the nature of the beast.”

Charlotte wanted to resist. This man was taking over her life and pushing her in directions she didn’t want to go. But for just one second it felt so
good
to lean against him. Her head fit neatly against his shoulder. His hand came up to cradle her head against him. She rested against him for one heartbeat, two. This was when she was supposed to pull away, but it was as if his shoulder was a magnet, and her head was full of iron filings.

“I hate guns,” she said into his tee shirt. The words were fervent, and came from the deepest reaches of her heart. She belonged to every antigun organization there was and had marched and campaigned for gun control. She’d collected petitions and written letters to the editor and her senator and consistently voted for the gun control candidate.

“I know, honey. I hate guns, too.”

Charlotte pulled away at that, looking up at him, sure to find him grinning at her inanely. A soldier hating guns. Yeah, right.

Instead, what she found was Matt looking grimmer than ever. Sober and deadly serious.

“You don’t believe me.”

“N-no, I don’t.”

“Trust me, we hate violence the way only someone who goes in harm’s way can.”

With an electric shock, Charlotte remembered the bullet scars on Matt’s body. The fact that he’d spent months in a coma. He’d been shot, too. And more times than she had. She’d completely forgotten.

“If this were a perfect world, and no one meant me or my country any harm, I’d have been a math teacher or a high-school football coach. But the world’s not like that. We need weapons because the bad guys have them.”

It was an age-old argument, and Charlotte had heard it more than once. But never from a soldier who bore bullet wounds on his body.

He reached down and ran the back of his index finger down her cheek. “You’re scared,” he said gently. “You’re right to be scared. You’re in trouble, and you need help. Listen to me, honey. No, listen,” he insisted, as she tried, uselessly, to pull away from him.

“I can’t protect you against a danger I can’t see. You won’t talk to me about your troubles, which means no one can protect you other than yourself. So either you talk to me, right now, and tell me what trouble you’re in, and I take precautions, or you learn at least the basics about handling guns. I want you to be able to defend yourself.”

She stared up at him numbly.

“I want that for you,” he said softly. “I don’t want anything else to happen to you. I want you to be safe and happy and spend your days drawing and painting. Usually the bad guys get their way in this world, did you know that?” His eyes were dark, intense pools. “I hate that. It makes me angry. Doesn’t it make you angry? They never stop, Charlotte. They just keep on coming until someone stops them.”

This was so
true.
For the first time, Charlotte allowed herself to feel anger instead of fear and panic and grief.

She had an idea what had happened. Robert had gotten greedy. His huge salary at Court Industries hadn’t been enough. Deep down, she realized that for someone like Robert, nothing would ever be enough. For some reason, he had felt that the Courts were in the way of something he wanted. And so he hadn’t hesitated to murder her father. Charlotte stiffened. An electric surge of knowledge coursed through her. Robert had wanted to kill
her,
too! Whatever it was that required Philip’s death would have required hers, too. The plan hadn’t been to kill Philip and frame her. The plan had been to get rid of the Court family. Framing her had been Plan B when Plan A—putting them both underground—hadn’t worked.

She’d escaped by a miracle.

Matt was too attentive not to notice something. “What?” he murmured, pulling away and angling his head to look her full in the face. “You just thought of something. Something that scared you or shocked you. What?”

Charlotte wasn’t used to this. She didn’t know how to mask her feelings from someone as perceptive as Matt. But burrowing her head more deeply against his shoulder didn’t work. Matt gently gripped her jaw and pulled her face away.

“Don’t hide from me. What’s wrong now?”

Charlotte bit her lips and shook her head.

Matt sighed. “Okay, we’re having lunch at the cantina, then another swimming lesson. And tomorrow a shooting lesson and a few pointers on self-defense. I’m not taking any chances with you.”

“Okay,” Charlotte said sweetly. “And then tomorrow evening you can accompany me to a concert at the old mission.” She nearly laughed at Matt’s panicked expression. “You’ll love it.”

Warrenton

April 27

Moira Fitzgerald weighed about 140 pounds.
On the plump side, aren’t we darling?
Barrett thought as he carried her easily to his van. He’d gotten her out of the Irish pub while she was still able to walk, though her head was lolling on his shoulder, and her eyes were closed. Nobody gave them a second glance. Lots of drunken second-generation Irish girls were staggering out of the pub, helped along by their equally drunk boyfriends. Once in the parking lot out back, Barrett simply picked her up and carried her in his arms. There was no one to see. He’d parked in the northwest corner, where the light of the big halogen streetlamps didn’t carry. Barrett never left anything to chance. Three-quarters of an hour later, they were in a warehouse in the industrial district he’d rented by e-mail, using a perfectly legitimate credit card stolen off a man in Times Square. The two magnetic passcards to enter the gates and open his individual unit had been couriered to the Hotel Plaza, care of Mr. Vincent Bender, who had checked in that morning. Barrett had even gone into the room, mussed up the bed, and run the shower, making sure not to leave fingerprints or DNA.

The industrial area was perfect. There was no one around as he used his passcard to enter the big, empty space. Within a couple of minutes, he had Moira in a chair and the metal door shut.

Perfect. There were no windows, and though it wasn’t soundproofed, the walls were cement, and he was certain sound wouldn’t carry.

Not that he intended making Moira scream. It wouldn’t be necessary. Everything was prepared for her. A big tarpaulin was spread in the center of the empty concrete floor and on it was a metal chair. The only other item in the room was a big bottle of industrial-strength bleach.

Barrett stripped Moira, folded her clothes neatly, and put them in a big condominium-sized black garbage bag, poured bleach in, and used twist ties to seal the bag off. The bag would be tossed into the big landfill he’d seen twelve miles north of town. Barrett placed Moira’s naked, unconscious body on the chair placed in the center of the tarpaulin. He had a roll of duct tape and made three circuits around her breasts, tying her to the chair. Plastic flexicuffs went around her wrists and ankles, rendering her completely immobilized.

Barrett wore latex gloves on his hands, and his feet were encased in sterile booties. Tomorrow, he would douse the clothes he was wearing with gasoline and burn them. He knew all about Locard’s theory of transference. Nothing was perfect, but he intended to leave behind as little of himself as possible.

As he wrapped the maid in duct tape and tugged the snap-ties closed, Barrett handled her naked body as impersonally as he would a side of beef.

Rohypnol was a date-rape drug, but rape never even entered his thoughts. He’d once shot a soldier under his command for breaking opsec in order to have sex with a prostitute. Sex messed with men’s heads, not just their dicks. Barrett bought clean, energetic sex a couple of times a month from a reliable supplier and never thought about it outside those pleasant interludes.

Moira was rapidly metabolizing the Rohypnol he’d administered in her Coke. An hour had elapsed. She should be coming out of her drug-induced stupor any moment now. Barrett sat on his haunches and waited, patient and attentive. He was prepared to wait all night, if necessary, but it wasn’t necessary.

After thirteen minutes, she moaned. Four minutes later, her eyelids flickered. She mumbled something. Barrett waited patiently. She wasn’t yet in a position to tell him anything useful. He knew there’d be some nonsense to get through. “Cold,” she muttered, licked her lips. Yes, she was cold. She was naked in an unheated warehouse unit in the dead of night.

Barrett had contemplated and then discarded torture. As a professional soldier, he knew that torture seldom worked. A soldier who’d trained properly—or a terrorist whose fanaticism created a mental shield—could seldom be broken. Their hearts gave out first. For civilians, using torture as a tool to obtain information was stupid. It worked just fine as an instrument of oppression, as a warning to others. Having a tortured body dumped into the central square of a village softened the villagers up nicely.

But in this case, Moira Fitzgerald wasn’t going to cough up info on the Court woman because he hurt her. Fear and pain would overwhelm her mind with catecholomines and cortisol, rendering her incapable of coherent thought. She’d be willing to say anything to make the pain stop, and any information she gave him would be suspect. He could spend weeks chasing down her intel and end up with nothing. He didn’t have weeks. He needed a reliable info dump from her and he needed it now.

She moaned again, and her eyes opened. They were unfocused, pupils dilated.

“Hi, Moira,” Barrett said softly.

“Cold,” she mumbled again.

“Yes, honey,” he said, his voice gentle. “We’ll get you warm in just a minute. But first you need to tell me a few things.”

Her eyes were a little more focused now. Her head turned slowly as she took in her surroundings, not that she could see much. Most of the unit was lost in darkness, the only light a two hundred-watt spotlight focused on her, blinding her. She closed her eyes and turned her head away.

She struggled briefly against the tape and the flexicuffs, then subsided. Good. The drug made most people compliant, robbing them of the will to resist. Moira didn’t appear to be the rebellious sort, and anyway, Barrett supposed that obedience would be part of a maid’s mental makeup. After a brief tussle with the restraints, she simply accepted that she was tied up.

“Where—where am I?” The words were slurred. Her mouth would be dry, her tongue would feel swollen.

“You’re with friends, Moira. And pretty soon you’ll be with Charlotte. Won’t you like that, when you can see Charlotte again?”

She smiled, her head wobbling gently on her neck. “Miss Charlotte. She’s coming back.”

“That’s right, Miss Charlotte’s coming back. She wants to come back. But she needs for us to go get her and bring her back, Moira. So you need to tell me where she is. Where is she? Where is Miss Charlotte?”

A pucker appeared between her eyebrows. “Sure an’ I don’t know. Gone. Accused her of murder, they have.” She scowled. “Nasty buggers. Idiots, the lot of them.”

A woman who faithfully cleaned an empty house obviously valued duty. And it sounded like there was affection there. Barrett tried a different tack. He put some sharpness in his voice.

“Miss Charlotte’s in trouble, Moira. Terrible trouble. We have to get to her. Where is she?”

She blinked. “Don’t—don’t know.”

“How did she get away, Moira? Miss Charlotte’s car is still in her garage. Is she driving your car?”

She blinked rapidly and nodded. “Yes. That day—it was snowing so hard. Miss Charlotte’s car wouldn’t start. She borrowed my Tahoe.” A look of grief crossed her face, and a single tear trickled down her cheek. “Never came back.” She began to cry quietly. Barrett had done his homework. He’d spent the day holed up in a motel, logged onto the Internet via an encrypted line. He probably knew more about Moira Charlotte Fitzgerald than her own mother did. After a day spent digging into the maid’s life, he’d found a number of facts that intrigued him.