Hot Target (12 page)

She didn’t take his hand, so he pulled it back in. But she was definitely listening, so he kept going.

“PJ’s going to be here in just a minute,” he told her. “I’m going out to check the house, take a look at the road down where Murph said he saw that car. But first I have to clear up something that’s kind of important to me. You implied back when we were, you know, both shouting and not really listening to each other that you believed your, um, actions during the press conference would benefit Troubleshooters Incorporated. You’re dead wrong.”

She opened her mouth, about to speak, but he stopped her. “Wait. Hear me out. I heard you out.”

She waited.

“When I’m out there, working to protect you, the way I was at the press conference, I’m a personal representative of both Tommy Paoletti and his company. When you did what you did—using me as a prop like that—you implied that I’m engaging in unprofessional behavior.”

She started to speak again, to argue, but again he stopped her with one hand. “I know there’s lots of movies and books where, you know, the bodyguard and the client get busy, fall in love, whatever, but it’s crap. Bottom line, it’s unprofessional—that kind of contact. It’s not romantic; it’s wrong. My relationship with you is a business relationship. You pay Troubleshooters, Tommy pays me, I keep you safe. I don’t care how good anyone is—you can’t have sex with someone and be paid to keep them safe at the same time. It cannot be done. At least not by someone who considers themselves truly professional.”

Across the room, Cosmo could see that Jane was on the verge of exploding. She couldn’t keep silent another moment. “I was joking. It was a joke. Like, hubba hubba, check out the bod on my bodyguard. Nobody really thought—”

“Jane.” He cut her off. “You’re an intelligent woman. I know you know that people definitely
thought.
My own mother
thought.
”

She was subdued, but she still shook her head. “I just—”

“See, if I’m unprofessional, then Tommy and TS Inc. is, too. Tommy’s most valuable asset is his reputation as the former CO of the best SEAL Team in the country, as an honorable man, as a professional. You know that saying? There’s no such thing as bad publicity? Well, yes, there is. That’s exactly what you gave Tommy this afternoon.”

She looked up at him, finally meeting his gaze. “Then I’m sorry. I am. I really thought it would be a double win. I just . . . I didn’t realize.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “And I apologize to you—for assuming that you did realize and that you did it anyway. I thought . . .” He shook his head and laughed. “Well, you know what I thought. You still want me off this team, just say the word, and I’m gone.”

“Am I really in danger?” she asked. “I mean, what just happened here—that was . . . real?”

“I heard a rifle shot,” he told her. “It’s possible it was a blank or that it was fired away from the house—maybe only in an attempt to scare you, to scare us all.” He asked the question he knew would be coming next, beating her to it. “Who would do something like that? I don’t know. Was it the Freedom Network—or someone else who saw the news and thought they’d shake you up?” He smiled at her. “Maybe the producer making
Doctor Dolittle Seventeen
saw all the press you were getting and was jealous—wanted to make sure you didn’t get a good night’s sleep.”

Jane smiled back. “You’ve been talking to Decker.”

“Yes, ma’am. We share all information. There are no secrets on an assignment like this—no such thing as private information,” he told her. “We’re doing more than providing personal protection, you know. We’re actively investigating the e-mailed threats you’ve received—the ones that we perceive to be credible. One way to keep you from getting hurt is to find whoever wants to hurt you before they can get close enough to do any damage.”

“I read most of those e-mails,” Jane countered. “They all sound alike—just . . . kind of crazy.”

“If you want,” Cosmo said, “I’ll sit down with you and Deck and Jules Cassidy—you know, from the FBI. We’ll show you the ones we think could be real trouble.”

She swallowed as she nodded. “Okay.”

He’d scared her.

Good. She needed to start taking this more seriously.

His radio crackled. “PJ’s here,” Murphy’s voice announced. “He’s inside.”

“Thanks,” Cosmo responded. He stood, and Jane looked up at him.

“If you honestly thought there was a threat,” she said, “then you really were ready to . . . to
die
for me?”

“No one’s going to die,” he told her as there was a knock on the door. He gave Jane a nod as he went out and PJ came in.

The knock on his door came after Jules had spent thirty minutes on the treadmill in the hotel’s gym.

He’d pretended he was going to the gym in an attempt to exhaust himself, but while he ran, he was hit on five times—twice by the same barely twenty-year-old outrageously buff rap artist wannabe who called himself the White Boomerang. And as Jules took the elevator back to his room, he knew why he’d really gone down there.

It was because he wanted a reminder of everything he
wasn’t
looking for—of everything he
didn’t
want cluttering up his life. And he’d also gone there because even though he had no trouble at all declining sexual invitations from strangers, he knew that Adam wouldn’t have been able to walk out of that room alone. He’d wanted to be reminded of that, too.

He opened the door with a towel around his neck, saying, “Look, kid, you get points for persistence, but I’m really not into pretentious children who—”

It wasn’t the White Boomerang standing there.

It was Adam.

This was bad. This was very bad.

“Hey,” Adam said.

Jules just shook his head. “No.”

“You’re saying the word,” Adam told him, “but, you know, if I were directing you in a scene, I would have to tell you that the audience just isn’t going to believe you because—”

“How did you get my room number?”

Adam leaned against the wall outside his door. “I used to live with an FBI agent, remember?”

Jules did remember. Vividly.

“Look, I’m not asking you to let me in,” Adam said with total sincerity. Of course, he was an actor, so it meant nothing. “I just . . . I didn’t get a chance to tell you about everything that’s going on in my life.”

Jules folded his arms across his chest, planting himself firmly in the open doorway, making sure his body language was a very clear noninvitation to enter.

Adam kept going. “I just wanted you to know that I’ve had this really great job for the past, I don’t know, six months now.”

“Job,” Jules repeated. “Is it possible I just heard you say job?”

“Don’t be an asshole.” Adam was good at playing injured, but there was a new depth to his performance, a new vulnerability that Jules had never seen before. Was it possible . . . ? “This isn’t easy to talk about. When I do, it feels like I’ve sold out—you know, given up on the acting. But it’s not a career, J., you know, it’s not. It’s just a day job. Well, sometimes it’s a night job, and the money’s not all that great, but it’s a job that I like, so . . .”

It was the lack of eye contact that did it—the fact that Adam didn’t look at Jules at all, didn’t check to see whether he was buying into the performance. And that made Jules dare to hope that it wasn’t an act.

“Where?” he asked, squeezing the word past his heart, which was securely lodged in his throat.

“That’s the cool part,” Adam told him, finally looking up and meeting his eyes. He was almost shy about his own enthusiasm. “It’s at this vet’s office—you know, veterinarian.”

“That’s so great,” Jules said. Adam had always bemoaned the fact that their apartment building had a no-pets rule.

“Yeah,” Adam agreed. “I help run a doggy hotel—we don’t call it a kennel, but that’s what it is, you know, for people who need to go out of town and leave their dog someplace nice where they know they’re going to be treated right. It’s really pretty upscale. The dogs stay in these rooms that are nicer than my apartment, and two or three nights a week I stay over there, too. It’s great, J.—we have regulars. You know, return customers and . . . My boss is okay. Mandy—she’s cool. She’s become a friend and—”

A door opened across the hall. “This reunion is touching, boys, but I’m trying to sleep. Do you mind?” Whoever he was, he closed his door forcefully.

Jules looked at Adam, who held his gaze only briefly before looking away.

“That’s pretty much all I wanted to say,” Adam said, more softly than before. “That and, well, I miss you.” He was looking down at the floor again, and this time when he looked back up at Jules, there were actually tears in his eyes. “I’ve missed what we had.” He straightened up. “Thanks for dinner. I’m glad you’re doing well, too.”

He turned away. He actually turned and began to walk away.

“Adam.” Jules heard himself speak. With the part of himself that remembered the pain, he knew that doing anything other than letting Adam leave was a terrible mistake. But that part of himself wasn’t in control of his voice. Or his feet.

He stepped back, opening the door wider.

And he let Adam in.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

Sometime last night, a truce had been called.

Decker sat in Mercedes Chadwick’s downstairs meeting room with Cosmo Richter, waiting for her highness to appear.

Cosmo looked beat, but the undercurrent of anger Deck had noted after yesterday’s press conference had vanished. Of course, it wasn’t any wonder that the SEAL was tired—Deck had heard his account of last night’s drama.

Cosmo had sat outside, in front of the house, in the dark, for hours. He’d made a list of every motor vehicle that had gone past, right up until dawn.

The road ended at a cul-de-sac a couple of miles past Jane’s driveway, so there hadn’t been all that much traffic.

There had been some, though.

After the sun had come up, after Cosmo had taken a brief nap, he’d spent quite a bit of time searching for evidence that what he’d heard had indeed been a rifle shot. Problem was, he’d found no shell, no bullet hole.

The intern came back in with mugs for them both. The coffee steamed, too hot to let him do more than sip very cautiously. Decker set his mug down on the table next to his chair, on top of the file folder he’d brought with him.

Cosmo drank deeply, apparently needing that caffeine desperately enough to risk being burned. Decker could relate. He’d been there plenty of times himself—wishing he could have his coffee in an IV drip.

Cos had a file folder, too. Inside was his list of the ten cars and trucks that had driven past last night, including one—a dark-colored Ford pickup with a significant dent in the right rear bumper and a torn bumper sticker reading only “. . . ville Honor Student”—that was slightly suspicious due to its mud-smeared license plate. Cosmo had told Deck he’d only been able to make out a six in white against a dark background.

It was only slightly suspicious considering it had driven past more than two hours after the “incident.” If there had been, indeed, an actual incident.

It wasn’t too long after the coffee arrived that Mercedes swept into the room. Both Decker and Cosmo got to their feet.

“Sit,” she said, “please, sit.” So they sat. At least until she headed for the windows. “It’s a beautiful day. Why didn’t Patty—”

Cosmo moved to intercept her. “We closed the blinds.”

She stopped short, looked from him to Decker and back, instantly understanding that they’d done it as a precaution. So that someone couldn’t aim a weapon at the office window and wait until she walked into their sight and . . .

She was a smart woman, and she took it a step further. Until they eliminated the threat, she wasn’t going to be spending much time outdoors.

“Well, damn,” she said. “There goes my tan.”

“Only temporarily,” Cos told her. “The way this house is set up, we could construct a wall, create an area where you’ll be able to go outside—”

“And take walks around the prison compound three times a day?” She shook her head in disgust. “No thanks.”

“Think of this as short-term,” he said.

“Yeah, I know.” She met his gaze. “I’m sorry for complaining. It’s just . . . frustrating.”

“It must be.”

So okay. Who was this apologetic woman, and what had she done with Mercedes Chadwick? She was actually wearing clothes today, too. Clothes that covered her. Mostly. Her T-shirt didn’t quite meet the low-rise waistband of her jeans.

Still, it was an improvement. It was going to make it a hell of a lot easier to focus on their agenda.

“You look good in sneakers and jeans,” Cosmo volunteered his opinion as they both sat down on the sofa, surprising the hell not just out of Decker but Mercedes, too. “Not stupid at all.”

Obviously, they’d had a conversation about the producer’s default four-inch heels.

She recovered first, laughing. “Yeah, well, I figured the ‘bimbo slut’ didn’t need to attend this particular meeting.”

Again, there was eye contact, as some kind of silent communication passed between them.

“Hey, didn’t you go home?” she asked suddenly, no doubt noticing that Cosmo was wearing yesterday’s clothes.

“Nah,” Cos said. “I caught a nap, though. I’m okay.”

“In your truck?” she asked, her voice dripping with horror, as if she were asking if he’d fixed the sewage problem by swimming to the bottom of the septic tank.

“I’m okay,” he said again, this time with a smile. An actual smile.

Decker knew for a fact that the SEAL had taken naps in far worse places.

But Mercedes turned to him. “We have, like, ten extra bedrooms in this place. Why don’t we make them available to your team?”

“That’s very generous. As long as it’s not an imposition,” Decker said.

“It’s not,” she said. “Make sure everyone knows. I’ll have Patty send a memo. No more truck sleeping.”

That got a head shake along with another smile from Cos. Easy there, man. Two smiles inside one minute? What was next? Fire falling from the sky?

“Before we get started, I need to apologize to you.”

Decker looked over to find that Mercedes Chadwick had focused her enormous eyes back on him.

Apparently an apology—which, when he’d walked in here this morning, had seemed about as unlikely as that rain of fire—was next.

“Larry,” she said. “May I call you Larry?”

Decker cleared his throat. “Most people call me Deck.”

“Deck,” she said. “Right. Yesterday, at the press conference, I . . . I’m sorry. I really am. I had no idea that what I said would reflect badly on you and Tom and . . . I really do apologize. It won’t happen again. Although I’m afraid the paparazzi are going to be circling for a while. If I go out—
When
I go out, and I have to go out. I can’t stay inside forever. I have a movie to make. But when I go out, there’s a good chance there’ll be cameras. Some of them will be focused on, well, you.” She included Cosmo in that collective you. “Whoever’s with me. But mostly you.” This time the
you
was singular, and aimed at the SEAL. “At least until next week’s tabloids come out. When they do . . . Well, I’m working on making this thing with Cosmo go away.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Decker said. “We’ll keep the cameras in mind.”

“I am sorry,” she said again.

“To be honest,” Deck told her, “Tom and I had a long conversation last night, and I recommended we pass your case over to another security organization.”

She nodded, even more subdued. “And yet you’re still here,” she pointed out. “What made you change your mind?”

He opened his file folder and pulled out the three e-mails that Cosmo had recommended they show to her. She quickly read through them. They weren’t more than a few sentences each.

Bitch,

You think you’re so smart. You think you’re going to get away with this? You may be smart, but I’m smarter. You’re wrong about me—everyone’s wrong about me, and you won’t catch me. I will catch you, guaranteed. Clear your calendar—it’s almost time to die. You’ll be dead, and I’ll be laughing. You’ll be rotting, and I’ll still be free.

“Sorry I’m late.” Jules Cassidy, the gay FBI agent, came breezing into the room, followed by Mercedes’ intern, who was running to keep up. “Traffic was . . . I left a little too late and . . . Good, you started. That’s good.”

“Can I get you coffee, Mr. Cassidy?” the intern asked.

“Yes,” Cassidy said. “Please. Coffee. Excellent. Gallons, please, Patty. Bless you.”

Was Decker the only person in California who’d actually gotten a good night’s sleep? Even Patty the intern looked as if she were stumbling around in a fog.

Cassidy sat down, setting his briefcase on the floor beside him. “How far did you get?” he asked, and Deck realized the man was more than tired. He was emotionally fried.

Decker knew the symptoms well. He’d seen them in his own mirror a time or two. The strain he just couldn’t keep from showing on his face. The red eyes, which were no fricking fair. A man shouldn’t have to deal with eyes that made him look as if he’d spent days weeping, when in truth he’d spent every one of his waking hours making goddamn sure he
didn’t
cry. The tension—shoulders, neck, back strung tight as a battleship’s anchor cable.

There was stress, and then there was stress.

The kind that came from helping bury a friend . . .

Stress that came from mistakes that couldn’t be fixed, from enormous loss that was irrevocable.

It fucking sucked.

So, yeah. He recognized emotionally fried when he saw it.

Something bad had happened to Jules Cassidy between last night and this morning.

“Bitch.”
Mercedes was reading the third and final e-mail aloud.
“You’ll be news for a day, but then you’ll be gone. You’ll be dead, and I’ll be here, laughing. They won’t catch me. They’ll never catch me. You’ll be rotting and I’ll still be free. You can’t touch me, but I’ll touch you.”
She put the paper down. “So, okay. Aside from the different e-mail addresses, these are all obviously from the same person. I mean, the writing—the voice—is clearly the same, right? But what I don’t get is how these are any different from the three hundred others we get each day.”

Patty returned with Cassidy’s mug of coffee along with an entire extra pot that she placed on the end table. He managed to smile as he thanked her.

They all waited for the intern to leave the room and close the door behind her, and both Cosmo and Cassidy eyed Decker, obviously wondering who should take the point and answer Mercedes’ question.

“Do you want to, uh . . .” Deck ordinarily would have just motioned for the FBI agent to take it away, but the man looked like he needed at least fifteen solid minutes alone with his coffee.

“Yes,” Cassidy said much too crisply. “Certainly.” He put down his mug, opened his briefcase, handed another sheet of paper to Mercedes, and gave a second copy to Deck. “Sorry, I only have—”

“That’s okay.” Cosmo moved closer to Mercedes on the couch so he could read over her shoulder.

This document was a copy of an e-mail sent from one of those free e-mail accounts. It started with a slightly different salutation, “Pigfucker,” but other than that . . . Whoa-kay. The body of this message was identical—word for word—to the first of the e-mails Decker had just shown to Mercedes.

You think you’re so smart. You think you’re going to get away with this? You may be smart, but I’m smarter. . . .

“This was sent to ADA Benjamin Chertok on April 12, 2003. Thirteen days before he was fatally shot,” Cassidy informed them. “He was murdered by an unknown assailant with a Remington 700P long-range rifle.”

On the sofa, Mercedes looked up from the e-mail, directly at Cosmo. “Shit,” she said.

Cosmo nodded. “Yeah.”

“What’s an ADA?” she asked.

“Sorry,” Cassidy said. “Assistant district attorney. Ben Chertok worked in the Idaho Falls office. He headed a team of lawyers who had just successfully prosecuted John Middlefield—a prominent Freedom Network leader. It was a tax evasion case, with a huge penalty as well as a mandatory prison term. During the trial, the Freedom Network started an Internet smear campaign targeting Chertok. Two weeks after the trial ended, he was dead in his driveway, shot as he was coming home from work on a Friday afternoon.”

“My God,” Mercedes said. “Why haven’t you arrested the entire Freedom Network?”

“It’s not that simple,” Cassidy said. “I wish it was. But we haven’t been able to connect these e-mails to the Freedom Network, or even to Chertok’s murder.”

Mercedes looked from Cassidy to Deck to Cosmo questioningly. “But if you can’t connect them, then . . .”

“This could be a coincidence,” the SEAL explained.

“While we’re as close to certain as possible that these four e-mails were sent by the same person,” Cassidy clarified, “we have no proof that this e-mailer is the shooter who killed Ben Chertok. They could well be two different people.”

“But . . .” Mercedes prompted him.

“Personally, I think it’s one and the same,” he admitted. He was sitting there, looking Mercedes straight in the eye, putting it all into plain-speak.

Deck had worked with both FBI and Agency personnel who refused to share guesswork with anyone. Until they could verify something as a fact, it didn’t get talked about.

He preferred Jules Cassidy’s all cards on the table approach. It was clearly the correct way to deal with someone with such a strong personality as Mercedes Chadwick.

“If it is,” Cassidy continued, “if the e-mailer and the killer are one and the same, then we’re up against someone who’s killed before and gotten away with it. Not only that, but by sending you an exact copy of the e-mail he sent to Chertok, he wants us to know for sure that he’s coming after you. In a sense, he’s issued a challenge.”

“This is not someone who’s going to make sloppy mistakes,” Decker told her.

“Of course not,” she quipped. “God forbid Mr. Insane-o, my personal psycho, is actually of the careless variety.”

“We’re not going to let him or anyone else hurt you,” Cosmo said quietly.

She looked at him, holding his gaze for several long seconds before she turned back to Decker and Cassidy. “But if he’s got a Remington whatsis long-range rifle, isn’t it likely that
some
one’s going to get hurt?”

“Yeah,” Cosmo told her. “He is.”

Mercedes laughed as she nodded, but Decker could tell that, as much as she wanted to, she didn’t quite believe him.

As Jules let himself out the front door of Mercedes Chadwick’s house, her brother, Robin, pulled into the driveway in a neat little Porsche Speedster that screamed
movie star.

God, he had a headache. As he headed for his stodgy rental car, Jules searched his pockets for his sunglasses and slipped them on.

Not that they helped.

What he needed was sleep—at least six uninterrupted hours of it. But first he had to call his boss, Max, and verify that the FBI hadn’t managed to trace those e-mails. Then he had to fax Cosmo’s list of license plate numbers to Max’s assistant, Laronda—what a total wild-goose chase that was. Maybe he’d put that off until later. Until after he’d checked out of his hotel room and checked in someplace else.