Hunted (Reeve Leclaire 2) (24 page)

He chooses a seat next to the window, where he can watch the fitness center’s front door and parking lot. Even better, he can see inside, where all the young bodies are jogging and bouncing on rows of exercise equipment. He watches carefully and first spots Bender’s son inside. The tall blond holds open a door, and Flint then glimpses his girl’s bright red hair before the two disappear into a back room.

So close.

When the waiter brings his cappuccino, Flint considers the design swirled into the foam. It’s too symmetrical, so he takes a spoon and cuts an edge here, an edge there, imagining scars on milky white skin as he licks the spoon.

T
he gym has way too many mirrors, in Reeve’s opinion, so she keeps her eyes on JD. He leads her past the rows of busy exercise machines, through an area with benches and weights, to a small room with no windows. A body-sized punching bag hangs in the corner.

He stops and faces her. “So, first question, have you ever taken any self-defense classes before?”

“Once, years ago. It was just a one-day class, but it was pretty good.”

“What did you learn?”

“Hit him where it hurts. Eyes, throat, groin, knees, instep.”

“Good. Take off your shoes and socks and we’ll get started.”

They step onto the heavy floor mats and he leads her through a series of stretches and introductory positions. Their muscles warm and loosen, and he begins demonstrating simple ways to break out of holds, doing it slowly at first, then faster, then letting her try.

“I remember some of this,” she says, getting the hang of it.

“You’re stronger than you look. Are you ready to try some throws?”

“Okay. But you’re, like, twice my size.”

“That doesn’t matter. The secret is to use your attacker’s momentum against him. It’s all in the technique, okay?”

“Right,” she says doubtfully.

“So attack me.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, give it your best shot.”

She lowers her head, balls her fists, and with a cry lunges at him with all her strength. In the next instant, her feet are swept from under her and she’s flat on her back.

“You okay?”

She scrambles upright. “Show me how you did that.”

“Okay, the most important thing is that you have to widen your stance and tighten your core.” He demonstrates, moving his feet wide apart and bending his knees, and she does the same. “Flex your knees a bit more. Feel that? You need to keep your center of gravity low.”

“Yeah. Got it.”

“Okay, watch closely.” He takes her through the steps in slow motion, saying, “As I try to grab you like this, you turn and grip me here, pulling my weight past you, like this. . . . See? Okay, now faster. Grab, shift, and then—”

His feet leave the mat and he’s on his back.

She looks down at him, grinning. “Cool.”

He stands upright, saying, “Okay, let’s do it for real. Are you ready?”

“Sure.”

He attacks. She grabs and pulls and shifts just as he showed her, but she lands on the floor with a grunt of pain.

“What did I do wrong?” she asks as he helps her to her feet.

“You lost your center of gravity.”

“Well, crap. Show me again.”

They start over, step by step, in slow motion. She understands the mechanics perfectly. They go through the movements again, working together, and he lands on his back as intended.

“Okay, I’ve got it now,” she says.

“You sure?”

“Yep, let’s try this for real.”

He attacks fast, and she grabs and pulls and shifts just as before, but loses her footing and falls hard.

“Dammit!”

“That’s okay,” JD says, helping her up. “It’s not as easy as it looks. Not everybody picks it up right off the bat.”

She frowns at him. “I know what I did wrong. Let’s try this again.”

“You don’t want to go over it slowly one more time?”

“No, no. I’ve got it. Come on.”

He attacks, she pulls and spins, but she is again the one to land hard on the floor. She smacks the mat in frustration, and he patiently helps her to her feet, saying, “We can try something else if you want.”

“No, I want to do this. Come on, show me what I’m doing wrong.”

JD again shows her how to use her opponent’s momentum against him.

Again, she tries to throw him onto his back, and again, she is the one who hits the mat.

“Dammit! If only I were taller.”

“Or I were shorter,” he says, grinning. He helps her to her feet. “It’s tough to throw someone bigger than you, but you’ve almost got it.”

They try over and over—now this approach, now that—but he towers over her, she’s far outmatched, and the choreography eludes her. The room’s temperature climbs and Reeve is sweaty and cross.

“Okay, try again,” she snaps, taking a stance.

But JD shakes his head and moves away. “You’re too tired. That’s enough for one day.”

“Oh, come on. I know I can do this. It’s just force and motion, right? I get it.”

“Do you want me to show you again?”

“No, you keep throwing yourself on purpose.”

“No I don’t,” he says, doing a pratfall and sprawling at her feet.

“Ha ha,” she says with hands on hips.

“Help me up.” He puts up a hand. When she grabs hold, he pulls her off her feet and she lands on the matt beside him.

She glares at him. “What did you do that for?”

“To prove a point. I’ve figured out what you’re doing wrong.”

“I trusted you,” she says pointedly. “And I let my guard down. And I lost my stance and my center of gravity.”

“Good. What else?”

She makes a face.

He gets to his feet and helps her up, saying, “You’re forgetting about your core. Here,” he says, placing a hand firmly on her stomach. “Think about pulling your belly button toward your spine. No, don’t suck it in, just keep it flat. You’re tightening these muscles. See? This is the center of all action. It’s not in the limbs, it comes from your core. Think of it as an affirmation. Your core is your center of strength.”

Her pulse flutters. She cannot remember anyone ever touching her like this.

“Okay,” he says, stepping back. “This was a good first lesson.”

“Wait, I don’t want to give up.”

“You’re not giving up. But that’s enough, let’s call it a day.”

Reeve swipes a lock of hair from her eyes. “Well, I guess I’m not destined to become the Karate Kid.”

“But you were excellent in slow motion.”

“Great. So if I’m attacked in slow-mo, I’ll be fine.”

F
lint smokes in the silver sedan, watching as Milo Bender’s neighborhood settles into the quiet of early evening. He’s certain his cricket is the only one in the house. He followed the green pickup from the gym. Bender’s son dropped her off, the lights came on, and no one else has arrived.

But that damned next-door neighbor keeps fussing around his yard. First, he was raking leaves and sweeping off his sidewalk. Now the guy is rearranging a display of jack-o’-lanterns on his porch. At last, he dusts off his hands, and a moment later the kinetic light of a television fills his front window.

When nothing else moves on the street, Flint turns the key in the ignition. He moves the nondescript sedan closer to the house and parks just around the corner. He pops the trunk, leaving it closed but unlatched, and gets out of the car, the stun gun ready in his pocket.

As he approaches the house, a tall woman comes out of nowhere, walking a stubby-legged mutt. Flint lights a cigarette and crosses to the opposite side of the street, where he leans against a tree to smoke in the dark. The great thing about smoking these days is that no one does it indoors anymore, so smokers outdoors are ignored.

When no one is around, he creeps to the side of the house, listening. All his skills have come back to him. In a matter of minutes, he’ll have her secure in the trunk of the car. After seven long years of refining designs in his imagination, he’ll finally have the chance to see them realized in the flesh.

He edges past a camellia bush, relishing a swell of anticipation, and is letting himself into the side gate when headlights sweep the trees. He crouches low and backs into the damp shrubbery beside the trash cans.

The garage door opens and he drops his glowing cigarette to the ground, crushing it underfoot. He hears the bright chatter of talk radio as the car pulls in. The engine shuts off. A car door opens . . . the rustle of shopping bags . . . a woman’s light grunt. The car door shuts, followed by the soft tread of footsteps and the closing garage door.

Mrs. Bender, I presume.

Two women in the house. He stands in the dark, calmly considering these odds.

Before he can move, headlights again sweep the trees. This time, the car parks on the street. A man gets out of the car humming.

Flint stays still as stone, listening to the jingle of keys. The front door opens and shuts.

The odds have changed, and frustration burns in his throat as he sneaks back out the side gate and moves away from the house. Unobserved, he straightens to stroll casually along the sidewalk. He returns to the silver sedan and quickly shuts the trunk. Then he slips into the driver’s seat and drives away from Bender’s house.

So close.

Cursing his luck, he replays events while driving toward Sea-Tac airport, but finds nothing he could have done differently. He returns the silver sedan to the car rental agency’s parking lot, already thinking about his next visit to Milo Bender’s residence. Perhaps his cricket will stay another week, another month. Perhaps she has become a permanent resident.

In a short while, a taxi drops Flint off at his address in Olympia. He enters the house, and when he glimpses the Halloween costume waiting on the countertop, he thinks about tomorrow and his mood lifts.

T
he moment he steps from the elevator, Milo Bender detects a different vibe. The violent crimes division is charged with an electric intensity. The hunt. This is what he misses about the FBI.

When he enters the door marked “Special Agent in Charge,” Stuart Cox sets down his coffee cup. “Good morning, Bender,” he says, pointing toward a chair. “What can I do for you?”

“I think you need my help, actually,” Bender says, taking a seat.

“With the LeClaire girl?” Cox lifts his eyebrows. “Gutsy little thing, isn’t she?”

“Not with Reeve. With Dr. Moody.”

“How’s that?”

“The files that Flint took. I think I might be able to reconstruct them, maybe find what was worth killing for.”

Cox goes still. “I’m listening.”

“I recall that Dr. Moody was a bit of a Luddite, so I’d expect that what you found on his computer was disappointing, wasn’t it?”

Cox pulls a face. “Unfortunately. I wouldn’t call him a Luddite, exactly, but he was no technophile, either. His assistant said Moody wrote his desk notes in spiral notebooks that he kept at home. But any of those that might have had to do with Flint are gone.”

“And you’ve already collected Dr. Moody’s files from the hospital.”

“They weren’t especially illuminating. Prescriptions, dosages, that sort of thing. Moody clearly didn’t keep extensive notes at the hospital. And if he wrote things in longhand, he didn’t make a habit of scanning them to store them digitally.”

“That’s what I thought.” Bender adjusts his glasses. “During Flint’s trial, I got to study Moody’s work habits. I know some of what he likes to share and what he doesn’t. So if you’ll let me go over whatever you’ve got, perhaps I can reconstruct some of what’s missing.”

Cox steeples his fingers on his desk, seeming outwardly calm, but his knee bounces like a piston. “That’s an idea. You could reconstruct, give us a better idea of what Flint might have been after.” Cox slaps his desk. “Why not? What do you need?”

“Just a desk, some coffee, and copies of whatever papers you collected from his office.”

Cox pushes up from his chair. “I’ll have Keswick get you set up.”

Ten minutes later, Bender is at a table in an unused conference room, sifting through file boxes, extracting what he finds of interest. He’s in his element. Details from Daryl Wayne Flint’s trial come back to him, rising like braille from the ink on the paper. He shuffles and skims and sorts, wondering about Flint’s connection with those other missing girls.

Nikki Keswick opens the door and pushes in another cart loaded with file boxes. “This is the last of Dr. Moody’s stuff,” she says, leaning against the door frame. “But it’s mostly academic papers and clinical files. I don’t envy you.”

Bender gives a rueful smile. “Sometimes you just have to work your hunches.”

“And you have a hunch that there’s some overlooked evidence here?”

“Pieces of a puzzle. Maybe something that leads to something else.” He shrugs. “When you can’t move forward, you’ve got to turn around and look behind you, right?”

“I’ve heard that. And it sure can’t hurt. We’re kind of stuck at the moment, and Blankenship is giving everyone fits.”

“You don’t like him much, do you?”

“Does it show?”

“Just a tad.”

She rolls her shoulders. “The thing is, he reminds me way too much of my ex-boyfriend.”

“Oh? He’d probably like hearing that.”

“Not if he knew my ex-boyfriend,” she says with a wicked smile.

Bender is laughing when Blankenship’s forehead looms behind her. “I’ve been looking for you, Nikki. Are you working here or what?”

“Sorry,” she says, snapping to attention. “What’s up?”

“A couple of things. We got a tip from a woman at a wig shop who swears that Flint came in and bought some wigs.”

“Wow. Wigs similar to the synthetic hair we found?”

“Possibly. But first, I want you to check on something from the evidence team. We got an ID on those headlight fragments at Triangle Park. It’s a Ford Bronco. I want you to search vehicle regs and see what pops. Do a cross-check with anyone who might have any connection with Flint, got that? Get back to me the minute you’ve got a lead.”