Pursuit (9 page)

At the time, Haine had been ecstatic over his good fortune. Philip Court, the owner and majority shareholder of Court Industries, was a weak man, interested more in writing some stupid scholarly book than in the company that had been in his family for almost two hundred years. Philip had given Haine a free hand in running CI. And then it turned out that Philip’s daughter—who held a hefty package of shares herself—was a beauty.
Perfect.
Haine could marry the daughter and acquire a big share in the company without spending a cent. And he could proceed with
Proteus
, which would make him megarich. He was earning good money as CEO, but nothing like what Proteus would make him. Haine had never met a woman he couldn’t seduce. He knew all the tricks both in and out of bed, and it wasn’t until he’d spent months watching Charlotte turn up her nose at him and leave a room as soon as he entered it that he finally admitted to himself that she couldn’t be seduced. Not by him, anyway.

But before he’d reluctantly given up on getting Charlotte to marry him, he’d studied her just as hard as he’d ever studied a company prospectus. His file on her was as complete as he could make it.

The photographs had been hard to get. Charlotte was a private woman and had never figured much in the society pages, though as a Court of Court Industries she could have, of course. She could have done anything she wanted to, though apparently all she wanted was to study art.

Many of the photographs had been taken by Robert himself, and in most of them, Charlotte was looking either bored or annoyed. Some of the photographs had been lifted off the Web, posted there by the charities she supported and the three weddings she’d attended as a bridesmaid. In those photographs, she was radiant.

“Looker,” Barrett said, flipping through the pages.

“Yes.” Haine nearly sighed. Maybe he should have tried harder to seduce Charlotte.

“Lookers have a harder time hiding.” Barrett closed the last page and held out his hand. The second file was entirely press clippings, all from the past two months. Dozens of articles from the first few days, then fewer and fewer as the days went by. Nothing new was being reported, and the Court news cycle ended, to be replaced by other news cycles. The worst winter weather since 1931. A plane full of high-school band players going down over Tampa. A new congressional scandal.

Barrett carefully read every word of every article, sat very still for about five minutes, his pale blue eyes unblinking, then went over every article again.

Haine knew that he was reading the police and newspaper versions of events. They’d constructed a story line with a lot of help and input from him.

Charlotte Court, in the throes of a nervous breakdown after being a caregiver for two years, had smothered her ailing father with a pillow and been surprised in the act by the Court Industries head of security, Martin Conklin, who had come to pay his respects to Philip Court in the hospital. Charlotte Court nearly cracked Martin Conklin’s skull open with the IV tree and shot and killed Imelda Delgado, an ICU nurse, in a desperate attempt to get away.

Charlotte had told Robert Haine, CEO of Court Industries, that enemies were following her and that she had been forced to procure a gun for herself. There were several interviews with Robert Haine, where he blamed himself for not recognizing in time “the enormous pressure Charlotte was under.”

Though the police authorities put out an APB, Charlotte Court simply disappeared off the face of the Earth. Friends of Charlotte Court expressed utter shock at the events. They all knew she was under stress due to her father’s long, lingering illness, but no one believed that she was capable of killing her father and a nurse.

Haine had even found an expert that the newspapers could quote.

“Long-term caregiver stress has only recently become recognized as an illness in itself,”

says Norbert Leonard, Rifkin Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, author of a recently published study on caregiver stress:
Close to the Brink: How Caregiver Meltdown
Occurs and What You Can Do to Stop It
. “Clearly, Charlotte Court was able to put up a façade of functionality but the inner stresses concomitant with two years of caregiving led to a major breakdown. We call caregivers ‘hidden patients.’ The Task Force on Caregiver Stress, which I head, has carried out blood tests on four thousand caregivers, and by the second year of caregiving cortisol levels rise by 40 percent. Cortisol is the stress hormone, which interferes with linear thought and impulse control.”

Barrett finished his reading and lifted his eyes. “How did she get away?”

It still rankled. Haine worked hard to keep a flush from rising to his face. “Well, you read it. She—ah—grabbed the IV tree and swung it against Martin Conklin’s head. There’s no way he could have foreseen that. It’s right there in the articles—”

“No.” Barrett’s voice was calm and firm. “Charlotte Court clearly is a resourceful woman. What I meant was— how did she get out of Warrenton?”

“The police checked airport departures, Amtrak departures, and Greyhound departures. So did we.”

Barrett looked away, then back. His eyes were unfocused, and he spoke as if to himself, as if in a light trance. His words came out slowly, as if he were reading what he was saying as it scrolled across a screen. “She knows she can’t take public transportation. She’s too well-known in Warrenton. There was bound to be somebody who would recognize her, either because of who her father was or because of her charity work. And public transportation has an end point. Find out where she got on, and you know where she got off. Or at least you can backtrack to the jumping-off point. So she needs private transport. Some-how she has to get away without being seen by anyone who can report later to the police. One possibility would be a private plane.” Those pale blue eyes focused intently on Haine.

At least Haine had an answer to that one. He shook his head. “There was a snowstorm that night. All planes were grounded from 5 p.m. onward, both commercial and private. Martin was coldcocked around 5:15 p.m.” Every time he thought of it, Haine shivered with rage. At the bitch herself, but at Conklin, too. He’d failed miserably, and so Haine was forced to deal with this contract killer with the cold pale eyes and was going to have to fork out an indecent amount of money, so he didn’t have to do what Conklin should have taken care of in the first place.

Barrett tilted his head back against the high-backed armchair, eyes slightly unfocused again. “Then she has to use a car. An SUV could make it out of town. Roads are cleared before runways.”

“Except she didn’t own an SUV.” Haine ground his teeth. The little bitch had joined an association to lobby for the banning of SUVs the week after he’d plunked down $45,000

for a Tahoe. The little lecture she’d given him about road safety and gas emissions in her cool soft voice still rankled. “She drove a Prius. A blue Prius.”

“So how did she get to the hospital?”

“Don’t know,” Haine shrugged irritably. It was the question everyone asked. It had chilled him at the time to think that his plan wouldn’t have worked in any case. Conklin had been on the lookout for a light blue Prius with a specific tag number. In the bad weather, he wouldn’t have been able to make out the passengers of passing cars and wouldn’t have been looking for Charlotte in another car anyway. “Not a taxi. The police checked. Someone drove her?”

“Maybe.” That faraway tone was back again. “Maybe not. Maybe she borrowed someone’s car. Then she catches your man killing her father. He’s about to shoot Court when she takes him down and escapes, though he gets off a wing shot.”

“Yes,” Haine gritted. A small sun of humiliation and resentment burned brightly in his chest. Sitting still under that calm, flat scrutiny was unsettling. He got up to put more wood on the fire.

“So she gets in the car she came in and goes . . . to the police,” Barrett continued softly.

“That’s the logical step. Why doesn’t she take it? Why not go to the police and report what she’s seen? Because”—he closed his eyes again—“because you’re there already. Maybe with several of your men, already talking to the police chief. Maybe she recognizes some of your men. They’re armed, and she knows they’re dangerous. She understands what’s happening. So she goes home, and you have men posted there, too.” He opened his eyes. It hadn’t been a question.

Haine nodded. Barrett’s reading of what happened was eerie. It was as if he’d been there and had seen what went down.

“She’s wounded, bleeding, on the run. She needs to get out of town.” Barrett was silent for almost five minutes, silently drumming his fingers on the armchair. The fire against the far wall crackled. Haine jumped when a log crumbled into a pile of ash, shooting sparks up the flue. Barrett didn’t move a muscle. If his eyes hadn’t been open, Haine could have mistaken him for dead.

“I need to get inside the house. I need to get inside her head, find out what she likes and what she doesn’t like. What kind of resources she’ll have, where she might be headed. I assume that won’t be a problem?” He turned that flat pale gaze to Robert. Pending Charlotte’s reappearance, Court Mansion was closed off by the police. But the chief wasn’t about to deny him a small favor.

Robert nodded. “Yes, I can get the keys. We can go over there whenever you want.”

“Right now. I’ll need a couple of hours to go through her things. When I know her, I’ll know where to find her.”

“I can drive you over right now, if you want.”

“I’ll take my own car. Now, let’s talk terms.”

“Okay.” Haine sat up straighter. “I need a dead Charlotte Court found and identified by June 1. It has to look like an accident, the cause of death something that will hold up as an accident even with an autopsy. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly.” Barrett nodded his head once, gravely. “So. These are my terms: $200,000

now and $200,000 upon completion of the mission. Plus expenses. And since you’re not giving me much time, expenses will pile up. It won’t come cheap.” He looked hard at Haine.

Shit
.

Haine was putting himself entirely in this man’s hands. He nodded. Barrett rose smoothly, with the grace of an athlete. “You’ve just bought yourself a very beautiful corpse, Mr. Haine.”

San Luis

Charlotte was so cold. It felt as if she would never be warm again. Matt had made her change into warm, dry clothes and drink hot tea with so much sugar in it, it was a miracle she didn’t plunge into a diabetic coma on the spot. It all worked to bring her head back from the brink, though her body wasn’t warming up yet. The deep, convulsive shivering had stopped, but tremors still shook her. She was still cold inside, a deep, painful chill, as if her heart had been packed in ice.

He knew
.

Of course he knew. Those dark eyes were intelligent, observant. He’d put it all together. Charlotte had watched him do it, heart beating wildly in her chest, wondering if she was going to have to run for it again.

Somehow, though, she knew she could never escape from Matt. It had been bad enough running away from Haine and his goons. Matt was an entirely different animal. Quiet, strong, and observant, every inch a warrior. How could she possibly be a match for him?

Martin Conklin, Robert’s preposterous head of security, had always posed as a real tough guy, letting everyone know he was a former soldier.

Conklin must have seen
Patton
a gazillion times because he affected a George C. Scott swagger. All that was missing was an ivory-handled revolver. His men, too, affected that hard-as-nails security-staff look, running around with close-cropped hair shaved to the skull along the sides, pitch-black Matrix sunglasses, and curly little wires running from the earpiece down into the collar. They spoke into their wrists in a sort of military jargon, and tended to say things like, “Roger that” or “Ten-four.”

Charlotte thought they were ludicrous, all of them. She also thought it an utter waste of company money keeping such a large contingent of security staff. Her father had, too. While he had still been capable of taking an interest in the company, he had spoken to Robert a number of times about it.

She had been right in her assessment of the idiots. The security staff couldn’t have been that good because, in the end, she’d managed to escape from both Martin Conklin and his men.

She could never escape from Matt Sanders if he chose to attack her. He didn’t have to strut his toughness. He was the real deal. She’d seen his toughness and strength for herself. It was real, and it wasn’t just physical, it was mental and spiritual as well, bone deep. The man was formidable in every way.

He was watching her calmly, not moving a muscle. His dark eyes were alive, aware. If it weren’t for that, she could almost think him a wax figure. She had the impression he could see right inside her head. There wasn’t anything she could do, nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. Matt Sanders would know if she was planning on bolting as soon as she knew it herself and would already have taken steps to stop her.

Right now, though, he was taking pains to be utterly unthreatening. He was so still he hardly seemed to be breathing. Yet, when he’d seen her scar, something frightening had come into his dark eyes, something feral and uncontrolled.

A bullet wound, clearly without medical care, could only mean one thing. She was a renegade, on the run.