Bait Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for Bait

  “Veteran romance/crime bestseller Robards delivers another hold-your-breath drama, this time starring FBI agent Sam McCabe and advertising executive Maddie Fitzgerald. Her pacing is excellent, and regular infusions of humor keep the story bouncing along between trysts and attacks. This one is sure to please fans.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Robards returns once again with a pulse-pounding novel. Nonstop suspense amidst sensual romance heats up the pages of this captivating novel. Top rate suspenseful action and sizzling romance form the backbone of this spectacular read, one of Robards’s all-time best.”—The Best Reviews

  “Fans of police procedural romances will enjoy the action-packed thriller that does not slow down until the final confrontation ties up all loose ends.... Readers will enjoy this solid suspense story.”—Midwest Book Review

  “A top-notch thriller filled with humorous characters and diverting subplots that leave the reader engrossed until the very end, this is another coup for Robards.”—Booklist

  “Maddie and Sam are two extremely likable and compelling characters, which makes this a love affair worth rooting for.”

  —Romantic Times

  Also by Karen Robards

  BEACHCOMBER

  WHISPERS AT MIDNIGHT

  IRRESISTIBLE

  TO TRUST A STRANGER

  PARADISE COUNTY

  SCANDALOUS

  GHOST MOON

  THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

  THE SENATOR’S WIFE

  HEARTBREAKER

  HUNTER’S MOON

  WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT

  MAGGY’S CHILD

  ONE SUMMER

  THIS SIDE OF HEAVEN

  DARK OF THE MOON

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,

  Ontario, M4V 3B2, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin

  Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition.

  First Signet Printing, June 2005

  Copyright © Karen Robards, 2004 Excerpt from Superstition copyright © Karen Robards, 2005

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49544-5

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  PETER, THIS ONE’S FOR YOU.

  HAPPY 21ST, DARLING.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank my husband, Doug, my sons Peter, Christopher, and Jack, and Peggy Kennady, all of whom helped with research, contributed ideas, insights, and comments, and generally told me when I was writing myself into a corner.

  I’d also like to thank the people who made this book possible: my brilliant agent, Robert Gottlieb, my wonderful editor, Christine Pepe, and her noble assistant, Lily Chin; and Carole Baron, who is awesome as always.

  ONE

  Thursday, August 7

  It was a professional job, Sam McCabe saw at a glance. The bare minimum of fuss and muss. A couple sprawled on the floor of their cathedral-ceilinged great room, hands bound behind their backs, blood from the bullet wounds in their heads soaking into the already deep red of their Oriental carpet.

  “I see dead people,” E. P. Wynne muttered behind him. The words were slightly slurred by the enormous wad of bubble gum the big guy was chewing in an effort to quit smoking. Sam shot him a quelling glance. Granted, they were so tired they were more or less punch-drunk, but humor in the face of multiple homicides was never a good idea.

  “Who the hell are you?” A brown-uniformed local yokel separated himself from the pack at the corner of the room and came toward them, bristling. Considering that Sam was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and sporting a three-day growth of beard, while Wynne’s two-hundred-fifty-pound girth was decked out in baggy shorts and a stained Hawaiian shirt, the man’s attitude was understandable. But this was the culmination of another in a series of really lousy weeks. Sam was not in the mood for attitude, especially from a skinny kid who might or might not be just out of his teens.

  “FBI,” Sam growled, not even slowing down. Wynne, ever obliging, flashed his ID as they brushed past the kid like he wasn’t even there.

  “Nobody called the feds,” the yokel protested to their backs, then, less certain, called over his shoulder, “Did anybody call the feds?”

  “Hell, no.” Another brown-uniformed local, a burly, surly-looking fifty-something with a bald head as shiny as a Christmas ornament, entered through an arched opening at the opposite end of the room in time to hear the plaintive question and headed toward them. “I’m Sheriff Burt Eigel. And sure as shit, nobody around here called anybody, feds or otherwise.”

  “Sam McCabe. E. P. Wynne,” Sam said, jerking a thumb at Wynne as he introduced him.

  “FBI,” Wynne added helpfully, doing his badge-waving thing again.

  Sam stopped beside the female victim and looked down at the b
odies. Multiple strips of duct tape covered each victim’s mouth. Thin, white cord secured their wrists. The fingers had purpled, indicating that the cords had been tied tightly enough to impede circulation—and to hurt. “Wendell Perkins and his wife, Tammy Sue, right?”

  Eigel frowned. “How the hell did y’all know that?”

  “Let’s just say a little bird told me.” Sam squatted and pressed his fingers to the carpet. It was made of fine wool, expensive, just like the furniture in the enormous great room was expensive, the newly built McMansion was expensive, and the gated Mobile, Alabama, retirement community was expensive. The blood soaking the soft, smooth fibers still retained a degree of warmth. This time he’d been close—so damned close. Twenty minutes earlier and Perkins and the missus would have been offering him a cup of coffee—or trying to sneak out their back door, depending on why they’d been hit.

  Damn it to hell and back anyway.

  “Who called this in?” Sam asked, still studying the bodies as he stood up and wiped his fingers on his already ripe jeans. It was not quite eleven-thirty p.m. Blonde, bird-boned Tammy Sue was dressed for bed in a pair of navy cotton pajamas and had a single white terry slipper on her left foot. Perkins, who appeared to be at least two decades her senior, was a beefy, big-bellied guy with a furry back and chicken legs. He was wearing nothing but boxers, which he had pissed. The pungent ammonia smell all but overrode the meat-locker aroma of fresh blood.

  As Sam had noted on multiple previous occasions, there was no dignity in death.

  “There’s an alarm. Somebody here hit the panic button. We had a man on the scene nine minutes after the call came in. They were dead when we got here.” Eigel paused and glared at Sam, who was glancing around without any real hope for shell casings. There were none immediately visible, and he’d be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that none would be found. “Why the fuck should I be telling you this?”

  There was that attitude thing again. Sam still wasn’t in the mood. “ ’Cause you like me?”

  Eigel’s florid face turned apoplectic. Ignoring him, Sam moved around the bodies, studying them from different angles. From the look of it, Perkins had died first. His wife’s death had come moments later, most likely a by-product of the hit on her husband. A glance around the room revealed several possible points of entry for the killer: the front door, which opened into the slate-floored hall that Sam and Wynne had just crossed, and which provided access to the great room through a wide, arched opening; the smaller arched door leading into the kitchen through which the sheriff had entered; or the sliding patio door on the south wall. He calculated the steps from each to the black leather couch where, from the evidence—remote control and a bowl of melted ice cream on the coffee table in front of it; the mate to Tammy Sue’s white terry slipper on the carpet between the couch and table; several sections of the newspaper scattered about—Tammy Sue had been sitting when the killer surprised her.

  The most likely point of egress was through the kitchen.

  Wynne pulled a tiny digital camera out of his pocket and started taking pictures of the crime scene. Sam, meanwhile, headed for the kitchen.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” From the corner of his eye, Sam saw that Eigel was looking from one to the other of them. By now his face was as red as the blood-soaked carpet, and his eyes were starting to bulge out of his head like a pug dog’s.

  “Our jobs, man. Just like you,” Wynne said soothingly. As usual, he was playing good cop to Sam’s bad cop. The roles suited both of them to a tee.

  “You got no jurisdiction here. This is our case.”

  Eigel had elected to follow him, Sam registered absently as he glanced around the kitchen. It was gleaming white, wall-to-wall cabinets, an island, the latest appliances. State-of-the-art, fit to grace one of those women’s magazines. An ice-cream scoop had been left in one of the pair of stainless-steel sinks. Other than that, it was immaculate.

  Sam headed toward the patio door at the far end. Its bright floral curtain wasn’t shut all the way. An approximately eight-inch-wide, floor-to-ceiling slice of glass was visible, black with the darkness of the night beyond. The door was closed and locked. Careful not to touch it, he studied the handle. It had a self-locking mechanism, so the killer could have exited this way as well. Turning slowly, he stared at the pale oak floor.

  A thin sliver of grass nestled near the foot of the island.

  Bingo.

  “He entered and exited here,” Sam said. “You can dust for fingerprints, but you won’t find any. Footprints are a better bet, especially if the ground’s soft outside. He would have had to walk around the house. Maybe he got careless.”

  Eigel bristled. “Listen, smart guy, I’m right now officially askin’ you and your pardner in there to leave. Nobody here called you, nobody here wants you, and you got no call bustin’ in and tryin’ to take over.”

  Sam ignored the comment as he turned and headed back toward the great room, retracing the killer’s path. Twenty steps to the great-room door, where he paused to try to visualize the scene through the killer’s eyes. The couch faced away from the door. If Tammy Sue had been sitting on the couch, eating ice cream and watching TV, she probably wouldn’t have seen him coming.

  At least, not until it was too late.

  Feeling his stomach tighten, Sam glanced at Eigel, who was behind him again. “You got roadblocks up? Say, five miles out in all directions, access to expressways blocked, vehicles being checked as they attempt to exit the area, that kind of thing?”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”

  “I take that as a ‘no.’ ”

  As Sam spoke, more people rushed into the great room from the front hall: paramedics making an unholy racket as they rolled in a pair of stretchers, a grumpy-looking man in a rumpled suit and tie, and a mid-thirties brunette in white jeans and a black T-shirt, crying, “Daddy! Oh my God, where’s my daddy?”

  “Janelle!” Eigel abandoned him to rush to the brunette’s side, reaching her just as she stopped, clapped her hands to her cheeks, and, eyes riveted on the corpses, let out a shriek that could have cracked windows as far away as Atlanta.

  Holy Christ, Sam thought, wincing as his head gave another excruciating pang. Somebody pass the Excedrin.

  “Da-a-a-ddy! Da-a-a-ddy!”

  “Get somebody on the door!” Clumsily patting the screeching Janelle on the back, Eigel turned to bark the order at the skinny officer in the corner, who was looking appalled. “Nobody else gets in here unless I personally clear it, understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” The kid hurried toward the door. Eigel glared at Sam, muttered something that looked like “Goddamn fucking zoo,” and turned back to deal as best he could with Janelle’s hysterics.

  Following the kid with his gaze, Sam saw that the elaborate front door, which had been just slightly ajar when he and Wynne had pushed through it moments earlier, was now standing wide open. Beyond it, he could see the ambulance that had joined the pair of police cars that already had been parked in the driveway when he and Wynne had pulled up—their first concrete indication that they were too late. The ambulance’s siren was off, but its flashing blue lights lit up the night. At the bottom of the small, manicured front yard, more cars were parking hurriedly, haphazardly. A TV truck was arriving; people were charging up the yard.

  Wynne joined him, pocketing his camera. “Hey, at least this time we were right behind him.”

  “Yeah.” Sam watched as deputies started to stick tape to the carpet to mark the positions of the bodies. The guy in the suit—from an overheard snatch of conversation, Sam gathered that he was the coroner—knelt beside Tammy Sue, carefully lifting a section of long, bleached hair, now wet with blood, away from her face. Even in death, she was a pretty woman, fine-featured, carefully groomed. As he had expected, a pair of black, oozing holes the size of dimes adorned her right temple.

  Like all the others, she’d been shot twice in the head. From the look of the dark stippl
ing surrounding the wounds, it had been at point-blank range.

  He was hit by a wave of weariness so strong it almost made him stagger. Seventy-two hours without sleep, seventy-two hours spent frantically racing the clock—and it ended like this.

  Again.

  “Hell, let’s go,” he said dispiritedly to Wynne. “We can get everything else we need tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.”

  Sam headed for the door. Raising a hand in farewell to the sheriff, who had managed to get the now-sobbing Janelle into a chair, Wynne followed. Without saying so much as a word, they passed by the kid and another deputy who were holding down the doorway and slid, unnoticed, around the knot of people standing on the stoop, arguing heatedly for their right to be admitted into the house. The unaccustomed buzz of activity along with the stroboscopic lights from the ambulance had drawn the neighbors from nearby houses. Groups were congregating on nearby lawns, talking among themselves while they craned their necks to see what was going on. The TV camera crew raced toward the house. Even at that time of night, it was as steamy hot as a sauna. Stars winked lazily overhead above a canopy of feathery charcoal clouds. The moon was a distant, pale ghost of itself. A slight breeze, humid and unrefreshing, blew in from the lake across the street, rippling its moonlit surface. Walking down the golf-course-caliber lawn toward their rented Sentra, Sam took a deep breath and wished he hadn’t. Flowers were everywhere, massive banks of them bordering the streets, the driveways, the walks. Their colors were muted by the darkness, but their perfume was not, lending a nauseating sweetness to the heavy air that didn’t mix well with the death-scene smells that still lingered in his nostrils.

  “He’s watching us,” he said suddenly, stopping dead and glancing at Wynne. “You know that, don’t you? That son of a bitch is out here somewhere watching us. I can feel him.”

  “Sam ...” Wynne began, and Sam knew from his tone that he was about to get lecture number 257—the one on not taking cases so personally—again.