Hot Pursuit (10 page)

Maria and Gillman both looked over Sam’s shoulder as he flipped through what was, absolutely, a collection of bills and an advertisement from a local restaurant.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that Maggie’s rich new boyfriend with laryngitis works for either Con Ed or Paulo’s Pizzeria,” Jenn said.

But stuck between the bills for the phones and Internet and a statement from a credit card company, Sam found a postcard.

It was plain and white with no picture—the kind with the postage printed right on it, that you could buy from the post office. And it was addressed to the assemblywoman with her name and street address printed onto a mailing label.

The message on it was also computer printed, and affixed via a label.

Bottom drawer
was all it said. There was no return address, and the postmark was from here in the city, dated yesterday.

“Bottom drawer of what?” Maria wondered.

“Your desk?” Jenn theorized, as out in the hall, Ash started to cry. “The filing cabinet… ?”

“Don’t open anything, don’t move,” Sam ordered as he handed it with the rest of the mail to Jenn. He opened the door to bring Lopez and Ash back inside, taking his son from the SEAL. Ash had achieved infinity-mouth, which meant full-lung-power wailing was a nanosecond away. “It’s okay, big guy. Daddy’s got you now. That was a little scary, I know. I’ll try to give you more warning next time. But Lopez is a good guy, okay? Shhhh, now …”

“Sorry, sir,” Lopez apologized as Ash locked his arms around Sam’s neck. “I couldn’t get him to—”

Sam cut him off. “Not your fault. Go find Zanella.” He’d managed to pull Ash back from going full bore into the angry-baby
zone—a tremendous achievement. But the kid was now a total snot machine, which wasn’t fun for anyone. “Gillman, look in the baby bag for a Kleenex,” he ordered as he dug for his cell phone, because enough was enough.

Whatever was in the bottom drawer of Maria’s desk or the closet or wherever, he wanted his son far from it. Which meant he needed Alyssa off of the phone with Max, now. He speed-dialed her and—shit—went right to her voice mail.

Which was when Lopez brought Izzy back from the bathrooms.

“Nope and nope,” Izzy reported.

“What took you so freaking long?” Gillman asked, disgusted with Zanella as usual, as he found the container of baby wipes and was attempting to wrestle it open.

“I had to go,” Izzy said with a shrug.

“That’s for his butt,” Sam told Gillman, as he dialed Alyssa again. They had a code. Two calls, right in a row, meant break away ASAP and call right back. Again, it went to voice mail. “I need something dry to use for his nose.”

“I’ve got a box of tissues right here,” Jenn said, adding, “Oh!” as she realized a little too late that she’d yanked open the drawer of her desk. The
bottom
drawer. “Oh, my
God.”
She slammed the drawer shut.

Lopez didn’t even ask. He just grabbed Ash and took him out the door, as Izzy and Gillman both reached for Maria, to hustle her outside, too.

Poor Jenn was no doubt used to being overlooked, but Gillman’s brains and training overrode his hormones as he realized that he was closer to Jenn. He left Maria in Izzy’s charge and turned to Jenn, but she wasn’t ready to run. She moved away from him, keeping him at arm’s length.

“The smell,” she said. “Is just… God, that looked like
… Blood
. What is
in
there?”

The smell—which absolutely hadn’t been in the room a moment
ago—was fucking awful. Sam covered his nose and mouth with the inside of his elbow and grabbed the drawer-pull with his other hand and …

Jesus.

It looked like a human heart, lying there in a puddle of blood and gore. But it couldn’t be. It had to belong to some recently butchered animal. A pig. Didn’t pigs have similar hearts to humans?

Whoever had put it there had lined the drawer with plastic, to keep the mess from dripping out. And they’d caulked and sealed the edges of the drawer, too—which was why this hideous smell hadn’t leaked either, despite the office’s subtropic heat.

Sam shut the drawer, but it was too late. The seal had been broken. Still the odor was less awful with it closed.

Jenn had gotten over her initial shock and was both angry and disgusted, her hand over her nose. She called to Maria, out in the hall, “It’s some kind of dead animal body part,” then turned to Gillman to add, “I doubt it’s toxic. It’s just gross.” She searched the top of her desk for something. “You can go out into the hall if you need air, but I have to …” She picked up both a business card and the telephone. “I’m calling the police.”

Sam, meanwhile, was dialing Alyssa again—three calls in a row meant
pick up, now
—because this prank wasn’t the act of some harmless loose-screw fuckwad. This had been planned and executed by someone who had skill, means, and will. As far as threats went, this one fell into the “take very seriously” column.

And the fact that Alyssa had gone dark was not sitting well with him. And, shit, again his call to her went right to voice mail.

“What kind of degenerate would do something like this?
God!
Yes,” Jenn said into the phone. “Detective Mick Callahan, please. It’s Jennilyn LeMay from Assemblywoman Bonavita’s office and it’s urgent.”

“Stay here,” Sam ordered Gillman.

“Yes, sir.”

Out in the hall, Izzy had taken Ash from Lopez and, by some miracle, he was making the baby laugh instead of cry. Maria was on her cell phone, her face pale, and Alyssa was still nowhere in sight.

“Get Ash and Ms. Bonavita back in the office and lock the door behind you,” Sam ordered Izzy. “Open the window in there if you have to. Lopez, you’re with me. We’re going to open every door on this floor, I don’t care if it’s locked, kick it down.”

“What’s going on?”

Alyssa.

Sam exhaled hard as he turned, and there she was, coming out of the stairwell with Vlachic on her heels.

She was whole, in one piece, no gaping hole in her chest where her heart had once been.

The relief that flooded him mixed badly with the god-awful smell of death and rot that clung to the insides of his nostrils. Rationally, he knew that the thing in Jenn’s desk drawer couldn’t have come from his wife, but his vivid imagination was linked to his inner caveman, and it often took the less-rational path.

“She was out front,” Vlachic reported. “Talking to the President.”

Izzy, who hadn’t yet gotten to the close-and-lock-the-door part of his order, said, “That sounds like some kind of rockin’ euphemism.
Stop banging on the bathroom door, homes, I’m talking to the President.”

“No,” Vlachic told the taller man. “I mean, yeah, that does sound like … But… She was actually talking.
To
the President.”

Jenn appeared beside Izzy in the doorway. “NYPD’s on their way.”

“What,” Alyssa asked Sam again, as she took Ash from Izzy’s arms, “is going on?”

A
lyssa got in the police detective’s face. “I am
not
the problem here.”

“Maybe not, but you’re also not the solution
I
would have chosen,” he retorted, and across the room, she sensed more than saw Sam shift his weight.

Oh, yeah. Good idea. Start a brawl with this fool. That would help.

But to Sam’s credit, he didn’t move more than that one little weight-change, and he certainly didn’t speak. Even though Alyssa knew how badly he wanted to.

Before the police had arrived, they’d sent Ash and Izzy back to Savannah’s pied-à-terre where Sam and Alyssa were staying. Izzy Zanella apparently had the wonder-touch when it came to the diaper-wearing set. It was pretty impressive. Alyssa had known that the SEAL babysat, all the time, for Troubleshooters CO Tom Paoletti and his wife Kelly, but she hadn’t really thought about what that meant until today.

But not only did Ash take to Izzy immediately and quite warmly, it was also clear that the SEAL petty officer was unafraid of spending an undetermined number of hours alone with the baby. He actually seemed as if he were going to enjoy the opportunity.

“I became an uncle when I was barely out of diapers myself,” Izzy told her as he gathered up Ash’s bag. “I speak baby at a high level of expertise, so we’ll be fine. My cell phone’s on. I won’t be insulted when you call to check in, so do what you need to do. Call every five minutes, if you want. If I don’t answer, it’s because I’m dealing with a two-handed diaper of doom. I’ll call you right back if that happens.”

Izzy was known in SEAL Team Sixteen as being something of a wise-ass but he leaned in close before he left, and told Alyssa quietly, “Feel free to stop on your way back to the condo and buy your husband there a drink. FYI, the whole heart-in-the-drawer, you-going-AWOL thing weirded him out way more than he’s letting on. And I have no plans for any extracurricular carousing tonight, because, you know, I’m married.”

Alyssa did know that he was married. To Dan Gillman’s sister, Eden, no less. Who’d lost her baby six months into her pregnancy, after which she’d run off to Germany.

All of which had to suck for Izzy. But that was neither here nor there, as Alyssa stood now, facing down NYPD Detective Mick Callahan, who’d lingered after the uniformed officers had left. He didn’t like the fact that she and her team were here and he wasn’t afraid to let her know that.

When Callahan had first arrived, he’d all but peed in possessive circles around Assemblywoman Bonavita, who’d finally gone into her office to escape him on the pretense of making a phone call.

At about the same time, Alyssa had sent Lopez, Gillman, and Vlachic out with Jenn, to scope out both Maria and Jenn’s apartments.

Mick Callahan hadn’t liked the way gleamingly handsome Gillman had said “See you later,” to the assemblywoman. It had made him pissy.

Extra pissy. It had been clear from that moment he’d walked in that he felt threatened by their very presence.

“I don’t get,” he said now, in his tough-guy New York accent,
“how it’s going to help Maria to have
you
here, bringing additional attention to her situation. What she needs to do is keep her head down and let this bullshit pass.”

“I’m pretty sure, detective,” Alyssa shot back, “that keeping her head down was removed from the options list when someone broke into this office and put an animal’s heart in that desk drawer.”

The entire drawer had been removed and taken to the lab to verify that, indeed, it was a pig’s heart in there, as Sam had suggested. It had to be. Nearly everyone was going on the assumption that it wasn’t human—the idea that it could be was just too awful to consider. But Alyssa did consider it, and until they got the results from the lab, until they located Margaret Bell-Thorndyke—aka Maggie Thorndyke—and the cell phone from which the mysterious-voiced man had made that call, she was putting both her team and the clients into lockdown mode.

And yes, it was likely that when Ms. Thorndyke was found, she would discover that her cell phone had been lost or stolen. The police were tracking it right now, hopefully to some disgruntled butcher’s shop.

But until they had some solid answers, Alyssa was taking precautions.

All of the assemblywoman’s interns, both male and female, had been called and advised to come into the office only if they had a scheduled interview with Alyssa. And Maria and Jenn, both, were going to have a Navy SEAL or two guarding them, around the clock—at least until the security systems at the office and in their apartments were installed and running.

“If Maria hadn’t waited nearly a week for your team to arrive,” Callahan pointed out acerbically, “she would’ve had a security system in place. Maybe even a camera—”

“Do you often engage in wishful thinking about your cases, Detective?” Alyssa asked. “Because in my experience, I find that doesn’t help.”

“And what I find doesn’t help,” he said, “is turning something like this into a media circus. You publicize this, then we
will
have a story.”

Callahan was one of those men who walked into the room and looked over the tops of the heads of all of the women as he tried to find the man who was in charge.

He probably didn’t do it consciously. But he’d done it today-walking right past Alyssa to introduce himself to Sam.

It was a hot button for her, she had to admit. And it had made her put more than the usual amount of steel in her voice when she’d set him straight. “Over here, Detective.
I’m
in charge.”

At that point, she still could have won him over—it wasn’t too late. It was clear, just from looking at him, that he was the kind of too-attractive, too full-of-himself man who said things like, “I have a way with the ladies,” and called his spouse “the little woman.”

Alyssa could have smiled at him in a way that would have made him think that she was respectfully acknowledging the obviously enormous size of his penis. And maybe she could have swallowed her ire and done it if she truly believed that he had more than a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming more to Maria Bonavita than her pet cop.

But he didn’t. It was clear that Maria was uncomfortable around him.

“I have no intention of publicizing any of this,” Alyssa told him. “At this time, that wouldn’t serve the investigation.”

“And you don’t think someone’s going to recognize you?” Callahan asked. “And start asking questions?
Why is bodyguard-to-the-stars Alyssa Locke spending so much time with Assemblywoman Bonavita?”

“No one’s going to recognize me,” she said.

“I did.” He gave her an extremely inappropriate once over. “A beautiful woman like yourself… ? Although I gotta confess that the outfit you were wearing in those pictures in the
National Voice? Far
more memorable than what you’ve got on right now, toots.”

•   •   •

Toots.

The police detective had called Alyssa
toots
.

Not
sweetheart
or
honey
or
sugar
, but
toots
.

And Sam knew, as he leaned there against the wall in the assemblywoman’s front office, that this man’s choice of belittling term of endearment was not unintentional. It was meant to be a reminder of that other word that started with a
t
and ended with
ts
.