THE FBI THRILLERS COLLECTION Books 1-5 (135 page)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either 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.

RIPTIDE

A
Jove
Book / published by arrangement with the author

All rights reserved.

Copyright ©
2000
by
Catherine Coulter

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

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ISBN:
978-1-1011-9126-2

A
JOVE
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First edition (electronic): July 2001

My ongoing love and thanks to Iris Johansen and Kay Hooper, and a big special hug to Linda Howard for a terrific twist.

—CC

New York City
June 15
Present

B
ecca was watching an afternoon soap opera she’d seen off and on since she was a kid. She found herself wondering if she would ever have a child who needed a heart transplant one month and a new kidney the next, or a husband who wouldn’t be faithful to her for longer than it took a new woman to look in his direction.

Then the phone rang.

She jumped to her feet, then stopped dead still and stared over at the phone. She heard a guy on TV whining about how life wasn’t fair.

He didn’t know what fair was.

She made no move to answer the phone. She just stood there and listened, watching it as it rang three more times. Then, finally, because her mother was lying in a coma in Lenox Hill Hospital, because she just plain couldn’t stand the ringing ringing ringing, she watched her hand reach out and pick up the receiver.

She forced her mouth to form the single word. “Hello?”

“Hi, Rebecca. It’s your boyfriend. I’ve got you so scared you have to force yourself to pick up the phone. Isn’t that right?”

She closed her eyes as that hated voice, low and deep, swept over her, into her, making her so afraid she was shaking. No hint of an Atlanta drawl, no sharp New York vowels, no dropped R’s from Boston. A voice that was well educated, with smooth, clear diction, perhaps even a touch of the Brit in it. Old? Young? She didn’t know, couldn’t tell. She had to keep it together. She had to listen carefully, to remember how he spoke, what he said.
You can do it. Keep it together. Make him talk, make him say something, you never know what will pop out.
That was what the police psychologist in Albany had told her to do when the man had first started calling her. Listen carefully. Don’t let him scare you. Take control. You guide him, not the other way around. Becca licked her lips, chapped from the hot, dry air in Manhattan that week, an anomaly, the weather forecaster had said. And so Becca repeated her litany of questions, trying to keep her voice calm, cool, in charge, yes, that was her. “Won’t you tell me who you are? I really want to know. Maybe we can talk about why you keep calling me. Can we do that?”

“Can’t you come up with some new questions, Rebecca? After all, I’ve called you a good dozen times now. And you always say the same things. Ah, they’re from a shrink, aren’t they? They told you to ask those questions, to try to distract me, to get me to spill my guts to you. Sorry, it won’t work.”

She’d never really thought it would work, that stratagem. No, this guy knew what he was doing, and he knew how to do it. She wanted to plead with him to leave her alone, but she didn’t. Instead, she snapped. She simply lost it, the long-buried anger cutting through her bone-grinding fear. She gripped the phone, knuckles white, and yelled, “Listen to me, you little prick. Stop saying you’re
my boyfriend. You’re nothing but a sick jerk. Now, how about this for a question? Why don’t you go to hell where you belong? Why don’t you go kill yourself, you’re sure not worth anything to the human race. Don’t call me anymore, you pathetic bastard. The cops are on to you. The phone is tapped, do you hear me? They’re going to get you and fry you.”

She’d caught him off guard, she knew it, and an adrenaline rush sent her sky-high, but only for a moment. After a slight pause, he recovered. In a calm, reasonable voice, he said, “Now, Rebecca sweetheart, you know as well as I do that the cops now don’t believe you’re being stalked, that some weird guy is calling you at all hours, trying to scare you. You had the phone tap put in yourself because you couldn’t get them to do it. And I’ll never talk long enough for that old, low-tech equipment of yours to get a trace. Oh yes, Rebecca, because you insulted me, you’ll have to pay for it, big-time.”

She slammed down the receiver. She held it there, hard, as if trying to stanch the bleeding of a wound, as if holding it down would keep him from dialing her again, keep him away from her. Slowly, finally, she backed away from the phone. She heard a wife on the TV soap plead with her husband not to leave her for her younger sister. She walked out onto her small balcony and looked over Central Park, then turned a bit to the right to look at the Metropolitan Museum. Hordes of people, most in shorts, most of them tourists, sat on the steps, reading, laughing, talking, eating hot dogs from the vendor Teodolpho, some of them probably smoking dope, picking pockets, and there were two cops on horseback nearby, their horses’ heads pumping up and down, nervous for some reason. The sun blazed down. It was only mid-June, yet the unseasonable heat wave continued unabated. Inside the apartment it was twenty-five degrees cooler. Too cold, at least for her, but she couldn’t get the thermostat to move either up or down.

The phone rang again. She heard it clearly through the half-closed glass door.

She jerked around and nearly fell over the railing. Not that it was unexpected. No, never that, it was just so incongruous set against the normalcy of the scene outside.

She forced herself to look back into her mother’s lovely pastel living room, to the glass table beside the sofa, at the white phone that sat atop that table, ringing, ringing.

She let it ring six more times. Then she knew she had to answer it. It might be about her mother, her very sick mother, who might be dying. But of course she knew it was him. It didn’t matter. Did he know why she even had the phone turned on in the first place? He seemed to know everything else, but he hadn’t said anything about her mother. She knew she had no choice at all. She picked it up on the tenth ring.

“Rebecca, I want you to go out onto your balcony again. Look to where those cops are sitting on their horses. Do it now, Rebecca.”

She laid down the receiver and walked back out onto the balcony, leaving the glass door open behind her. She looked down at the cops. She kept looking. She knew something horrible was going to happen, she just knew it, and there was nothing she could do about it but watch and wait. She waited for three minutes. Just when she was beginning to convince herself that the man was trying new and different ways to terrorize her, there was a loud explosion.

She watched both horses rear up wildly. One of the cops went flying. He landed in a bush as thick smoke billowed up, obscuring the scene.

When the smoke cleared a bit, she saw an old bag lady lying on the sidewalk, her market cart in twisted pieces beside her, her few belongings strewn around her. Pieces of paper fluttered down to the sidewalk, now rutted with deep pockmarks. A large bottle of ginger ale was broken, liquid flowing over the old woman’s sneakers. Time seemed to have stopped, then suddenly there was chaos as
everyone in view exploded into action. Some people who’d been loitering on the steps of the museum ran toward the old lady.

The cops got there first; the one who’d been thrown from his horse was limping as he ran. They were yelling, waving their arms—at the carnage or the onrushing people, Becca didn’t know. She saw the horses throwing their heads from side to side, their eyes rolling at the smoke, the smell of the explosive. Becca stood there frozen, watching. The old woman didn’t move.

Becca knew she was dead. Her stalker had detonated a bomb and killed that poor old woman. Why? Just to terrorize her more? She was already so terrified she could hardly function. What did he want now? She’d left Albany, left the governor’s staff with no warning, had not even called to check in.

She walked slowly back inside the living room, firmly closing the glass door behind her. She looked at the phone, heard him saying her name, over and over.
Rebecca, Rebecca.
Very slowly, she hung up. She fell to her knees and jerked the connector out of the wall jack. The phone in the bedroom rang, and kept ringing.

She pressed herself close to the wall, her palms slammed against her ears. She had to do something. She had to talk to the cops. Again. Surely now that someone was dead, they would believe that some maniac was terrorizing her, stalking her, murdering someone to show her he meant business.

This time they had to believe her.

Six Days Later
Riptide, Maine

S
he pulled into the Texaco gas station, waved to the guy inside the small glass booth, then pumped some regular into her gas tank. She was on the outskirts of Riptide, a quaint town that sprawled north to south, hugging a
small harbor filled with sailboats, motorboats, and many fishing boats. Lobster, she thought, and breathed in deeply, air redolent of brine, seaweed, and fish, plus a faint hint of wildflowers, their sweetness riding lightly on the breeze from the sea.

Riptide, Maine.

She was in the sticks, the boondocks, a place nobody knew about, except for a few tourists in the summer. She was sixty-four miles north of Christmas Cove, a beautiful small coastal town she’d visited once as a child, with her mother.

For the first time in two and a half weeks, she felt safe. She felt the salty air tingling on her skin, let the warm breeze flutter her hair against her cheek.

She was in control of her life again.

But what about Governor Bledsoe? He would be all right, he had to be. He had cops everywhere, brushing his teeth for him, sleeping under his bed—no matter who he was sleeping with—hiding in his washroom off his big square office with its huge mahogany power desk. He would be all right. The crazy guy who had terrorized her until six days ago wouldn’t be able to get near him.

The main street in Riptide was West Hemlock. There wasn’t an East Hemlock unless someone wanted to drive into the ocean. She drove nearly to the end of the street to an old Victorian bed-and-breakfast called Errol Flynn’s Hammock. There was a widow’s walk on top, railed in black. She counted at least five colors on the exterior. It was perfect.

“I like the name,” she said to the old man behind the rich mahogany counter.

“Yep,” he said, and pushed the guest book toward her. “I like it, too. Been Scottie all my life. Sign in and I’ll beam you right up.”

She smiled and signed Becca Powell. She’d always admired Colin Powell. Surely he wouldn’t mind if she borrowed his name for a while. For a while, Becca Matlock would cease to exist.

She was safe.

But why, she wondered yet again, why hadn’t the police believed her? Still, they were providing the governor extra protection, so that was something.

Why?

New York City
June 15

T
hey had Becca sit in an uncomfortable chair with uneven legs. She laid one hand on the scarred table, looking at the woman and two men, and knew they thought she was a nut or, very likely, something far worse.

There were three other men in the room, lined up against the wall next to the door. No one introduced them. She wondered if they were FBI. Probably, since she’d reported the threat on the governor, and they were dressed in dark suits, white shirts, blue ties. She’d never seen so many wing tips in one room before.

Detective Morales, slight, black-eyed, handsome, said quietly, “Ms. Matlock, we are trying to understand this. You say he blew up this old woman just to get your attention? For what reason? Why you? What does he want? Who is he?”

She repeated it all again, more slowly this time, nearly word for word. Finally, seeing their stone faces, she tried yet again, leaning forward, clasping her hands on the
wooden table, avoiding the clump of long-ago-dried food. “Listen, I have no idea who he is. I know it’s a man, but I can’t tell if he’s old or if he’s young. I told you that I’ve heard him many times on the phone. He started calling me in Albany and then he followed me here to New York. I never saw him in Albany, but I’ve seen him here, stalking me, not close enough to identify, but I’m sure it was him I saw three different times. I reported this eight days ago to you, Detective Morales.”

“Yes,” said Detective McDonnell, a man who looked like he sliced and diced criminal suspects for breakfast. His body was long and thin, his suit rumpled and loose, his voice cold. “We know all about it. We acted on it. I spoke to the police in Albany when we didn’t see anything of him here in New York. We all compared notes, discussed everything thoroughly.”

“What else can I tell you?”

“You said he calls you Rebecca, never shortens your name.”

“Yes, Detective Morales. He always says Rebecca and he always identifies himself as my boyfriend.”

A look went between the two men. Did they think it was a vengeful ex-boyfriend?

“I’ve told you that I don’t recognize his voice. I have never known this man, never. I’m certain of it.”

Detective Letitia Gordon, the only other woman in the room, was tall, wide-mouthed, with hair cut very short, and she carried a big chip on her shoulder. She said in a voice colder than McDonnell’s, “You could try for the truth. I’m tired of all this bullshit. You’re a liar, Ms. Matlock. Sure, Hector did everything he could. We all tried to believe you, at first, but there wasn’t anyone around you. Not a soul. We wasted three days tagging you, and all for nothing. We spent another two days following up on everything you told us, but again, nothing.

“What is it with you? Are you on coke?” She tapped the side of her head with two long fingers. “You need
attention? Daddy didn’t give you enough when you were a little girl? That’s why you have this made-up guy call himself your boyfriend?”

Becca wanted to punch out Detective Gordon. She imagined the woman could pulverize her, so that wouldn’t be smart. She had to be calm, logical. She had to be the sane adult here. She cocked her head at the woman and said, “Why are you angry at me? I haven’t done anything. I’m just trying to get some help. Now he’s killed this old woman. You’ve got to stop him. Don’t you?”

The two male detectives again darted glances back and forth. The woman shook her head in disgust. Then she pushed back her chair and rose. She leaned over and splayed her hands on the wooden tabletop, right next to the clump of dried food. Her face was right in Becca’s. Her breath smelled of fresh oranges. “You made it all up, didn’t you? There wasn’t any guy calling you and telling you to look outside your window. When that bag lady got blown up by some nutcase, you just pulled in your fantasy guy again to be responsible for the bomb. No more. We want you to see our psychiatrist, Ms. Matlock. Right now. You’ve had your fifteen minutes of fame, now it’s time to give it up.”

“Of course I won’t see any shrink, that’s—”

“You either see the psychiatrist or we arrest you.”

A nightmare,
she thought.
Here I am at the police station, telling them everything I know, and they think I’m crazy.
She said slowly, staring right at Detective Gordon, “For what?”

“You’re a public nuisance. You’re filing false complaints, telling lies that waste manpower. I don’t like you, Ms. Matlock. I’d like to throw you in jail for all the grief you’ve dished out, but I won’t if you go see our shrink. Maybe he can straighten you out. God knows someone needs to.”

Becca rose slowly to her feet. She looked at each of them in turn. “I have told you the truth. There is a madman out there and I don’t know who he is. I’ve told you
everything I can think of. He has threatened the governor. He murdered that poor old woman in front of the museum. I’m not making anything up. I’m not nuts and I’m not on drugs.”

It did no good. They didn’t believe her.

The three men lined up along the wall of the interrogation room didn’t say a word. One of them simply nodded to Detective Gordon as Becca walked out of the room.

T
hirty minutes later, Becca Matlock was seated in a very comfortable chair in a small office that had only two narrow windows that looked across at two other narrow windows. Across the desk sat Dr. Burnett, a man somewhere in his forties, nearly bald, wearing designer glasses. He looked intense and tired.

“What I don’t understand,” Becca said, sitting forward, “is why the police won’t believe me.”

“We’ll get to that. Now, you didn’t want to speak with me?”

“I’m sure you’re a very nice man, but no, I don’t need to speak to you, at least not professionally.”

“The police officers aren’t certain about that, Ms. Matlock. Now, why don’t you tell me, in your own words, a bit about yourself and exactly when this stalker first came to your attention.”

Yet again, she thought. Her voice was flat because she’d said the same words so many times. Hard to feel anything saying them now. “I’m a senior speechwriter for Governor Bledsoe. I live in a very nice condominium on Oak Street in Albany. Two and a half weeks ago, I got the first phone call. No heavy breathing, no profanity, nothing like that. He just said he’d seen me running in the park, and he wanted to get to know me. He wouldn’t tell me who he was. He said I would come to know him very well. He said he wanted to be my boyfriend. I told him to leave me alone and hung up.”

“Did you tell any friends or the governor about the call?”

“Not until after he called me another two times. That’s when he told me to stop sleeping with the governor. He said he was my boyfriend, and I wasn’t going to sleep with any other man. In a very calm voice, he said that if I didn’t stop sleeping with the governor, he’d just have to kill him. Naturally, when I told the governor about this, everyone licensed to carry a gun within a ten-mile radius was on it.”

He didn’t even crack a smile, just kept staring at her.

Becca found she really didn’t care. She said, “They tapped my phone immediately, but somehow he knew they had. They couldn’t find him. They said he was using some sort of electronic scrambler that kept giving out fake locations.”

“And are you sleeping with Governor Bledsoe, Ms. Matlock?”

She’d heard that question a good dozen times, too, over and over, especially from Detective Gordon. She even managed a smile. “Actually, no. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but he is old enough to be my father.”

“We had a president old enough to be your father and a woman even younger than you are and neither of them had a problem with that concept.”

She wondered if Governor Bledsoe could ever survive a Monica and almost smiled. She just shrugged.

“So, Ms. Matlock, are you sleeping with the governor?”

She’d discovered that at the mention of sex, everyone —media folk, cops, friends—homed right in on it. It still offended her, but she had answered the question so often the edge was off now. She shrugged again, seeing that it bothered him, and said, “No, I haven’t slept with Governor Bledsoe. I have never wanted to sleep with Governor Bledsoe. I write speeches for him, really fine speeches. I don’t sleep with him. I even occasionally write speeches for Mrs. Bledsoe. I don’t sleep with her, either.

“Now, I have no clue why the man believes that I am having sex with the governor. I have no clue why he would care if I were. Why did he pull the governor, of all people, out of the hat? Because I spend time with him? Because
he’s powerful? I just don’t know. The Albany police haven’t found out anything about this man yet. However, they didn’t think I was a liar, not like the police here in New York. I even met with a police psychologist, who gave me advice on how to handle him when he called.”

“Actually, Ms. Matlock, the Albany police do believe you are a liar. At first they didn’t, but that’s what they believe now. But do go on.”

Just like that? He said everyone believed she was a liar and she was just to go on? “What do you mean?” she said slowly. “They never gave me that impression.”

“That’s why our detectives finally sent you to me. They spoke to their counterparts in Albany. No one could discover any stalker. They believed you were disturbed about something. Perhaps you had a crush on the governor and this was your way of getting him to acknowledge you.”

“Ah, I see. I have, perhaps, a fatal attraction.”

“No, certainly not. You shouldn’t have referred to it like that. It’s much too soon.”

“Too soon for what? I’m still trying to get the hang of it?”

Anger flashed in his eyes. It made her feel good. “Just go on, Ms. Matlock. No, don’t argue with me yet. First tell me more. I need to understand. Then we can determine what’s going on, together.”

In his dreams, she thought. A crush on the governor? Yeah, right. What a joke that was. Bledsoe was a man who would sleep with a nun if he could get under her habit. He made Bill Clinton look as upstanding as Eisenhower, or had Ike had a mistress, too? Men and power—the two always seemed to go with illicit sex. As for Bledsoe, he’d been very lucky thus far, he hadn’t yet run into an intern as voracious as Monica, one who wouldn’t just fade into the woodwork when he was done with her.

“Very well,” she said. “I came to New York to escape that maniac. I was—I am—terrified of him and what he’ll do. Also, my mother lives here and she’s very ill. I wanted to be with her.”

“You’re staying in her apartment, is that right?”

“Yes. She’s in Lenox Hill Hospital.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

Becca looked at him and tried to say the words. They wouldn’t come out. She cleared her throat and finally managed to say, “She’s dying of uterine cancer.”

“I’m sorry. You say this man followed you here to New York?”

Becca nodded. “I saw him here for the first time just after I arrived in New York, on Madison near Fiftieth, weaving in and out of people to my right. He was wearing a blue windbreaker and a baseball cap. How do I know it was him? I can’t be specific about that. I just know. Deep down, I recognized that it was him. He knew I saw him, I’m sure of that. Unfortunately I couldn’t see him clearly enough to give more than a general impression of what he looks like.”

“And that is?”

“He’s tall, slender. Is he young? I just don’t know. The baseball cap covered his hair and he was wearing aviator glasses, very dark, opaque. He was wearing generic jeans and that blue windbreaker that was very loose.” She paused a moment. “I’ve told the police all of this, many times. Why do you care?”

His look said it all. He wanted to see just how specific, just how detailed her descriptions were, how much she’d embellished her fantasy man. And all of the marvelous particulars were from her imagination, her very sick imagination.

She kept it together. When he hesitated, she said mildly, “He ducked away when I turned toward him. Then the phone calls started again. I know he’s keeping close tabs on me. He seems to know exactly where I am and what I’m doing. I can feel him, you know?”

“You told the officers that he wouldn’t tell you what he wanted.”

“No, not really, other than to tell me if I didn’t stop having sex with the governor, he would kill him. I asked him why he’d do that and he just said he didn’t want me to have
sex with any other man, that he was my boyfriend. But it sounded funny, like it was just something he was saying, not something he really meant. So why is he doing this, really? I don’t know. I will be frank with you, Dr. Burnett. I’m not crazy, I’m terrified. If that’s his aim, he’s certainly succeeded. I simply don’t understand why the police think I’m the bad guy here, that I’m making all of this up for some crazy reason. Perhaps you could believe me now?”

He was a shrink; he hedged well. “Tell me why you believe this man is stalking you and making these phone calls to you, why you don’t believe that he wants to be your boyfriend, that it really all just boils down to an obsession and his possession of you?”

She closed her eyes. She’d thought and thought about why, but there wasn’t anything. Nothing at all. He’d targeted her, but why? She shook her head. “At first he said he wanted to know me. What does that mean? If he wanted that, why wouldn’t he just come over and introduce himself? If the cops wanted a nutcase to send to you, they should find him. What does he really want? I just don’t know. If I even had a supposition about it, I’d throw it out there, believe me. But the boyfriend thing? No, I don’t believe that.”