US Marshall 03 - The Rapids (6 page)

“You shouldn’t swear in here.”

“You’re right. We can go outside, and I’ll swear out there.” His eyes—they were a dark gray in the dim light of the cathedral—fixed on her. “And you can tell me about the old guy in the madras shirt.”

They found a table in the shade at an uncrowded café near the market square. “Get two of whatever you’re ordering,” Maggie said. “I’m not picky. I don’t even know if I can eat.”

Rob ordered two bowls of the soup of the day, which seemed to involve chicken, and coffee for himself, a Heineken for Maggie. He’d do the driving back to The Hague.

Their waiter brought the drinks first. Maggie touched a finger to the foam of her beer. She’d had a miserable day, and she looked more shaken than she’d want to admit, worse now that she’d finished with the investigators and the questions—and now
that whatever her mission at the cathedral had been was over.

“The old guy looked like he planned to take you out with that walking stick,” Rob said.

“For all I know, he thought it was tipped with ricin.”

“Is that a joke?”

She sighed. “An attempt at a joke.”

Rob lifted his small coffee cup. “I’d say cheers, but it wouldn’t sound right today.”

“I suppose not.” She picked up her beer, hesitating, as if pushing back an intrusive thought, before taking a sip. “It’s been a long week. Nothing about it’s been normal.”

Including having him thrust upon her, Rob thought, drinking some of his coffee. It was very strong, but he figured a jolt of caffeine wouldn’t hurt. He was hot from chasing after Maggie, negotiating the narrow, unfamiliar city streets in the late August heat. “Your rendezvous with the old guy at St. John’s. That’s why we’re in Den Bosch today?”

Maggie stared at the disappearing foam on her beer. “I shouldn’t drink—”

“Go ahead. I’m sticking to coffee. I’ll drive.” He smiled, trying to take some of the edge off her mood and maybe his own. “It’s okay. I can handle a Mini.”

She raised her eyes from her drink. “I know what it must have looked like back there. Just forget about it, okay?”

“Not okay. The old guy’s an informant?”

“A wanna-be, I think.”

“Any relation to Kopac?”

“I don’t know that much about him.”

Rob sat back in his chair. “That’s an evasive answer.”

“Maybe it’s a polite way to tell you—” She stopped herself. “Never mind. It’s been a lousy day for you, too.”

But she obviously wanted to tell him what happened in St. John’s was none of his damned business. “Better to evade than to lie outright. Okay. I get that. You don’t know anything about me except that I’m a marshal, I was shot four months ago and my family knows the president.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t trust me, either.”

“It’s not a question of trust.”

Then what else was it? But he didn’t ask. “This guy’s contacted you before?”

“First time.”

“What’d he do, call, e-mail, send a carrier pigeon? Come on. Throw me a bone. Let me think you’re starting to trust me a little.”

She didn’t smile. “He called.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“So, after I got here.”

Their soup arrived in heavy bowls. Cream of chicken and fresh vegetables. It was steaming and substantial, which, despite the heat, Rob welcomed.

Maggie shifted around in her chair. “I wouldn’t make too much of this. The timing’s bad, I know, but I’m not all that sure he’s playing with a full deck.” She picked up her beer with such force, some of it splashed out onto her hand. “It’s quiet, don’t you think? Especially for such a beautiful afternoon. People must be worried after this morning. I guess I don’t blame them.”

“They’ll decide it’s an American thing and go on with their lives. In Central Park in the spring, people decided it was a marshals thing. It helped them get past the idea of a sniper on the loose. Someone wasn’t picking off people at random.”

Maggie took a drink of her beer, then set down the glass and blew out a sigh. “Tom’s family must know by now what happened to him. It’s an awful experience to go through, having someone come to your house and tell you—well, you know what I mean.”

“I called my sister from Central Park so she wouldn’t have to find out that way or, worse, see me on television.”

“Did you know you were in bad shape?”

“I don’t remember what I knew.”

She looked away. “You didn’t need what happened today.”

“Maggie, I didn’t come to the Netherlands to run away from anything. I can do my job.”

“You’re not back on the street,” she said.

“That’s not my decision to make. Look—”

She faced him again, her creamy skin less pale.
“You should be. You didn’t hesitate today. The shooter, Tom. You did fine.”

He acknowledged her words with a nod. “I still want to know about this Scarlet Pimpernel character of yours.”

This time, she smiled. “You marshals. Hound dogs on a scent.”

Rob tried the soup, relished the normalcy of it. “Maybe I can help.”

“That’s nice of you to offer, but there’s nothing for you to do.”

Clever. It wasn’t as if he could order her to come clean. He could badger her for answers, but he’d already seen her help pull a dead man out of a river, deal with the Dutch police and a nervous embassy and chase a white-haired old man. She’d hold her own against anything he threw at her and tell him exactly what she wanted him to know and not one word more.

This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he’d told Mike Rivera he wanted to go to the Netherlands.

“You saw the man with me at St. John’s. My wanna-be informant. Did he look mentally stable to you?”

Rob shrugged. “Down on his luck, maybe. Lost his retirement, got a little daft. Could just be on a tight budget.”

“I suppose.” She picked up her spoon, held it in midair and sighed. “I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I just ended up putting you on high alert, got you into tracking mode.”

“Kopac’s murder did that.”

Her eyes shone, but she covered her emotion by dipping her spoon into her soup.

“This guy,” Rob said. “Does he have a name? Besides William the Conqueror.”

“That was snotty of me. I apologize.” She left it at that. “How long were you in the cathedral?”

“Obviously not long enough.”

“Did you see anyone else, anyone who could have been with my guy?”

Rob remembered the scene when he’d walked into the cathedral, his eyes adjusting to the dim light, his sensibilities to the atmosphere. It was quiet, removed from the murder investigation outside its doors. When he spotted Maggie in a pew, at first he thought, guiltily, that she had, indeed, come there to pray.

Then he’d noticed the white-haired man sitting too close to her. In the next second, she was chasing after him.

“I should have followed your guy,” Rob said. “But I didn’t see anyone who might have been with him. Think he tipped you off about Janssen?”

“No. I’m sure he didn’t. That message came by a free e-mail account. I doubt—” She topped herself. “I shouldn’t make assumptions. He just didn’t strike me as someone who would know the whereabouts of an international fugitive.”

“But he chose to meet you in Den Bosch, where Janssen was picked up.”

“Probably for dramatic effect. He could have read about the arrest in the paper and decided to give me a call. You must know how it is with sources. I’m sympathetic to mental illness—I mean it. But it’s not always that easy to sort out the cranks from the legitimate sources.” She sighed. “I didn’t expect that part of this work, did you?”

Rob didn’t answer right away. He’d dealt with his share of delusional would-be informants, from poor, illiterate drug addicts to highly educated society matrons. Getting sucked into one of their wild fantasies and acting on it was the nightmare of every law enforcement officer he knew. “Maggie—”

“I’ve told you what I can.”

He could feel her tension and reached across the table, skimming his fingertips across the top of her hand. Her skin was cooler than it should have been on such a warm day. She didn’t pull away, but touching her was an instinctive gesture on his part and took them both by surprise.

She took a breath, looking down at her soup. “It’s been a weird day. Surreal, almost.”

“I’m not the prosecution or your boss.” Rob tried to sound reassuring, not patronizing or irritated by her unwillingness to talk. Still, he could feel his own tension and fatigue clawing at him, and the caffeine had his mind going in a dozen different directions. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

She was naturally very fair, with freckles across
her cheeks—her appearance could have a tendency to make people not expect her to be an elite diplomatic security agent, not expect her to be as tough and competent as she was. She’d lost a friend today—an embassy employee—and it had to feel like a failure as well as a personal loss.

She raised her eyes, the turquoise, he noticed, softened with flecks of gold. “I know that. But thanks. It’s a decent thing to say.”

He sat back, letting go of her hand. “Eat your soup. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“I never pass out.”

But she ate more of her soup, although Rob could see it was an effort for her. She seemed far away again, caught up in something she didn’t want to think about but couldn’t stop focusing on. He noticed how drawn she looked, how closed off from him. It’d been that way at the police station. Even on a good day, getting anything out of Maggie Spencer wouldn’t be easy.

“Want my opinion?” She looked up at Rob, more alert now, less distracted by whatever had her in its grip. “My guy picked Den Bosch and me because we’ve been in the news, and that’s all there is to it.”

But she wasn’t willing to take the chance that she was wrong. Part of her believed her wanna-be snitch had access and information that could help her, Rob thought, or she wouldn’t have stepped foot in St. John’s. At the very least, she would have dismissed
the guy she’d met there out of hand. Instead, she was thinking about whatever he’d told her, chewing on it, debating whether or not it made sense after all.

Rob finished off his soup. “I guess it would have been tough to frisk him there in the church—”

“Unless he had a gun strapped to his ankle, he wasn’t armed.”

“Going to tell the Dutch police about him?”

“Only if it’s relevant to Tom Kopac’s murder. Right now, I can’t see that it is.”

“I’ll bet they’d like to decide that.”

She ignored him, abandoning her soup. “We should get back. Sorry for the lousy day. Come on. Half a beer won’t affect my driving.” She got to her feet, more animated. “I’ll pay—”

“No, I’ll take care of it.” Rob dropped some euro notes on the table, more than enough to cover their tab. “And I’ll drive.”

“Going to fight me for my car keys?”

An image of the two of them going at it popped into his head, but he stifled it, rising. He was taller than she was—not that she seemed to give a damn. “Sure.”

That brought some color to her cheeks. “All right. You get to drive.” She smiled brightly, unexpectedly, with a touch of self-deprecation. “
You
know President Poe.
Me
—I know a probable paranoid-schizophrenic old man who needs medical treatment, not the ear of a DS officer.”

Rob narrowed his eyes on her. “This guy got to you.”

“This entire day’s gotten to me.”

He had an urge to ease some of her emotional turmoil. He wanted her trust and almost asked her for it straight out. But why should she give it to him? They’d known each other for two days. She’d been stuck with him, the wounded marshal whose family was at the heart of the Janssen investigation.

Maybe it was the effects of pulling a dead man out of a Dutch waterway. He hadn’t known Thomas Kopac, but, Rob thought as he followed Maggie out to the street, if he got to the point that murder was nothing to him, just another event in a day’s work, he’d quit.

She glanced back at him, said nothing.

He took a sharp breath.

And maybe he should pull back from the effects of those turquoise eyes and that red hair and remember that she’d received the Janssen tip, that she had hidden motives for today’s trip to Den Bosch.

Rob had less reason to trust her than she did him.

He had his own contacts.

He’d make a few calls and check out the old guy in the madras shirt himself, see what people knew.

E
than Brooker stood next to a subdued William Raleigh on an arched bridge over the Binnendieze, the water dark and quiet with the fading sun. After the discovery of the American’s body, boat tours had been canceled for the day.

“Ever do the boat tour?” Ethan asked.

“Once,” the older man said, staring down at the canal-like river. “It’s fascinating. You see things you never get to see on ordinary canal tours. The waterway runs behind buildings, not in front, and it literally takes you under the city. It’s all very clean. You get an up-close view of the architecture of centuries-old buildings. There are many small surprises along the way. An unexpected window box or a pot of flowers, a statue. And it’s so quiet.” Raleigh glanced sideways at Ethan. “I take it you’ve never done the tour?”

“No, sir.”

Raleigh looked tired. They hadn’t expected Tom
Kopac to turn up dead. Scooting out of St. John’s before Spencer or Dunnemore pounced had taken some doing. Ethan had stood watch in the cathedral, in hiding, and gave Raleigh the high sign when the good marshal showed up. Dunnemore would have recognized Ethan. That meant Raleigh had to get away from the DS agent on his own. If it’d come to it, the old buzzard would have nailed her with his walking stick. It was more an affectation than a necessity, but it would have done the job.

Instead, Maggie Spencer had let him go.

Why? What had Raleigh told her? Their meeting was his idea.

It was to have followed a meeting with Tom Kopac.

“Did you tell Spencer that you and Kopac were supposed to meet this morning, but he was shot to death before—”

“I didn’t see how that would help.”

“I don’t know Dutch law—hell, I don’t know U.S. law—but I’m guessing they could haul you in as a material witness.”

“I have no information about the murder today.”

“What did you tell Spencer?”

“I didn’t have much time. She knows my name. That I knew her father.”

Ethan turned to his side and leaned a hip against a stone support column of the old bridge. “She thinks he was killed by Czech bank robbers?” he asked. “Or does she know you’re a suspect—”

“I’m not a suspect. Not in his murder.”

“In fucking up something that led to his murder.” Ethan didn’t sugarcoat his words, although he and Raleigh had never discussed just how much Ethan had managed to find out in the short months of their acquaintance. “Spencer must not know or she wouldn’t have let you go the way she did.”

Raleigh didn’t react. He was like that. He didn’t act on emotion. Which was what made his contact with Maggie Spencer so weird—it was all emotion. That was the only explanation that made sense.

“Right now,” Raleigh said, “it doesn’t seem prudent or necessary to alert Maggie to all of our actions. I gave her a small mission.”

“What small mission?”

“I’d like to keep that to myself for now.”

The old man was getting testy. Ethan let it slide. He was thinking he should head for the American embassy and throw himself at their mercy for ever getting hooked up with this guy.

Raleigh pulled himself away from the fence. There was a slight tremble in his hand.

“You’re not hitting the bottle, are you?” Ethan asked, and when Raleigh didn’t answer, added, “People say you’re a bottle-and-breakdown case.”

“People say a lot of things. They don’t know me.” Raleigh glanced sideways at Ethan and smiled, not nicely. “You don’t know me.”

It was a fair point. “I want answers about my
wife’s death. All the answers. That’s it. That’s all I’m about.”

“We’re not about to take the law into our own hands,” Raleigh said.

“I think we already have.”

He regarded Ethan with paternal insight. “Is that what you think?”

“If I had a clue who killed Kopac, I’d be knocking on the door to the American embassy and asking them what the hell to do with what I knew.”

“I don’t have a clue, either, Major.”

Major.
Some months ago, Ethan had stopped thinking of himself as a West Point graduate, an army major who’d led covert special operations missions. In the past, he’d done his best to accomplish the mission tasked to him and his men.

His wife’s death had changed all that.

Char.

The gut-wrenching anger, grief and guilt weren’t there anymore. Just the determination to expose Nicholas Janssen as the person behind her death, and why. All of it, all the answers. Her actual killer—one of the two men Janssen had sent to the U.S. in May—was dead. Nick Janssen himself was behind bars.

It was a start.

Ethan hadn’t seen Kopac’s murder coming that morning. He’d have stopped it if he had. It had totally blindsided him.

He wasn’t sure about William Raleigh.

“Tom Kopac was a good guy?” Ethan asked.

Raleigh didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

“Raleigh…” Ethan turned away from the river. “You’d better be who and what I think you are.”

Which was a spy. For what agency, even what country, Ethan couldn’t be sure. But he’d spent a dozen years in the U.S. Special Forces and thought he could recognize an intelligence operative when he saw one. They’d met earlier in the summer when Ethan’s personal mission of tracking down Nick Janssen and Raleigh’s mission—unknown—had converged.

Unsettling stories about the supposed economist’s drinking and mental health problems had reached Ethan, and he hoped he hadn’t misplaced his trust. He didn’t want to be duped by a delusional man haunted by his own wrongdoings, trying to dig his way back to some measure of self-respect.

“You’re sure you shouldn’t be in a home?”

Raleigh’s eyes twinkled with sudden amusement, the kind of insight that made Ethan continue to work with him. “You are quite a direct man, Major Brooker. If you weren’t, I fear I wouldn’t have made it out of St. John’s today.”

“Spencer and the marshal never saw me. If they had—”

“You’d still have found a way out.”

“I don’t know about that.” Ethan was a search-and-destroy specialist, not someone who hid from federal
agents—they were all supposed to be on the same side. “I was just playing the hand dealt us back there.”

“Yes.”

Raleigh grew thoughtful, and Ethan could see he needed rest and a good meal—they both did. “Come on. I’ll buy you dinner. Our American friends are on their way back to The Hague. We’re not going to run into them.”

“Would Rob Dunnemore have recognized you?”

“The feds weren’t happy when I took off on them in May. I think they all had my picture tattooed on various body parts. Dunnemore was still recovering from the Central Park attack, but I lied to his sister. Told her I was a gardener.”

“In other words he’d recognize you. You and U.S. federal law enforcement—”

“We’re square. They’re not after me anymore.”

“It’s difficult for me to believe anyone would take you for a gardener,” Raleigh said.

Ethan grinned. “Why not?”

They started off the bridge, the shadows long in the street with the waning light. “Our job is to keep more innocent people from being killed,” Raleigh said abruptly, then glanced at Ethan in that holier-than-thou way he sometimes had, despite the ancient, worn shirt, let-out pants and veins in his nose. “No matter how great our will or noble our cause, neither of us has the power to change the past.”

Ethan laid on his west Texas accent, a contrast to
the erudite diplomat and economist who’d become his partner of convenience. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Major. It sucks very much.”

Rob turned the Mini back over to Maggie at his hotel, waiting for her at the driver’s door before handing over the keys. “Don’t want to come in for a drink?”

She shook her head. “Thanks, no.”

“You could dump your car at your place and come back.”

“It’s been a long day.”

He smiled at her. “Dinner? A walk? Another bowl of soup?”

That seemed to penetrate her obvious preoccupation. She almost laughed. “You’re very deceptive, Deputy Dunnemore. You have this easygoing facade, but underneath? Uh-uh. Not so easygoing at all. I’m going home and taking a shower and having a glass of wine.”

“I’m not invited?”

“Like I said, underneath the Southern charm is a very dangerous man. See you tomorrow.”

She slid behind the wheel.

Rob shut the door for her and leaned into the open window. “Maggie—”

“I’m fine. I’m sorry about today. I know it’s not what you came here for.”

Rob stepped back from the small car.

A shower and a glass of wine. Did he believe her?

He could understand her rationale for not bringing up her clandestine meeting at St. John’s Cathedral at the Den Bosch police station, before she even knew it would come off. But now that it had? Maggie had made no mention of going to the authorities.

Rob thought he could understand that rationale, too. If she planned to tell anyone, it’d be without him.

When he got to his room, he showered off the river smells, feeling the scar from his bullet wound under his fingers. Tom Kopac hadn’t had a chance. His killer must have been standing next to him, unrecognized or a friend? An acquaintance Kopac had never suspected of murderous intent? Had he known, at the last second, what was happening to him?

Rob remembered almost nothing of the shooting in Central Park. The tulips. The miserable weather. So much of his life before and after the shooting was fuzzy, some of it gone forever, due to the trauma he’d endured—the loss of blood, the complications, the long recovery. For some reason, he vividly remembered the shock and determination on Nate Winter’s face as he’d dragged Rob, injured only seconds earlier, to cover behind a rock outcropping.

But he couldn’t be sure the memory was real, not something he’d pasted together from accounts and descriptions he’d heard and read after the fact.

He toweled off and put on shorts and a T-shirt, walking out into his room. His window was open,
and he could hear a toddler squealing. When he glanced down at the street, he saw a towheaded little guy sitting in a child’s seat secured to the handlebars of his father’s bicycle. Neither wore a helmet. They pushed off, pedaling along on the quiet street on a pleasant summer evening.

Rob felt an urge to rent a bicycle and head off into the Dutch countryside for a few days, go up north to the polders and the lakes stolen from the North Sea. Who’d care? Just so long as no reporters followed him, no one would.

Pushing aside such thoughts, he sat at the small table next to the window and dialed his parents’ number in Night’s Landing. He pictured them on the porch of their log home, sipping iced tea punch, the air hot, hazy with the oppressive summer humidity. There was often a breeze on the Cumberland River, and the porch was shaded by huge old oaks that beckoned family and friends to leave the comfort of their artificially cooled rooms.

His father answered, a man who’d traveled the world but never considered anywhere but Night’s Landing home. “I didn’t expect to hear from you,” Stuart Dunnemore said. “Sarah told us you were in the Netherlands.”

Rob felt a twinge of guilt, knowing he should have got word to his family himself. His father was almost eighty, and he liked to keep track of his only son. “I didn’t get much notice that I was going.” He
hated the note of defensiveness in his voice. “I’m sorry I didn’t call. How are you?”

“Just fine, son, just fine.”

It was what he always said. “Mother?”

“She’s in Nashville with friends, but she should be home for dinner.”

His mother was twenty-two years his father’s junior, a fact Nick Janssen had tried to twist to his favor—without success.

“The weather’s nice here. What’s it like there?”

His father, who’d grown up close to the land, loved to talk about the weather. “We’re expecting thunderstorms late tonight and tomorrow. It’s been hot.”

From the tone of their conversation, it was obvious he hadn’t heard about the American killed in Den Bosch.

Rob’s room suddenly seemed claustrophobic, and he wished for a breeze; but the air was still, the street a few floors down quiet.

“Rob?”

“I’m okay. I wanted to tell you about something before you hear it elsewhere. An American foreign service officer was killed today in Den Bosch. A DS agent and I found him.”

“Good God.”

“We weren’t in any danger.” Which, of course, he didn’t know for a fact. What if the killer had decided to put a bullet in the back of his head? Maggie’s? But he kept his voice calm as he related what had hap
pened. “His name was Tom Kopac. You didn’t know him from your time here, did—”

“No. No, I didn’t know him. I doubt your mother did, either, but I’ll ask her. Are you all right? How—”

“I’m okay. Nothing to worry about.”

“Isn’t Den Bosch where Nick Janssen was found?”

“That’s right. We were there checking out the area.”

“You don’t think he had anything to do with what happened?”

Rob stared down at the empty street. “I don’t know.”

After reassuring his father that he was fine, he hung up, feeling guilty. His parents were still dealing with the aftermath of Conroy Fontaine and Nick Janssen’s assault on the entire Dunnemore family in the spring.

I shouldn’t have come here.

But Rob dismissed the thought before it could take root. His father would have chosen a different profession for his only son. The shooting in the spring and the murder in Den Bosch today would only add to his conviction that Rob didn’t belong in the Marshals Service.

He dialed Nate’s cell phone. He didn’t want his sister picking up their home phone.

“Rob. Where the hell are you? I heard about what happened.”

“I’m safe and sound in my hotel room, about to
head down to the bar for a stiff drink. My sister knows?”

“Yes.”

“She’s—”

“She wants to get on a plane and fly to Amsterdam tonight. You know she does.”

The twin thing, as Nate liked to say.

“Do you want to talk to her?” he asked.

Rob tried to smile. “Why do you think I called your cell phone and not that haunted house you’re living in?”

“That’s not why. You’ve never been afraid to talk to Sarah. You aren’t now. What’s up?”