Hot Pursuit (36 page)

“Yes, ma’am. I’m on my way.”

“I want one of the FBI agents with us,” Alyssa told Douglas. “But she’ll catch up.”

“I really have to hurry,” he said.

So they hurried.

In order to access the back alley, they either had to go through the building’s basement, or they had to walk down to the cross street, take a left and another left. But Alyssa had been with the team that checked out the basement earlier that morning, and even as innocuous as Douglas appeared, she wasn’t going to risk Sam’s wrath by taking the man through what could have been a perfect set for a horror movie.

As opposed to a narrow back alley that smelled like urine and rotting food, covered in ankle-deep slush that they’d have to slog through.

They were retracing Douglas’s route in reverse, and Alyssa stopped briefly at the entrance to the alley as she narrated what he’d already told them.

“When you got out to the street,” she said, “here, right? He was gone?”

“That’s correct,” he said.

This entire neighborhood consisted of older buildings, some of
them crumbling, some exquisitely preserved. Some had wrought iron fences and gates that locked, but some had gates that hung permanently open on broken hinges. Steps led down to what looked like basement apartments—again in a wide variety of upkeep.

There were dozens of places Winston could have hidden from Douglas’s untrained eye.

He glanced at his watch again, and Alyssa gestured for him to lead the way into the alley.

“How often have you seen Winston in the area?” she asked as she followed him.

“Oh … at least several times a week,” he told her. “He’s something of a local institution, although I had no idea his name was Winston. Savannah was right—you
are
good. You’re here only two days, and already you know more than we do.”

“How well do you know Savannah?” Alyssa asked.

“Are you sure I’m not a suspect?” he countered, and it was weird, his demeanor was almost flirtatious or coy—as if, after thinking it through, the idea of being a suspect was titillating.

He was not unattractive, though, and maybe that was the problem she had with him. A man who looked like Douglas Forsythe—a man as wealthy as Douglas Forsythe—was used to getting whatever he wanted.

And she just couldn’t see him providing intimate care for his elderly parents.

“Just making conversation,” she told him.

“Oh, and you’re quite good at lying, too, aren’t you?” he teased.

What she needed to do was meet the parents, and get a look at the place where he lived with them. Because right now she just could not imagine it.

She made herself smile at him, though. Where
was
Carol … ? “I’ve been friends with Savannah for a long time. Our husbands were both with SEAL Team Sixteen. Well, Ken still is. For a while,
I thought that Savannah was going to run for office, but then she got behind Maria … Is that how you met?”

“At a fund-raising event, yes. Back in … what was it? May, I think. Right after Maria announced her candidacy. I’d just come home. Mother had fallen and fortunately
hadn’t
broken her hip. But it was a very close call.” He pointed down the alley. “Fourth dumpster’s ours. Or rather, Maria’s. I tend to get possessive, but I have to admit that the campaign kept me sane. When he’s lucid, Dad’s stuck in 1975, and Mother’s happy enough to join him there. It’s been a challenge—and that’s aside from having to learn how to properly fasten an adult diaper. I’ve come to value my extracurricular activities quite highly. And I’ll answer your next question before you ask it: It’s only been recently that I’ve had to have someone stay with them when I go out. Dad’s gotten much worse. Mother’s afraid he’s going to wander off.”

“That can be a serious problem,” Alyssa agreed, then got the conversation back on track. “You approached the dumpster… how?”

“Just as we’re doing right now,” he told her. “I came in from the street, as we just did.”

It didn’t make sense for the homeless man to run
past
Douglas, when the alley extended down in the other direction, all the way to the next side street. Why not run that way?

As Alyssa stood, gazing down the alley, a car pulled in to the far end, followed by a police car, its lights spinning.

Douglas saw it, too. “Wonder what’s going on,” he murmured. “Should we run?
You’ll never catch me, coppers.”
He did a terrible imitation of James Cagney.

She smiled, because it was polite to do so, especially since this was taking far longer than the three minutes she’d promised. “So … Winston was where, exactly?”

“He was standing over here.” Douglas put himself at the closest
end of the dumpster. “I must have gone right past him, to get over here”—he moved again—“to the recycling bin. The bag of tins I was carrying was heavy, so I didn’t see him until I’d dumped it in. He startled me—I may have screamed. I’m rather glad no one heard me.
He
took off, running back the way we came.”

He peered down the alley at the cars that were still parked there, clearly distracted by them, and the people who’d gotten out of them—several of them uniformed officers.

“At which point you followed?” Alyssa asked him.

“Not immediately, no,” he told her. “I had one more bag that I disposed of before heading back toward the street.”

“Could you still see him at that point?” she asked, turning to look down the alley, toward the street where they’d entered.

“No, he was already out of sight. He was moving quite quickly.” He added, “Despite his limp, of course.”

Of course. “Could he have hidden behind one of the other dumpsters?” she asked, as she walked back a bit in that direction. There were other access doors in the buildings on both sides of the alley. Some had steps leading down, some had old-fashioned bulkhead entrances. But every door that Alyssa could see had extremely secure-looking locks.

And it was true that plenty of people could get past even the most secure-seeming lock, but doing so would take even an expert lockpick a longer amount of time than Douglas had described.

“I suppose he could have,” he mused. “I have to confess, I was somewhat leery of being alone in the alleyway with him. I didn’t look for him too carefully. Do you really think he might be the one who did that awful thing to Maggie?”

“We’re looking for him for a variety of reasons,” Alyssa said, checking her phone yet again.

“Which you can’t tell me about,” Douglas said. “Of course. Any word?”

“Nothing yet,” she said, as what looked like an ambulance
joined the two vehicles at the end of the alley. “Thank you for your time. I know you need to get on your way. I’m going to see what’s going on down there.”

“I’ll walk with you,” he said. “With the one-way streets, it’s actually easier to get a cab going home if I go out this way.”

As Alyssa got closer, she could see yellow tape, marking the area as a crime scene. A crowd had yet to form, but there were police officers standing by the open door to the basement of the building at the very end of the alley.

A woman was nearby, her jacket unzipped, her face pale and her eyes bright with tears. Her hands were trembling as she used a tissue to blow her nose.

“Are you all right?” Alyssa asked her.

“I never seen nothing like that,” the woman whispered. “Never in my life. They’re dead. They’re both dead.”

“Two
bodies,” Alyssa clarified. “And you found them?”

She nodded. “Tenant in 1B was complaining of the stink. Something died in the wall, she said. Or maybe in the basement… I knew he’d been living there—the old homeless man. I thought he was harmless, but he wasn’t. I never seen such a thing as what he did to that woman …”

Alyssa opened her phone and called Jules.

Who answered on the first ring. “Shit,” he said. “Sorry, Sam asked me to call you, and I totally spaced. Jenn’s fine. Maria’s brother Frank showed up packing heat, but Danny Gillman talked him off his proverbial ledge. Everyone’s okay, but it’s entirely possible that Frank’s our man—”

Alyssa interrupted him. “You need to get over here. Now. I’m in the alley behind Maria’s office. I haven’t been able to get onto the scene, but I think the police have found Winston—and Maggie’s body. Bodies. I think Winston’s dead, too, Jules.”

“Holy crap,” Jules said. “When it rains, it pours. I’m on my way. Sam is, too.”

Good. She could use a little Sam right about now. A little eye contact, a little connection, the briefest touch of his hand … Amazing how something so simple could make the world a significantly better place.

Alyssa hung up her phone to find Douglas watching her. “Jenn’s all right,” she told him.

“They’ve found the killer, haven’t they?” he asked, but he was talking about Winston, in the basement.

“Go home,” she said. “Your parents need you. If we have any additional questions, someone will be in touch.”

He nodded and turned, and as he walked away, Alyssa saw the intern, what’s his name—Gene—standing in the crowd that was forming. Word was apparently getting out that bodies had been found.

But when Gene saw that Alyssa had spotted him, he quickly faded back, disappearing from sight.

And okay, Sam wasn’t even here yet to whisper into her ear about how freaking spooky
that
was. It was true what they said. Criminals—particularly killers—usually had an overpowering urge to return to the scene of the crime.

She headed toward the crowd, determined to talk to Gene, but he was gone.

Which was when her phone rang. It was Carol.

“I’m so sorry I was delayed,” the FBI agent said, her voice out of breath. “The head of the New York office called and … I’m finally at the dumpster. Where are you?”

“They’ll call us,” Izzy said, for the four hundredth time, as Maria paced the living room of the hotel suite. “As soon as they get the situation under control.”

Robin had taken Ash into the bedroom, because he’d surpassed fussy and moved full-bore into weep-monster of doom.

It was hard to say which was the chicken and which was the egg.
Babies were so perceptive, Ash might’ve originally started fussing because Maria’s tension level was off the charts.

But it was also obvious that his crying made Maria more tense. It had turned into an ugly self-perpetuating cycle that Robin was smart enough to try to break.

Izzy could hear him in the bedroom, singing to the kid with a voice that made Izzy’s sound like amateur-hour, as—alleluia—Ash brought his diva-worthy outburst down to an occasional mewl or snuffle.

Maria, however, still paced.

As far as wrangling went, Robin had definitely left Izzy with the more difficult of the two jobs. Maria wasn’t going to be distracted by funny faces or peek-a-boo, or even the fact that he knew all eighty-seven verses of Don MacLean’s “American Pie.”

“
A long, long time ago,”
he sang, testing his theory.
“I could still remember …
No? I guess a puppet show’s probably out then, too.”

She looked at him as if he’d spoken to her in Martian, which he had—if he put any faith in the time-honored theories from that book,
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
.

In his entire life, Izzy had met only one woman who came close to speaking his language and getting most of his jokes, and she still wasn’t talking to him, and probably wouldn’t ever talk to him again, even when he flew to Germany to see her, which he was going to do in just a matter of days now.

Thinking of Eden made him sad—no. It was beyond sad. It was sorrow that tightened his chest, and he had to look away from Maria and out the window at the low-hanging pewter-colored clouds that made the city skyline look simultaneously starkly ugly and timelessly beautiful.

Maria sat down next to him on the sofa. “You remind me of that Smokey Robinson song,” she said, which doubly surprised him. Not only had she stopped pacing, she was talking about something other than was-Jenn-all-right. And then she completely made him sit
back, because she started to sing.
“If there’s a smile on my face, it’s only there, trying to fool the public …”

Her voice was rich and husky and really nice and he found himself smiling at her.

“Have you thought about
American Idol
as a way to the White House?” Izzy asked. “Think of how many votes you could get if you went that route.”

“See, you’re doing it,” she said, unamused. “You’re sitting here, and you’re terribly sad, but you still have to make a joke.”

“I don’t
have
to,” he said. “I just like to. I mean, what am I going to do, sit around and cry all day?”

She pretended to think about that. “Yeah,” she said. “Because that’s what people do when they’re sad. They cry, and cry, and
cry
, and eventually they’re not so sad anymore. You’re not the only person in the world who’s ever had his heart broken, you know.”

“Really?” he said, “because I thought I was. I thought everyone except me always got everything they ever wanted.”

“You want to hear something really sad?” Maria asked him, but didn’t wait for him to respond. She just kept going. “I’m sitting here, scared to death that my baby brother might hurt my best friend, and at the same time, there’s a really dark, ugly part of me that’s not-so-secretly hoping that Frankie finally dies.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Because it’ll be easier for me to achieve my political goals without a drug-addicted, PTSD-suffering brother hanging like an albatross around my neck. How’s
that
for sad?”

Izzy nodded. “I don’t know if you
win,”
he said, “but it’s definitely sad. Besides, we don’t know that he’s the one who made Jenn push the panic button.”

“We know,” she said. “At least I do. It’s got to be Frank. Where else would he go? Stopping first at his dealer’s, of course.”

Her cell phone rang. It was sitting on the coffee table in front of them and she picked it up. “It’s Jenn.” She answered it. “Are you all right? Oh, thank God.” She closed her eyes, listening to her friend
on the other end. “I knew it was,” she said. “Is he … ? Oh, God, Jenni, I’m so sorry
. … Damage
control? Are you
serious?”
She looked at Izzy. “She wants to write a statement for the website—as well as a press release. No,” she said into the phone again. “What I want you to do is soul kiss Dan Gillman for me and send him into orbit.” She laughed. “Oh, yes, I did go there,” she added, but she sobered up fast. “All right,” she said. “Yes. It’s not like I’m going anywhere. Love you, too. Yeah. Bye.”