Harper Allen - Woman Most Wanted

“Okay, I was a jerk,” he said. “I lied to her and she knew I was lying and she ran. But I feel the same way about her as you do, Marg, and whether you agree or not, I feel I’ve got a responsibility to find her and get her some help. Did she say anything about where she was heading?”

“No.” The waitress surveyed him stonily for a second, and then sighed. “Sorry for the outburst. I guess I was having a flashback or something.” She glanced over at the kitchen and shrugged. “You could ask Tom if he saw which way she went—he probably had to open the door for her.”

Jimmy, now that the crisis was over, had regained his swagger. “Nice kid, but no rocket scientist, if you catch my drift,” he confided to Matt. He raised his voice. “Tom, get your butt out here! Man’s got a question for you!”

“He’s a little slow, but he’s not deaf.” Marg shot the security guard a black look. As the younger man lumbered out of the kitchen toward them, she fixed a smile on her face. “Tom, you know the red-haired lady who went out of here a little while ago?”

“The pretty one? Sure.” Tom nodded judiciously. “I had to open the door for her. She couldn’t do it all by herself, so she asked me. Her hair smelled good.”

Marg reached out and touched the boy on the arm. “It’s pretty important, Tom. Did she go to where the alley comes out on the street, or did she turn right and head for the back of those apartments?”

With a start, Matt realized that the apartment building she was talking about was the one where he and Jenna had had that ill-fated encounter with West and Mrs. Janeway earlier—the building where she’d insisted she’d lived. It made sense that she’d head back to what she imagined was familiar territory, and he grabbed Tom’s arm, his voice urgent. “Did she go toward the apartments? Is that the way she went?”

With slow deliberation the pudgy teenager looked down at Matt’s hand. Then, as if he’d come to a momentous decision, he shook his head and pursed his lips. “Not toward the apartments, mister. She ran toward the street and a bus was coming and it stopped for her. She got on it and then she told the driver she wanted to go downtown, and he said okay. Then the bus drove away with her on it.” His voice rose. “But she didn’t go toward the apartments. She never even looked that way! She went toward the street, okay?”

He was lying as best as he knew how, Matt thought with rueful admiration. Jenna had done it again—passed a few moments with a stranger and gained another friend for life.

“He couldn’t have heard a conversation on the bus at this distance,” Jimmy said in a low tone. “Not with this downpour making such a racket. The kid’s lying—she musta headed for the back of those apartments like you figured.”

“She got on the bus and it drove away with her,” Tom said. He folded his arms across his chest, adding a new smear of raspberry jelly to the stains already on his apron. There was a smudge of powdered sugar on his cheek. “She didn’t go anywhere near those apartments, mister.”

“Poor kid, he’s trying to protect her,” Marg murmured to Matt. She patted Tom’s arm. “Thanks, Tom. You’d make a pretty good detective.”

“Okay, Marg. I’m going to start making more lemon doughnuts now.” Pointedly ignoring Matt, he turned away from the open door.

If anything, the rain was heavier now. Down the cracked pavement of the alleyway small streams ran and merged together, sweeping bits of paper and cigarette butts and other flotsam along with them. Jenna was out there, Matt thought. He’d been responsible for making her run. Anything could happen to her, and it would be his fault.

“Thanks, Marg. Jimmy, forget anything you thought you heard me talking about on the phone.” Hunching his shoulders, he sprinted out into the downpour, heading toward the apartment building.

THE KID HAD suckered him in. For the third time in as many minutes, Matt wiped the rain from his eyes in frustration and wondered briefly if it was too late to switch careers. A few feet beyond him was the dead end to the alleyway, beside him was an industrial garbage bin with the refuse from the apartment building spilling out of it, and behind him was the building itself—the building where this doomed nightmare of an evening had begun. Jenna hadn’t come this way at all. He’d been finessed by a donut-making teenager who, if he definitely wasn’t a rocket scientist, as Jimmy the security guard had said, certainly had managed to pull a fast one on one Matt D’Angelo, future area director of the Agency.

Jenna could be anywhere by now. He’d lost her.

He was halfway back down the alley when he heard the sound—an unearthly scream that floated eerily through the night. The hair on the back of his neck lifted in an atavistic reaction and he whirled around, his hand going automatically to his gun before he checked himself.

It had sounded like a baby’s cry—but not like any human baby he’d ever known. A chill that had nothing to do with the rain spread through him. From out of his childhood came, full-blown and as spine-tingling as when he’d first heard it, the memory of a story his great-grandmother had told him and his sister Carmela; the story of the goblin’s child who sobbed and wailed in the forests of her native Calabria to draw soft-hearted maidens to their deaths.

The cry came again, an unearthly, soulless entreaty that turned his blood to ice.

Matt blinked the rain from his eyes, and his mouth thinned to an angry line. He didn’t believe in ghosts or fairy tales or fantasy. He believed in hard facts. He started running, heading blindly toward where the sound had last come from and he felt his foot connect with something.

With a raucous clatter, the lid of a trash can fell to the pavement and rolled a few feet before its noisy progress ended. The next minute he saw a small figure leap from the edge of a nearby garbage bin and felt a searing pain rip its way across his left bicep. Immediately the cold clamminess of his shirt was overlaid with the warmth of blood.

His blood. Dammit, he was bleeding. And he was holding a damn cat!

For the second time that evening he found himself gazing into impossibly blue eyes, but this pair was cross-eyed. They glared myopically out of the triangular, brown-masked face peering from his arms, and even as Matt met that disconcerting gaze, the cat opened its mouth and let out a sobbing wail that gurgled off into an irregular purr.

He’d insisted on proof. He’d refused to believe anything she’d told him, he’d let her run out into the night believing she was what that lying bastard West had called her—Miss Looney Tunes—and now she was on the run, alone and frightened, just because he had to have everything by the book. How could he have been so damn stupid?

The cat in his arms yowled miserably and lashed a rain-drenched tail—which was covered, Matt saw, with a streak of sky-blue paint.

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