Carla Neggers - The Rapids

Magster.

Her stomach flip-flopped, but she warned herself that using her childhood name could just be a good guess, a way to manipulate her. It didn’t mean he knew anything about her father’s death. She couldn’t let herself think it was anything more.

“Who are you? I need a name.”

It was as if she hadn’t spoken. “Come alone. If you don’t, I’ll disappear, and you’ll have missed an important opportunity.”

“An opportunity for what?”

But he was gone, the connection dead.

A meeting. Was the guy out of his mind?

He must have prepared every word in advance. Of course her father called her Magster. What father with a daughter named Maggie didn’t?

Some days she couldn’t believe it’d been eighteen months since his murder; other days, it was as if her father was more a dream than anything else, lost in a fog of memories and lost possibilities.

Had the caller known him?

Maggie felt a sudden rush of tears that she immediately fought back, impatient with herself.

But Rob Dunnemore materialized behind her, startling her with his good looks. The ends of his fair hair were still damp from his shower. He hadn’t wasted any time in getting cleaned up and settled in.

She smiled quickly, hoping there was no sign of even one damn tear in her eyes. “Have a seat, Deputy. We can get started.”

“Bad day?”

“What? Oh.” She made herself smile. “No, not yet.”

He didn’t seem to believe her. “That’s good.”

Maggie wished she’d indulged in chocolate sprinkles that morning, because it was going to be a very long day.

Magster.

She’d figure out what to do about her anonymous caller when she didn’t have Deputy Dunnemore’s gray eyes on her.

Wide awake despite his overnight flight and long day, Rob sat on a wooden chair at a small table in his room on the top floor of his hotel, a renovated eighteenth-century building. It had low, slanted ceilings and no air-conditioning, but it wasn’t a hot night, at least by middle Tennessee standards.

He heard laughter through his open window and looked down four floors at a young couple standing under a linden tree, its branches carefully trained.

Rob turned away from the scene.

His eyes were heavy, scratchy, from fatigue and jet lag.

Maggie Spencer had walked with him back to his hotel, turning down a quick after-work drink.

A woman with things on her mind, Special Agent Spencer.

He’d gone into the dark, quiet bar by himself, but in a few minutes another man joined him, introducing himself as Tom Kopac, an embassy employee. Maggie’s friend.

They’d had a beer together. It was clear word had gotten out that the wounded marshal from the Janssen mess in May—the marshal who was friends with the president—was in town and Maggie was stuck with him.

Kopac had decided to check him out.

Their conversation was cordial but superficial. Rob had smiled at the older man. “Maggie’s a DS agent. She protects you. You don’t protect her.”

“She’s also a friend.”

After Kopac left, Rob had a spicy, meat-filled kroket with mustard, then went up to his room.

Why the hell was Kopac suspicious of him when Spencer was the one who had received the damn anonymous tip about Janssen? Not even an hour afterward, he was under arrest. Tips like that didn’t happen often, even with minor nonviolent fugitives, never mind with violent fugitives with international warrants out on them.

Was it someone wanting to collect the reward for information leading to Janssen’s arrest?

No one had come forward.

Rob put aside his questions and picked up the phone, dialing his future brother-in-law’s office in Arlington.

“What do we know about the DS agent who got the Janssen tip? Maggie Spencer.” Rob didn’t mention her rich red hair, her turquoise eyes, her creamy skin, and chastised himself for his gut-punched reaction to her. “She’s gritting her teeth, but she’s not complaining about getting saddled with me. At least not to my face.”

“Her name’s familiar,” Nate said.

“Because she’s the one who got the Janssen tip—”

“No, it’s something else.”

“You want to see what you can find out?”

“Sure.”

“She’s fetching me up in the morning and carting me to the town where Janssen was picked up.”

“Her idea?”

“She’s finding things to do with me.”

The alternative meanings of what he said struck him like a junior high student. Jet lag.

“I’m not touching that,” Nate said with a chuckle. “I’ll check her out, let you know if I find out anything. Has she given you any idea of who she thinks gave her the tip?”

“She’s not a talker—she’s not easy to read.”

“All right. I’ll see what I can do. Isn’t it midnight there?”

“Just about.”

“Go to bed. Take a sleeping pill.”

“I don’t want to oversleep and miss my field trip.”

Then again, Spencer was probably the type to throw a brick through his window to wake him up.

“I’ll tell Sarah you called,” Nate said.

“And the president?”

Silence.

“He wanted to know how I reacted to Janssen’s arrest, didn’t he?”

“It’s not that simple—”

“It never is with Wes. Yeah. Say hi to Sarah for me.”

When he hung up, Rob glanced down at the street and saw that the laughing couple was gone. The street seemed empty, almost too quiet. He lay atop his bed in his shorts. No shirt, no shoes. He’d visited his parents in Holland in April, when Nick Janssen was just wanted for failing to appear in court to face tax evasion charges. He’d made a move on Rob’s mother, and Rob hadn’t even known it.

So much had happened since then.

But his parents were back in Night’s Landing, permanently, and his father, in his late seventies, was finally easing up on his schedule. His mother seemed more at peace than she had in many weeks. Neither had wanted Rob to go back to work after the shooting—they hadn’t wanted him to become a marshal in the first place.

“Should have called them before you left New York,” he said to the ceiling. But he hadn’t talked to them at all since Janssen’s arrest.

He let his eyes close, pushing back an image of Night’s Landing and the old log house his grandfather had built, thinking instead about Maggie Spencer and Tom Kopac and what it was about the diplomatic security agent that bothered him.

Maggie pulled up to Rob’s hotel in her Mini at eight. She didn’t know what else to do except drag him to ’s-Hertogenbosch with her.

He greeted her with a charming smile and two espressos and folded himself into her small car without complaint, handing her one of the espressos. “What is it, about two hours to ’s-Hertogenbosch?”

He pronounced the full name of the southern city the same way her Dutch friends did—flawlessly. It translated as “the duke’s forest” and was typically shortened to Den Bosch, which Maggie could pronounce easily enough. “Should be,” she said, pulling out onto the street.

As he sipped his espresso, Rob dug out a pocket map and checked their route. “Den Bosch was founded in the twelfth century by Hendrik I of Brabant.”

“Ah.”

“Biggest attraction there is Sint Jan’s Kathedraal.”

Maggie didn’t let herself react to his use of the Dutch name for St. John’s Cathedral, where she was supposed to meet her anonymous caller, her ulterior motive for going to Den Bosch on a warm Saturday morning. “You’ve been reading tourist brochures, I see.”

“We might need something to do after we look at the spot where the Dutch police picked up Janssen. Do you know the address of his safe house?”