Lethal Read online

  She did as told but with attitude.

  He backed up through the doorway and into the hall. Keeping his eyes on her, he used his foot to push the opened box of clothing from the hallway into the bedroom, moving it along the hardwood floor until it was within her reach.

  “Pick out some clothes I can wear. It makes no difference to me what it is, but it might to you. I don’t want to defile some sacred garment.”

  It took her a moment to comprehend that she wasn’t about to be raped, and that all he wanted from her was a change of clothing. But not mere clothing. Clothes that Eddie had worn.

  She started to tell him that he could rot in his bloodstained clothes for all she cared. But he would only take something from the box himself, so what would be the point?

  She knelt beside the box and rifled through the garments, choosing a worn pair of jeans and an LSU Tigers T-shirt. She held them up for his inspection.

  “Underwear? Socks?”

  “I didn’t keep any.”

  “Okay, bring the clothes with you into the bathroom.”

  “Into the bathroom? What for?”

  “A shower. I’m sick of my own stink.”

  She looked through the connecting door into the bathroom, then came back to him. “Leave the door open. You can see me from here.”

  “Not an option.” He flicked the barrel of the pistol toward the bathroom.

  Slowly she stood up and walked toward it. He motioned for her to sit on the lowered commode lid, which she did, watching with dread as he closed the door and flipped the lock.

  He opened the shower stall door and turned on the water, then, after setting the pistol on a decorative shelf well out of her reach, he tugged off his cowboy boots one at a time. Socks came next. He whipped off his T-shirt and tossed it to the floor.

  She stared at intersecting lines of grout on the tile floor, but within her peripheral vision she could see a lean torso with a fan of hair over the pectorals. A barbed-wire tattoo banded the left biceps.

  She had hoped he would forget the cell phones in his jeans pockets, but she saw him take them out and set them on the shelf beside the pistol. He also took from his pockets a wad of currency and a piece of paper that had been folded into a tight rectangle about the size of a playing card. These, too, went onto the shelf.

  Then his hands moved to the fly of his jeans and deftly worked the metal rivets from their well-worn holes. Without the least compunction, he pushed the jeans down his legs and stepped out of them, kicking them aside. Last came a pair of undershorts.

  Honor’s heart was thudding so hard she felt each pulse against her eardrums. She’d forgotten, or rather hadn’t allowed herself to remember, the particular essence of a naked man, the shape of the male body, the intriguing textures.

  Perhaps because she feared Coburn, because he posed a physical threat, she was acutely aware of his nakedness as he stood only inches from her emanating a very real, dominant, primitive masculinity.

  Beneath Eddie’s clothes that were lying in her lap, her hands curled into fists. Despite her determination not to be cowed, she’d kept her eyes open. But now they seemed to shut tightly of their own volition.

  After what seemed like an eternity, she sensed him moving away from her and stepping into the shower stall. He didn’t close the door. When the spray of hot water hit him, he actually sighed with pleasure.

  That was the instant she’d been waiting for. She shot to her feet, dumping the garments to the floor, and, hands outstretched, lunged for the shelf.

  Only to find it empty.

  “I figured you would try.”

  Angrily, she spun toward the stall. He was casually working the bar of soap into a lather between his hands, water sluicing over him. With a smug smile, he tipped his head toward the narrow window high in the shower wall. On the tile ledge, safe and dry, were the pistol, the cell phones, the money, and the folded piece of paper.

  With a strangled cry of despair, she launched herself toward the door and turned the lock. She even managed to yank the door open before a soapy hand shot over her shoulder and slammed it shut, then remained flat against it. He placed his other hand at her hip, the heel of it pressing against the bone, his palm and fingers tightly fitting themselves to the curve of her belly.

  The wet imprint of his hand was as distinct and searing as a brand as he crowded up behind her, mashing her between him and the door. From the corner of her eye she had a close-up view of the barbed-wire tattoo, which looked as unyielding as the hard muscle it encircled.

  She froze with fear. He didn’t move either, except for the rapid rise and fall of his chest against her back. Her clothing acted as a sponge to his wet skin. Water dripped off him and trickled down the backs of her bare legs. Soap bubbles dissolved into liquid on his hand that was still flattened against the door.

  His breath was rapid and hot against her neck. He bent his head downward toward her shoulder even as his hips angled up. It was an oh-so-subtle adjustment of two body parts, perfectly synchronized and corresponding. But it was enough to cause Honor’s breath to catch in her throat.

  “Jesus.” The word was spoken in a barely audible groan that came from deep within his chest and wasn’t in the least religiously inspired.

  Honor didn’t dare shift her position, didn’t dare even breathe, afraid of what the slightest motion might provoke.

  Half a minute ticked by. Gradually, the tension in his body ebbed, and he relaxed his hold, but only marginally. In a gravelly voice, he said, “We had a deal. You cooperate, you don’t get hurt.”

  “I didn’t trust you to keep to the agreement.”

  “Then we’re even, lady. You just lost all trust privileges.” He released her and backed away. “Sit down and stay there, or so help me God…”

  He made his point so emphatically that he didn’t even bother locking the bathroom door again. Her knees gave way just as she reached the commode. She sat down on it heavily, grateful for the support.

  He got back into the shower stall, and although she didn’t look in that direction, she sensed him picking up the bar of soap from off the floor, then washing and rinsing in cycles in order to get the filth off himself.

  She smelled her shampoo when he uncapped the plastic bottle. Knowing he would have to duck his head beneath the spray in order to rinse it, she wondered if she dared try again to get through the door. But she didn’t trust her legs to support her, and she didn’t trust what he would do if she tried and failed again.

  The room had become cloudy and warm with steam by the time he turned off the faucets. She sensed him reaching through the open shower door and whipping a towel off the rack. A few moments later, he picked up Eddie’s old jeans and pulled them on, then the faded purple T-shirt.

  “My head is bleeding again.”

  When she looked up, he was still working the T-shirt over his damp torso with one hand, and with the other was trying to stanch the bleeding from his scalp. Bright red blood was leaking through his fingers.

  “Hold the towel against it. Press it hard.” She stood up and opened the medicine cabinet above the sink. “You’d better douse it with peroxide.”

  She passed the bottle to him. He uncapped it and did as she suggested, liberally pouring the peroxide directly over the wound. She winced. “Is it deep? You may need stitches.”

  “This’ll do for now.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I was running with my head down, trying to see the ground. Ran into a low tree branch.” He tossed the bloody towel to the floor. “What do you care?”

  She said nothing to that, but she didn’t believe he actually expected her to reply. He retrieved the items from the window ledge in the shower stall. He slid the pistol into the waistband of Eddie’s jeans. They were a bit short, Honor noted, and the waistband was a tad too large. The cell phones, money, and odd piece of paper went into the front pockets. Then, gathering up his socks and boots, he said, “You can open the door now.”

&nbs
p; As they left the bathroom, Honor said, “While we were locked up in there, someone could have come along searching for you. You would have been trapped.”

  “That had occurred to me, but I wasn’t too worried about it. Thanks to your father-in-law I know where they’re concentrating the search.”

  “Where you stole the boat?”

  “It’s miles from here. It’ll take them a while to pick up my scent again.”

  “Are you shore?” Mrs. Arleeta Thibadoux squinted doubtfully. “ ’Cause they’re crazy, mean kids, always into trouble of one kind or another. I ’spect they do drugs.”

  Tom VanAllen had yielded the floor to Fred Hawkins, letting the police officer interview the owner of the small boat that had gone missing in the approximate area where Lee Coburn had last been seen. Or was thought to have last been seen. That he was the man the motorist with the flat tire had spotted as he ran into the woods couldn’t be confirmed either, but it was all they had, so they were following it up as though it was a strong lead.

  The trio of boys of questionable repute, who lived a quarter mile from Mrs. Thibadoux, had been interrogated and dismissed as the suspected boat thieves. Last night, they’d been in New Orleans with several friends prowling the French Quarter. They’d slept over—passed out, more accurately—in the van belonging to one of those friends and had just straggled home, hungover and bleary-eyed, just as Tambour police had arrived to question them.

  This had been explained to Mrs. Thibadoux, who wasn’t quite ready to rule them out as the culprits. “I had to holler at them just a few days ago. Saw them down there at the dock messing around with my boat.”

  “Their friends can vouch for their whereabouts since eight o’clock last night,” Fred told her.

  “Hm. Well.” She sniffed. “That boat weren’t worth much, anyhow. I hadn’t took it out since my husband died. Thought many times about selling it but never got around to it.” She grinned, revealing a space where a critical tooth should have been. “It’ll be worth more money now if that killer got away in it. If you find it, don’t let nobody do nothing to it.”

  “No, ma’am, we won’t.”

  Fred tipped his hat to her and made his way past the bird dogs sprawled on her porch. As he came down the steps, he opened a stick of gum, offering the pack to Tom.

  “No thanks.” Tom swiped a trickle of sweat off his forehead and waved at the swarm of gnats that had taken a liking to him. “You think Coburn took her boat?”

  “Could’ve just got loose from her dock and drifted with the current,” Fred said. “But she swears it was secure. In any case, we gotta assume it was Coburn and try to locate it.”

  Frustration made Fred’s reply sound terse, even obligatory. Tom could tell that the police officer’s patience was wearing thin. The longer Coburn was at large, the better his odds for escaping. Fred was beginning to feel the pressure. He was giving the chewing gum a workout.

  “My office called while you were talking to Mrs. Thibadoux,” Tom said. “The search of the trucks hasn’t yielded anything.”

  The first thing he’d done last night, after being alerted to the multiple murder, was to order that all the trucks in the Royale fleet be stopped along their routes and thoroughly searched.

  “I didn’t expect it to,” Fred said. “If Coburn had an accomplice who whisked him away in a company truck, or a buddy who provided him a getaway, he could have been dropped anywhere.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Tom said testily. “But the drivers are being held and questioned all the same. And using the company manifests, we’re checking out anyone who was in that warehouse within the past month. Coburn could have forged an alliance with someone who worked for any of the companies Royale does business with. Maybe more than one.”

  “Nothing’s missing from the warehouse.”

  “That we know of,” Tom stressed. “Coburn could have been stealing for a while, a little at a time, and it just hadn’t caught up with him yet. Maybe his embezzlement wasn’t exposed until yesterday, and when Sam challenged him, he went haywire. Anyhow, I’ve got agents working that angle.”

  Fred shrugged as though to say it was the federal government’s time and manpower that were being wasted. Sardonically he said, “You can question Coburn about that when we catch him.”

  “If it’s us.”

  “It’ll be us,” Fred growled with resolve. “He’s still in the area or I’m not three-quarters Coonass.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I can feel him like hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.”

  Tom didn’t argue. Some law enforcement officers had innate crime-solving skills that had inspired their career choice. Tom wasn’t one of them. He’d always wanted to be an FBI agent, to work in that environment, but he’d never deluded himself into believing that he possessed extraordinary powers of detection or deduction. He relied strictly on training and procedure.

  He knew he didn’t call to mind the sexy, glamorous image of an FBI agent that Hollywood portrayed—steely-eyed, iron-jawed men defying machine-gun bullets as they chased gangsters in fast cars.

  The perils Tom faced were of another kind altogether.

  He cleared his throat to shake off that disturbing thought. “So you think Coburn is out there somewhere.” He shaded his eyes against the sun, which hadn’t yet slipped below the tree line. He could hear the search helicopter hovering not too far away but couldn’t see it in the glare. “Chopper might spot the boat.”

  “Might. But probably won’t.”

  “No?”

  Fred relocated his gum to the other side of his mouth. “It’s been up there going on two hours. I’m thinking Coburn’s too smart to let himself be sighted that easily. It’s not like that chopper can sneak up on him. Meanwhile we’ve got police boats trolling miles—”

  A sharp whistle drew their attention to the ramshackle boat dock fifty yards from Mrs. Thibadoux’s dwelling. Doral Hawkins was waving his arms high above his head. VanAllen and Fred jogged down the grassy slope that was littered with junk, relics from salvage yards and garage sales that had been purchased, then left to the mercy of salt air.

  They joined Doral and several uniformed officers who were grouped around an area on the bank of the bayou. “What have you got, brother?” Fred asked.

  “Partial footprint. Even better, blood.” Doral proudly pointed out what was obviously spatters of blood near a distinct depression in the cool mud.

  “Hot damn!” Fred went down on his haunches to better examine the first real clue they’d found.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Doral said. “Looks like the heel of a cowboy boot. Could belong to one of those idiot teenagers the old lady was ranting about.”

  “She said they were down here at her dock only a few days ago,” Tom remarked.

  “We’ll check out their footwear,” Fred said. “But one of the ladies who works in the Royale offices sounded like she had the hots for Coburn. Described him in detail. Right down to his boots.” He grinned up at the other two men. “She said she never saw him in anything except cowboy boots.”

  “What do you make of the blood?” Tom asked.

  “It’s a few drips, not a puddle, so he couldn’t be hurt too bad.” Fred slapped his thighs as he stood up and called back to one of the other officers, “Get the lab boys from the sheriff’s office down here.”

  He put another pair of officers in charge of cordoning off the area. “Twenty feet wide. From the house down to the water. And tell Mrs. Thibadoux to keep her damn dogs away from here.”

  “They might pick up his scent,” Tom said hopefully.

  Fred scoffed. “Not that sorry pack. Where were they when Coburn was stealing her boat?”

  Good question. Strangers were milling all over the property and none of the dogs had even growled.

  Doral, who’d been staring out over the sluggish water of the bayou, used his thumb to push his dozer cap farther back on his head. “I hate to throw a wet blanket over
this, but if Coburn put into the bayou here—”

  “We’re screwed,” Fred said, catching his twin’s meaning.

  “What I was thinking,” Doral said unhappily.

  Tom hated to show his ignorance, but he had to ask. “What were you thinking?”

  “Well,” Doral said, “from here, Coburn could’ve gone in any one of five directions.” He pointed out the tributaries that converged into the widest section of the bayou behind the Thibadoux property.

  “All five of those channels branch off into others, and those into others. It’s a network. Leaving us with miles of waterways and swamp to cover.” Fred’s elation had rapidly dissipated. Looking out over the watery view, he placed his hands on his hips. “Shit. We should have had this son of a bitch in custody by now.”

  “Won’t argue with you there,” Doral said.

  “He worked on the loading dock, for crissake,” Fred grumbled. “How smart can he be?”

  Tom refrained from pointing out the obvious, but he did say, “It’s like he chose this point on purpose, isn’t it? Like he knew that these creeks came together at this spot.”

  “How could he know that if he’s not from around here?” Doral asked.

  Fred took the wad of chewing gum from his mouth and pitched it overhand into the dark, murky waters of the bayou. “It means he had an escape route all planned out.”

  Tom’s cell phone vibrated. He took it from his pocket. “My wife,” he told the two men.

  “You’d better take it,” Fred said.

  Tom didn’t talk to anyone about his circumstances at home, but he was certain people talked about them behind his back. Lanny was never mentioned, but everybody acquainted with the VanAllens, even by name, knew about their son. Someone as disabled as Lanny aroused pity and curiosity, which is why Tom and Janice had never taken him out in public. They wanted to spare not only themselves but their helpless son the humiliation of having people gawk.

  Even their friends—former friends—had revealed a morbid curiosity that got so uncomfortable that he and Janice had severed all connections. They no longer socialized with anyone. Besides, their friends had borne normal, healthy children. It was painful to listen to their talk about school plays, birthday parties, and soccer games.