145 mile per hour winds to 150. The storm was expected to hit Grand Cayman in a few hours. One million Cubans were said to have evacuated in anticipation of the monster hitting there on Sunday. Moving at only ten miles per hour, the hurricane was expected to enter the Gulf by Monday.
On every projected path Maggie had seen in the last several hours, Pensacola, Florida, was smack-dab in the middle. Charlie Wurth hadn't been kidding when he told her they would be driving down into the eye of a hurricane. Consequently, there were no available flights to Pensacola. Tomorrow morning she was booked to fly to Atlanta where Charlie would pick her up and they would drive five hours to the Florida Panhandle. When she asked him what he was doing in Atlanta--his home was in New Orleans and his office in Washington, D.C.--he simply said, 'Don't ask.'
Wurth still had difficulty acting like a federal government employee. He came to the position of assistant deputy director of Homeland Security after impressing the right people with his tough but fair investigation of federal waste and corruption in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But Wurth, like Maggie, probably would never get used to the bureaucracy that came with the job.
Maggie knew she should be packing. She kept a bag with the essentials. She just needed to add to it. What did one pack for hurricane weather? Sensible shoes, no doubt. Her friend Gwen Patterson was always telling Maggie that she didn't have the appropriate respect for shoes.
She glanced at the time. She'd need to call Gwen. She'd do that later. The foray with today's killer was still too fresh in her mind and on her skin. Her friend the psychiatrist had a knack for reading between the lines, weighing pauses, and detecting even the slightest of cracks in Maggie's composure. An occupational hazard, Gwen always said, and Maggie understood all too well.
The two women had met when Maggie was a forensic fellow at Quantico and Gwen a private consultant to the Behavioral Science Unit. Seventeen years Maggie's senior, Dr. Gwen Patterson had the tendency to overlap maternal instincts into their friendship. Maggie didn't mind. Gwen was her one constant. It was Gwen who was always there by Maggie's side. It was Gwen propping her up during her long, drawn-out divorce; setting up vigil alongside Maggie's hospital bed after a killer had trapped her in a freezer to die; sitting outside an isolation ward at Fort Detrick when Maggie'd been exposed to Ebola; and most recently Gwen was again by her side at Arlington National Cemetery when Maggie paid her last respects at her mentor's gravesite.
Yet there were days like today when Maggie didn't want to confront her own vulnerabilities. Nor did she want her friend worrying. Maggie knew her insomnia was not just the inability to fall asleep. It was the nightmares that jolted her awake. Visions of her brother Patrick handcuffed to a suitcase bomb. The image of her mentor and boss lying in a hospital bed, his skeletal body invaded with tubes and needles. Herself trapped inside an ice coffin. A takeout container left on the counter of a truck stop, seeping blood. Rows and rows of Mason jars filled with floating body parts.
The problem was that those nightmare images were not the creation of an overactive or fatigued imagination but, rather, were memories, snapshots of very real experiences. The compartments Maggie had spent years carefully constructing in her mind--the places where she locked away the horrific snapshots--had started to leak. Just like Gwen had predicted.
'One of these days,' her wise friend had warned, 'you're going to need to deal with the things you've seen and done, what's been done to you. You can't tuck them away forever.'
The cell phone startled both Maggie and Harvey this time. She patted him as she reached across his body to retrieve the phone. She wouldn't have been surprised to hear Gwen's voice.
'Maggie O'Dell.'
'Hey.'
Close. It was Gwen's boyfriend, R. J. Tully, who happened to be Maggie's partner. That was before the FBI buckled down on costs. Now they found themselves working singularly and assigned to very few of the same cases. However, Tully had been one of the contingency there today at the warehouse, one of half a dozen agents who witnessed Kunze's kill shot.
'Thought I'd check to see if you're okay.'
'I'm fine.' Too quick. She bit down on her lower lip. Would Tully call her on it? Gwen would. Before he had a chance to respond, she tried to change the subject. 'I was just about to call Emma.'
'Emma?' Tully sounded like he didn't recognize his daughter's name.
'To stay with Harvey. I need to leave tomorrow morning. Early. Charlie Wurth has a case in Florida he wants me to check out. Is Emma home?'
Too long of a pause. He knew what she was up to. He was a profiler, too. But would he let her get away with it? Gwen wouldn't.
'She hasn't left for college yet, has she?' Maggie asked the question only to fill the silence. She knew the girl was dragging her feet about going.
'No. Not until late next week. She's not here right now, but I'm sure she'll be okay about staying with Harvey. Text her instead of calling. You'll get an immediate response.' Another pause. 'Does AD Kunze know about this trip?'
'Of course, he does.' She hated that it came out with an edge. 'Wurth checked it out with him.' She didn't add that Kunze thought it was a good idea. Tully would add it on his own. He had faced the wrath of Kunze last fall when their new boss put Tully on suspension. 'It's probably not a big deal,' Maggie jumped in again. 'Some body parts found in a cooler off the coast.'
'More body parts.' She could hear Tully laugh. 'Sounds like you're becoming an expert on killers who chop up their victims.'
She would have laughed, too, if it wasn't so close to being true. Then, without regard to all the work she had done to change the subject, Maggie heard herself say, 'Do me a favor, don't tell Gwen about today, okay?'
'Not a problem.' This time there had been no pause, no hesitation. A partner backing up another partner. 'Let me know if I can help. With the case,' he added, allowing her cover.
CHAPTER 6
HILTON PENSACOLA BEACH GULF FRONT
Scott Larsen sipped his draft beer and waited for the man he'd secretly nicknamed 'the Death Salesman.' It was sort of a term of endearment, one colleague to another. After all, Scott didn't mind that some people--including his own wife--sometimes called him a death merchant. Sounded sexier than funeral director or even mortician.
He watched the back door to the hotel from the deck bar. This was the first time they were meeting outside of Scott's office. Scott was good at his job, good at being the professional. He didn't do casual or social very well, and in his line of work you never mixed business with pleasure so it worked just fine.
The cute, blond bartender had already given him a refill and his head was beginning to feel a bit fuzzy. He'd never been good at holding his liquor, even beer, though he was pretty good at pretending. As soon as the buzz began, he slowed down his speech and carefully measured his words.
His wife, Trish, claimed he was too good at pretending. But then he'd had a lot of practice. That was, after all, what the funeral business was all about, wasn't it? Pretend the deceased is at peace. Pretend he's gone on to a better place. Pretend that you care.
Scott glanced at his wristwatch and turned to look back at the water. He tried not to stare at any of the young bikinied bodies though the beach was filled with them this early on a Saturday evening. He was a married man now, or at least he could use that as an excuse. He stunk at flirting, too. He could be so charming when it came to widows, holding their hands and letting them sob on his shoulder. But put him in a room full of beautiful, sexy women and he choked. Had no clue what to do or what to talk about. His palms got sweaty, his tongue swelled in his mouth. Couldn't even fake his way around. It was a wonder he ever snagged Trish. He was lucky and grateful and he tried never to forget that.
He started to turn back around to watch the hotel door when he noticed a guy walking up the beach with a confident, relaxed stride, deck shoes in one hand and the other casually slipped into the pocket of his long khaki shorts. The hem of his pink button-down shirt flapped in the breeze. He wasn't stunningly handsome and yet that confident stride turned some heads. The guy looked like he had stepped off the cover of GQ and nothing like a death
