Shooting Starr

that look go away.

Again Redfield acknowledged her anger calmly, with a nod she couldn’t see. He spoke with so much control his voice sounded gentle. “We know the links are there, but so far we haven’t been able to find the ones that lead back to Vasily. The man is clever and he’s careful. And he has almost unlimited resources. He insulates himself inside so many layers of organization, it’s been impossible up to now to follow a trail directly to him. We’ve been able to find and close off a lot of his-I guess you could call them fingers. Tributaries. Channels. What we haven’t been able to do is connect any of them to the man at the top-we believe that’s Vasily.” C.J. wondered if he was the only one to see the FBI man’s hand curl into a fist. For the first time Jake’s voice betrayed tight-jawed, frustrated rage. “We know it, but we can’t prove it.”

Caitlyn spoke, not sullen or accusing, but quietly alert. “What does this have to do with me?”

“I think you may be his first mistake.” Jake’s smile wasn’t pleasant to see. “We’d like to see that it’s a fatal one.”

“A mistake?” Caitlyn whispered. And then, referring to the second part of the statement, a rather pugnacious, “How?”

Redfield shifted, in the manner of somebody getting down to the nitty-gritty. “This is the first hint we’ve had that Vasily might be human.” He smiled wryly. “It’s obvious that his daughter is important to him. So important that when faced with losing her, he’s apparently willing to go to extreme lengths to get her back, even at unprecedented risk of personal exposure.” He leaned forward and his voice hardened. “Spelling it out, I believe Vasily ordered the hit on his wife. I think that’s obvious, even if there’s no way in hell anybody’d ever make it stick in a court of law. Why would he do such a thing, effectively turning the spotlight of law enforcement on himself, when he’s been so successful in avoiding it for so long?” He paused, then answered himself.

“Because he was driven to it by sheer frustration. All those months waiting for you to crack, not able to get to you, not able to do a damn thing to get his daughter back-it finally pushed him into doing something stupid. Now all we have to do is take advantage of that mistake.”

“How can you?” Caitlyn whispered. “If you can’t prove he did it-had Mary Kelly killed.”

The FBI man leaned closer, and his voice grew softer still. “He had Mary Kelly killed for one reason, Caitlyn-to send a message to you. Look,” he said, putting up a hand as if to block her gasp of rejection, “you were the one who had his daughter spirited away. He knows his wife didn’t have the resources to do that. So, obviously, you’re the one who knows where she is.”

“But I don’t-” He made a sound to cut off the denial.

“Vasily probably figured you’d be so shook up by the shooting you’d give in and spill what you know to the judge and he’d get the kid back and that would be that. He didn’t count on you getting in the way of a bullet.”

“How can you be so sure of that?” Caitlyn protested faintly, voicing the same arguments C.J. and the others in the room had put forth when Jake had first laid out his theory for them. “There were bullets flying everywhere! Other people were hit-injured. Killed.” Her eyes darted desperately around the room; she had that lost child look again. “Couldn’t it have been…I don’t know…random?”

“Anything’s possible,” Jake said solemnly, without an ounce of conviction. “But consider this-the first shots took out the guards, but only wounded them. Then one bullet got Mrs. Vasily square in the heart. The only reason it creased your skull first was because when you heard those first shots you got some crazy notion in your head that you’d protect her. Vasily must have just about had a heart attack when he saw that.” His lips curved in his chilling smile. “It took a real pro and one helluva sharpshooter to do that, but I wouldn’t give a bent nickel for the hit man’s life right now. Vasily wants you, and he wants you alive.”

Vasily wants you.

This must be what drowning feels like, Caitlyn thought, as the wave of fear washed over her. To be engulfed in blackness…suffocating and cold.

And yet her mind was astonishingly clear. “I think I know where this is going,” she heard her own calm voice saying. “You want to set a trap for Vasily, and you want me to be the bait.”

There was a flurry of sounds and stirrings. Her mind’s eye struggled to sort them out: a choked protest from Dad, hastily stifled; C.J.’s voice-an angry, growled “No. No way. You said that wasn’t…” Background mutterings of protest from someone-that would be C.J.’s sister-in-law, the lawyer, probably; closer by, the FBI man’s restless shifting and the barely audible hiss of a breath, exhaled through someone’s nose.

The lawyer-Charly-said in a thick Southern drawl, “For Lord’s sake, Jake, after you almost lost Evie-”

The FBI man cut her off, speaking directly to Caitlyn in a quiet but curiously vibrant voice. As if, she thought, he was trying to cover up some powerful emotion and not doing a very good job of it. “We do want to set a trap for Vasily, of course. Because if there’s one thing in this world Ari Vasily would take care of in person rather than leaving to his loyal-not to mention untraceable-soldiers, it’s picking up his little girl, once he finds out where she is. But the last thing we’d want to do is use you or the child as bait. Too many things can go wrong.” He paused to clear his throat against a background of more shiftings and stirrings.

Undercurrents, thought Caitlyn, intrigued in spite of everything.

“What we want to do,” the FBI man-Jake?-went on after a moment, raising his voice in a struggle to reclaim his self-control, “is get you under wraps and keep you there until we’ve got Vasily in custody. To do that-”

“You’ll have to use me,” Caitlyn said calmly. “You said yourself-he wants me alive.”

“He wants his daughter,” Jake corrected, his voice now hard and flat. “You’re the means to an end, as far as he’s concerned, nothing more. We’ll set up the situation, and it’ll be one that isn’t going to put you or Emma Vasily in harm’s way-leave that to us. Right now we’re more concerned about getting you to a safe place without Vasily knowing about it.”

A safe place… Her mind filled with achingly brilliant images of her room in her parents’ house on its shaded street in Sioux City-soft-green walls and borders of pink tulips clashing intriguingly with the dark and brooding posters of Middle Earth from the Tolkien phase she’d dwelt in during most of her high school years.

I want to go home.

She couldn’t go home, and knew it. So did everybody else in the room, judging from the silence and tension that had followed Jake’s words. Caitlyn’s sunny visions of home took on the grainy, shadowy shadings of an old film noir movie as she imagined Ari Vasily tracking her down…finding her there. She couldn’t let him find out where her family lived. Ever.

She shivered, and felt isolated…alone.

A gruff and froggy sound reached for her in her cave of loneliness and yanked her back to the room filled with people. C.J., clearing his throat. C.J., sitting close to her, on the other side of the bed from the FBI man who’d demanded her focused attention so that she’d all but forgotten anyone else was there. C.J., the cute Southern trucker with the melting-chocolate eyes, sweet smile and wicked dimples, who she’d asked for help and who had let her down so badly and who she had expected never to see again, and yet-who was now so inexplicably and constantly here.

C.J. cleared his throat and said, “How ’bout this? How ’bout she comes home with me-to my folks’ place in Georgia?”

Silence again-and Caitlyn thought she’d never known before how many different shades of silence there were. This one shimmered around the edges, balanced on the verge of sound, like that suspenseful moment of emptiness in a symphony just before the strings come in at triple pianissimo.

Then everyone spoke at once, a murmur and chatter of sound that blew past her ears like a capricious gust of wind.

In its wake, C.J. said, with what she thought was a touch of belligerence, “Look, it’s the perfect place. Where we live it’s way out in the country-”

“It is that,” said Charly dryly. “C.J.’s right. Out there, the only neighbors are friends and family, and they all know one another. It’d be just about impossible for any stranger to get close enough to Caitlyn to do her harm, and anybody dumb enough to try would have to go through all the brothers and in-laws first-” she interjected a rich, warm chuckle “-not to mention Momma Betty. Personally, I’d bet on Betty Starr up against a hit man any day of the week.”

Jake said, thoughtful and somber, “Actually, it’s got possibilities. There’s no way to connect any of you with Caitlyn…” She could tell by the clarity of his voice that he was looking at her, waiting for her reaction.

“Honey?” Her dad’s voice, cautious and distant. “What do you think?”

What did she think? She couldn’t think. The silence was all around her…vibrant…waiting. Where was C.J.? Was