Deadly Pursuit (SCVC Taskforce) (18 page)

Sitting across from Cooper, the DEA section chief, Hart Kipfer, drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He was forty and balding in all the wrong places but, like Dupé, he was highly respected by all the operatives in the room. “A smart man would head for the border. Self-preservation first, payback later, when he felt safer.”

“Exactly,” Celina said.

The profiler agreed. “It doesn’t fit with his personality to take these kinds of chances.”
Smile
.

“It’s like he’s flaunting himself at us.” Celina stared at the frozen man on the screen again. “Risking everything, when he could disappear to Mexico or South America and lay low until the worst is over. He has a complete, multi-layered business in place down there even though the Mexican
federales
took out a bunch of his connections in conjunction with our arrest. He still has contacts and people willing to risk their life for his. Why break out of prison and then not run?”

“Prison changes a man,” Cooper interjected. “Especially the intelligent ones like Londano. They lose their future and start taking things one day at a time. Risk doesn’t matter. Revenge does.”

Dupé checked his watch. “Understanding Emilio Londano’s motivation is important to figuring out his next step, but not necessarily critical. Celina?” She broke her stare at the monitor and Dupé continued. “Will Emilio follow you back here?”

“He tracked me to Des Moines. And then to the safe house. Whatever else is on his agenda, it does appear he’s after me. He’ll come to California.”

The profiler nodded agreement; several others around the table did as well.

“If he was truly after you,” Lana said, “why didn’t he get you at your apartment?”

This was another thing Celina had had more time to consider. “Thomas interrupted him, I think. He probably wanted me to find Ronni and the others before he kidnapped me or tortured me, or whatever he was going to do. Thomas showed up and threw his plans off track. Self-preservation won out that time.”

“How lucky for you.” Lana’s voice held the slightest trace of sarcasm.

Was she imagining it? Not likely since most of the men in the room dropped their eyes to the table. Everyone except Dupé and the DEA chief.

Agent Rios, the fugitive apprehension agent sitting off to the side, gave Celina a supportive smile.

Dupé steepled his fingers under his chin, considering. “I don’t believe he’s stupid enough to come after you now with a nationwide manhunt and a five million dollar reward on his head. Too risky.”

“He seems to like risk.” Forester spoke for the first time. “And a challenge. Hell, he got himself out of prison without so much as a burp.”

“So how do we catch him?” Kipfer asked, but the question was directed at Cooper.

“That would be my job,” Rios interjected, standing up. “While the manhunt continues, I’ll coordinate follow-up on the calls made to the tip hotline. I’ll also be looking at alternative ways to catch Londano in case none of those pans out.”

“Has anyone called yet?” Celina asked.

Sara gave her a quirky smile. “About two hundred last I checked.”

Celina heard Cooper whistle softly under his breath.

“Two hundred?” she repeated.

“He murdered an FBI agent and severely injured three others in order to get at the New Face of the FBI. He’s got a lot of people’s attention.”

“Any credible leads?” Cooper asked.

Rios shook her head. “So far, no. Few calls have come from people here, in California, or from Iowa. Fewer still match our exact description or timeline. At this point we have three to five sightings that seem viable.”

Three to five? How pathetic. Celina held back a sigh. “What can I do to help?”

“For now,” Dupé told her, “I’m sending you to a safe house with guards posted around the clock.”

“But,” Celina started, and Dupé held up a hand to stop her. She ignored it. “But this is my case,” she continued. Seeing Dupé’s eyes darken, she added, “Sir.”

Lana doodled on a page in her Day-Timer. “There are no safe houses available. I checked a few hours ago and they’re all full.”

Dupé showed disbelief. “Seven safe houses between San Diego and L.A. and they’re all full?”

“L.A. has sent us three witnesses in protection for the Buffico trial. Northern CA sent us two families displaced by mudslides, and West Coast ATF is using the last two for temporary housing for some of their special units in training at Camp Pendleton. We’re booked.”

Frowning, Dupé shook his head. “Do you still have your apartment here in Carlsbad?” he asked Celina.

“I sublet it before I left.”

Dupé rubbed his chin with his fingers. “Get a hotel room and bill it to me.” He shot Forester a look. “You’re staying?”

Forester gave him a brief nod. “I’ll bunk with her.”

Celina’s smile fell off her face. Lana stopped doodling and chuckled under her breath.

Cooper cleared his throat, and Celina refused to look at him, knowing he was enjoying the image of her and Forester sharing a hotel room.

“My group can help with hotline tips,” he offered.

Dupé stood up, pushing back his chair. “Good.” He gathered papers and his PDA. “I have a Homeland Security meeting in Washington tomorrow at oh-eight-hundred hours. I’ll be back by fourteen hundred tomorrow and we’ll meet here at that time to reevaluate our position.”

He pointed at Celina. “Stay in the hotel room and lay low. Agent Kipfer will set up a security detail for you. Lana will see to it you have everything else you need.”

Lana sighed, and Celina recovered from her shock. “Yes, sir,” she said, sending Lana a merciless smile. “Thank you, sir.”

“I’ll see you when I get back.” His eyes lit on Celina’s face for a second too long and Lana briskly closed her Day-Timer and stood. Following Dupé out of the room, she cast one long scathing look over her shoulder at Celina.

Celina glanced at Cooper. As Lana disappeared from sight, the two of them shared a smile.

“Let’s find the restroom,” Sara said, grabbing Celina’s hand and hauling her toward the door.

“Why?” Celina grabbed her overnight bag from the floor as they passed.

“You’ll see.”

A minute later, Celina was in the twentieth floor women’s restroom, shedding her clothes and watching Sara shed hers. “You really think Emilio’s back in California already and watching this building?”

“It’s a possibility, isn’t it?” She handed Celina her shirt, grabbed the one Celina handed her in exchange. “From a distance, few people would be able to tell us apart. If he’s out there and decides to follow me instead of you, I’ll catch him.”

She dropped her eyes, kicked her left foot into the heel of the right boot, and slipped it off.

Celina put on the pink shirt and start buttoning. When Sara had pulled the other boot off, she scooted them across the concrete floor to her. “Anything I should know about your relationship with him?”

“He’s both charming and vindictive.” Celina took the jeans Sara handed her and tugged them on. They were tight and a little long. She zipped them up anyway. “When he’s ready to kill me, he’ll want to do it himself, slowly and privately.”

Sara thought for a moment, sliding into Celina’s jeans. “So he’ll try to get close to me.”

Celina sat down and drew on one of Sara’s boots. It was a perfect size seven and a half. “Be cautious. He’s very resourceful.”

Their clothing exchange completed, Sara motioned for Celina to turn around. She wrapped Celina’s hair in a low bun that she clipped at the base of Celina’s neck. Celina then helped Sara muss her hair up so it looked more like hers.

“We’re good,” Sara said, placing an arm around Celina and turning her to face the mirror.

“Are you Cuban?” Celina asked.

“No, I’m a mishmash of a bunch of things.” She pulled an FBI cap out of a backpack and stuck it on Celina’s head, snugging it down low over her eyes. “Stay with your security detail at all times.”

Celina shook Sara’s hand. “Watch your back.” She took a deep breath. “Emilio will not be happy if he figures out we’ve tricked him.”

“If you catch him before I do,” Sara said softly, “put a bullet in him and be done with it. He doesn’t deserve to live.”

Celina opened the door for her and thought again about Ronni and the others. Emilio deserved more than one bullet.

Chapter Eighteen

In Celina’s top ten nightmares, she never imagined anything as horrifying as spending the night in a hotel with Chief Eugene Forester. Still dressed in Sara’s clothes, she sat on the single king-size bed and wondered if things could get much worse.

Celina had insisted on staying in Carlsbad. Forester had insisted on driving her to the hotel. All through L.A., he’d swerved and sworn and Celina had held on to the Jesus handle in the Taurus rental as if her life depended on it. She wondered how her security tail managed to keep up with them. To make matters worse, Forester wouldn’t let her sit in the car while he picked up the key cards at the front desk for the room reserved for them. He’d insisted Celina never be out of his sight, even though her security guards were sitting directly beside them in the hotel parking lot.

She tried unsuccessfully to convince the chief to get two separate rooms, but he wouldn’t cooperate. It wouldn’t have mattered; the hotel was booked with the exception of one room—a single, king-size bed with not even a pullout couch. Celina sat on the bed now debating the merits of sleeping in the straight back desk chair or the bathtub.

Sleeping outside with the security guys held more appeal.

What she really wanted was to sleep with Cooper. He was outside the hotel somewhere; she could feel it. He’d told her he was going to the Carlsbad satellite office to catch up on paperwork and assign the team members he could spare to follow up on the hotline calls, but that wasn’t all he was up to. Like he’d told Forester, he was assuming the position of bodyguard. He might have been out of sight, but he was keeping close tabs on her as he lay in wait for Emilio.

While the security detail and a couple of local cops formed a circle around the hotel, Cooper watched their circle. He worked like that, thought in layers. A single security layer was easy to breach. Every layer added to the circle made it harder for the perp to break through without getting caught. Emilio had become quite adept at slipping by trained law enforcement officers, killing those who stood in his way. It wasn’t his style, his MO, but then like Cooper had told the group in the conference room, prison changed a man.

The Cooper on duty outside didn’t fit the Cooper she’d witnessed today with Lana. The woman was competitive and mean-spirited, but Cooper’s version of her was ridiculously exaggerated. Celina couldn’t believe he was so immature as to make up outlandish stories. There was something more between them, she’d bet her pink polka-dot underwear on it.

Underwear. She went to her carry-on bag and rummaged through the clothing. As soon as Forester was out of the bathroom, she was going to run a big tub of hot water and take a soothing bath. Get out of Sara’s clothes and relax. She’d been on such a whirlwind for the past twenty-four hours, she needed a few minutes without distractions to think about Emilio and figure out what he was really up to.

Her hand stilled in the clothes as her mind circled a mix of images. There was something about that video from the safe house in Des Moines that kept popping to the surface. Something about the way he looked or moved that was wrong. It was him, but it wasn’t. Why couldn’t she place it?

Just like his new smoking habit, something in his mannerisms had changed.

Making a mental note to discuss her intuition with Cooper, she went through her clothes again. Normally, she slept in as little as possible. Under the current circumstances, that was obviously out of the question.

Settling on yoga pants and a T-shirt, she went to the patio doors where she pushed the curtains aside. The room was on the top floor, facing the courtyard below. No patio, just a railing nailed across the outside of the glass to keep guests from using the patio doors and taking a big fall into the part-tropical, part-desert garden below. Mixed in with the palm trees and gardenia bushes were succulents the size of a car and cactus plants that sported spines as long as her thigh.

The hotel curved in a U-shape so that most of the rooms had an ocean view. An ocean view that, Celina decided, craning her neck to look around the leaves of a palm tree waving in front of her window, could only be seen with binoculars even on a clear day. Outside the courtyard was the front drive. Beyond that, the coastal highway, then the boardwalk, and beyond that, in the distance, the Pacific Ocean. Since it was dark, the most she could see were the flashing stoplights on the highway.

Flipping the lock on the patio door, she slid it open and took a deep breath of cool air. She could almost smell the ocean. She strained her ears, listening, and in between cars on the highway, she heard the waves. Closing her eyes, she imagined standing in the waves when this was over, and felt some of the tension drain from her shoulders.

She was stuck in a hotel room that featured a patio door without a patio, her oversized, gruff-as-a-linebacker ex-boss, and no clean underwear. But being on Emilio’s list was the real nightmare, one she had to bring to an end soon, before anyone else got hurt.