Exposed (28 page)

Maddie unhooked the sling and got a trash bag from a cabinet. After wrapping the bandaged part of her arm in plastic, she secured it with tape and then stepped into the shower.

Fifteen minutes later, she emerged from her bathroom feeling cleaner but no less rattled by the night’s events. She pulled on jeans and a fleece sweatshirt. Then she went in search of food and possibly a drink to calm her nerves.

She walked into her kitchen and saw Brooke—who didn’t have a domestic bone in her body—standing at
the stove and stirring a pot of soup. Tears sprang into Maddie’s eyes.

“I made you a Cape Cod.” Brooke nodded at a short pink drink on the counter.

“Thank you.” She picked it up and took a sip. “Where did the agents go?”

“I think they’re camping out in the car. That’s the sense I got. They wanted me to tell you they’ll be doing periodic checks of the perimeter, so don’t be alarmed.”

The doorbell rang, and Maddie jumped. She crossed the house and peered through her peephole, expecting to see the accountants again, but it was Brian and Sam. She pulled open the door.

Brian frowned. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“Nice to see you, too.”

“How’s the arm?” Sam asked.

Maddie bolted the door behind them. “Sore.” She led them into the kitchen, where Brooke was setting a steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup on the table.

“Hey, the first string’s back,” she said.

“You don’t want any?” Maddie asked Brooke, noting the lone place setting.

“Sorry, I need to get home.” She glanced at the clock, and Maddie saw to her surprise that it was almost three.

“Thanks for the soup. And the ride.”

“Anytime.” Brooke grabbed her purse and nodded at Brian and Sam. “Don’t keep her up too late.”

When she was gone, Maddie sank into her chair, relieved to see Sam already helping himself to a soft drink. She was too tired to play hostess.

“We’ve had some developments we thought you’d
want to know about.” Sam pulled out the chair beside her and sat down.

“First, before you say anything,” Maddie said, “there’s something I need to know.”

“Craig Rodgers,” Sam said. “I know what you’re going to ask, and he’s not in on it.”

Maddie’s shoulders slumped with relief. “Are you sure?”

“Not a hundred percent, but we think he’s clear.”

Brian crossed his arms. “We interrogated him at length.”

“We?”

“Sam and I. His alibi checks out.”

“But what about the phone call?”

“His cell phone was stolen yesterday morning,” Sam told her.

“From where?”

“Locker room of his gym,” Sam said. “And we checked out his story. He said he reported it to the front desk there right when it happened, and we were able to back that up. So yes, someone sent you that text message from his phone. But we don’t think it was him. Frankly, he was pretty distraught when he heard you’d been summoned to that scene by someone pretending to be him.”

Maddie wanted to believe them. She wanted to believe Craig, too. She’d known the man for years. But her confidence in everything, in every
one
, had been shaken tonight.

Brian was watching her carefully, probably picking up on her skepticism. “He passed a polygraph.”

“You had him take a
lie detector
? Whose idea was that?”

“Mine,” Brian said. “He passed with flying colors. Someone called you to that crime scene, but we don’t believe it was him.”

Maddie took a deep breath. She looked down at her soup but no longer felt the slightest bit hungry.

Craig wasn’t in on her attack. And yet someone knew enough about her routine to summon her to a job and ambush her.

“Why don’t you get some of that soup in you?” Sam nudged the bowl toward her. “You can listen while we spell some of this out.”

Maddie picked up the spoon and forced down a few bites. It was hot and salty and familiar, and she felt better almost instantly. She waited for them to talk.

Brian remained standing, watching her intently. His protectiveness toward her practically oozed from his pores, and although she told herself he was just doing his job, deep down she knew that it was more than that. If he hadn’t gone searching for her, if he hadn’t found her in the middle of that storm and dragged her out from under that tree, she could have died, either from exposure or from being hunted down like a wounded animal. She shuddered at the memory.

“Okay, I’m listening.” She met Sam’s gaze. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“We believe you witnessed something.”

She waited.

“Whether you actually did or not, someone
thinks
you did, and that’s why you’ve become a target.”

Maddie swallowed.
Target
. She pictured someone watching her through a rifle scope. She pictured a blurry image of herself coming into focus—no different
from a camera lens, really—as someone carefully composed the shot.

“What did I witness? Jolene’s kidnapping?”

“At first, that’s what we believed,” Sam said. “Or, better put, what we thought someone
else
believed. That you’d seen or photographed Jolene’s abduction. Now we’re not sure.”

“Now our focus is on your subsequent attack,” Brian said.

“You mean Volansky?”

“Him, and also the man driving the car. He saw you in that alley. You saw him, at least a glimpse. And although you didn’t realize it, you probably photographed him the day he staked out Jolene’s workplace.”

“Who is he?”

“That’s the thing,” Sam said. “We don’t know. He’s an unidentified accomplice of our primary suspect, Goran Mladovic. We think he’s crucial to Mladovic’s operation, or else he wouldn’t be going to all this trouble to silence you.”

Maddie looked at Brian. “Any ideas?”

“Nothing solid yet.”

She tamped down her irritation. “Okay, no more games. What is this ‘operation’? This criminal enterprise? I want to know what I’m up against here.”
And what Jolene’s up against
. The more Maddie learned about it, the more she felt the girl had never stood a chance.

“You’ve heard of pill mills?” Sam asked.

“I think so. That’s, what, a doctor’s office where they overprescribe drugs?”

Sam nodded. “Used to be they were storefronts. Pain-management clinics, they were called sometimes.
Walk-ins welcome. Cash-only transactions. Armed guards stationed by the door.”

“And Mladovic is running one of these?”

“He was,” Brian said. “The DEA tried to bring him up on charges about five years ago, but he had a hotshot lawyer. They couldn’t make it stick. Best they could get was a slap on the wrist with the medical board.”

“He didn’t pop up on our radar again until a few years later, when a sixteen-year-old girl was wheeled into a San Antonio ER and died of a drug overdose. She’d just been to a pill party.” Sam paused. “Another teenager died at the same event.”

“These kids had raided their parents’ medicine cabinets and set up a buffet of drugs,” Brian said. “It’s become a trend in affluent neighborhoods. They don’t know what they’re taking, and most of the time, they’re taking it with alcohol.”

Maddie hugged her arms around herself. “Two teens died at the same party? Was anyone arrested?”

“No, but we linked some of the drugs back to Mladovic. He’s popular with the country-club crowd, apparently.”

“We started looking at him more closely, and we learned that although he’s joined a new ‘legit’ medical practice and cleaned up his act some with regard to writing scripts, he’s still raising some red flags. We believe he may have started importing phony drugs from Mexico and selling them straight to the black market.”

“So now you’re talking smuggling?”

“He’s got a long roster of patients and their friends who are more than willing to pay top dollar for whatever they want,” Brian said.

Sam leaned closer. “And here’s where it gets dangerous.”

Maddie scoffed. “It’s not dangerous yet? Supplying children with a drug buffet?”

“He crossed one of the major cartels, the Saledos.”

“They’re brutal. And they have their hand in everything—drugs, human trafficking, firearms,” Brian said. “We even linked them to a terrorist organization a few summers ago. The head of this cartel is extremely violent. And he holds a grudge. No way Mladovic crossed him and managed to get away with it. When he found out about it, Saledo would have sought immediate and painful revenge.”

Maddie tensed. “Katya Mladovic. You think they murdered her?”

Brian watched her silently.

“He might have been sending a message,” Sam said. “ ‘The gloves are off. You work for us now.’ ”

“If he’s so harsh, why didn’t he just kill Mladovic?” Maddie asked.

“Why? He’d be losing potential customers for his product,” Brian said. “Better to force his compliance, by killing his daughter, and then use him as a distribution center.”

“Plus, he’s got stateside connections,” Sam said. “More and more, the cartels have been looking for ways to circumvent the border. They actually grow some of their product on this side now.”

“And we think they might be making some of their knockoff prescriptions here, too.”

“You mean literal pill mills?”

“Exactly,” Sam said. “Take an abandoned factory or
warehouse. Set up shop. Get the product directly into the hands of users through already established channels, such as a seemingly legitimate doctor who operates on a cash-only basis.”

Maddie’s gaze turned to Brian. “The tannery where we were the other night.”

He nodded.

“I knew something set your radar off in there. What was it?”

“The smell. And there was dust everywhere. I sent my shoes to the lab, and on the soles they found trace amounts of various chemicals.”

“Like what?”

“Sodium borate, for one,” Brian told her. “That was probably used in the tanning process. But they also found a substance called—are you ready for this?—ammonio methacrylate copolymer. It’s used as a coating for pills.”

“We found the same trace substances on the trash bag used to dispose of Heidi Beckles,” Sam said.

Maddie flinched. She hadn’t heard about a trash bag. “You think she was held in that building?”

“Probably Jolene, too,” Brian said. “But when she managed to make a cellular call from the warehouse, they realized it was blown as a safe location for anything, so they destroyed it. Burned up all the evidence—or tried to, at least.”

Sam’s phone buzzed, and he checked the screen. “I have to take this,” he said, stepping into the living room.

Maddie looked at Brian. “I still don’t understand why you don’t just arrest him. At least, tell me you have him under surveillance.”

“We do. But again, it comes down to evidence we can put in front of a judge. Right now, it’s all conjecture. We don’t have anything linking him to that warehouse, for example. It’s only a theory.”

Sam reappeared. “I’ve got to go in again. You staying or going?”

“Staying.”

Maddie looked at him.

“See you tomorrow, Maddie.” Sam nodded at her. “You take care of that arm.”

“Wait.” Maddie got to her feet and walked him to the door. “What’s tomorrow?”

“I pulled the graveyard shift.” He smiled and walked out, and Maddie stood by her threshold.

No fewer than three “unmarked” police units were parked in front of her house. The accountants were in one. Sam was getting into another. Which meant the black Taurus in her driveway must belong to Brian.

She closed the door and turned to face him. “You guys are very discreet, you know that?”

He slouched against the doorway to the dining room, watching her carefully. “We’re not trying to be.”

Maddie looked him over. His sleeves were rolled up, and she realized he’d found a fresh shirt somewhere. He must keep an entire suit stashed at the office for emergencies.

“What did Sam mean earlier?” she asked. “About the graveyard shift?”

“He’s on tomorrow night.”

“On?”

“Your security detail. Unless, that is, we get something better lined up before then.”

“They’re going to be here
overnight
?”

“Someone tried to kill you, Maddie.” His jaw clenched as he looked at her sling. “They almost succeeded.”

Maddie fumed. Part of it was fear. And her frayed nerves. But she didn’t like having things dictated to her, and she didn’t like evasiveness.

“What do you mean, ‘something better’?”

“We’re talking to the Marshals service. I’ll let you know.”

“You mean witness protection, where you uproot your life and go into hiding?”

Brian didn’t say anything.

“Forget it,” she snapped. “I’m not going.”

He watched her silently.

“I’ve got work to do. I’m not just going to change my identity and move away because you guys can’t manage to get your case together and come up with an arrest warrant.”

He didn’t react, and her temper festered.

“And you can’t stay here tonight,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Brian.” She lifted her uninjured arm in exasperation. “It’s after three in the morning. I’m going to bed.”

“So go to bed. I’ll take the couch.”

“Brian . . . get real.”

“What?”

“You know damn well
what
.”

“You think this is about sex?” He looked insulted. “You do, don’t you? You could have been killed tonight. I’ll take the goddamn floor if I have to, but you’re not staying here alone.”

“I’m not alone! I’ve got two FBI agents out on my curb. I’ve got my pistol. I’ve got my alarm system.”

“That’s right. And you’ve got me.”

I don’t want you!
She almost yelled it, but he would have known she was lying.

She
did
want him. She wanted his arms around her and his fingers intertwined with hers, as they’d been the entire ambulance ride, when she’d gripped his hand and refused to let go of him. She wanted his body, warm and solid in her bed. She wanted his Glock on her nightstand to make her feel safe. And the fact that she wanted all those things made her furious with herself. She wasn’t needy. She was strong and resilient and independent.