Woman Most Wanted

So how come words like betrayal and abandonment kept running through his mind?

Probably because she’d come to him in good faith, asking for his help. She certainly hadn’t expected that he’d end up taking her freedom away, no matter how much he felt his actions were justified. He rubbed the side of his jaw tiredly, hardly noticing the pinprick of stubble against his hand, and as he did he caught the sidelong glance the waitress threw him. Their eyes met, and she switched her attention quickly to her order pad, but not before he saw the guilty flush of color on her cheeks.

For crying out loud, D’Angelo—she’s taken off on you. And that pottery-making waitress helped her escape!

He pushed his chair back swiftly and crossed the distance between them in three strides. Flustered, Marg looked up with an expression of innocence that wouldn’t have fooled a Cub Scout—which was no guarantee that it couldn’t fool him, Matt thought disgustedly. He’d screwed up royally.

“She left by the back exit, didn’t she? Where is it?”

“It’s past the kitchen, mister.” Marg snapped her order book closed defiantly and crammed it into her apron pocket. The only other customer left in the place, a bleary-eyed old man in a security-guard uniform, looked up with interest as the waitress’s voice took on a sharp edge. “And she’s had a good five minutes’ start on you, so you might as well just kiss her goodbye. She’s gone. What the heck did you say to her, anyway?”

Matt didn’t answer. He pushed past her and down the short hall at the back of the room. A slightly overweight boy in a white apron over a stained T-shirt was filling jelly doughnuts with an enormous pastry bag. His boredom was replaced by dull interest as first Matt, then Marg, then the geriatric security guard went by at a fast trot, and he stared hopefully at the hallway as if he was expecting more to the parade. The doughnut he’d forgotten he was filling exploded, sending raspberry jelly and powdered sugar all over the counter.

“You a fed?” The security guard pushed importantly past Marg and wheezed out his question at Matt, watching with avid interest as he unlocked the heavy metal door at the end of the hall with some difficulty. “I switched my hearing aid up full blast when you were on the phone and I heard you talking about that big shot that’s gone missing. That redhead with the great gams was a witness—and you let her get away.”

Ignoring the excited old man’s running commentary, Matt slid the lock back on the door.

Behind the coffee shop was an alleyway that seemed to run parallel with the street in front of the building, but it was hard to see more than a few feet. The rain was a silvery curtain blocking out everything but the basic shapes of the buildings backing onto the alley.

“Calm down, Jimmy,” Marg snorted. “It’s just a lovers’ argument.”

“It wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel.” Even though he was standing in the doorway, already the front of Matt’s suit jacket was beaded with moisture. The rain-haloed glow of a street-light shone fuzzily on the three of them as they huddled there. “And she wasn’t a witness, old-timer. She was just a lady with a problem.”

“It looked to me like the only problem she had was you,” Marg said with a scowl. “One minute the two of you are practically melting the frosting off my Boston cream doughnuts, and two seconds later she looked like she’d just lost the only friend she ever had. She was a basket case when she ran out of here—no sane girl would take off into this downpour.”

“Yeah, well…” Matt turned his suit collar up and looked out into the night. It wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, he thought, and somewhere out there Jenna was getting soaked to the skin. “The question of her sanity was what I was worried about. I was about to take her to a hospital.”

“The redhead was crazy? She looked all there to me.” The guard pushed his cap to the back of his head and whistled in disbelief. “Didn’t seem like there was anything wrong with her, if you catch my drift.”

“There wasn’t anything wrong with her.” Marg’s fists went pugnaciously to her hips and her voice rose in scorn. “You’re the one who’s crazy if you were planning on having her locked up in a padded room somewhere. You were sitting right across from her, mister—didn’t you take a good look at her? She was upset, sure. I guess to you she looked a little offbeat, what with her clothes and all. But that sweet girl was as sane as you and me, and if you’d even thought twice about it instead of jumping to conclusions, you’d have realized that.”

“Hold on, Marg,” the old man said uncomfortably. “He’s a federal agent. He must know what he’s doing.”

“He works for the Establishment, Jimmy.” Anger sparked in her eyes, making her look suddenly younger. “He’s the Man—what does he care about ordinary people like you and me and that beautiful, gentle girl, people who think peace and love and doing your own thing are more important than wearing a suit and tie and toeing the corporate line? He probably thinks we all should be carted off to a padded room!”

Jimmy tugged nervously at his jacket, partially hiding the holstered gun and the handcuffs that hung from his belt. Matt didn’t blame him. He felt as though he’d been dropped into the middle of an early Peter Fonda film. Jenna Moon might be Miss Looney Tunes, as the apartment superintendent had so sensitively phrased it, or she might be the saint that this fiery holdout from the ’60s, with her faded apron and work-roughened hands seemed to think she was, but one thing was definite. She certainly had an effect on anyone she came in contact with—and if proof was needed, all he had to do was examine his own emotions.

He felt a sudden affinity for Marg. She’d only known Jenna for a few minutes, but in that short time the course of her life had taken a drastic turn. She’d been given back her hopes and dreams, all because Jenna had taken the time to care about her. Of course she was going to defend her and blame him for the situation she thought he’d created.

“Okay, I was a jerk,” he said. “I lied to her and she knew I was lying and she ran. But I feel the same way about her as you do, Marg, and whether you agree or not, I feel I’ve got a responsibility to find her and get her some help. Did she say anything about where she was heading?”

“No.” The waitress surveyed him stonily for a second, and then sighed. “Sorry for the outburst. I guess I was having a flashback or something.” She glanced over at the kitchen and shrugged. “You could ask Tom if he saw which way she went—he probably had to open the door for her.”

Jimmy, now that the crisis was over, had regained his swagger. “Nice kid, but no rocket scientist, if you catch my drift,” he confided to Matt. He raised his voice. “Tom, get your butt out here! Man’s got a question for you!”

“He’s a little slow, but he’s not deaf.” Marg shot the security guard a black look. As the younger man lumbered out of the kitchen toward them, she fixed a smile on her face. “Tom, you know the red-haired lady who went out of here a little while ago?”

“The pretty one? Sure.” Tom nodded judiciously. “I had to open the door for her. She couldn’t do it all by herself, so she asked me. Her hair smelled good.”

Marg reached out and touched the boy on the arm. “It’s pretty important, Tom. Did she go to where the alley comes out on the street, or did she turn right and head for the back of those apartments?”

With a start, Matt realized that the apartment building she was talking about was the one where he and Jenna had had that ill-fated encounter with West and Mrs. Janeway earlier—the building where she’d insisted she’d lived. It made sense that she’d head back to what she imagined was familiar territory, and he grabbed Tom’s arm, his voice urgent. “Did she go toward the apartments? Is that the way she went?”

With slow deliberation the pudgy teenager looked down at Matt’s hand. Then, as if he’d come to a momentous decision, he shook his head and pursed his lips. “Not toward the apartments, mister. She ran toward the street and a bus was coming and it stopped for her. She got on it and then she told the driver she wanted to go downtown, and he said okay. Then the bus drove away with her on it.” His voice rose. “But she didn’t go toward the apartments. She never even looked that way! She went toward the street, okay?”

He was lying as best as he knew how, Matt thought with rueful admiration. Jenna had done it again—passed a few moments with a stranger and gained another friend for life.

“He couldn’t have heard a conversation on the bus at this distance,” Jimmy said in a low tone. “Not with this downpour making such a racket. The kid’s lying—she musta headed for the back of those apartments like you figured.”

“She got on the bus and it drove away with her,” Tom said. He folded his arms across his chest, adding a new smear of raspberry jelly to the stains already on his apron. There was a smudge of powdered sugar on his cheek. “She didn’t go anywhere near those apartments, mister.”

“Poor kid, he’s trying to protect her,” Marg murmured to Matt. She patted Tom’s arm. “Thanks, Tom. You’d make a pretty good detective.”

“Okay, Marg. I’m going to start making more lemon doughnuts now.” Pointedly ignoring Matt, he turned away from the open door.

If anything, the rain was heavier now. Down the cracked pavement of the alleyway small streams ran and merged together, sweeping bits of paper and cigarette butts and other flotsam along with them. Jenna was out there, Matt thought. He’d been responsible for making her run. Anything could happen to her, and it would be his fault.

“Thanks, Marg. Jimmy, forget anything you thought you heard me talking about on the phone.” Hunching his shoulders, he sprinted out into the downpour, heading toward the apartment building.

THE KID HAD suckered him in. For the third time in as many minutes, Matt wiped the rain from his eyes in frustration and wondered briefly if it was too late to switch careers. A few feet beyond him was the dead end to the alleyway, beside him was an industrial garbage bin with the refuse from the apartment building spilling out of it, and behind him was the building itself—the building where this doomed nightmare of an evening had begun. Jenna hadn’t come this way at all. He’d been finessed by a donut-making teenager who, if he definitely wasn’t a rocket scientist, as Jimmy the security guard had said, certainly had managed to pull a fast one on one Matt D’Angelo, future area director of the Agency.

Jenna could be anywhere by now. He’d lost her.

He was halfway back down the alley when he heard the sound—an unearthly scream that floated eerily through the night. The hair on the back of his neck lifted in an atavistic reaction and he whirled around, his hand going automatically to his gun before he checked himself.

It had sounded like a baby’s cry—but not like any human baby he’d ever known. A chill that had nothing to do with the rain spread through him. From out of his childhood came, full-blown and as spine-tingling as when he’d first heard it, the memory of a story his great-grandmother had told him and his sister Carmela; the story of the goblin’s child who sobbed and wailed in the forests of her native Calabria to draw soft-hearted maidens to their deaths.

The cry came again, an unearthly, soulless entreaty that turned his blood to ice.

Matt blinked the rain from his eyes, and his mouth thinned to an angry line. He didn’t believe in ghosts or fairy tales or fantasy. He believed in hard facts. He started running, heading blindly toward where the sound had last come from and he felt his foot connect with something.

With a raucous clatter, the lid of a trash can fell to the pavement and rolled a few feet before its noisy progress ended. The next minute he saw a small figure leap from the edge of a nearby garbage bin and felt a searing pain rip its way across his left bicep. Immediately the cold clamminess of his shirt was overlaid with the warmth of blood.

His blood. Dammit, he was bleeding. And he was holding a damn cat!

For the second time that evening he found himself gazing into impossibly blue eyes, but this pair was cross-eyed. They glared myopically out of the triangular, brown-masked face peering from his arms, and even as Matt met that disconcerting gaze, the cat opened its mouth and let out a sobbing wail that gurgled off into an irregular purr.

He’d insisted on proof. He’d refused to believe anything she’d told him, he’d let her run out into the night believing she was what that lying bastard West had called her—Miss Looney Tunes—and now she was on the run, alone and frightened, just because he had to have everything by the book. How could he have been so damn stupid?

The cat in his arms yowled miserably and lashed a rain-drenched tail—which was covered, Matt saw, with a streak of sky-blue paint.

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