Unlucky 13 - James Patterson Page 0,30

dinner, Linds.”

She put down her glass and toed around for her shoes. I didn’t think Cindy was actually steady enough to make it through the front door. And there was no way she could drive.

“I’m not going to beg you, Cindy. But if you don’t spit it out, I will come over there and smother you with a throw pillow.”

She laughed and said, “Please don’t hurt me.”

“We’ll see.”

She grinned, sat back on the couch, and said, “Okay. So when we got to the house, Morales was gone. But she had wired the house with explosives. Yeah! To blow up. I have that on excellent authority.”

“How do you know it was Morales who did that?”

“Off the record—her prints were found under a layer of dust. Anyway, the FBI is watching the house. Hoping she’ll go back to it so they can nail her. Personally? What do I think? I think she’s out of that house for good.”

“Because?”

Cindy took a deep breath and let it out as a long sigh.

“Earlier this week, a female fitting Mackie’s description robbed a bank in Chicago. She killed two people—a guard and a bystander. I just flew out there and talked to two customers who had fled before the cops locked them down. The way they described her, Linds, get this: five foot six to five foot eight. Athletic. Could be Hispanic.”

I said, “That’s a description? I call that a vague generality that could fit too many people to be useful at all. But listen, Cindy. Please look at me. Let’s say you’re actually onto Morales. Thank God you didn’t confront her. Are you kidding me? She’s on the FBI’s top-ten most-wanted list. Number five. You know better than almost anyone how dangerous she is.”

Cindy said, “I’m a crime journalist, Linds. A damned good one, as it turns out.”

That was indisputable. Cindy had helped me solve more than one case with her doggedness, and she had some kind of intuition that couldn’t be put down to luck. She had told me once that she was one killer story short of national acclaim. I understood what Morales meant to her.

But that didn’t mean she should be trying to get close to her. I nodded my head in agreement and said, “I know how good you are. I know.”

Cindy said, “So—may I have some coffee now? I’m not done telling you what’s going on.”

CHAPTER 37

I KEPT MY eyes on Cindy while I brewed the coffee. She was tapping on her phone, looking as distracted as she had seemed over dinner.

Joe came into the kitchen and I whispered to him, “She’s tracking Morales.”

His eyebrows shot up to his hairline.

“By herself? You gotta love her,” he said.

“And—why?” I said dubiously.

“She’s a lot like you.”

“Come on,” I said. “You really think that?”

He grinned, gave me a swat on the behind, poured coffee for himself, and went back to his office.

I called out, “Cindy, come get your mug.”

She sugared and milked her java, after which we took our mugs to the living room and assumed our former positions. She swiped at her cell phone with her thumb, and just when I was ready to scream, she got up and brought her phone over to me.

“I just got an e-mail with these attachments about three hours ago,” Cindy said. “Sometimes a picture is actually worth a thousand blah-blah-blahs.”

“What am I looking at?” I asked her.

The first photo was of three State of Wyoming Highway Patrol cars, flashers on, clumped up along the side of a highway.

The second shot showed traffic cones across the lane and a half-dozen khaki-uniformed troopers standing around what looked like a female body lying in the ditch off the shoulder of the road.

“You’re saying that’s Mackie?”

“No,” said Cindy. “Keep flipping through.”

The next photo was a tighter shot of the corpse. I thought that I was looking at a hit-and-run, but by the fourth photo, it was clear that the victim had been shot through the left temple.

“Who sent you these to you?” I asked.

“Off the record,” Cindy said, “they’re from a cop friend of mine who got the pictures from an undisclosed source. There’s no ID yet on the victim. I don’t know her, Linds,” Cindy said, “but she looks familiar.”

I looked at the close-ups of the victim. She was pretty, in her twenties, long dark hair, pale skin, slender build.

The gunshot wound to the temple made me think that if she had been a passenger, the driver could have shot her and dumped her out of the vehicle.

Or,