Twice Dead Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  RIPTIDE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  HEMLOCK BAY

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  PRAISE FOR CATHERINE COULTER’S FBI THRILLER SERIES

  “Fast-paced.”—People

  “A good storyteller . . . Coulter always keeps the pace brisk.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “With possible blackmail, ntra-judiciary rivalries, and personal peccadilloes, there’s more than enough intrigue—and suspects—for full-court standing in this snappy page-turner ... A zesty read.”—BookPage

  “Twisted villains . . . intriguing escapism . . . The latest in the series featuring likable . . . FBI agents Lacey Sherlock and Dillon Savich.”

  —Lansing (MI) State Journal

  “Coulter takes readers on a chilling and suspenseful ride . . . taut, fast-paced, hard to put down.”—Cedar Rapids Gazette

  “The perfect suspense thriller, loaded with plenty of action.”

  —The Best Reviews

  “The newest installment in Coulter’s FBI series delivers . . . a fast-moving investigation, a mind-bending mystery . . . The mystery at the heart . . . is intriguing and the pacing is brisk.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Fast-paced . . . Coulter gets better and more cinematic with each of her suspenseful FBI adventures.”—Booklist

  Don’t Miss Catherine Coulter’s FBI Thriller Series

  THE COVE (1996)

  THE MAZE (1997)

  THE TARGET (1998)

  THE EDGE (1999)

  RIPTIDE (2000)

  HEMLOCK BAY (2001)

  ELEVENTH HOUR (2002)

  BLINDSIDE (2003)

  BLOWOUT (2004)

  POINT BLANK (2005)

  DOUBLE TAKE (2007)

  TAILSPIN (2008)

  KNOCKOUT (2009)

  WHIPLASH (2010)

  THE BEGINNING (2005)

  (includes The Cove and The Maze)

  DOUBLE JEOPARDY (2008)

  (includes The Target and The Edge)

  TWICE DEAD (2011)

  (includes Riptide and Hemlock Bay)

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Collection copyright © 2011 by Catherine Coulter.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / February 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Coulter, Catherine.

  [Riptide]

  Twice dead / Catherine Coulter.—Berkley trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47866-0

  1. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation—Fiction. 2. Suspense fiction, American.

  I. Coulter, Catherine. Hemlock Bay. II. Title.

  PS3553.O843R5 2011

  813’.54—dc22

  2010039460

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  RIPTIDE

  My ongoing love and thanks to Iris Johansen and Kay Hooper, and a big special hug to Linda Howard for a terrific twist.

  —CC

  ONE

  New York City

  June 15

  Present

  Becca was watching an afternoon soap opera she’d seen off and on since she was a kid. She found herself wondering if she would ever have a child who needed a heart transplant one month and a new kidney the next, or a husband who wouldn’t be faithful to her for longer than it took a new woman to look in his direction.

  Then the phone rang.

  She jumped to her feet, then stopped dead still and stared over at the phone. She heard a guy on TV whining about how life wasn’t fair.

  He didn’t know what fair was.

  She made no move to answer the phone. She stood there and listened, watching it as it rang three more times. Then, finally, because her mother was lying in a coma in Lenox Hill Hospital, because she plain couldn’t stand the ringing ringing ringing, she watched her hand reach out and pick up the receiver.

  She forced her mouth to form the single word. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Rebecca. It’s your boyfriend. I’ve got you so scared you have to force yourself to pick up the phone. Isn’t that right?”

  She closed her eyes as that hated voice, low and deep, swept over her, into her, making her so afraid she was shaking. No hint of an Atlanta drawl, no sharp New York vowels, no dropped R’s from Boston. A voice that was well educated, with smooth, clear d
iction, perhaps even a touch of the Brit in it. Old? Young? She didn’t know, couldn’t tell. She had to keep it together. She had to listen carefully, to remember how he spoke, what he said. You can do it. Keep it together. Make him talk, make him say something, you never know what will pop out. That was what the police psychologist in Albany had told her to do when the man had first started calling her. Listen carefully. Don’t let him scare you. Take control. You guide him, not the other way around. Becca licked her lips, chapped from the hot, dry air in Manhattan that week, an anomaly, the weather forecaster had said. And so Becca repeated her litany of questions, trying to keep her voice calm, cool, in charge, yes, that was her. “Won’t you tell me who you are? I really want to know. Maybe we can talk about why you keep calling me. Can we do that?”

  “Can’t you come up with some new questions, Rebecca? After all, I’ve called you a good dozen times now. And you always say the same things. Ah, they’re from a shrink, aren’t they? They told you to ask those questions, to try to distract me, to get me to spill my guts to you. Sorry, it won’t work.”

  She’d never really thought it would work, that stratagem. No, this guy knew what he was doing, and he knew how to do it. She wanted to plead with him to leave her alone, but she didn’t. Instead, she snapped. She simply lost it, the long-buried anger cutting through her bone-grinding fear. She gripped the phone, knuckles white, and yelled, “Listen to me, you little prick. Stop saying you’re my boyfriend. You’re nothing but a sick jerk. Now, how about this for a question? Why don’t you go to hell where you belong? Why don’t you go kill yourself, you’re sure not worth anything to the human race. Don’t call me anymore, you pathetic jerk. The cops are on to you. The phone is tapped, do you hear me? They’re going to get you and fry you.”

  She’d caught him off guard, she knew it, and an adrenaline rush sent her sky-high, but only for a moment. After a slight pause, he recovered. In a calm, reasonable voice, he said, “Now, Rebecca, sweetheart, you know as well as I do that the cops now don’t believe you’re being stalked, that some weird guy is calling you at all hours, trying to scare you. You had the phone tap put in yourself because you couldn’t get them to do it. And I’ll never talk long enough for that old, low-tech equipment of yours to get a trace. Oh yes, Rebecca, because you insulted me, you’ll have to pay for it, big-time.”

  She slammed down the receiver. She held it there, hard, as if trying to stanch the bleeding of a wound, as if holding it down would keep him from dialing her again, keep him away from her. Slowly, finally, she backed away from the phone. She heard a wife on the TV soap plead with her husband not to leave her for her younger sister. She walked out onto her small balcony and looked over Central Park, then turned a bit to the right to look at the Metropolitan Museum. Hordes of people, most in shorts, most of them tourists, sat on the steps, reading, laughing, talking, eating hot dogs from the vendor Teodolpho, some of them probably smoking dope, picking pockets. There were two cops on horseback nearby, their horses’ heads pumping up and down, nervous for some reason. The sun blazed down. It was only mid-June, yet the unseasonable heat wave continued unabated. Inside the apartment it was twenty-five degrees cooler. Too cold, at least for her, but she couldn’t get the thermostat to move either up or down.

  The phone rang again. She heard it clearly through the half-closed glass door.

  She jerked around and nearly fell over the railing. Not that it was unexpected. No, never that, it was just so incongruous set against the normalcy of the scene outside.

  She forced herself to look back into her mother’s lovely pastel living room, to the glass table beside the sofa, at the white phone that sat atop that table, ringing, ringing.

  She let it ring six more times. Then she knew she had to answer it. It might be about her mother, her very sick mother, who might be dying. But of course she knew it was him. It didn’t matter. Did he know why she even had the phone turned on in the first place? He seemed to know everything else, but he hadn’t said anything about her mother. She knew she had no choice at all. She picked it up on the tenth ring.

  “Rebecca, I want you to go out onto your balcony again. Look to where those cops are sitting on their horses. Do it now, Rebecca.”

  She laid down the receiver and walked back out onto the balcony, leaving the glass door open behind her. She looked down at the cops. She kept looking. She knew something horrible was going to happen, she knew it, and there was nothing she could do about it but watch and wait. She waited for three minutes. Just when she was beginning to convince herself that the man was trying new and different ways to terrorize her, there was a loud explosion.

  She watched both horses rear up wildly. One of the cops went flying. He landed in a bush as thick smoke billowed up, obscuring the scene.

  When the smoke cleared a bit, she saw an old bag lady lying on the sidewalk, her market cart in twisted pieces beside her, her few belongings strewn around her. Pieces of paper fluttered down to the sidewalk, now rutted with deep pockmarks. A large bottle of ginger ale was broken, liquid flowing over the old woman’s sneakers. Time seemed to have stopped, then suddenly there was chaos as everyone in view exploded into action. Some people who’d been loitering on the steps of the museum ran toward the old lady.

  The cops got there first; the one who’d been thrown from his horse was limping as he ran. They were yelling, waving their arms—at the carnage or the onrushing people, Becca didn’t know. She saw the horses throwing their heads from side to side, their eyes rolling at the smoke, the smell of the explosive. Becca stood there frozen, watching. The old woman didn’t move.

  Becca knew she was dead. Her stalker had detonated a bomb and killed that poor old woman. Why? To terrorize her more? She was already so terrified she could hardly function. What did he want now? She’d left Albany, left the governor’s staff with no warning, hadn’t even called to check in.

  She walked slowly back inside the living room, firmly closing the glass door behind her. She looked at the phone, heard him saying her name, over and over. Rebecca, Rebecca. Very slowly, she hung up. She fell to her knees and jerked the connector out of the wall jack. The phone in the bedroom rang, and kept ringing.

  She pressed herself close to the wall, her palms slammed against her ears. She had to do something. She had to talk to the cops. Again. Surely now that someone was dead, they would believe that some maniac was terrorizing her, stalking her, murdering someone to show her he meant business.

  This time they had to believe her.

  Six Days Later

  Riptide, Maine

  She pulled into the Texaco gas station, waved to the guy inside the small glass booth, then pumped some regular into her gas tank. She was on the outskirts of Riptide, a quaint town that sprawled north to south, hugging a small harbor filled with sailboats, motorboats, and many fishing boats. Lobster, she thought, and breathed in deeply, air redolent of brine, seaweed, and fish, plus a faint hint of wildflowers, their sweetness riding lightly on the breeze from the sea.

  Riptide, Maine.

  She was in the sticks, the boondocks, a place nobody knew about, except for a few tourists in the summer. She was sixty-four miles north of Christmas Cove, a beautiful small coastal town she’d visited once as a child, with her mother.

  For the first time in two and a half weeks, she felt safe. She felt the salty air tingling on her skin, let the warm breeze flutter her hair against her cheek.

  She was in control of her life again.

  But what about Governor Bledsoe? He would be all right, he had to be. He had cops everywhere, brushing his teeth for him, sleeping under his bed—no matter who he was sleeping with—hiding in his washroom off his big square office with its huge mahogany power desk. He would be all right. The crazy guy who had terrorized her until six days ago wouldn’t be able to get near him.

  The main street in Riptide was West Hemlock. There wasn’t an East Hemlock unless someone wanted to drive into the ocean. She drove nearly to the end of the street to an old
Victorian bed-and-breakfast called Errol Flynn’s Hammock. There was a widow’s walk on top, railed in black. She counted at least five colors on the exterior. It was perfect.

  “I like the name,” she said to the old man behind the rich mahogany counter.

  “Yep,” he said, and pushed the guest book toward her. “I like it, too. Been Scottie all my life. Sign in and I’ll beam you right up.”

  She smiled and signed Becca Powell. She’d always admired Colin Powell. Surely he wouldn’t mind if she borrowed his name for a while. For a while, Becca Matlock would cease to exist.

  She was safe.

  But why, she wondered yet again, why hadn’t the police believed her? Still, they were providing the governor extra protection, so that was something.

  Why?

  TWO

  New York City

  June 15

  They had Becca sit in an uncomfortable chair with uneven legs. She laid one hand on the scarred table, looking at the woman and two men, and knew they thought she was a nut or, very likely, something far worse.

  There were three other men in the room, lined up against the wall next to the door. No one introduced them. She wondered if they were FBI. Probably, since she’d reported the threat on the governor, and they were dressed in dark suits, white shirts, blue ties. She’d never seen so many wing tips in one room before.

  Detective Morales, slight, black-eyed, handsome, said quietly, “Ms. Matlock, we are trying to understand this. You say he blew up this old woman to get your attention? For what reason? Why you? What does he want? Who is he?”