Murder List

Chapter Forty-five

Alec had kept her keys. Now, why had he done that? It wasn’t like him to be so forgetful and not realize he had them in his pocket. Maybe he’d kept them so he would have an excuse to go back to the hotel. That’s what the shrinks would tell him. His subconscious wanted to see her again.

And so did the rest of him.

Alec stayed up half the night thinking about his future. About three in the morning he finally figured it all out. His future was with Regan… if she would have him. “Moving forward” took on a whole new meaning to him now. He didn’t want to go anywhere without her.

He made a couple of decisions about the job too, and he felt pretty good about them, but he fell asleep thinking about Regan and wondering how he would ever be able to convince her to love him.

The next morning, after he showered, he decided he ought to get cleaned up before he went to the hotel. He shaved and then put on a clean pair of jeans that only had a couple of holes below his knees. He opened one of the packed boxes and found a clean, though wrinkled, short-sleeve T-shirt and even took the time to tuck it in.

He happened to glance in the mirror while he was putting his gun in his holster and realized he should have gotten a haircut. His hair was sticking up all over the place. He shrugged. It was too late to do anything about it now anyway.

It was raining when he drove to the hotel. He was walking into the lobby when Gil caught up with him.

“What are you doing here?”

“Didn’t you hear me honking at you when you were crossing Michigan? I got caught at the light,” Gil panted.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

“Alec, I might have something for you.” He glanced around and then said, “Maybe we ought to find someplace private.”

“I was just going up to Regan’s office. We can talk there.”

He used Regan’s key to get up to the third floor. Gil started explaining as soon as the elevator doors closed. “I finally heard back from that patrolman down in Florida, and he had some interesting news.”

The doors opened on the third floor, and both of them stepped into the corridor. It was empty and as quiet as a confessional on Friday night.

“So what did he tell you?”

“The accident happened over a year ago, closer to two,” he said. “And it was bad, just like I told you. A five-car pileup. I was worried the patrolman wouldn’t remember much about it, but he told me it was so gruesome he’ll take the memory to his grave.

“There was this ten-mile stretch of two-lane highway outside of Tampa. Walker Madison was driving a sports car, and the engine had a lot of power. Evidently he was passing this truck, and this late-model sedan pulls out behind him and follows him. A guy named Gage, Eric Gage, was driving, and his wife was in the passenger seat. Walker gets around the truck and back into his lane without any trouble at all, but Gage’s sedan didn’t quite make it. There are some conflicting reports. The patrolman said one witness swore the truck driver wouldn’t let the sedan in, that he deliberately sped up. There was another possibility that the sedan clipped the truck trying to get back in. Anyway, there was a terrible crash,” he explained.

Alec noticed Gil was talking faster and faster now, and his face was getting red. A knot was forming in Alec’s gut. He had a really bad feeling about what he was going to hear. “Go on,” he urged.

“The truck lost control, spun, and flipped. The sedan was totaled, but the driver, this Eric Gage, didn’t get so much as a bruise. His wife wasn’t so lucky. The patrolman said they had to pry her out of the passenger seat. He said it looked like the car had folded in on her. Sometimes he says he can still hear the screams. The wife was unconscious and barely hanging on by a thread. It was the husband who was screaming. The patrolman said he went crazy, pulling at his hair and sobbing that he should have let her drive like she wanted, and it should have been him in that seat. He got more and more out of control the longer it took to get his wife out of the car. The paramedics had to sedate him, and because of his size, it took three men to strap him down to the gurney. He was out of his head, all right,” Gil said. “And do you know what the patrolman told me he was trying to do?”

“What?”

“Get across that highway to Walker. He wanted to kill him. He was ranting about how Walker had been driving too fast, and that was why the truck veered.”

“But that wasn’t true?”

“Not according to the witnesses. The truck driver’s insurance company settled with the families.”

“How bad was Gage’s wife?”

Gil was pulling slips of paper out of his pockets. He unfolded one and nodded. “Her name was Nina, and she was all broken up, but her legs got the worst of it. The bones were crushed.”

“Ah, hell,” he whispered. “I knew it was too easy.”

He thought of Haley Cross and how her legs had been crushed with a hammer, and he knew it wasn’t a coincidence. He sprinted to Regan’s office. He just wanted to see her, to know she was okay. Then he could calm down and call Wincott.

Gil was chasing him. “Wait. Don’t you want to know where Eric Gage is now?”

“He’s here, isn’t he, Gil? He’s in Chicago.”

Gil nodded. Then he thrust the slip of paper at Alec. “Here’s his address.”

Alec grabbed the paper, opened the door, and rushed into her office. It was empty. Panic like he’d never felt before bore down on him. He was reaching for the phone when he heard the fax machine humming.

He knew what it was before he looked. He dropped the phone and ran to the fax machine. He grabbed the paper before it slid into the tray. It was another murder list, but the heading was different. *My Murder List*, he’d written, and underneath there was just one name. “Regan Madison.”