Twice Dead - Catherine Coulter [254]
He realized he was in a storeroom. There were barrels lining the walls, shelves filled with boxes and cans, paper goods. The floor was wooden and it creaked. The place was really old. It was dead quiet, not even any rats around. He swept over the room, hurrying because he didn’t believe she’d stayed in here, no, she’d go through the door at the far end of the storeroom. It wasn’t in Tammy’s nature to hide and wait.
He opened the door and stared into a bright, sunlit dining room filled with a late-lunch crowd. He saw a kitchen behind a tall counter on the far side of the dining room, smoke from the range rising into the vents, exits to the left leading to bathrooms, and a single front door that led out to the sidewalk. He stepped into the room. He smelled roast beef and garlic. And fresh bread.
Slowly the conversations thinned out, then stopped completely, everyone gaping at the man who was in a cop stance, swinging a gun slowly around the room, looking desperate, looking like he wanted to kill someone. A woman screamed. A man yelled, “Here, now!”
“What’s going on here?”
This last was from a huge man with crew-cut white hair, a white apron stained with spaghetti sauce, coming around the kitchen counter to Savich’s left, carrying a long, curved knife. The smell of onions wafted off the knife blade.
“Hey, fellow, is this a holdup?”
Savich slowly lowered his gun. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, couldn’t believe he’d come through a dank storeroom into a café and scared a good twenty people nearly to death. Slowly, he reholstered his gun. He pulled out his FBI shield, walked to the man with the knife, stopped three feet away, and showed it to him. He said in a loud voice, “I’m sorry to frighten everyone. I’m looking for a woman.” He raised his voice so every diner in the big room could hear. “She’s mid-twenties, tall, light hair, very pale. She has only one arm. Did she come in here? Through the storeroom door, like I did?”
There were no takers. Savich checked the bathrooms, then realized Tammy was long gone. She might have remained hidden in the storeroom, knowing he’d feel such urgency he’d burst into the café. He apologized to the owner and walked out the front door.
In that moment, standing on the Bar Harbor sidewalk, Savich could swear that he heard a laugh—a low, vicious laugh that made the hair on his arms stand up. There was no one there, naturally. He felt so impotent, so completely lost that he was hearing her in his mind.
Savich walked slowly back to Hamlet’s Pics. When he got there, he stood a moment outside the shop, incredulous. There’d been mayhem when he’d burst out of there. But now there were no cop cars, no ambulance, no fire engines. Everything was quiet, nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.
He walked into the photo shop. There were three agents standing on the far side of the shop talking quietly among themselves.
Agent Possner wasn’t burned. There was no sign that there had ever been a fire in Hamlet’s Pics. Agents Briggs, Lowell, and Possner stared back at him.
Savich walked out. He sat down on a wooden bench on the sidewalk just outside the photo shop and put his head in his hands.
For the first time, he thought the FBI needed to assign someone else to catch this monster. He’d failed. Twice now, he’d failed.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and slowly raised his head to see Teddi Tyler standing over him. “I’m sorry, man. She must really be something to get past you guys.”
“Yeah,” Savich said, and he felt a shade better. “She’s something. We’ll get her, Teddi. I just don’t know how as of yet.”
She was still somewhere in Bar Harbor with Marilyn, she had to be. He got slowly to his feet. He had to get a huge manhunt organized.
In that instant, he realized that even if they didn’t find her, she had every intention of finding him. She would hunt him down, not the other way around. And the good