The Rapids

“Maggie, I didn’t come to the Netherlands to run away from anything. I can do my job.”

“You’re not back on the street,” she said.

“That’s not my decision to make. Look—”

She faced him again, her creamy skin less pale. “You should be. You didn’t hesitate today. The shooter, Tom. You did fine.”

He acknowledged her words with a nod. “I still want to know about this Scarlet Pimpernel character of yours.”

This time, she smiled. “You marshals. Hound dogs on a scent.”

Rob tried the soup, relished the normalcy of it. “Maybe I can help.”

“That’s nice of you to offer, but there’s nothing for you to do.”

Clever. It wasn’t as if he could order her to come clean. He could badger her for answers, but he’d already seen her help pull a dead man out of a river, deal with the Dutch police and a nervous embassy and chase a white-haired old man. She’d hold her own against anything he threw at her and tell him exactly what she wanted him to know and not one word more.

This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he’d told Mike Rivera he wanted to go to the Netherlands.

“You saw the man with me at St. John’s. My wanna-be informant. Did he look mentally stable to you?”

Rob shrugged. “Down on his luck, maybe. Lost his retirement, got a little daft. Could just be on a tight budget.”

“I suppose.” She picked up her spoon, held it in midair and sighed. “I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I just ended up putting you on high alert, got you into tracking mode.”

“Kopac’s murder did that.”

Her eyes shone, but she covered her emotion by dipping her spoon into her soup.

“This guy,” Rob said. “Does he have a name? Besides William the Conqueror.”

“That was snotty of me. I apologize.” She left it at that. “How long were you in the cathedral?”

“Obviously not long enough.”

“Did you see anyone else, anyone who could have been with my guy?”

Rob remembered the scene when he’d walked into the cathedral, his eyes adjusting to the dim light, his sensibilities to the atmosphere. It was quiet, removed from the murder investigation outside its doors. When he spotted Maggie in a pew, at first he thought, guiltily, that she had, indeed, come there to pray.

Then he’d noticed the white-haired man sitting too close to her. In the next second, she was chasing after him.

“I should have followed your guy,” Rob said. “But I didn’t see anyone who might have been with him. Think he tipped you off about Janssen?”

“No. I’m sure he didn’t. That message came by a free e-mail account. I doubt—” She topped herself. “I shouldn’t make assumptions. He just didn’t strike me as someone who would know the whereabouts of an international fugitive.”

“But he chose to meet you in Den Bosch, where Janssen was picked up.”

“Probably for dramatic effect. He could have read about the arrest in the paper and decided to give me a call. You must know how it is with sources. I’m sympathetic to mental illness—I mean it. But it’s not always that easy to sort out the cranks from the legitimate sources.” She sighed. “I didn’t expect that part of this work, did you?”

Rob didn’t answer right away. He’d dealt with his share of delusional would-be informants, from poor, illiterate drug addicts to highly educated society matrons. Getting sucked into one of their wild fantasies and acting on it was the nightmare of every law enforcement officer he knew. “Maggie—”

“I’ve told you what I can.”

He could feel her tension and reached across the table, skimming his fingertips across the top of her hand. Her skin was cooler than it should have been on such a warm day. She didn’t pull away, but touching her was an instinctive gesture on his part and took them both by surprise.

She took a breath, looking down at her soup. “It’s been a weird day. Surreal, almost.”

“I’m not the prosecution or your boss.” Rob tried to sound reassuring, not patronizing or irritated by her unwillingness to talk. Still, he could feel his own tension and fatigue clawing at him, and the caffeine had his mind going in a dozen different directions. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”