PART I

 

The Hunt

 

CHAPTER 1

 

Monday, the First Week

 

The girl lounging out by the hotel pool was definitely trouble.

The black strips of material barely covered her smooth, tanned flesh. To make the volatile situation even worse, she was fifteen years old.

Watching from a tinted window in the dark, air-conditioned hotel bar, Adam Brooks sipped his Manhattan. He knew this wouldn't take long. Yesterday, it took the girl less than half an hour to attract a victim. The day before, thirty-seven minutes. She was just a kid, but she was also a knockout, and obviously knew how to reel in a man.

Kids grew up much too quickly nowadays. Renee, his younger sister, started developing at about the same age and was a knockout at sixteen. But that was nearly two decades ago. Each generation made the transition a year or two quicker. Soon these kids would be walking into bars at twelve and being served without question.

Adam's job wasn't to criticize or judge. He was a private eye - he wasn't qualified to provide professional criticism or analysis. He found people and brought them home as requested. He also caught people in compromising positions. Sometimes he was paid to take incriminating pictures. Sometimes he was paid just to warn someone from doing something stupid. He left criticizing, evaluating, and all that other mumbo-jumbo to the guys in tailored suits making hundreds of bucks an hour.

The tall, slender waitress made her second trip to his table to see if he wanted a refill. Once again, he smiled and shook his head. She smiled back, but he could tell she was a little peeved. Bars didn't make their money on customers who sat at their tables and bought just one drink. But it didn't matter. He couldn't get soused on the job. He needed to stay sharp and alert. Once he got back to his apartment, he could do as he pleased. But right now, he was earning his two-fifty a day.

Five minutes later, he realized the action was about to start. He glanced at his watch. Twenty-four minutes this time. The girl was getting better. By this time next week, she wouldn't even have to bother looking for a lounge chair. She could just wander out to the pool, push her hand through her hair, and lead the way back to her hotel room.

The girl's new companion looked like money - designer shirt and slacks, imported shoes that probably went for a couple of bills, top-of-the-line visor, and red-tinted sunglasses. The Rolex on one wrist and gold bracelet on the other conveyed the true image of the rich businessman on the prowl. He was around forty and fairly slender, but with a slight expansion around the midsection - probably from too many martinis and porterhouse steaks. His lack of tan told Adam that the man was probably here to attend a convention or a series of business meetings.

He stood beside the girl's lounge chair, smiling down at her, but his leering was obvious even behind the shades. The girl sat up, stretched, and reached up to arrange her dark brown hair more provocatively over her shoulders. Then she grabbed her towel and spent some time blotting the perspiration from her cheeks, shoulders, and arms before draping it over one shoulder. Her companion watched every move. Adam felt sorry for the poor guy. He's toast. If he only knew... He will. Shortly...

They crossed the pool area, making their way across the lush garden leading to the wing of hotel rooms. Adam left some bills on the table, got up, and hurried out of the cool, dark room.

Although he didn't particularly like this sort of work, it paid the bills. As a private eye, he did other people's dirty laundry - no more, no less. He talked to people his clients didn't want to talk to, dealt with people he wouldn't be caught dead associating with otherwise, listened to lies, both from his clients and the people he was being paid to deal with, and collected money when the job was finished. Sometimes he actually got paid. Other times he didn't. If the check cleared, he celebrated with a little booze, paid a bill or two, and got back in the saddle. If it bounced, he chalked it up to experience and promised himself he'd be more careful the next time, even though he knew that sort of thinking was useless. Being careful only helped in a perfect world.

The two walked quickly toward one of the rooms on the other side of the pool. The man already had his arm around her tiny waist. He'd only met her five minutes ago but had already gotten physical. The bottoms of her feet probably wouldn't see much of the carpet once they went inside.

They stopped in front of Room 12. The girl reached into the bottom piece of her bikini for her key. The man had already begun groping her. She had to push him away so she could open the door. He bent, burying his face in her hair at the base of her neck. She pushed him away again, then reached for the door. As soon as it opened, he shoved her inside.

Adam decided not to wait very long. It wouldn't take the man any time at all to rip off her bikini scraps and send them flying. This had to be done as quickly and as cleanly as possible.

He knocked on the door. Nothing. He knocked again, this time harder.

"No one here!" the man announced gruffly.

Adam pounded this time.

The door clicked open. The man's red, angry face appeared in the six-inch gap. "What the hell do you-"

"Sir, I don't know who you are." Adam kept his voice calm. "Quite frankly, I don't want to know, but-"

"Whatever you're selling, I'm not-"

"I'm not selling anything. I'm giving it away."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I'm offering you your freedom. You want it or not?"

The door opened a few more inches. The man gripped the doorknob with his right hand. With his left, he held his shirt in front of him to hide his nakedness. "Listen to me, whoever you are." His voice was a harsh whisper. "I'm about to get laid, and I don't like interruptions. I'll give you just ten seconds to tell me why the fuck you're-"

"Sir, I don't know if you're aware of this, but you're about to have sex with an underage girl."

The man's face paled.

"The girl is fifteen. She won't be sixteen for nearly a year, and her father has instructed me to have the police here in fifteen minutes if you don't comply with his wishes and just walk away while you still can."

The door slammed shut.

Adam stepped aside and waited.

Seconds later, the door was yanked open. Shirt wide open, the man charged out of the room, fastening his belt as he ran.

***

Perched on a barstool, Richard Warden sipped his double vodka martini while the late-afternoon Orlando sun pierced the cloudless sky beyond the big, tinted windows.

Gino's was nearly packed. Local businessmen and vendors rubbed elbows with sloppy-dressed tourists taking a break from their street-prowling. The bar maintained a cool 72 degrees - a welcomed respite from the approaching summer brightness already filling the late March sky.

Richard Warden was tired. Following a long afternoon of back-to-back board meetings, he could feel the vodka gently nudging the tension away. The tension was a by-product of frustration. And anger. Years of listening to nonsense, of supervising a room filled with well-dressed idiots, was taking its toll. Once again he considered firing them all and starting from scratch.

Richard had known long ago that his company, WarCo SoftSystems, Inc., would have to make harsh decisions if they wanted to stay ahead of the pack. People would have to be laid off. Departments would need to be absorbed. Products would have to be cut or improved. It was the American way. Profit was always the bottom line. WarCo would have to grit its teeth and take no prisoners.

But he couldn't just sit back on his haunches and let Lou Berchfeld run things his way, could he? Even though the two men went back more years than either of them cared to remember, this was serious business. If Berchfeld couldn't take the initiative and start kicking some high-powered corporate ass, Richard would have to jump in and start slamming butts himself. Even if it meant opening the door and tossing the bunch into the street.

Jack Koslo was a prime example. The jerk was a computer wiz, and had graduated from MIT before he was twenty. With an IQ of 160, Koslo came to WarCo with glowing reports, a brilliant portfolio, and contacts up the ass. Berchfeld did some serious scrambling to get Koslo behind the helm of the WarCo subsidiary, RKW ChipTics. And as a result, Koslo had done nothing but bring RKW stock steadily down.

Koslo's specialty was outsourcing. The man thought nothing of eliminating a department of high-salaried, well-trained technicians and transferring the work to a larger group of low-salaried incompetents, to manufacture products of considerably lower quality.

In one instance, Koslo's outsourcing scheme had resulted in so much lost work and cancelled contracts, Berchfeld was forced to step in and recall those who'd been dropped, making them consultants at a much higher rate of pay. A very expensive fiasco, indeed.

Koslo and Berchfeld were related - making the situation sensitive as well as tense. Regardless, Richard wanted Koslo to stop his reckless shenanigans. It came to a boiling head just an hour ago in Richard's office, following the meeting in which RKW's questionable future was discussed.

"Bottom line, Jack. And don't give me any of those stupid stats that don't matter."

Despite Richard's firm request, Koslo consulted his figures. To Koslo, they meant everything. He'd resort to them even though his plan had just gone down the shitter. "The chip factory is a seven-twenty-four operation. Electricity alone is costing us-"

"I don't give a rat's ass about electricity," Richard snapped. "All I care about is the bottom line. Your figures don't mean a thing. You've got five good people - brilliant techs, every one of them - producing excellent products, and they're making upwards of seventy-five K, plus another fifteen K in health benefits. Their products are bringing in ten million in revenues per year - which comes out to two million a head.

"You pop into Walmart for groceries, or McDonald's for a cheeseburger and fries, and you see these kids working their butts off for pennies. And you think - for whatever stupid reason - that you should run RKW in the same fashion. You fire all your accomplished techs and hire ten worthless incompetents who wouldn't know a good product if it bit them in the ass. But this is just fine, because these people are only making twenty K - which is all you care about. It doesn't matter that their products aren't selling or that the ten million the other crew was bringing in has dwindled down to less than three. So now we've got to fire the incompetents, squeak by the usual lawsuit bullshit, then hire back the original guys short-term for nearly twice what we were paying them before."

Richard loosened his collar and unbuttoned the single button of his fifteen-hundred-dollar Luciano Carreli pinstripe. Wiz kids. The bane of humanity.

"Refill? "Frieda had come over. Her sweet perfume brushed against his skin.

Frieda was a good-looking chick, even though she was on the wrong side of forty and had brought three kids into the world. Her frosted hair was still thick and shiny.

"Sounds good."

Less than a minute later, she placed a new glass on a clean napkin in front of him and took the empty away.

He lifted his glass and got ready to drain it when he suddenly stopped. Careful, now. Take it easy.

Not too long ago, he could pull down half a dozen martinis in an hour. But since he'd turned fifty, many things had changed, forcing him to realize moderation might actually be the intelligent way to go. It had been more than three years since the incident. Though he'd managed to overcome it, his attorney Bob Dalgren had ordered him to cut way down on his drinking. "The less you're seen in bars," Dalgren had said, "the better."

Easy for him to say.

Richard was paying Dalgren a shitload of cash for his personalized legal services. The least the little nerd could do was cut him some slack. Three years had passed, for Christ's sake. Richard had grown, had matured. He'd learned a few things along the way. Moderation turned out to be more reasonable than he'd initially thought. Binges at age fifty were ten times worse than when he was a kid. His body could no longer tolerate the abuse.

Anyway, Richard's drinking was no longer out of control. And he no longer reached the point where he couldn't quit when he wanted to. There hadn't been a time in his life when he didn't have the self-control to stop whatever he was doing whenever he damned well pleased. Except, of course, for sex.

And why shouldn't he enjoy himself? He was still young, strong, and vital. A sexual powerhouse at fifty. He'd spawned two kids and enjoyed hundreds of sexual encounters over the last twenty years - no small feat for a man who had, according to his smug, overpaid doctor, passed his prime. And what would the doc know about anyone else's prime? What would any of them know about anything?

He picked up his glass, drained it, and motioned to Frieda for another refill. Two down. He'd stop at three. A man with no self-control couldn't stop at three, could he?

He turned on his stool. Across the room, a gorgeous redhead sat by herself at a table in front of the window. She was smiling at him.

***

"May I join you?"

She smiled. "Please." The blinking of those thick lashes sent his pulse pounding. Her heavy red hair cascaded in shiny swirls down to her shoulders. Her large glittering green eyes held him fast, taking in his suit as well as his tie, his smile, and his hair. Her high cheekbones tapered down to a firm jaw line. Her swollen, pouty lips made his heart sputter.

"I'm Richard. Richard Warden."

"I know."

"You ... know me?"

"You were pointed out to me."

He straightened in his seat. Being talked about always pumped up the old ego. This happened frequently to him, as owner of a software empire. Sometimes it was damned hard not to appear too smug - especially when such a lovely babe was involved.

"I take it you've seen me before, then?"

She shrugged. "Right here. You spend a lot of time in this place."

So much for the old ego boost...

Her blank expression didn't give him any additional information. Had she said it to criticize? The rehab program had ended two years ago, leaving him sensitive and self-conscious. And for good reason. A man of his caliber? Reduced to swapping sob stories with tramps, drunks, and street scum? The experience was humiliating. But at least it was over.

He found no reason to take offense. He didn't know her, so he couldn't be certain about her disapproval. She may have merely stated a fact. Besides, it was easy to overlook her comment. No man in his right mind could criticize this perfect package in her blue suit and white silk shirt with the top three buttons undone, exposing a deliciously tanned cleavage. Not to mention the shapely legs or the strong fragrance of lilacs in her hair. Although she was obviously close to thirty, which was a few years older than what he ideally preferred, he knew that with a little luck, he'd eventually be able to snare her without too much difficulty.

"You have me at a disadvantage. You know my name-"

"Brittany. Brittany Weber."

At least the awkward formalities were over. So far, everything was progressing nicely. The next step, logically, would be to clear the air. It wasn't necessary, of course, but he decided to let her know why he spent so much time here. "Gino's is my favorite, uh, watering hole. My offices are on the twentieth floor. And since this place is so convenient, I just pop down here for lunch, or when I need to get away from those irritating board meetings." He gave her a relaxed smile. He wanted another drink but decided to hold off.

Instead of replying, she sipped her drink and studied his tie.

Was it his imagination, or were her eyes lowering? Don't jump the gun, sport. You're fifty, not fifteen...

"And where do you work, Brittany? Orlando?"

"I've got my own home business. I sometimes do seminars."

"What do you sell?"

"Software programs. I'm a wholesaler."

"Good and solid right now. I ought to know. I'm CEO of-"

"WarCo SoftSystems. Yes, I know. I've seen your stuff on the Net."

He puffed up again.

She finished her drink. He signaled for Frieda.

"No, thanks. Gotta go." She glanced at her watch. "It's almost six, and I've got to get back to my place and finish up some work."

"Why not have another drink with me?" He wanted to get to know her. It had been a while since he'd met such an attractive, interesting woman.

She smiled. "Thanks, but I've really got to go." She reached for her handbag and opened it. He waved her down, quickly producing two crisp twenties and dropping them on the table.

A wrinkled frown appeared on her face. "Mr. Warden, I'd much rather-"

"Richard."

"It's really not necessary to-"

"My pleasure."

"But-"

"I'll let you pay next time."

Her smile drifted back. "Perhaps. Maybe."

He not only liked this woman for her looks, he admired her independence. She obviously liked paying her own way. She did exactly as she pleased. His kind of woman.

She snapped her handbag shut, looped the thick leather strap over her left shoulder, and stood.

He joined her, hoping she'd suggest getting together again. But she didn't. He decided to take the initiative. "Perhaps we could repeat this another time? Tomorrow? After lunch?"

She held out her hand. "It was nice meeting you, Richard." He took her hand in his, wincing at its coldness - probably from her drink.

"It was nice meeting you, too. I hope we can-"

"Maybe we'll see each other another time."

He opened his mouth to reply, but she'd already turned to leave the bar.

He crossed the room, moving to the tinted windows viewing the front lot. He wanted to see those gorgeous legs moving on the pavement ... the white heels bringing out the muscularity of her shapely calves ... the late afternoon sun playing on her bouncing red locks.

But there was no sign of her.

He hurried out through the lobby. The sun was hiding behind a swollen gray cloud. Heavy rush-hour traffic roared past. People marched up and down the aisles in the main lot, talking on cell phones.

He ran down the walk, turned the corner, and scanned another section of parking lot. Brittany Weber had disappeared.