*COLD TARGET*

*'Patricia Potter'*

*Prologue*

NEW ORLEANS, 2003.

'A creak. Then another.'

Creaks she shouldn't hear.

Holly Matthews Ames froze in her bed and glanced at the illuminated clock on her night table. Three in the morning. She listened intently.

Silence. Yet she 'had' heard those creaks.

Fear twisted inside her. Someone had mounted the stairs and tried to be stealthy about it. She knew those creaks. She'd heard them many times when her husband returned home after a late meeting.

'Maybe you're hearing things'. Imagining sounds that weren't there. This two-hundred-year-old house was full of strange noises.

But this was not her husband. The creaks would have been closer together. He would have turned on the lights. He would not have closed the front door softly, and he probably would have headed for the bar first. Not to mention that tonight he had been scheduled to make a speech in another city and had planned to stay there overnight.

She would not have heard the noises had she not been awake most of the night, a conversation she'd heard hours earlier repeating in her mind like a song stuck on automatic replay. She'd tried to turn it off but she couldn't. The implications had been too horrible.

Perhaps that's why her hearing was so acute, why all her senses were tingling. She sat up in bed. A thought flashed that was so fast, so terrifying, it almost paralyzed her. Fear exploded into panic. 'Mikey'! Icy fingers of pure terror ran down her spine. Mikey. Dear G.o.d, Mikey was alone in his bedroom.

He was her life.

She scurried over to Randolph's side of the bed, and the nightstand. Her husband was paranoid. Despite her many protestations, he kept a pistol in the drawer. He'd even insisted she learn how to use it years ago when they first married.

'When he loved her.'

'If he ever had.'

But those were thoughts for a different time.

She reached for the key to the drawer. It was taped underneath the table.

For the first time, she was glad he had not paid any attention to her pleas to keep the gun in a place where Mikey could never find it. She unlocked the drawer, picked up the automatic and clicked off the safety.

Her hand shook.

She had never been brave. The only way she could force herself to touch the weapon was to think of her son alone in his room.

She saw a pinpoint of light outside the door. When she was alone, she never closed the door. She wanted to hear Mikey if he had one of his nightmares.

Whoever was approaching was doing so cautiously. Definitely not Randolph. He always made his presence known. She moved away from the bed and hid behind the door, just as she had seen in films and on television.

She thought the intruder could probably hear her heart beat.

She tried not to breathe. She smelled the intruder, the heavy cloying odor of a man's cologne, before she saw him.

The wood floor creaked again, and movement stopped.

She huddled behind the door, wishing that she had bundled something in the bed and covered it. Instead the bed looked as if someone had just left it.

She heard an oath as he moved into the bedroom and apparently saw the empty bed. She saw the gun in his hand just as he seemed to sense her presence behind the door. He started to turn toward her. Her finger squeezed against the trigger in involuntary reaction.

The gun bucked in her hand. The intruder jerked back with a cry. His gun went off but the bullet missed her. She watched in shock as his body twisted and fell to the floor. He didn't move.

Barely holding herself together, she turned on the light. The intruder wore a mask and black clothes. A red stain darkened the pale carpet. She wanted to lean down and check the pulse in his throat, but she could not force herself to do that. She saw his eyes through the holes in the mask. They now stared sightlessly at her. The bullet must have struck his heart.

Paralyzed, she couldn't move for several seconds. She had killed someone. Taken a life. Nausea a.s.sailed her and she had to choke back vomit. She could not go to pieces.

'Think!'

The police. She should call the police. But a small voice kept her from running to the phone. The intruder had entered the house without the alarm going off, and she 'had' set the alarm. He had entered her bedroom with a gun in his hand, so obviously he wasn't a burglar more concerned with theft than murder.

She forced herself to pull off the mask.

She gasped as she recognized him. She did not know his name, but she had seen him several times with her husband. She'd always thought he was a hanger-on, someone who did errands for small sums of money. Errands like taking a car to be detailed.

Blood was visible on his dark shirt.

'Mikey'. Check on him. But the intruder had appeared at her bedroom door immediately after his footfalls on the stairs. He had come directly to her room. As if he had known...

'Police. You should call the police.'

Instead she leaned down and went through the man's pockets. She found a key in one. Her house key. And a slip of paper with the alarm system's code written on it. Nothing else.

He had been given a key and the code to their alarm system. No one should have either, unless her husband ...

Her legs almost buckled under her. For a moment, she'd believed the intruder might have expected to find jewels and money in the house. But now it was clear that his objective wasn't to steal material things.

It was to kill her.

*Chapter One*

'NEW ORLEANS'.

FOUR WEEKS LATER.

Meredith Rawson paused at the doorway to her mother's room and looked at her ravaged body.

She was dying. The change in just a day was shocking. She had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer only weeks earlier, but already the disease had spread throughout her body.

Until now, Meredith had clung to hope. But a call to her mother's doctor had revealed that she had only days to live. An aggressive treatment of chemo and radiation had failed to halt the progress of the disease.

Meredith had hoped against hope. She'd known deep inside that the rapid deterioration was its own prophecy. She'd known, and yet she had not accepted it.

Grief and regret tore at her heart. Grief for her mother, for the loss of a life that was ending far too early. Regret that she had never completely made peace with her, that the remnants of old wounds had kept them apart.

She pasted a smile on her face, balanced the large bouquet of flowers in her hands, and went inside.

Her mother lay quietly, unmoving, in the bed. She hadn't been moved to critical care from the room she'd occupied for the past two weeks. Instead Meredith's father had hired private duty nurses to care for her twenty-four hours a day. He'd been convinced she would be more comfortable. Her mother always had been a very private person.

The nurse sat beside her mother's bed now. Her father, she knew, was in court. There was an important case.

'There is always an important case.'

That excuse had been only too familiar. A distant mother. An absentee father, except during those times he planned her life.

Her mother's eyes were closed. Her face looked skeletal, her once l.u.s.trous blond hair nearly gone. The nurse stood and took the vase and flowers from Meredith. The room was already filled with gaily colored flowers. They made her mother look even more pale. Faded.

"How is she?" Meredith whispered to the nurse.

The nurse indicated the door, and Meredith followed her outside into the hall.

"You'll have to talk to the doctor about that," the nurse said.

"I know he'll give me the medical information. I already have that. I want to know how she's feeling." Her worry overrode her usual courtesy.

The nurse--Betty Akers, Meredith remembered--did not seem to take offense. "Not well," she said softly. "She's taken a turn for the worse. I think she's... given up. But she's been asking for you."

"I can stay a few hours. I have a court hearing at two."

"She's drifting in and out of consciousness. I don't know how long before she wakes again."

"If she doesn't wake before I have to leave, I'll be back as soon as possible." She'd planned to visit her mother this evening, but that was before the doctor told her that her mother was failing rapidly, far faster than anyone had thought. It had been telling, but not surprising, that it had been the physician who called, not her father.

She went back into the room and sat on the chair next to her mother. She looked at the face that had been so beautiful. Beautiful and distant. Marguerite Rawson had been the perfect hostess. The perfect wife. Sometimes Meredith thought she was also the perfect mannequin. Emotion seldom showed in her face. Affection was a brief smile.

As a child, Meredith had eaten in the kitchen. Her father didn't think young children should be allowed in the dining room with adults. A housekeeper--a long succession of housekeepers--always put her to bed. Play was ballet cla.s.ses, which, being taller than the other girls and more awkward, she detested.

Once Meredith finished her homework, her father always gave her another task. It wasn't good enough that she pa.s.sed her courses. She had to be the best in her cla.s.s. If she received less than an A, she received a bitter tongue-lashing about being lazy and worthless.

Her mother had never protected her from the attacks. She'd never dried her tears.

Meredith had learned not to cry, not to reveal any sign of vulnerability.

But she was crying now. Perhaps the tears weren't falling down her cheeks, but she felt them trapped at the back of her eyes. Tears for all that was, and all that had never been.

She picked up her mother's hand. It was purple now from multiple needle p.r.i.c.ks. And impossibly fragile.

The touch apparently woke her mother. Eyes flickered open. Once a vivid sapphire blue, they now looked dull and sunken.

"Meredith," she said in a thin voice.

"I'm here," Meredith said, wanting to tighten her hold on her mother's hand yet afraid she might hurt her.

Her mother's gaze flicked over to the nurse, who had been reading a book. "Please ... leave us," she said with labored breath.

The nurse rose and looked at Meredith. "I'll be right outside."

Meredith waited as the nurse retreated.

"I want you to do... something for me." Her mother stopped as if even that sentence exhausted her.

"Anything," Meredith said.

Marguerite Rawson said nothing for several moments. Emotions crossed her face. Meredith wondered whether she was having some kind of internal argument.

Then, haltingly, "You ... have a ... sister."

Meredith just sat there. The news was like a thunderbolt striking her. "I don't understand."

"I was ... seventeen. Pregnant. My parents were ... furious. Mortified. Daddy thought it would destroy his career." Her mother swallowed hard and pain etched her sunken face.

"Squeeze the ball," Meredith urged her. The pain medication was self-controlled now.

"Later," her mother said. "I... please find her. My ... trust fund. I am leaving it to you. And to her." She searched Meredith's face, as if seeking approval.

Meredith knew about the trust fund. It had been established for her mother, who had never used it. Meredith knew it was meant to go to her. But that had been the least of her thoughts. She made an adequate income with her practice.

"How...?"

"Memphis. I was... sent to Memphis. She was born in... February."

Her mother suddenly jerked. She squeezed the small rubber ball that released the narcotic into her veins. She turned back to Meredith. "Promise me."

"When, Mother? What year? I need more."

"Seven ... seventy."

"Father? Does he know?"

A tear worked its way down her mother's face. She seemed to nod, but she didn't answer directly. Instead she looked away as if she were staring into another place. Another time. "I'm ... sorry. Not a good mother. I... didn't have anything ... left after..."