Part 1 (1/2)

*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, wis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+rt.

'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.