Catch Her If You Can Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PRAISE FOR

  ALL THE WRONG MOVES

  “A 21-gun salute for All the Wrong Moves, a fast-paced, original, authentic military mystery that builds to a pulse-pounding finale.”

  —Carolyn Hart, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author

  of the bestselling Death on Demand series

  “All the Wrong Moves has all the right stuff . . . Fast-paced adventure starring an irreverent heroine you’ll never forget. I couldn’t put it down!”

  —Vicki Lewis Thompson,

  New York Times bestselling author

  “Samantha is great—sassy and indomitable and believable . . . [The] action never stops.”

  —Joanna Carl,

  author of the bestselling Chocoholic Mysteries

  “Well paced, this chatty first-person narrative develops the character of the not-so-military-type heroine who doesn’t deal well with authority figures but does the best she can because she knows her job’s important. Crime fans will look forward to Lt. Spade’s next adventure.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “What fun! Merline Lovelace delivers a wisecracking heroine with a fascinating and interesting occupation that teams her with a cast of eccentric and peculiar characters. If you are looking for a good laugh with a strong mystery, All the Wrong Moves is the perfect choice.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Merline Lovelace’s new novel, All the Wrong Moves, is a great start to a new mystery series. I enjoyed her fast-paced first-person narrative, and I like United States Air Force Lieutenant Samantha Spade a lot.”

  —INDenverTimes

  RAVES FOR

  MERLINE LOVELACE

  “Strong and clever characters populate the Lovelace world in stories that sizzle with a passion for life and love.”

  —Nora Roberts/J. D. Robb, New York Times bestselling author

  “Merline Lovelace’s stories are filled with unforgettable characters . . . Each new book is an enjoyable adventure.”

  —Debbie Macomber, New York Times bestselling author

  “Merline Lovelace rocks! Like Nora Roberts, she delivers top-rate suspense with great characters, rich atmosphere, and a crackling plot!”

  —Mary Jo Putney, New York Times bestselling author

  “If you’ve never read Merline Lovelace before, you’re in for a treat. She’s one of the best. Heart-stopping action and high-stakes intrigue spiked with sexy, pulse-pounding romance—a reader couldn’t ask for more.”

  —Carla Neggers, New York Times bestselling author

  “Lovelace’s many fans have come to expect her signature strong, brave, resourceful heroines, and she doesn’t disappoint.”

  —Booklist

  “Compulsively readable.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Merline Lovelace

  ALL THE WRONG MOVES

  NOW YOU SEE HER

  CATCH HER IF YOU CAN

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CATCH HER IF YOU CAN

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / January 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Merline Lovelace.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-48598-9

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my own handsome hero, Al.

  Thanks for all the grand adventures!

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was at Pancho’s bar/cafe/motel/convenience store when I lifted the lid on a dented beer cooler and discovered three severed heads. Or more precisely, I was in the dirt parking lot outside Pancho’s bar/cafe/etc., trying without success to get Snoopy SNFIR to heel. Or sit. Or just puh-leese stop crawling all over everything!

  I admit I was pretty exasperated at that point. Sergeant Cassidy and I had chased the little robot across the desert for close to five hours that May afternoon. I was hot and sweaty and really, really looking forward to a cool one before beginning the return trip to our remote test site.

  Before going into the gory details of what happened next, I guess I should introduce myself. I’m Samantha. Samantha JoEllen Spade, former cocktail waitress at the Paris casino in Las Vegas. Through a convoluted set of circumstances involving my jerk of an ex-husband and our over-endowed tramp of a neighbor, I traded the bright lights and big tippers of Sin City for a commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force.

  I’m sure there have been more troublesome second lieutenants in the long and storied history of the military. You wouldn’t think so, though, if you’d heard my boss at the Air Force Research Lab when he announced that he’d arranged a “career broadening” assignment for me to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That’s DARPA in military lingo. For reasons I’ve yet to comprehend during my twenty-two months in uniform, the military never uses whole words if they can possibly avoid them. I’ve learned to string whole sentences together using only initials. Lest you think I’m exaggerati
ng, check out the DOD DMAT, aka the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. It’s available online in PDF format and runs to a mere 780 pages!

  But I digress. As mentioned above, I was “loaned” to DARPA as a brand-new second looey. The agency’s mission is to develop far-out technologies that could improve the war-fighting capabilities of our military services. It does that through program managers who loll around in nice, air-conditioned offices in Arlington, Virginia, and shovel out big bucks to universities and high-powered research centers across the country.

  Wish to heck I was one of those fat-cat program managers. No such luck. My reputation must have preceded me, as I was treated to a brief orientation at DARPA headquarters before being shipped out to El Paso, Texas, as OIC of FST-3. (See what I mean about initializing! It’s a disgusting habit but as infectious as pinkeye.) What I meant to say is that I was designated officer in charge of Future Systems Test Cadre—Three.

  FST-3’s mission—and that of its two sister cadres—is to evaluate projects that don’t meet headquarters’ threshold for direct oversight. Translation: we play with inventions submitted by mom-and-pop enterprises, retired high school chemistry teachers, and pimply adolescents who like to tinker with devices that weren’t designed to be tinkered with.

  FST-1 is based in Alaska and tests items with potential for cold weather application. FST-2 does its thing in the Florida Everglades. Our venue is desert terrain. Hence the hot, bumpy chase Sergeant Cassidy and I had just made through twenty-plus miles of cactus-infested terrain.

  A few words about Staff Sergeant Noel Cassidy. He’s six-three, steely-eyed, and keeps his hair buzzed so near to his scalp that he looks bald. A Special Ops type with several combat tours and a bunch of years of service under his belt, Noel got shuffled off to FST-3 after an unfortunate misunderstanding with an undercover vice cop.

  The experience did a real number on his muscle-bound psyche. The poor guy has yet to recover from the shock of learning that he got turned on by a cop in drag. Just between you and me, though, it’s taking Noel a loooong time to sort through his issues. But when I mentioned as much to his military shrink, she merely smoothed her honey-colored bob and treated me to a bland smile. Since then I’ve tried very hard not to think about Sergeant Cassidy’s extended sessions on her couch.

  The third player in this little drama with its head still attached is a robot. He was created from spare parts and Radio Shack circuitry by Allen H. Farnsworth, an Iowa potato farmer and self-proclaimed renewable-energy nut. Farmer Farnsworth labeled his creation Self-Nurturing Find and Identify Robot—SNFIR for short. According to Farnsworth’s passionate letter requesting FST-3’s evaluation, his little thingamajig could sniff out, extract, and chow down on naturally occurring biodegradable energy sources like twigs and grass and garbage, thus providing itself a limitless fuel supply.

  The concept caught my team’s interest. We’re suckers for gizmos and gadgets with even the slightest potential for military application. This one definitely had that. If it worked, SNFIR could travel indefinitely to scope out enemy territory. Or scoot ahead of Humvees to sniff out IEDs. Or provide a platform to ferry munitions to pinned-down troops. Or transport wounded back behind the lines.

  Pretty grandiose hopes for an invention that, when it arrived at our test site, my team instantly dubbed Snoopy. As in Snoopy Sniffer. Remember him? The toy dog with droopy ears you pulled around on a string?

  Not that I ever played with one. Girly girl that I am, I preferred Barbie dolls to clacking hounds. But I remember one of my brothers smacking a cousin in the mouth with the wooden toy and knocking out two teeth. The same brother, by the way, who’s now on his fourth wife and trying to make it as an Ultimate Extreme Wrestler. What does that tell you about the collection of losers and boozers who comprise my family?

  Back to SNFIR. He really does resemble the wooden Snoopy of old. His torso is about the size of a shoebox mounted on toy tractor wheels. A sort of elongated snout with imbedded sensors sniffs out organic materials. When the sensors find something yummy, a mechanical arm with a claw at the end rises out of the robot’s back to scoop up the munchies. You know the kind of claw I’m talking about. You see them in those machines kids feed three or four dollars’ worth of quarters into hoping to latch onto a stuffed frog, only to end up with five cents’ worth of bubble gum. Instead of candy or stuffed animals, Snoopy’s claw scooped up rotting vegetation and dumped it into his built-in fuel processor.

  That was without the plastic ears and bobbing wire tail one of my wiseass team members glued onto the little robot. With them, you’d swear you could hook him on a leash on and take him out for a walk in the park, properly armed with a pooper-scooper, of course.

  Except this Snoopy doesn’t need to be leashed. Guided by GPS and preprogrammed instructions, he chugs along on his tractor wheels like the Little Engine That Could. Over dry humps of earth. Around prickly cacti. Down into and up out of steep arroyos. Every so often he stops to check out a fuel source and feed himself.

  When Sergeant Cassidy and I took ole Snoop out for this field test, we got a kick out of the little critter. At first. Following along on ATVs, we’d grinned at his flapping ears and traded jokes whenever he’d stopped to sniff out a snack. Then the arm would emerge from his back, the claw would snap its jaws, and twigs or decaying plant matter would disappear into his external combustible engine. After digesting his meal, Snoop would huff on.

  My grin fell off my face, however, when he chugged up to the bloated carcass of banner-tailed kangaroo rat. I knew it was a banner tail because one of the members of my team is a double PhD who drives the rest of us nuts with her lengthy discourses on the flora and fauna of the north Chihuahuan Desert. I’ve learned to smile and tune her out once she gets started, but enough useless detail seeps into my subconscious to pop up at unexpected moments.

  Like this one.

  As Snoopy’s arm came up with the disgusting mess in its claw, I brought my ATV to a skittering halt and jerked my radio off my belt.

  “O’Reilly! This is Spade. Come in, please.”

  “Yo,” my team’s software guru drawled. “Speak to me, oh, Goddess of Gadgets.”

  Dennis O’Reilly isn’t real big on military protocol. Neither am I, for that matter, although I have exercised my somewhat dubious authority as team chief to censor some of his more colorful titles.

  “I thought you reviewed Snoopy’s code,” I said, scrunching my face in disgust as the kangaroo rat’s gory remains disappeared into the hopper.

  “I did.”

  “When you confirmed he was programmed to detect, identify, and consume a wide variety of energy sources, did you know that included, like, dead rodents?”

  “I did.”

  “And you didn’t deem it advisable to share that information with me?”

  “I did,” he said again, with noticeable sarcasm this time. “As a matter of fact, I highlighted a few of the juicier items in the appendix of potential fuel sources that Farmer Farnsworth sent with Snoop. You read it, didn’t you?”

  The question was purely rhetorical. I knew it. Dennis knew it. The damned appendix had run to more than sixty pages.

  “I may not have read the entire list,” I conceded, “but I did read the specs. You can program Snoopy’s computer to accept some fuel sources and ignore others, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Next time,” I said heavily, “program out the dead stuff.”

  “Your wish is my command, Widget Woman.”

  I signed off and clipped the radio back on my web belt. Like Sergeant Cassidy, I was in combat boots and ABUs. ABU, for those of you unacquainted with them, stands for airman battle uniform. Baggy pants and baggy shirt done in pixelated tiger stripes on a heavy fabric that’s supposed to reduce the wearer’s near-infrared signature. Maybe on the outside. On the inside, I was swimming in sweat.

  I’d clipped up my hair and tucked it under my patrol cap, but the thick auburn mane has a m
ind of its own. Damp tendrils straggled down my neck, and my face was so slick I had to remove my sunglasses and swipe my cheeks and chin with my sleeve while Snoopy processed his meal.

  “We’re only a few miles from Pancho’s,” Sergeant Cassidy commented, hefting the palm-size unit that controlled the robot. “Want me to aim him in that direction?”

  “God, yes!”

  BAD decision. Reeeally bad.

  The dead rat should have tipped me to the possibility that Snoopy might sniff out other, equally unpleasant fuel sources. Which he did, not two minutes after we pulled up at Pancho’s.

  The crumbling adobe establishment sits on the south side of the only road running through the town of Dry Springs, Texas. Dry Springs is the closest human habitat to my team’s isolated test site. We deploy there once a quarter to test weird inventions like Snoopy SNFIR. And while we’re at the site, we deploy to Pancho’s every chance we get.

  Aching for something tall and cool, I swung my leg over the back of the ATV and dismounted, Texas-style. Sergeant Cassidy did the same with considerably more grace and coordination. What can I say? He spends his free time working out. I spend mine watching TV or perusing glamour mags.

  Or otherwise occupied with the studly Border Patrol agent I’ve been seeing for a little more than eight months now. I was thinking that I only had three days left at the test site before I returned to El Paso and the arms of Macho Mitch when I noticed Snoopy banging his snout against a Dumpster off to the side of the dirt parking lot.