Deadline (Sandra Brown)

however, had known he was lying. By omission, but that counted. He’d lied to her. Except for the kiss. That hadn’t been a lie. And however this turned out, he hoped that she would come to realize that in that kiss, he’d been completely honest.
    Since he’d left Savannah, there had been three calls from her to his cell phone, which indicated to him that she must have discovered he wasn’t on his way out to meet Tucker and Wills.
    He hadn’t answered those calls, he hadn’t listened to the voice mails she’d left, fearing that if he did, he would be persuaded to return. Short of making a U-turn, he might be tempted to tell her what he planned to do, in which case she would try everything within her power to stop him.
    He couldn’t allow that. He might fail, but he couldn’t live out the rest of his life with even a semblance of peace if he didn’t at least make this attempt to have a face-to-face with Jeremy and Carl.
    Actually what Amelia had said this morning about their perception of him—that of a reporter on the trail of a good story—had reminded him of his one talent. The single thing at which he excelled was getting people to talk to him about themselves.
    That had sparked an idea. After the attempt on Headly’s life, the idea had crystallized and expanded into a resolve.
    Acting on the tip Willard had given him, he had called Glenda even before reuniting with Headly and Amelia in the lobby of the jail visitation center. God bless her, she’d undertaken the task he’d requested, persisted throughout the day, and when he called her from the hospital corridor, she’d given him something to go on.
    He should share what he’d learned with the authorities, but although he’d told Amelia that he was about to, he had no intention of doing so. If he was later brought up on charges of obstruction of justice, his defense would be that he hadn’t wanted to get everyone excited if Glenda’s information turned out to be useless.
    But the real reason he’d kept the information to himself was because he wanted a crack at Jeremy and Carl. He wanted that badly. If they were arrested or killed, he would never get an opportunity to speak with them without being monitored. He had a sliver of a chance to have a candid, no-holds-barred, one-on-one conversation with them, and he was taking it.
    Carl and Jeremy knew him only as an ambitious journalist who had ingratiated himself with Amelia and her children in order to write a story that would be fat with intimate details. They didn’t know about his relationship with Headly. That was a major advantage.
    Another was Carl’s personality. He has a colossal ego. If Headly had told Dawson that once, he’d told him that a thousand times. Most sociopaths had elevated opinions of themselves, which was why they were capable of such derring-do. Dawson reasoned that Carl fit that profile and that he would welcome being given a soapbox from which to vent his spleen. Dawson could provide him a huge audience.
    That is, if Carl or Jeremy didn’t kill him before he could state his purpose.
    He was taking a bold, possibly even foolhardy chance, but Carl should relate to that kind of chutzpah. He’d based a criminal career on it. Dawson’s sheer audacity might make Carl curious enough not to pull the trigger before Dawson could make his pitch, and he’d have to make it fast.
    “I want to commit your story to print.”
    That should get the megalomaniac’s attention.
    An interview with him wasn’t unprecedented. Carl had granted one once before. Dawson had heard about it through Headly. “In the mideighties, a reporter for the Washington Post wrote and published an article about Carl. A lot of the background information on him and his crimes came from me. The writer wanted to be fair, give Carl a chance to rebut what I’d said, set straight any misconceptions about him. In the article, he made it clear that he wished for an interview with him.
    “Carl took him at his word. A few weeks after the article appeared, the reporter was kidnapped. Several days after his disappearance, he mailed in a handwritten transcript of a lengthy interview. The newspaper published it in its entirety, and the reporter was awarded a Pulitzer for it.”
    Carl now had thirty more years to tell about than he had during that first interview. Dawson planned to ask him about the past seventeen specifically. Had he committed crimes that weren’t attributed to him, or had he semiretired as he