Читать книгу No Escape - Meredith Fletcher - Страница 9

At the window, Heath watched Lauren Cooper drive away and vanish into the dark streets, only realizing then how late it had gotten. Only a few blocks over, a neon fog pooled above an area near a beach where the tourists gathered. Over there the music would be too loud, college kids and twentysomethings just out in the world would be dancing and celebrating summer, beer and liquor would flow, and no one would know that the White Rabbit Killer had taken another victim.

Maybe knowing wouldn’t even slow them down. They were there to party.

Pensive and irritated, Heath thought about grabbing his jacket and heading out into the cool night, just blowing through an evening by trying to sink into the magic of the island. That would have been wasted effort, though, and he knew it. If things went well, he’d only end up more restless than ever. If things went badly, he could end up in a fight. He knew himself, and he knew the dark mood he was in.

It had been years since he’d exhibited that kind of behavior, but he knew he was next door to it now. He could feel the techno trance of the club music in his veins. That was where he would gravitate to. Trance, industrial heavy metal, something that would bang through him, something that would amp him up even more.

Country music would be worse. Those songs were loaded with pain, and he’d do his best to drown it. He’d done it before. The only reason he’d become a cop was because he hadn’t known what else to do after four years with the Marines right out of high school. He hadn’t wanted the military life his father still enjoyed, but he’d wanted something physical, something where he’d make a difference. He’d taken the police exams, thinking that if the cops didn’t want him, he’d re-up with the military.

Atlanta P.D. had taken him, though, and he’d found work that he could do that wasn’t the same thing day in and day out. He didn’t see himself as a hero. He was a guy who helped paint that thin blue line between the civilians and the savages. He’d liked busting heads, maybe a little too much.

Detective Janet Hutchins had taken an interest in him. She’d seen that he had an eye for investigation, didn’t just take the first answer he was given, and that he checked the facts. She’d gotten Heath groomed for his detective’s shield, then partnered with him for three years till he made Detective 2nd and got a junior partner of his own.

That was two years ago. The junior partner had been Jackson Portman.

Heath turned away from the window and pulled out his cell phone. He pulled Jackson up on speed dial, then punched the call through. It rang only once before the connection was made.

“There you are.” Jackson sounded relieved.

“Here I am.”

“Thought you were gonna leave me hanging just when things were getting interesting.”

“No.”

“You still got company?”

“No. I need you to do something for me.”

“Sure. First, tell me about Lauren Cooper. That’s how this favor thing works. You do something for me, I do something for you. How did that woman know so much about you?”

“She read my mind.”

Jackson snorted derisively. “Bro, the stuff she knew, even you don’t know without checking. What’s your gym membership number?”

Heath didn’t say anything because he didn’t know it. Case numbers he knew, phone numbers of snitches he knew, but not so much numbers involving his personal life.

“Well? Time’s ticking.” Jackson whistled, an off-key version of Final Jeopardy!

Heath grimaced, knowing that once Jackson was armed with the facts of what had happened, his partner would never let it go. “Back at the hospital when I was checking out the murder down here, I bumped into Lauren Cooper. She’s the dead woman’s sister. While we were in a heated discussion, she lifted my wallet.”

“Lifted your wallet.” Jackson sounded hollow, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Yeah, it means she picked my pocket.”

“I know what it means. Just surprised you’d slip up like that. It ain’t like you, bro.” Some of the colloquial accent was gone from Jackson’s words. He was deadly earnest now. “You really don’t have your game, Heath. You should come back home. Let’s sit down and sort this out. We still own one of the White Rabbit murders.”

“Two. We own two.” Neither of them mentioned Janet’s name.

“Come home. We have enough to buy into the investigation and leverage some muscle from the captain. Let’s dig into it together. If I have to, I’ll get some leave and we’ll work the investigation together.”

“The investigation is down here. This is where Gibson goes to hole up. He’s got a place down here. I found it. I just can’t get close to it.”

“All right. That’s something we didn’t know. How did you find his place?”

“Gibson made a mistake. The dead woman took pictures of his house and uploaded it to her Cloud. I got a chance to look at the data dump from her iPad, accessed the pictures, and found the house.”

“So he took the woman to his house?”

“Yeah.”

“Can’t the locals get a search warrant?”

“Gibson says he put the woman in a cab, waved goodbye, and he never saw her again.”

“Uh-huh. And they decided not to press him on that?”

“They don’t have any proof that that wasn’t what happened.”

“They find the cab driver?”

“No.”

“They look?”

“Myton says they did, but this is a tourist area. A lot of people take cabs every night.”

“You think the locals are protecting him?”

“They’re being careful. Gibson is rich. They don’t want to ruffle any feathers until they have a lock.”

“You did mention this guy is a probable serial killer? Probably gonna kill again?”

“Yeah. The cops here I’ve been talking too aren’t big fans of the American justice system, and they’re even less happy about Georgia detectives wandering in off their beats to poke around in their business.”

“That would be a problem. So tell me about Lauren Cooper. Did she look hot to you? ‘Cause from what I’m looking at here, she looks seriously hot.”

“Can I quote you on that to your future second missus?”

“Lord, no. That woman’s jealous enough.”

“What are you looking at?”

“Her file. Since she called in, knew so much about you, I thought it was only fair we know stuff about her. Only expected to get a hit on her from the Chicago DMV. That’s where she told me she’s from. Turns out she’s had a little bit of a record.”

That surprised Heath, but then he thought about how easily she had picked his pocket. Even on his worst day, he wasn’t the easiest guy to pull something like that on. “What record?”

“Breaking and entering and assault. From what I see, she broke into a guy’s apartment and punched him out in Chicago three years ago.”

“For what?”

“Says here she claims the guy stole an illusion she was working on. She’s some kind of magic designer or something. The guy claimed that they came up with this thing together, that there wasn’t a clear title to anything. The judge dropped the hammer on her because it was a home invasion. She ended up doing some community service—magic shows at old folks’ homes and orphanages—and had her record expunged. Are they serious about the magic thing?”

“She does magic.”

“She must be good at it if she can lift your wallet. ‘Course, her looking like she does, I could see how you got distracted.”

Heath ignored that. “Actually, the magic angle is what I want you to look into. Gibson picked up the woman down here. She’d taken her sister to a magic show Gibson put on in Chicago. Check and see if any of the other victims had a connection to magic in any way. Maybe Gibson is culling from a more select group than we thought.”

“Looking for relatives of people who jones on magic?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have a look.” Jackson hesitated for a moment. “Something you told me when you first started training me to work homicide—stay detached. Look at everything from the outside. The minute you crawl inside of an investigation, you lose all perspective. I’m gonna tell you now, because you’re my friend and I love you like a brother and you’re likely gonna be my best man when I wed my second Missus Portman, that you’re all kinds of up inside of this investigation. The captain came out asking what did I know about you impersonating a coroner. I told him I didn’t know nothing.”

“I can’t be detached from this one. Gibson killed Janet. Look into those cases and let me know what you come up with regarding the magic angle.” Heath broke the connection and tossed the phone onto the rumpled bed. He got a fresh beer from the refrigerator and stood at the window looking out again, trying to figure out what his next move was going to be.

Instead, to his surprise, he couldn’t keep his thoughts away from Lauren Cooper and how she’d felt struggling against him. He closed his eyes and could smell that berry vanilla scent again. Then he forced his eyes open and sipped his beer.

There was a thread here. Nobody killed that clean. He was going to find it, and he was going to use it to strangle Gibson.

“There.” From the backseat of the Jaguar X351, Gibson pointed at the low-rent hotel off the beaten path of the city. “Pull into the parking lot.”

In front of him, behind the steering wheel, Roylston resettled his bulk, looking like a steroid-infused earthquake in motion. Dressed in a black business suit, his skin dark and his head shaved, he could have passed for a native to the island. Only the Boston accent marked him as an outsider. During the three years he’d been with Gibson, Roylston hadn’t ever spoken much, and never mentioned anything personal. As far as Gibson knew, the bodyguard/chauffeur didn’t have a life outside of protecting him.

But all three of the live-in security specialists who tried to manage Gibson were like that. None of them wanted to get to know him, and they didn’t want him to know anything about them. They got paid to watch over him, protect him and try to rein in his “impulses.”

Escaping the watchdogs that had been with him throughout his life had been the initial part of the Game he played now. He’d avoided his protectors when he was a boy, escaped them at times for glorious bits of freedom, but in the end he’d always let them catch him in order to satisfy his father. Even at forty-three, Gibson didn’t want to completely escape his father’s attempts to control him. That was the very best part of the Game.

That particular thrill was even better than the killing, which he relished.

The bodyguards tended to be compliant with him. They didn’t want his father to know when they lost him, so they covered up most of his escapes—except for the ones that were too egregious.

His father covered for him as well, trapped by his desire to keep his corporation protected and to have an offspring to carry on his name. Gibson had robbed the man of that as well by choosing his stage name. Still, his father held out foolish hope of someday controlling him. The man was trapped, simply couldn’t let go of the selfish dream.

That was the very best part.

Roylston glanced up at the hotel. “This is where that Atlanta detective is staying.”

The fact that the man knew so much of his business irritated Gibson. He rested his elbows at his sides, curled his elbows and steepled his fingers under his chin. “I know that.”

With obvious reluctance, Roylston guided the sedan into the parking lot. The headlights flashed against the parked cars in the lot. “This is dangerous.”

“Of course it’s dangerous. I wouldn’t visit if it weren’t dangerous. The circus doesn’t really come alive until the aerialists perform without a net, until the lion tamer sticks his head inside a lion’s mouth. Death hovers there, just a snap away. And the potential of that is what keeps the crowd on the edges of their seats.” Gibson smiled and leaned over to the window so that he could look up.

Atlanta Detective Heath Sawyer still stood at the window. His shadow was a blurry image behind the curtain.

“You know I’m close, don’t you, Detective?” Gibson smiled at that thought, savoring it because he knew that closeness was making the man’s wounds hurt even more. When Gibson had killed the female detective in Atlanta—Janet, her name rolled so invitingly across his tongue—he had known her death would push the man to go the distance. Gibson had considered killing both of them, but in the end he’d decided not to. Having a mortal enemy was a delightful concoction that he’d never thought of.

Heath Sawyer didn’t worry Gibson. He had lawyers and riches that would keep the police far from his door. And if the man got too bothersome, it was never too late to take care of that loose end.

After a couple of minutes, the shadow at the window went away.

Gibson waited for a short time longer, enough to make Roylston uncomfortable. Then he leaned back in his seat again and addressed the driver. “Let’s go.”

Roylston had the sedan rolling within the next heartbeat. “Any particular destination?”

“Downtown, I think. I want to see how the revelers are doing.” Gibson took a California ten dollar gold piece from his pocket and rolled it across his knuckles. The coin leaped and flew like it was a living thing. He closed his hand on the coin, folding the fingers in with his other hand, then opened his hand again to reveal that the coin had vanished.

He smiled at the smoothness with which he worked. He was good and he knew it. The Atlanta detective could disappear just as easily when the time came.

Until then, there was the Game to play.

Back in Lauren’s hotel room, the phone call to her mother didn’t last too long. Chemo wore her out and left her in a fog. Plus, it was so late that Lauren had woken her up when she’d called. Her mother had insisted that she call when she returned to her room. Their conversation had been sad and groggy and disjointed, and had finally trickled off when her mother no longer had the strength to maintain it.

The doctors said she was improving, that this round of drugs was battling the cancer back into submission. She wasn’t supposed to undergo any stress during this time. That wasn’t going to happen.

After leaving Heath Sawyer’s room, Lauren had had to return to the morgue to finish paperwork she’d left undone earlier when getting to know more about Heath Sawyer. She’d worked in a numb state, just plodding through the information, borrowing a computer to get information she didn’t know, and contacting the insurance company as well as the State Department.

All of that had been exhausting.

Now, she couldn’t sleep, and it was two o’clock in the morning. She kept seeing Megan laid out on that table, so impersonal, so still, so cold to the touch. But the memory was confusing because Heath Sawyer was also there. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get the man out of her mind. She could still feel the strength of him when she’d fought him, still see the indomitable will in his green-flaked gold eyes and the set of his stubbled chin.

But she remembered the pain in them, too, when he’d told her about his old partner. Lauren remembered that image of him the most, that vulnerability that she’d seen that she was sure he would deny.

There was something more behind that pain, though. Heath Sawyer had been hurt somewhere else along the way, too. She could sense it in him even though she couldn’t yet put her finger on it. It was the same way she could take apart an illusion. Something was there just behind the curtain. If she spent enough time around him, she would have it.

That was why many of the illusionists who frequented Mirage Magic in Chicago where she worked insisted on giving private shows for her as they perfected pieces of their performances. If they could fool her, they could fool anyone.

Lauren didn’t think that was true, but it was nice to hear.

Warren Morganstern, the semiretired magician who had started the business over forty years ago as a supplement to his performances, told her that she had an eye for magic. More than that, though, she had a love for magic. She wanted to believe that magic could happen, and that made all the difference.

Seven years ago, when Lauren had been in college, she’d answered an ad in a newspaper for a part-time position at the magic store. When Megan had found out about it, she’d teased her unmercifully, till Lauren had finally gone and applied, knowing she was going get turned down, just to shut her sister up.

Then magic had happened. Lauren had gotten the job at Morganstern’s shop. She’d never asked how many other people had applied or what had made her application stand out among the others. Seven years later, she had taken over the store, allowing Morganstern to completely retire from performing, though he kept active in the business to socialize with the other magicians.

Since Lauren had started working there, she’d also started booking some of the acts, and she’d gotten successful at that. After a couple of years, she had doubled the store’s business, and Morganstern was giving serious thought to moving to a larger building.

Lauren hadn’t thought of the job as permanent, but she couldn’t think of anything else she’d rather do. She loved magic. She loved the possibility of what-if.

For a while, she tried to relax and go to sleep. Her flight tomorrow didn’t leave till the afternoon. Her mind wouldn’t stop spinning with everything that had happened.

Finally, she gave up trying to sleep, sat up in bed and got her laptop computer out of the bag. She logged on to one of the community boards that she used for the magic store and started asking questions about Gibson.

Someone out there had to know who the man was. Lauren still didn’t believe the man had killed Megan, but someone had. Heath Sawyer seemed to be the only person really digging into the investigation. Lauren thought that if she could prove the killer wasn’t Gibson, maybe Heath’s attention would refocus on the case from a different perspective.

Lauren was not going to let the killer go free if she could help it.

Wearing skintight surgical gloves, Gibson took out one of the specially embossed cards he’d had made when he first decided to kill. Ordering the cards anonymously from Thailand was simple. He’d used a drop box at a box store, an online pay service that accepted cash up front, and ordered from a large printer that did a lot of volume in special jobs. He knew the police investigators had tried tracking the origin of the cards he’d sent to claim his kills, but they hadn’t been able to do that.

Still seated in the rear of the luxury car, with Roylston looking on, though he was pretending not to, Gibson played with the card. Even with the gloves on, his skills were amazing. The card appeared and disappeared with lightning quickness.

Tiring of the game, he slid the card into an envelope he’d gotten straight from a box, affixed the address label he’d cut from an image he’d downloaded from the police department’s website. He added a picture of the young woman who’d been recently killed, a picture of her in the water not far from where her body had been discovered by two young Germans looking for a romantic section of the beach. He pulled the paper from the sticky strip, made sure there were no fibers clinging to it, and sealed the envelope.

When he was finished, he waved to Roylston, who pulled over to the public mailbox in front of the seedy hotel where Heath Sawyer was staying. Gibson thumbed down the window and leaned out for just a moment, knowing there were no security cameras on the premises to catch him in the act.

He popped the letter through the slot, then sank back in his seat as Roylston guided the car through the parking lot like a big shark. Gibson hummed to himself and took out the gold coin again, rolling it deftly across his knuckles, almost mesmerizing himself as the gleaming metal caught the reflection of the neon lights.