‘There are things living on the bottom of ponds that I’d rather spend time with.’
Levi waited for him to go on, clearly expecting to be told the reasons behind the animosity. It seemed to Evan that his fear about being reminded of Sarah every two minutes was well-founded.
‘First time we met, we had a big argument regarding the, uh, performance of the police department when my wife disappeared. I’d have punched his teeth down his fat throat if Kate hadn’t stopped me. I’m very pleased to say it’s gone downhill from there. One day when Kate’s not around I’m going to do it, too.’
Levi laughed as if it was the perfect attitude he looked for in an investigator he was thinking of employing.
‘I can see you’ve got a good relationship with Kate.’
Evan looked around the diner to make sure he was in the right place. He smelled bacon cooking, heard the hiss of eggs frying through the serving hatch. He saw a waitress he recognized, a middle-aged woman dressed in a tight black skirt and white blouse, parts of her spilling out of every item of clothing she wore. He took in the other diners digging into their breakfasts, some of them regulars, reading the paper and drinking coffee. It looked and smelled like a diner to him, but it didn’t change the feeling that he’d accidentally wandered into a psychiatrist’s office instead. He’d met Levi less than a half-hour ago and already they’d touched on Sarah’s disappearance and his undefined and ever-shifting relationship with Kate Guillory.
‘It’s not what you think,’ he said, feeling like he was letting her down as the words came out of his mouth.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’
Evan waved it off as the guy behind the counter poured them some coffee and took their orders.
‘Why don’t you tell me what happened five years ago?’
Levi swallowed thickly and took a sip of coffee, wincing as the hot liquid touched his cut and swollen lip. Evan gave him time. Levi picked up a paper napkin, pulling it to pieces as he talked. He kept his eyes down, staring at the photographs on the counter, looking through them, not at them. His voice was a flat monotone, all emotion suppressed.
‘There isn’t a lot to tell. It was a car accident. She lost control on a curve. The car went off the road, down a ravine. It turned over a number of times, then hit a tree and exploded.’ He paused to take another sip of coffee, not noticing or caring about the pain in his lips this time. ‘The car caught on fire. She—’
The moment was interrupted by the arrival of their food. Levi jumped as the plate was set down in front of him, right on top of the photographs. He stared at it as if he didn’t know what it was, didn’t know what he was supposed to do with it. Evan looked longingly at his own breakfast, the smell of bacon taunting him. He didn’t feel as if he should start while Levi was in the middle of his story.
He looked again at the bacon, felt his heart drop. It was over-cooked. He closed his eyes as his mind filled with thoughts of Levi’s wife burning to a crisp in her car. He hoped Levi wasn’t thinking the same thing. He needn’t have worried. From the look on his face, it could’ve been a dead dog on the plate in front of him for all he knew.
Still, best to get the reminders out of sight. He speared a piece of bacon with his fork.
‘Go ahead,’ Levi said, pushing his plate away. ‘I’m not hungry.’ He drew in a massive breath and let it out slowly, his chest shuddering. ‘She was trapped in the car. The police said she was knocked unconscious when the car landed upside down. She wouldn’t have known anything about it, wouldn’t have . . .’
Evan knew exactly what everyone had said. She wouldn’t have suffered. What else would they say? Sorry, she suffered horribly. It took a very long time for her to die. He knew from personal experience how inadequate well-intentioned comments like that were in the small hours of the morning as you tossed and turned, praying for sleep to claim you.
He knew what went through Levi’s mind at those times, knew how your mind liked to torment you. How did they know if she suffered or not? They’re only saying it to make me feel better.
Better?
Levi turned to face him, his eyes red-rimmed, mouth turned down. He leaned in closer. Evan recoiled as he breathed in the rotten smell of Levi’s nervous bad breath. His appetite gone, he put his fork down quietly, prepared himself for the onslaught of anguish that was on its way.
‘How can they know that?’
Evan shook his head.
They can’t.
‘Contusions to the head probably.’
Levi let out a sharp bark of laughter, loud enough to make the man sitting next to him look up. Evan caught the man’s eye, held it. The guy turned away, embarrassed.
‘Yeah, right.’
Levi picked up his fork and stabbed at a piece of bacon on Evan’s plate, chasing it around the plate until he got hold of it. He held it up between them. Evan groaned silently, his heart sinking. He knew what was coming next.
‘You think they’d be able to tell me if this had a contusion?’ Five years of pain and bitterness went into that one word. ‘Because this is what she looked like when they cut her out of the car.’
His voice had risen, edged with hysteria, as he waved his fork in front of Evan’s face. Despite that, nobody was looking at them. But Evan felt every ear in the room straining to hear, anxious not to miss the juicy gossip that would make them the talk of the coffee station when they got to work. He’d have put his hand on Levi’s arm to quieten him if he’d wanted the fork stabbed in the back of it.
‘They can tell. The amount of smoke in the lungs for one thing.’
Levi wasn’t listening. He’d had five years to get his mind set on this track. Evan wasn’t about to change it with a few platitudes. Evan let the silence stretch out, to give Levi space, to collect his own thoughts. He wished the server would take Levi’s plate away to remove the constant reminder of incineration. He called the counterman over.
‘I think we’re done here.’
The guy cleared the plates away and topped up their coffees.
Evan cleared his throat.
‘How—’
‘—did they know it was her if she was so badly burned? Is that what you were going to ask? It was her car, for one.’ He held up a hand. ‘I know, that doesn’t prove anything. They matched her dental records.’ He stuck his hand in his coat pocket and pulled something out. ‘And she was wearing this.’
He placed a gold bracelet on the counter between them. The shape had distorted in the fire, but it had survived intact.
‘I bought it for her on our first wedding anniversary. You can see the inscription on the inside. We loved with a love that was more than love. It’s from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.’
Evan picked it up, the words of the inscription blurring before his eyes. Two things were competing for his attention in his mind. Just as the car belonging to Levi’s wife didn’t prove anything, neither did the fact that the body was wearing her bracelet.
But it was the other thought that made Levi lean away and give him a strange look.
He was immediately aware of the Zippo lighter he carried around in his own pocket, the one he believed belonged to Sarah and might hold the key to her disappearance. He placed the bracelet carefully back on the counter, then put his hand in his pocket, felt the reassuring smoothness of the lighter, his fingertips brushing the inscription that had become every bit as personal for him as Levi’s engraved words to his wife.
‘What?’ Levi said, his face twisted in confusion.
Evan looked at him, equally confused.
‘It doesn’t say that at all,’ Levi snapped.
‘What doesn’t say what?’
‘I watched you read the inscription on Lauren’s bracelet. Then you said we the unwilling.’
Evan wasn’t aware he said anything. But he knew the words Levi was accusing him of saying. They were the first line of the inscription on the Zippo lighter.
‘What did you mean?’ Levi said, his face reddening, irri
tation in his voice. ‘Are you saying you’re unwilling to take this on?’
Evan closed his eyes. Should he take the escape route Levi was unwittingly offering him? He wasn’t sure he’d give Levi value for money if he kept being ambushed by his own past.
‘It’s nothing like that. The inscription made me think of my wife again, that’s all. There are more parallels than you thought when you looked me up.’
‘Is it going to be a problem?’
Evan shook his head.
‘No. Not at all.’
Levi didn’t look convinced. He picked the bracelet and the photographs up off the counter, then slid off his stool.
‘I’m not sure this was a good idea. If you don’t mind me saying’—Evan laughed to himself as Levi’s eyes narrowed in preparation for the spiteful personal comment that was sure to follow—‘it looks to me like you’ve got more than enough problems of your own to make time for anyone else’s. Thanks for breakfast.’
Then he was gone, striding across the diner, the door slamming after him. Evan called the counterman over for a refill, trying to decide if he was pleased to see the back of him or not. The counterman started to move away, then stopped. He bent and picked something off the floor.
‘This yours?’
He held out one of Levi’s photographs. It must have been knocked to the floor when he cleared the plates away and neither of them noticed. In his hissy fit, Levi hadn’t noticed that he only picked up one photograph. Evan took it.
‘Thanks.’
He looked around automatically even though Levi was long gone. He wasn’t going to run down the street after him now. He realized he didn’t know anything about him except for his name. He couldn’t even mail it back to him. If Levi was that bothered, he’d come back. Besides, he still had the other one if he wanted to hire somebody else.
Evan studied it again, more leisurely this time, without Levi’s anxious face hanging over him, waiting for him to produce instant answers like a rabbit out of a hat. The photograph was the one of Lauren and the man embracing, the one with her face visible. Her arms were wrapped around the man’s body. The guy wasn’t tall which is why you could see her face over his shoulder, but he was solidly built. It was a stretch for her arms to go around his shoulders. Both wrists poked out of the sleeves of her coat, showing the black blouse underneath. Despite the poor quality of the image, the bracelet was clearly visible on her left arm. It had slipped up her arm, over the cuff of her blouse, clearly highlighted against the black sleeves.
That meant it was an old photograph. How could she be wearing the bracelet Levi had in his pocket if it was a recent photo? It might be a different bracelet but Evan didn’t think so. Add to that the fact that people don’t come back from the dead. It was an old photograph.
It was also somebody else’s problem now. Or so he thought.
END OF EXCERPT
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MORE BOOKS BY JAMES HARPER
The Evan Buckley Thrillers
RESURRECTION BLUES
(Evan Buckley Thrillers #5)
AFTER LEVI STONE shows private-eye Evan Buckley a picture of his wife Lauren in the arms of another man, Evan quickly finds himself caught up in Lauren’s shadowy past. The things he unearths force Levi to face the bitter truth—that he never knew his wife at all—or any of the dark secrets that surround her mother’s death and the disappearance of her father, and soon Evan’s caught in the middle of a lethal vendetta.
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HUNTING DIXIE
(Evan Buckley Thrillers #6)
HAUNTED BY THE unsolved disappearance of his wife Sarah, PI Evan Buckley loses himself in other people’s problems. But when Sarah’s scheming and treacherous friend Carly shows up promising new information, the past and present collide violently for Evan. He knows he can’t trust her, but he hasn’t got a choice when she confesses what she’s done, leaving Sarah prey to a vicious gang with Old Testament ideas about crime and punishment.
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FALLEN ANGEL
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WHEN JESSICA HENDERSON falls to her death from the window of her fifteenth-floor apartment, the police are quick to write it off as an open and shut case of suicide. The room was locked from the inside, after all. But Jessica’s sister doesn’t buy it and hires Evan Buckley to investigate. The deeper Evan digs, the more he discovers the dead girl had fallen in more ways than one.
A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
(A standalone Evan Buckley mystery)
PRIVATE-EYE EVAN BUCKLEY’S not used to getting something for nothing. So when an unexpected windfall lands in his lap, he’s intrigued. Not least because he can’t think what he’s done to deserve it. Written off by the police as one more sad example of mindless street crime, Evan feels honor-bound to investigate, driven by his need to give satisfaction to a murdered woman he never knew
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BAD CALL – A PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
RALPH DA SILVA has screwed up. Big time. He’s had four Tequilas too many for lunch and now he thinks he might have killed somebody—somebody important. Somebody with a lot of very unpleasant friends. The question is—can he get himself out of the country before they strap him to a chair and get the electrodes out. One thing is certain—he can’t afford to make another bad call.
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DEDICATION
To Rills Smills, without whom none of this would have been possible.
James Harper, The Evan Buckley Thrillers: Books 1 - 4 (Evan Buckley Thrillers Boxsets)
The Evan Buckley Thrillers: Books 1 - 4 (Evan Buckley Thrillers Boxsets) Page 99