by G. M. Ford
She read the concern in his eyes. “What?” she asked.
“I thought I saw something,” he said.
A grandmother shepherded a pair of young boys along the street.
He rubbed his eyes. “I’m the one needs a nap,” he joked as they stepped inside. Something in his voice told her the levity wasn’t sincere.
The entire building had once been a private palace called the Doria Pamphili. Modern sensibilities and Italian taxes had reduced the once-proud Pamphili family to living exclusively on the sixth floor and leasing out the remaining space. Retail shops filled the ground floor. The Roman offices of the Associated Press occupied the second, while the Hotel Coronet did business on the fourth. Three and five were an eclectic collection of doctors, dentists, accountants, and bond brokers.
His name tag read Vincenzo DeGrazia. He manned the small registration desk of the Hotel Coronet. He was scheduled to leave at four, a mere fifteen minutes away, when he looked up from the desk to see the familiar couple now approaching him. Big, both of them. The man was a bruiser. She was tall for a woman but beautiful. Must be newlyweds, Vincenzo decided. The way they clung to each other.
“Aaah…Mr. and Mrs. Landis. Welcome back,” he said in his heavily accented English. “I hope you enjoyed your day in Roma,” he said.
“Thank you, we did,” said Kirsten.
The man nodded pleasantly and cast a backward glance toward the empty street. Before Vincenzo could muster up enough English to make further small talk, the man took her by the elbow and pulled her off down the hall and out of sight.
Room 43 was the third door on the left. The maid had pulled the curtains. The room was cool and dark. Kirsten excused herself and headed for the loo.
He waited to hear the snap of the lock and then walked over to the window. He pulled back the drapes in time to catch yet another flash of yellow as it disappeared around the corner.
He snatched a room key from the top of the desk, let himself out into the hall, and hurried back to the lobby. “Mr. Landis…What may I…”
Mr. Landis hurried across the carpet, into the elevator, and was gone without a word.
Vincenzo shook his head. “Americans,” he whispered to himself.
Mr. Landis moved quickly now, stepping out of the narrow elevator, jogging across the foyer and out into the street. He looked both ways. Only the grandmother and the boys, carrying cups of gelato now close to their stained faces. One had chosen grape, the other what appeared to be raspberry. Nothing yellow anywhere in sight.
He stood in the street for a moment checking traffic before turning back toward the Hotel Coronet. He glanced up as he crossed the street. Kirsten stood at the window. The lines in her forehead were visible, even through the glare on the glass. He managed a wan smile and a halfhearted wave before disappearing inside.
Her dress was unzipped. She held a hanger in her hand but made no move to undress. “Everything okay?” she asked.
He hesitated. “I guess so.”
“That’s not terribly reassuring,” she said with a small smile.
He walked to the window and gazed down into the street. “Last day and a half”—he walked over and stood at her side—“I had this feeling that somebody’s been watching us.” He shrugged apologetically.
“That’s it? Just a feeling?”
“No.” He looked away.
Her smile disappeared. “What else?”
“Coupla three times…I’ve thought I’ve seen somebody…” He ran a hand through his ginger-colored hair. “You know…somebody stalking us or something.”
“Man or woman?”
“Can’t tell.”
“Who would be stalking us?”
“I can’t imagine.” He paced across the room. “Gavin Landis doesn’t exist.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Maybe it’s somebody stalking Adrian Hope,” she said.
Behind his deepening tan, he blanched. “Maybe we oughta go find out,” he said.
55
The water running beneath the Ponte Umberto shimmered in the moonlight as the couple strolled slowly along, seemingly entranced by the current crawling beneath their feet. At the midpoint of the bridge, they stopped and looked down into the water together. Kirsten stole a quick peek back the way they’d come.
“You see it?” he asked.
“Back at the end of the bridge,” Kirsten whispered. “Just for a second.”
“Good,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder about myself.”
They stood by the railing, looking down into the ink-black water.
“You ready?” he asked.
The air around them seemed to tighten.
Kirsten nodded.
“All we want to do is get a look at whoever it is, right?”
“Right.”
“No confrontations. No heroics.”
“Trust me,” she said. “I’m not looking for trouble.”
They’d talked it over as they’d dressed for dinner. The Café Adriana was a half-hour walk from the hotel. Long enough to work up an appetite or walk off a dinner and, not coincidentally, just about right for ascertaining whether or not one was being followed. Their shadow had picked them up as soon as they’d left the hotel, casting something of a pall over what had otherwise been a terrific dinner at the Café Adriana, a small bistro in the shadow of the Vatican, where the sacred and the secular regularly came together to break bread. Took her a full minute to recall exactly what she’d had for dinner.
“I’m ready,” she assured him.
They ambled another twenty yards.
She took his hand in hers, moving closer to him now.
“I’m almost relieved,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“I noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
“How you were all of a sudden way more uptight.”
“How’s that reassuring?” he asked.
“I thought…you know…maybe it was us…like maybe you lost interest in me or something.”
“Anyone loses interest in rolling around with you should see a doctor.”
“Is that all?”
“Is what all?”
“Sex,” she whispered.
“Why do you always whisper that word?”
“Do I?”
“Every time. Like it’s something shouldn’t be talked about.”
“It’s the last taboo, I guess,” she said.
They passed beneath the final ornate gold streetlight on the bridge. Ahead, the brightly lit Piazza Della Rovere beckoned them forward. Instead, the pair turned sharp left and disappeared behind what must have been in medieval times some kind of watchtower, where the man now calling himself Gavin Landis stepped into the deep shadows and waited as Kirsten continued down the stairs talking to herself now, emoting as if they were still together and engaged in a lively conversation.
He held his breath and waited. Nothing. He sneaked another chestful of air and held it. Still nothing. He began to contemplate the possibility that he was mistaken. That no one was shadowing them. That the whole thing was a figment of his imagination. He shook his head in disgust and was about to follow Kirsten down the stairs when the sound of running feet sent him leaning back into the darkness.
Soft feet, feet whose tread was little more than a whisper. He listened as their pursuer hesitated at the top of the stairs and then began to follow the sound of Kirsten’s voice as she rounded the lower corner and started to walk along the river.
He took a deep breath and stepped out to the top of the stairs. The interloper was nearly at the bottom step. He watched as…as…she…it was definitely a woman…as she peeped around the corner. Whatever she saw sent her scurrying back the way she’d come, taking the stairs two at a time on long legs, until she finally looked up and saw the hulking figure at the top of the stairs.
She stopped dead. She looked behind her, where Kirsten suddenly appeared at the foot of the sta
irs, then upward again at the shadow towering above her. And then, in the near darkness, as the single streetlight dumped its pale cone of light directly onto her face…suddenly he knew. He’d seen the face before.
“Isobel” escaped his lips.
56
The sound of her name froze her in place. “I…I…please…” she stammered.
“You remember me?” he asked. When she didn’t respond, he went on. “I came to your house on Water Street. Remember?”
She stood transfixed, her jaw unhinged, staring up the stairs until the sound of Kirsten’s high heels behind her pulled Isobel Howard’s head around. She closed her mouth and looked from the man to Kirsten and back. Her knees quivered and then bent. She sat on the ancient marble stair and put both hands over her face. “I don’t understand,” she said finally. “What have you done with Gavin?”
The question made his head spin.
“How do you know Gavin?” he choked out after a minute.
“He was…we were going to…” She looked around as if she were suddenly lost in the woods, and then her mouth drooped and she began to hiccup, and then, after a moment of sniffling, she broke out into full-fledged crying. “I don’t understand,” she wailed over and over from behind her hands. Kirsten walked up and sat beside her on the stair, leaning in close and whispering, soothing Isobel Howard’s back with an understanding hand.
He walked down the stairs and sat on the step above the women. He put his hand on Kirsten’s shoulder. She lifted her head and looked his way. Her eyes told him to wait. He took her word for it, trying in his mind to work up a scenario about how Isobel Howard could be linked with a professional assassin, a man with no name, no address, no connections, a man who didn’t, for all intents and purposes, exist at all.
Nothing came to mind. He waited until the sniffling stopped.
“How do you know Gavin Landis?” he asked again. She looked up.
“After Wes disappeared…” She searched herself looking for a tissue. She came up empty and reluctantly wiped her nose on her sleeve. “After Wes disappeared…Gavin…he used to stop by to check on me.”
“Check on you how?”
“You know…to make sure the little man-and-wife charade was working.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He was with security.”
“Security?”
“You know, for the space center.”
Kirsten threw a cautionary look his way.
“So?” Kirsten prompted.
Isobel Howard’s shoulders began to shake. “It went on for years,” she hiccuped before breaking into tears. “Gavin and I got to know each other. I stopped hating him. Started looking forward to his visits.” She knew how odd her story sounded. She made an apologetic face. “The girls adored him,” she said by way of explanation.
“So?”
She looked away to ease the pressure and then began to talk, halting and hesitant at first, until the dam broke and the words flowed from her mouth in a torrent. You could tell she’d practiced the story in her head, over and over. She had her rationalizations down pat. About how she’d become fond of one of her keepers and how the feelings were mutual. How, when things had begun to fall apart, he’d helped her to escape. How he was supposed to pick them up and how, when he’d failed to show, she’d gone online and fed his name into the GDS system, which was what travel agents used for bookings, and lo and behold if his name didn’t come up as having flown to Rome two weeks earlier. According to the GDS system, Gavin Landis was staying at the Hotel Coronet. She’d arrived the day before yesterday. She wouldn’t say where she’d left the girls, just that it was something that Gavin had arranged.
She looked up at him with bloodshot eyes. “Where’s Gavin? Why are you using his name?”
“Because I can’t use my own” was all he could think to say.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m Adrian Hope.”
She blinked twice and began to shake her head. “You’re not…I’ve seen pictures of Adrian Hope and you’re—”
He interrupted, told her about the plastic surgery and the fingerprints. Isobel Howard looked to Kirsten for confirmation and received it.
“Where’s Gavin?” she asked again. She read the look of pity as it passed between her companions. “Please…” She began to weep. “Don’t say…Don’t tell me…”
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
“It was in the line of duty,” Kirsten added.
“This can’t be happening again. It can’t.” The woman folded her arms over her knees and buried her face. Kirsten looped an arm around her shoulder and pulled Isobel Howard close. They sat huddled together as Isobel poured out the tattered remnants of her heart onto the cold stone below her feet. Kirsten kept up a steady whisper about the real Gavin Landis, if a guy who didn’t exist could be considered real, about how he’d been working on his new life with Isobel and her girls when he’d been killed. How he’d surely have picked her up as planned if only it had been possible. The way Kirsten told the story Landis had been nothing short of a national hero at the moment of his untimely demise.
The man now calling himself Gavin Landis pulled out his wallet. He fished around inside and came out with a pair of keys. He selected one and returned the other to his hip pocket. He squeezed the silver key in his hand as he waited for Isobel Howard to regain some measure of composure.
She used her sleeve as a hankie and looked up.
“Nobody’s looking for you anymore,” he said. “Everybody connected to what happened to you and your husband is permanently out of commission.”
“You’re sure?”
He said he was. “Take this,” he said, proffering the key.
Her hand was clammy and cold as he pushed the key into her palm.
“Market Street Station.” He named the city. “The locker number is on the key.”
“I don’t…”
“There’s a whole bunch of money in that locker. It’s enough to start a new life. It was Gavin’s money. He’d want you and the girls to have it.” She was about to lose her composure again. “There’s also a deed to a piece of property in Vermont. I’m guessing that’s where he had in mind living out his days with you.”
The news ushered in another bout of sobbing from Isobel Howard and another round of whispered encouragement from Kirsten.
While she collected herself, he told her everything he knew. Everything Bob Reese was about to share with the congressional subcommittee. How Ronald Jacobson was approached by a couple of generals on the Military Oversight Committee. All the generals wanted was for project management to ignore reports that the heat tiles constituted a hazard. How Roland Barber wouldn’t keep his mouth shut about it and needed to be silenced. How Jacobson was discussing that very matter with a professional hit man when Wes walked in. And then Adrian Hope came waltzing in when Jacobson and the killer were dealing with Wesley Howard. The rest, as they say, was history.
“Why the charade?” she wanted to know. “Why take my life from me?”
“They didn’t feel like they could weather a full-fledged investigation into Wes’s disappearance right then. Not with Roland Barber about to meet his maker. Not with Adrian Hope turning up missing. Not only that, but putting a new Wes in place gave them a man on the inside of the program.”
She took several minutes to process the information. “Who was…” She waved a hand in the air. “You’d think I’d know what to call a man I spent seven years living in the same house with. I always thought of him as ‘it.’”
“Reese says he doesn’t know who the guy was and Jacobson’s not talking,” he said. “That part’s going to stay a mystery, for the time being at least.”
For the third time, she used her sleeve as a tissue, then pushed herself to her feet.
“I’m going home to my girls,” she announced. She opened her hand and looked down at the key. “Thank you,” she offered.
“It’s how he would have wante
d it.”
“Does anybody but you know…you know…the farm and…”
“Just us,” he assured her. “Anybody but you know about Gavin Landis?”
She shook her head.
“We’ll just have to trust each other, then.”
They shook hands and then the three of them walked to the top of the stairs, where they said their good-byes. Kirsten and Gavin watched Isobel walk off in the direction of the bright lights and raised voices of the Piazza Della Rovere. She looked back twice before disappearing into the crowd. Kirsten opened her mouth to speak. “Maybe we should have told her the truth.”
“What? That her beloved Gavin killed her beloved Wes and that the only reason he kept stopping by was he was trying to decide whether or not to kill the whole bunch of them.” He shook his head. “Not me.”
“It was a story she could live with,” Kirsten said.
“That’s all it takes.”
About the Author
G.M. FORD is the author of six widely praised Frank Corso novels, Fury, Black River, A Blind Eye, Red Tide, No Man’s Land, and Blown Away, as well as six highly acclaimed mysteries featuring Seattle private investigator Leo Waterman. A former creative writing teacher in western Washington, Ford lives in Oregon and is currently working on his next novel.
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ALSO BY G.M. FORD
THE FRANK CORSO SERIES
Fury
Black River
A Blind Eye
Red Tide
No Man’s Land
Blown Away
THE LEO WATERMAN SERIES
Who in the Hell Is Wanda Fuca?
Cast in Stone
The Bum’s Rush
Slow Burn
Last Ditch
The Deader the Better
Credits
Jacket design by Ervin Serrano