THREE TIMES A LADY

by Jon Osborne

  Tick, tick, tick.

  Nicholas stretched his neck six inches to the left and sipped ice water through a plastic straw; wetting his lips at the same time he whetted his enormous appetite for murder. Of course Dinah Leach couldn’t hear the clock ticking. She was much too consumed with her own celebrity to notice something like that. Much too full of herself. Still, Nicholas supposed it would have been difficult for anybody to hear a goddamn thing above the deafening music blasting over the fifty or so speakers stationed around Johnny’s Hideaway, vibrating the floor beneath his shiny black dress shoes so violently that it reminded him of standing on the platform of a busy subway station in New York City.

  From his shielded position in the corner of the club, Nicholas watched Dinah Leach swivel her hips suggestively in perfect time to Gaga’s Poker Face. The woman’s jeans looked expensive to him, and Nicholas had an eye trained to notice such things. The fancy denim had no doubt cost Dinah Leach five hundred bucks at a bare minimum, and they’d obviously been tailoured to show off her very best asset. Her only asset, really. The only thing that anyone in the world really valued about her.

  Nicholas narrowed his eyes as a pair of hulking, muscular black men wearing oversized Atlanta Falcons football jerseys and matching baseball caps moved forward to sandwich Dinah Leach out on the crowded dance floor, trying their damndest to get some of her undeserved fame to rub off on them.

  Nicholas smirked and took another sip of his ice water. Didn’t these idiots know that fake celebrity came with its own fake gloss that never quite rubbed off, no matter how hard you tried?

  Apparently not.

  Shaking his head, Nicholas lifted his wrist and checked his watch again. One forty-two a.m. now. Just a little bit longer until he could get this show on the road. And the clock was still ticking. He wondered if Dinah Leach could hear it yet. It was barreling down on her like a goddamn freight train now.

  Tick, tick, tick…

  CHAPTER 19

  Dana’s eyes homed in like a powerful laser on the watch strapped around Nancy Lawson’s left wrist. It was a Tag Heuer.

  She blew out a slow breath and tried to control the jack-hammering of her heartbeat against her ribcage. No use. Nancy Lawson’s timepiece looked like a fairly expensive piece of jewellery to her – especially for someone who’d been complaining about money ten minutes earlier – but it wasn’t the cheap Mickey Mouse watch that the woman in the video had been wearing.

  Dana shook herself and tried to calm down. Wasn’t easy. She closed her eyes and wondered if she’d ever recover from the trauma of her life-and-death struggle in her brother’s underground bunker. She’d faced down other killers in the past, but never before had she felt this jumpy, this unsure of herself. She was acting like a scared little rabbit right now when what she really needed to be acting like was a goddamn lion. People’s lives depended on it.

  ‘Is everything OK, Agent Whitestone?’

  Dana opened her eyes and pursed her lips. Balling up the wet paper towels in her hand, she tossed them into a metal garbage receptacle two feet away. ‘Actually, no, Miss Lawson,’ she said. ‘Everything’s not OK. Not even close.’

  Dana paused then when the idea occurred to her. Fuck it. Worth a shot. As long as she had Nancy Lawson here in the restroom with her, she might as well put their time to good use and take advantage of the impromptu meeting. ‘I hate to bother you any further, ma’am,’ Dana said, ‘but I was wondering if you could help me out with something else. It’ll only take a minute or two, I promise.’

  The corner’s office employee looked hesitant. A frown creased her flawlessly painted lips. ‘Help you out with what, Agent Whitestone? I think I’ve already done everything I can for you.’ The woman paused. ‘Probably more than I should have, now that I think about it. I want to help you out, I really do, but I also want keep my job. Need to keep my job, as a matter of fact. And there’s no point in pissing off Dr Johnson any more than he’s usually pissed off for no good reason. He’s not exactly the kind of man who suffers slights lightly, if you know what I mean.’

  Dana nodded and dug her cellphone from her pocket. She flipped it open and covered the short distance between them. ‘I know, Miss Lawson, but this is extremely important. And I assure you Dr Johnson will never know about it. It’ll be our little secret.’

  She held up the screen so both women could see. ‘I know you don’t like watching these things, Miss Lawson, but I was wondering if you could take a look at this autopsy video and see if you can identify the woman in it for me. There’s nothing graphic in the video, I swear. No cutting or anything like that. Just take a look, OK? Like I said before, it’ll only take a minute or two of your time.’

  Lawson still didn’t look so sure. ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Agent Whitestone.’

  Dana resisted the urge to scream. But she really needed the woman’s help right now. And she knew that there was nothing quite as effective as cold hard cash to persuade a hesitant person to reconsider his or her hard-line stance. ‘There’s a monetary reward in it for you,’ Dana said quickly, remembering Lawson’s earlier consternation over being denied a raise in conjunction with her additional duties as the backup A/V person. ‘I can offer you five hundred dollars right now for your help, no strings attached. If you can help me out, great. If not, you get the money anyway. It’s a win-win situation for you any way you look at it.’

  Just as Dana had suspected, Lawson’s ears perked up at the mention of money. Pulling down the sleeves of her smart-looking blue blazer, the human-resources worker straightened her posture. ‘Well, I guess it couldn’t hurt to just look.’

  Dana nodded. ‘Nope. Couldn’t hurt at all. And you just might help me catch a killer. Anyway, I want you to watch this video and tell me if you recognise the woman in it.’

  Dana tapped the ‘play’ button on the touch-screen telephone and both she and Lawson looked on as the images flashed across the screen. Lawson’s bright blue eyes went saucer-wide when the woman wearing the fancy dress mouthed the words ‘fuck you, Dana’ to the camera while holding up the picture of Nathan Stiedowe.

  When the video reached its end, Lawson shook her head emphatically. ‘I’ve never seen that woman before in my life,’ she said, completely sure of herself. ‘I’m very sorry, Agent Whitestone, but I’m extremely good with faces, and I know for a fact that I’ve never seen her before.’

  Dana sighed and flipped shut her phone. She hadn’t really expected Lawson to recognise the woman in the video, but at least the possibility had been there. In any event, there went five hundred dollars of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money right down the toilet. Wasteful government spending at its worst.

  Dana put her cellphone back into her pocket and dug out a pen and notebook from her purse. ‘It’s OK, Miss Lawson. Thank you very much for taking the time to watch. If you’ll just write down your address for me, I’ll make sure you get your check within the next week.’

  Lawson took the pen and notebook Dana was holding out and scribbled down her address. When she’d finished, she handed them back to Dana and asked, ‘How in the heck did that woman get into the building in the first place, Agent Whitestone? That’s what’s bugging the crap out of me. I mean, security’s not all that tight around here, but still…’

  Dana shook her head, not especially interested in continuing the conversation any further. She didn’t want to seem rude, but Lawson didn’t have any useful information to offer her, which made what basically amounted to small talk a complete and utter waste of her time. A very expensive waste of her time.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dana said, slipping out a business card from her purse and handing it over. ‘That’s what I’m hoping to find out. Anyway, if anything occurs to you later on I’d really appreciate it if you’d give me a call at the number on this card. Any time. Day or night.’

  Lawson took the card and tucked it away inside her own purse. ‘Absolutely, Agent Whitestone. I’ll make I sure I do just that.’


  Lawson paused again and looked sheepish. ‘I feel kind of bad taking the money like this, considering the fact I didn’t help you out all that much. Still, I’m not going to lie – this definitely helps me out. Christmas is right around the corner and I’ve got five grandchildren I need to buy presents for. Money is always tight this time of year.’

  Dana winced internally at the twinge in her heart brought about by Lawson’s casual mention of grandchildren, wondering if she’d ever have grandchildren to spoil with Christmas presents. To spend the holidays with. To shower with her love and affection.

  Maybe if things worked out with Bradley’s adoption…

  Dana chased away the thought with a quick shake of her head, not wanting to get too far ahead of herself here. Before she could take care of someone else, she needed to learn how to take care of herself first. And lately she hadn’t been doing a very bang-up job of that particular assignment. ‘Nothing to feel bad about,’ Dana said. ‘I really appreciate you taking the time to look for me. It’s more than most people would do.’

  Lawson lifted her delicate left wrist and checked her fancy watch. ‘Well, I guess I should be getting back to work now. My shift’s getting ready to wrap up for the night.’

  Dana nodded. ‘Of course. Be careful driving home, ma’am.’

  Dana paused, then she added, ‘From what I hear, it’s supposed to get cold out there tonight. Viciously cold.’

  Lawson smiled thinly. ‘Hell, when you reach my age, Agent Whitestone, they’re all viciously cold nights. Just remember you heard it here first, OK?’

  And with that, the coroner’s office employee simply left the bathroom, five hundred dollars richer but without ever having used the facilities at all.

  CHAPTER 20

  From his unobtrusive position in the corner of the noisy nightclub, Nicholas watched a third huge black guy indelicately muscle his way in on the shameless ménage-a-trois taking place out on the crowded dance floor.

  Already sandwiched by the other two thugs from earlier, Dinah Leach didn’t seem to mind the added attention one little bit. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. After all, why settle for just two pieces of cake when you could have three, right?

  Judging by the hair graying at the new guy’s temples, no doubt he was known on his block as an ‘O.G.’ – an ‘original gangster’. One of those guys who didn’t seem to know that being ‘cool’ had passed him by long ago and had left him standing squarely on the pier of middle-aged poseur-hood.

  A moment or two later following the third guy’s appearance, the sounds of Lady Gaga faded away and the DJ flipped the wax over to Bullet With A Name by the heavy-metal group Nonpoint. Almost comically, the three thugs paused as one and looked at each other in confusion. Nicholas almost choked on his ice water as he fought back a sudden wave of laughter. Obviously, they didn’t have the slightest clue of how to dance to white-people’s music.

  Nicholas shook his head in bemusement, both at the thugs’ cartoonish reaction to the new music and also at the song selection itself. The lyrics couldn’t have been any more appropriate if none other than Clive Barker himself had written them. Because Nicholas had a bullet with Dinah Leach’s name on it, didn’t he? Even if he would go with the knife tonight? Of course he did. His mother’s exacting plan might have called for ending Dinah Leach’s life with a blade, but just to be safe Nicholas had also tucked a.45-calibre handgun into his jacket pocket before leaving for the club that night. A little added security to ensure that he lived up to Annabeth Preston’s very lofty expectations of him.

  In a perfect world, Nicholas would have marched directly out into the middle of the dance floor and put a bullet into Dinah Leach’s worthless temple right then and there. Sadly, though, this wasn’t a perfect world. Not even close. Not yet, at least.

  But Nicholas was working on it.

  Besides, killing Dinah Leach in that manner would have been going against Annabeth Preston’s very specific plans for the woman, and frail as the old gal might be these days, Nicholas knew she’d hoist him up by his shirt collar and hang him by the back of his neck on one of the sharp steel hooks in the butcher’s shop back home if he deviated even one iota from her very specific instructions. So for now he’d just need to wait a little bit longer before introducing any exciting new wrinkles to her script.

  But those wrinkles were coming. Boy, were they coming. Just wait until Annabeth Preston saw what Nicholas had planned for her.

  The heavy bass coming from the nightclub’s speakers punched like fists into Nicholas’s chest, making him wish he could punch it back. Doosh-doosh-doosh-doosh. After several minutes of this, the song finally switched to Stronger by Kanye West, and out on the dance floor, Dinah Leach gleefully succumbed to the renewed dry-humping foisted upon her by her three thuggish-ruggish friends, who seemed much more confident in their dance moves now that a fellow brother was supplying the beat.

  When Stronger faded away itself and gave way to Justin Bieber’s Girlfriend, Dinah Leach at last disengaged herself from the panting pack. Crestfallen looks coloured in the faces of her dance-mates as they watched her walk away. Three necks swiveled on three sets of powerful shoulders. Six bloodshot eyes immediately scanned the dance floor in search of another willing whore with whom they could get their respective grooves on.

  Nicholas chuckled to himself and checked his watch again in the strobe lights flashing overhead. He let a full thirty seconds pass before following Dinah Leach to the bar at a discrete distance. Wasn’t all that difficult in the packed nightclub. But to hell with all the foreplay already, right? He was ready to get his own groove on.

  Fighting his way through the bumping and grinding going on out on the dance floor, Nicholas shouldered his way up to the long bar lined with people and readied himself for what would come next. Any nervousness he’d been feeling earlier in the night had dissipated completely now. In its place, a calm like none he’d ever experienced before had settled over him like a mother’s warm and comforting embrace.

  Or at least what he imagined a mother’s warm and comforting embrace must feel like.

  Nicholas took in a deep breath through his nostrils and sidled up next to Dinah Leach at the bar. Almost time for the payoff. Just a little bit longer now. And the clock was still ticking. Could Dinah Leach hear it yet?

  Nicholas closed his eyes. Of course she couldn’t. But he sure as hell could.

  Tick, tick, tick…

  CHAPTER 21

  Dana finally left the coroner’s office through the front doors and stepped outside into the frigid winter air, flipping open her cellphone and punching in the number for Bill Krugman down in Washington, DC.

  Dana didn’t want to wait until she got back to the car to hear her boss’s voice. She wanted to know that he and Marie were OK now. Marie Krugman’s first chemotherapy session had been scheduled for today, and her current medical condition marked one of the scariest for women all around the world, bringing on a profound and universal sense of dread no matter what country you lived in or what language you spoke. Any way you cut it, breast cancer was no joke.

  A howling wind gusted in off Lake Erie and sliced hard through Dana’s body as the phone began to ring on Krugman’s end, whipping her short blonde hair wildly around her head and chilling her right down to her bone marrow. Though Dana’s main reason for calling Krugman was to check up on Marie’s condition, she also wanted to bring the Director up to speed on what was going on out in Cleveland and receive his blessing to send the autopsy-room video to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division down in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The Bureau was in the midst of a billion-dollar project to compile the world’s largest database of suspects’ physical characteristics, and Dana hoped the technicians stationed in the foothills of Appalachia could match up the face of the woman in the video to an existing face already on record. The hope of those in charge of the FBI’s sweeping new project was that in the next few years or so law-enforcement officials would be able to ac
cess the biometric information – including iris patterns, face shapes, scars, even the way people walked and talked – to crack cases and identify terrorists and fugitives. More than a million images of fingerprints, irises and faces of Iraqi and Afghan detainees had been collected over the past two years alone, and domestically that number wasn’t very far behind. As things stood currently, the FBI maintained fifty-five million sets of electronic fingerprints. A possible match was made or ruled out somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred thousand times a day. So any way you looked at it, it wasn’t a small-potatoes operation by any stretch of the imagination.

  Dana turned her face away from the bitter wind as the Director finally picked up his phone. ‘Agent Whitestone,’ he said immediately. ‘What’s wrong? Is everything OK? Are you OK?’

  Krugman’s concern touched Dana. Ever since she’d lost both James Whitestone and Crawford Bell to murder at the hands of the same bloodthirsty lunatic who’d very nearly ended her life too, he’d been the closest thing to a father figure that she had in this world. ‘I’m just fine, sir,’ she said, wanting to put him at ease as quickly as possible. ‘Almost back to a hundred per cent now. More importantly, how is Marie feeling?’

  Krugman blew out a slow breath. His deep voice didn’t crack, but it came close enough to make Dana wince. ‘Worse than we expected, I’m afraid. Apparently, the cancer’s more aggressive than we first thought. They’ve already doubled the number of her chemo sessions every week. It’ll be a long time until we’re safely out of the woods.’

  Dana gasped. ‘Oh my God, sir. That’s awful.’

  Krugman sighed. ‘Yeah, but what can you do about it? It is what it is. Anyway, what else is going on? You never call me this late unless it’s about work. Don’t tell me you’re back on the clock already.’