Unfinished Sentence (The Charlie Davies Mysteries Book 2)

by Clare Kauter

  “Can’t extradite someone for being creepy.”

  If only.

  A voice called out Adam’s name and I saw a couple heading our way. It was Sheila and someone I presumed was her husband who trailed along behind her. The man looked familiar too, though I couldn’t quite place him.

  “Adam! Charlie! So nice to see you.” The man caught up to her and she introduced him offhandedly. “And this is Duke, my husband.”

  Her lip seemed to curl as she said it, as if that statement disgusted her.

  Adam and Duke shook hands. When the man turned to me, his face paled. I squinted at him, trying to figure out who he was.

  “Duke works in construction, too,” Sheila said.

  Then it clicked.

  “You’re the guy who harassed me while I was jogging yesterday!” I cried.

  Sheila turned to her husband in disgust.

  “You what?” she demanded. “When I saw her in her jogging outfit I thought she was a child! She looks like a twelve year old, you disgusting perv!”

  “Sheel, darlin’,” Duke began, trying to placate his wife.

  She was having none of it. “Nope, that’s it. You’ve broken the conditions of the pre-nup. It’s divorce time.”

  “Babe –”

  “Don’t start with me, dickhead. It’s over, and I get to keep all of my money.” Her maniacal grin scared even me. “And it’s all your fault.”

  “But –”

  “You can fuck off now,” she said simply.

  Duke looked like he wanted to argue, but he thought better of it and did what he was told instead.

  “Thank you for that,” said Sheila. “There’s one problem solved. Now we just need to figure out why someone trashed my construction site and hid a body there.”

  Yeah, we ‘just’ had to do that.

  She frowned. “More immediately, I need to figure out where I’m going to sleep for the next little while. I guess I’ll get a room here tonight. Ah well – small price to pay for being rid of that creep.”

  “I think James mentioned they were booked out for the conference,” Adam said.

  “That’s OK,” I said. “You can come and stay in my room.”

  “Oh, that’s so nice of you! What an angel. First you get me a divorce, now this.”

  Yes, that is the typical definition of an angel. To be honest, I’d mostly offered her a room not because it was a nice gesture but because I felt uncomfortable sleeping here alone, knowing Lionel could be lurking outside my room at any moment. Rather than point this ulterior motive out to her, though, I just smiled sweetly. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

  Well, OK, maybe it would if he decided to come after me, but she didn’t need to know about that, right? It would only worry her.

  After I told her my room number so she could find it later, she left us to go and mingle with other business owners. Adam lent towards me and whispered: “Do you often invite people to come and live with you?”

  “Only once before.”

  I was, of course, referring to Lea.

  “Is splitting up couples a hobby of yours?”

  “Jeremy was a serial killer, so you can’t honestly say that you blame me for that. This time it was an accident, and besides, Duke might have been responsible for the dead body at the construction site. He was the one who organised the dodgy security, remember?”

  “True,” he conceded. “Though I probably wouldn’t have invited Sheila to stay in my room if I were in your situation.”

  “I thought it might be nice to have someone else there to keep me company.”

  Adam was silent for a moment. “Are you scared?”

  “No,” I said, too quickly. Of course I was scared.

  “Well, she wouldn’t be my first pick as a body guard, seeing as someone is clearly after her.”

  Oh, jeez. I hadn’t thought this through. Her construction site was trashed, and if Lionel was responsible for that, and if he was really after me, I’d just put two of his targets together in the one room.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Good point.”

  “Never mind,” said Adam. “I’ll keep an eye on you.”

  “Maybe keep both eyes on me. I’m pretty sure that drink spiking wasn’t a random incident.”

  As I walked through the room beside Adam, I thought back to the night before. Who was the man with the moustache? I wished I could remember his face. What if he was following me? He could be here right now and I wouldn’t even recognise him. Was he out to get me or did he want to help me?

  Lost in my own thoughts, I didn’t notice that Adam had led me to the outdoor area by the pool. There weren’t many people out here, probably due to the distant rumble of thunder that hinted at the rain to come.

  “Why are we out here?” I asked. I saw a far off flash of lightning and grimaced as I thought back to the weather report I’d seen earlier. I didn’t want to be out here in torrential rain.

  “Less people,” said Adam. “Better for talking.”

  Ah, of course. Because Adam was such a big conversationalist.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Our cover.”

  “Um, our cover is that you’re attending a business conference and I’m your secretary, right? Which isn’t even a cover, because that’s all true.”

  “I don’t think Lionel is buying it. He seems suspicious of me, and if he spiked your drink… Well, you get my point.”

  “So what are you suggesting? That we back off?”

  I was not impressed with that idea. After all this work? After I’d been drugged? We couldn’t just back off and pretend nothing was happening. Most of all, I couldn’t give up on Stacey.

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying we… modify our cover a little.”

  “I don’t think I’m following.” We couldn’t just start telling him a different story and expect him to believe it. Was Adam crazy?

  “He’s seen us sneaking around, whispering to each other, meeting up outside work, you know. Acting like we’ve got a secret.”

  “Yes?” I said slowly.

  “So we just need to make him think that it’s a different secret to what it actually is.”

  I frowned. “Still not with you, buddy.”

  He rolled his eyes and leaned in. I froze as he brought his face closer to mine. My ability to breathe became compromised and my mind went foggy. I’d had a lot of years of practice to overcome James McKenzie’s charms, but I wasn’t yet immune to Adam’s. He smelled of, um, I don’t know, expensive cologne I guess. Something I couldn’t identify, but not in a weird way. I couldn’t think straight with him this close. He brought his forehead in and rested it on mine.

  Very quietly, he whispered, “So we pretend that we’re secretly together.”

  Oh right. Sure, OK, I’d uh, pretend that he was intoxicatingly attractive. Sure, no problem. All make-believe. Yep. Uh huh.

  Cough.

  “Righty-o,” I said. “Sounds grouse.”

  A tidal wave of mortification washed over me. Had I just said ‘grouse’? What was I, sixty? Nobody says grouse! I couldn’t have been more embarrassingly Australian if I tried.

  Adam raised his eyebrows at me. “Wow.”

  “That never happened.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll find it did.”

  “Forget it. Delete it from your memory.”

  “Photographic memory, sorry.”

  Of course he had a photographic memory. Just my luck.

  “Well, pretend.”

  He frowned, pretending to think about it, and I felt his skin move against mine. I was having trouble breathing again and tried to clear my mind from his distracting face.

  “Hmm…” he said.

  Think of something gross, I told myself. Like nappies. Dirty nappies. Stinky old nappies filled with poo. But nappies come from babies, and I wouldn’t mind having –

  “OK cool anyway,” I said quickly, stepping away from Adam, breaking the contac
t between us in the hope of clearing my mind.

  He raised his eyebrows at my actions but didn’t comment, which I was glad about. Hot or not, he was a) my boss, and b) a bit of a prick. OK, so he’d been nice lately, but overall his personality seemed to rate pretty high on the douche scale.

  Urgh, I didn’t have time for this. It was taking up all of my energy just to not be attracted to McKenzie, now I had to worry about Adam as well.

  Before either of us could say anything more, a shout rang out through the pool area. It came from around the back of the pool sheds. Adam and I looked at each other and then took off at a run, heading towards the sound. The voice hadn’t said anything, but it was pretty clear someone needed help.

  As we rounded the pool sheds, two figures came into focus. A body lay on the ground while another dark figure fled the scene. Adam ran and knelt beside the person on the ground, pulling off his suit jacket as he went. I frowned, momentarily very confused and distracted, before I realised that there was a pool of blood forming around the supine figure lying on the cement. Adam was going to use his clothes to stem the bleeding.

  As much as I would have liked to have hung around for the full strip-tease, I had other things on my mind. I pulled off my heels, making eye contact with Adam as I slipped the second shoe off.

  “Charlie,” he said sternly. “Don’t you –”

  I took off at a run, chasing the dark figure around a corner. I saw him clamber over the fence ahead of me and thought it was game over (a climber I was not), but found when I got close to it that the gate wasn’t actually locked. Good job, illusive assailant. You just lost yourself three quarters of your lead.

  On the other side of the fence, there was another pool. Looking around briefly, I decided I must be in the main hotel leisure area. The smaller pool near the ballroom was probably an exclusive one for the fancy people invited to special events at the hotel. This one was for the average plebs who were just staying here at the most expensive hotel in Gerongate.

  The man – I was pretty sure it was a man by this stage, seeing as how he was nearly seven foot tall with shoulders about as wide – ran ahead and I chased.

  Then he stopped.

  And turned.

  Damn. I guess he’d realised he was being run down by a five foot tall nineteen year old.

  That was when the giant began to move towards me.

  Chapter Eleven

  Now, I’ve never been much of a runner in either sense of the word – I don’t like to move my body at such an unnatural pace, but I’m also not one to back out of a fight. OK, sure, this guy was massive and the odds were fairly heavily stacked against me. Whatever. He’d left his knife stuck in his last victim, and was unarmed. Yeah, so was I, but it was a more even match than it would have been otherwise.

  I planted my feet, back to the pool, and braced myself for whatever this guy was going to throw at me. As he neared, he seemed to grow, and I admit, I gulped a little. His fists were the size of my head. There was a very real possibility that a punch from this guy could kill me.

  Luckily, that’s not what happened. Instead, he lowered his shoulder and tackled me, causing me to be airborne for a longer time than I’d previously have thought possible, before I landed with a splash in the pool. I surfaced, gasping for air, and saw whoever it was bob to the surface across the pool.

  I hadn’t been able to see his face that well before, but now, in the well-lit pool, I realised that the man was wearing a balaclava, which looked kind of gross to be swimming in. It was basically like having wet socks, but on your head. Ew.

  Catching sight of me, the man began to swim in my direction. Oh, shit. It suddenly occurred to me how incredibly easy it would be for him to drown me. I tried to swim away, but I had nothing to push off from, and the masked assassin had a lot more power behind his strokes. Plus, for some reason, I was still holding my shoes in one hand. The man grabbed my ankle and pulled me back towards him.

  I screamed, and he forced my head under the water. Desperate to escape, and with my lungs screaming for air, I flailed around, trying to whack him with the shoes I held in my hand. They mostly seemed to just be bouncing off his skull, padded by his wet balaclava, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to get free.

  Then one of the heels connected with something soft.

  Even underwater, I heard him scream. The man let me go and I broke the surface, gulping in huge breaths of air. The man was clutching his eye a few feet away from me. I turned and swam as fast as I could to the side of the pool.

  “You little bitch,” he said. “You’re going to die.”

  Now didn’t seem like the appropriate time to point out that everyone was going to die, so I just kept swimming. The sound of the gate to the pool area opening and a voice calling out my name caused relief to flood over me. The masked guy seemed to have heard it too, because he stopped chasing me and instead pulled himself out of the pool and ran away before anyone reached us.

  James McKenzie helped me up out of the pool and took off his jacket, draping it over my shoulders, which I was grateful for, considering that it was kind of cold out here now that I was soaking wet from my little swimming trip. It was probably a really expensive jacket that was now totally ruined, seeing as I was dripping chlorinated water all over it. Oh well. It probably wasn’t going to be as destroyed as Adam’s jacket, what with him using it as a tourniquet and everythi –

  Shit! I’d completely forgotten about the guy who’d been stabbed! I guess I got caught up in all the excitement of my own impending death.

  “Wh-what about the other guy?” I asked, my teeth chattering with the cold. Normally a night-time swim would not have been so unpleasant at this time of year, but there seemed to be a cold front moving in ahead of the thunderstorm. (At least that’s what they’d said on the TV. I think. I dunno, I hadn’t really been paying attention. Who watches the weather?) “Is he going to be OK?”

  James shook his head. “I don’t know. I came outside when I heard the shouting, but when I saw Adam he just sent me after you.” He looked like he wanted to say something else, but he hesitated.

  “What?” I said. “Are you going to lecture me?”

  He shook his head. “I know better. I bet Adam’s going to be pissed, though.”

  Gulp.

  “Maybe I should just head back to my room and catch up with him later…”

  James raised his eyebrows. “Scared?”

  “No.”

  Well, maybe a little.

  We walked back through the dark outdoor area of the hotel to the place where the man had been lying on the ground. The ambulance had arrived amazingly quickly, and now there were two paramedics helping Adam tend to the victim. James and I stopped a distance away, neither of us wanting to get closer. They had the defibrillators out, but I had the feeling the guy was already gone.

  They worked on the man for what seemed like an hour, James and I watching and waiting, hoping for the best. It was a car crash – gruesome, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Eventually, they stopped. He was dead.

  This was my second dead body in two days, and things were escalating kind of quickly – last time I’d only seen a foot. Today I’d seen a guy bleed out after a brutal stabbing. I was not looking forward to what tomorrow would bring.

  James put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me into a hug. He’d probably seen a few dead bodies in his time, being a police officer and all, but I didn’t imagine it was the kind of thing that got easy over time. Weirdly, I didn’t cry. I was too overwhelmed and exhausted for that.

  “You OK?” James asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just as long as no one starts cranking any Whitesnake.”

  It wasn’t the best joke, but it lightened the mood a little. James looked over the top of me, back towards the scene, and frowned.

  “I think Adam wants us over there.”

  My stomach began to churn. Mostly because I didn’t want to get up close and personal with a bloody corp
se, but maybe partly because I was pretty sure I was about to be fired.

  We walked over slowly, neither of us really wanting to get closer. They were putting the man in a body bag, and I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to look at him. As they were zipping it up, however, Adam stopped them.

  “Hurry up,” he said, and James and I increased our pace slightly. When we got up closer, he nodded towards the body bag, still only half zipped.

  “What?” I asked. “You want us to look at the dead body? No! Why would I want to do that? Why would you want me to do that?”

  I was already feeling a little queasy looking at the pool of blood on the ground, as well as the same thick, glistening substance that was smeared all over Adam’s hands. I couldn’t even enjoy his shirtless state, because he looked like he’d just performed a ritual sacrifice.

  “Just look,” he said.

  “No! Stop it! I don’t – ”

  “Charlie,” said James quietly. I turned to him. He nodded towards the body. I turned slowly, not wanting to see whatever was bothering the boys so much.

  When my eyes locked onto the face of the corpse, I froze. My hearing became muted and I felt myself going numb.

  “Is it him?” I heard Adam ask, although it sounded like he was somewhere off in the distance.

  I wasn’t paying attention to the conversation, though. I was staring at the man. That face. A familiar face.

  With a familiar moustache.

  I hadn’t been able to remember it before, but now that I’d seen him again, some of the blanks in my memory were coming back. It was the man I’d spoken to at Rift.

  The one who’d warned me that I was in danger.

  Chapter Twelve

  Since I was dripping wet and hadn’t remembered to pack pyjamas, instead of heading back to my room, I went to Celia’s. The party downstairs had kind of ended after the murder, so everyone had headed to bed. Celia was staying at the hotel for the conference, and since we were (kind of maybe) friends again, and we were both unnaturally short, I was hoping she would lend me some clothes.

  “You’re not room service,” she said when she answered the door. “And to think I bothered putting on pants to greet you.”