Chameleon Assassin (Chameleon Assassin Series Book 1)

by BR Kingsolver

  “And why would I do that?”

  “So that I can continue working on this case after I kill Gareth Blaine. I also need you to organize a raid on that drug house.”

  “Oookaaay. What happened?”

  “Blaine and Alderette set Billy Smythe on me. Gave him my address and suggested he ambush me at the orphanage I support.”

  I took a drink and stared out at the dance floor below while I debated if I should tell him the rest.

  “I also found out that he put a hit out on me earlier, when Simon Wellington first suggested hiring me.”

  Wil was quiet for some time, then he said, “And how did you learn all of this?”

  “I heard Blaine and Alderette talking at the mortuary.”

  “Overheard their conversation. I see. And where were you?”

  “Hiding under the desk in the office they chose to accuse each other of incompetence.”

  Another short period of silence, then he snorted and cracked up. “You…are the…most unbelievable person…I ever met,” he managed between bouts of laughter.

  “I’m glad that people threatening my life are such a source of amusement for you.” I didn’t see anything funny about the situation.

  He wound down, wiping tears from his eyes. “I’m not even going to ask how you ended up under a desk.”

  “That mortuary is where Alderette sends his dead,” I said. “I assume Blaine uses it, too. Those guys from the airport, Sheridan and one of his lab assistants, and one of the security guards were all there. I’ll bet some bodies that no one knows about end up there, too.”

  “Isn’t that your boyfriend’s business?” Wil asked.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So, doesn’t that implicate him?”

  “No. Why would it? He’s a businessman. If I were in the body business, I’d want the contract with the two largest criminal organizations in town.”

  “And those are?”

  “The Chamber of Commerce and the Donofrio family, of course.”

  “Of course. And the Bouchard-Nelson family is third?”

  “I resent that. My father was defending himself. Are you going to pick up my contract, or not?”

  He acted as though he was thinking. I knew he was trying to figure out how to squeeze me to his benefit.

  “Why don’t you come to work for me full time?”

  Oh, no. Most corporations had strict policies on employees sleeping with their bosses, and I wasn’t ready to give up my Wilbur fantasies. That wasn’t the main reason though. I shook my head.

  “I couldn’t afford the pay cut.”

  “You haven’t heard my offer.”

  “The answer is no. I’ll take a retainer to be on call, but we’ll negotiate contracts on a case-by-case basis. Don’t change the subject.”

  Wil forcefully blew out his breath and nodded. He pulled out his phone, made a call, and told the person on the other end to transfer my contract from the local Toronto office to the continental office.

  “Happy?” he asked as he tucked his phone away.

  “Ecstatic. Now I can blow that bastard’s brains out.”

  He chuckled. “You seem like such a nice girl until one gets to know you. You didn’t happen to find Diane Sheridan, did you?”

  “No, but I looked. If she’s dead, they disposed of her body somewhere else.”

  I met with Wil and a couple of his men at a hotel the following day. We viewed recordings from the Chamber’s drones for almost two hours, studied maps, and made plans for an assault. They told me it would take them another day to airlift in a SWAT team.

  That was all right with me. I went home and tried to make myself presentable for my date with Ron. I had forgotten what it was like to go out on a date with my father around.

  “You’re still going on a date?” he asked.

  “Yes, why?”

  “Earth to Libby. Someone is trying to kill you.”

  “So, what am I supposed to do? Hide under my bed and hope they forget about me? Johnny Jack is only going to be here one night, and at his age, this might be my last chance to see him.”

  Dad shook his head and frowned.

  “I’ll be careful. I promise.”

  “At least you could wear shoes you can run in if you have to.”

  I looked down at my heels. He was probably right, and Ron wasn’t that tall. I changed them for a pair of calf-high boots with two-inch heels.

  “Happy?” I asked him.

  “Those are better, I guess. Are you going to be home tonight? I’m only asking so I know how long to wait before I send people out looking for your body.”

  “Dad, leave it alone. I’ll call you, okay?”

  I still had an hour before I met Ron, so I jumped on the computer. A couple of searches turned up empty. In spite of all the witnesses, I couldn’t find any mention of two young men dropping dead at the airport.

  Even more surprising, a small war in an upscale residential neighborhood wasn’t worth reporting. No mention of my dad’s house being bombed or men machine-gunned in his front yard. There must have been a hundred corporate agents, cops, EMTs, and assorted other personnel there all night. Totally invisible.

  When I mentioned it to Dad, he simply shrugged. “The media is corporate owned.”

  “But how do we know what’s true? How do you find out what’s really happening?”

  He gave me the kind of look you give a puppy that trips over its own feet.

  Ron and I met at a popular café near The Crown Royal. When we sat down, I turned the tables on him.

  “How’s business?” I asked.

  His head jerked up. “Uh, it’s okay.”

  “I was wondering. There’s been a lot on the newscasts about drug overdoses. A family I did some work for lost their son that way.”

  He seemed to be a little lost, fishing for an answer.

  “I was out at the airport the other day to meet a friend who flew in, and saw two men collapse and die, right there in the terminal. I wondered if they were on drugs.”

  I ordered through the automenu and looked to him. He hastily paged through the menu and submitted his order. Our beers slid out of the delivery chute and I took a drink of mine.

  “You haven’t seen any of that?” I asked.

  “A little bit. Not too much.”

  “Hmph. It figures. The media probably made a big deal of a couple of rich kids getting snuffed.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said.

  The concert was great. Johnny Jack was in fine form, telling funny stories between songs and interacting with the audience. The music was everything I hoped for—strong, driving, Mississippi Delta blues. Of course, at the time the genre was created, the Mississippi Delta was two hundred miles farther south than when he was born.

  Afterward, we strolled down the street and stopped in at a tavern for a drink. I hadn’t been in the place since my university days, but it hadn’t changed much. Except for the luvdaze. It was as bad as the Drop Inn. We found a small booth, and I had to brush three jet injectors off the seat before I sat down.

  “This is what I was talking about,” I said. His brow furrowed as he tried to put my statement into some kind of context. “The drugs.”

  “Oh.” His face cleared. “Yeah, it’s a little up front, isn’t it?”

  A couple of booths down, a guy and a girl were trying to rouse another girl. From her complexion and the way her head was rolling around loosely, I feared the worse. Getting up, I walked over and leaned close, placing my fingers on her temple to feel for a pulse. She wasn’t breathing. She couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen, and tiny, barely five feet tall. A dosage meant for a grown man would be too much for her, but of course, drug dealers didn’t think that way.

  I went to the bar and grabbed a bartender by the arm.

  “Hey,” he said, “wait your turn. I’ll get to you.” He was young, probably a student working part time.

  Yanking him toward me, I snarled in his face. “You se
e that girl over there in the booth? She’s dead. I suggest you call an ambulance. Now.”

  He turned pasty white and reached for a phone.

  Ron watched me from our booth. I walked back to him and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  As we walked to the door, he asked, “Is she dead?”

  “Yeah. I saw it happen a couple of weeks ago. I guess this new drug doesn’t have much room for error.”

  We went back to Ron’s. I knew that Ron worked with dead people all the time, but so did I. It kind of bothered me that the girl’s OD didn’t seem to bother him at all.

  He opened the front door of his house, and I stepped through into the foyer. The door to my right was open, and several caskets were stacked on rack-like pallets, as though they were being moved. Peering closer, I saw shipping labels on them.

  “Business must be good,” I commented. “Are those new, or are there bodies in them?”

  “A group of tourists were killed in an accident,” he said. “We’re shipping the bodies back to their homes.”

  I stepped closer and read the labels. Montreal, Chicago, Buffalo, and Calgary. “They certainly were an eclectic bunch,” I said. “No two of them from the same town?”

  “University students. The bodies are going to their parents.” He pulled the door closed and took me in his arms. “I’d rather think about someone warm and living, such as you.” He kissed me.

  I called Gareth Blaine the next morning and asked for a meeting. He set it for an upscale restaurant at lunchtime.

  The arms vault in my spare bedroom contained a small refrigerator. I sprayed my hands and forearms with a sealer, put on surgical gloves and my filter mask, then took a tiny vial from the fridge. Putting a drop from the vial on a small piece of special paper and sealing the paper in a plastic bag completed my preparations for the meeting.

  Forensics teams used the spray sealer to prevent contaminating a crime scene, but it also prevented my skin absorbing foreign substances and sealed my fingerprints.

  Blaine and I walked into the restaurant at almost the same time and the host conducted us to a table off to the side. I saw that the spacing between tables was larger than most restaurants, ensuring more privacy. All of the patrons except me were wearing suits.

  He looked a little nervous. “What is this about?” he asked after the waiter brought us drinks.

  I glanced around, licking my lips. “I think we have a problem. How well do you know Wilbur Wilberforce?”

  His eyes narrowed, he seemed to relax slightly, and he leaned forward. “I know him professionally. Other than that, not very well. Why?”

  “I think we have a leak inside the investigation. I think there’s a corporate connection to the drug, and that someone is tipping them off.”

  “That’s a very serious allegation.”

  “I’m not accusing him. I don’t know where the leak is coming from, but he’s the outsider here. You and I are from Toronto and have local connections.”

  “When you say a corporate connection to the drug, what do you mean?”

  I glanced around again and dropped my voice even lower. “I think CanPharm is producing the drug either in a secret lab, or maybe in one of their production facilities after hours. Then they’re shipping it with legitimate products to other cities.” I was lying through my teeth, but thought I should give him something plausible and near the truth.

  “And how are they distributing it?”

  “Here in Toronto, through the Donofrio crime family. I assume they’re using similar channels in other places.”

  I whipped my head to the side, eyes wide, as though I’d seen something startling. Blaine turned his head to look and I dropped my little piece of paper in his drink. The paper dissolved immediately.

  “What?” he asked, turning back to me.

  “Nothing. I thought I saw one of Alonzo Donofrio’s men come in, but I was mistaken. Mr. Blaine, I want out of this. The mob has already attacked my father. I’m scared.” I took a swallow of my drink.

  “Let me check into a few things,” he said. “Maybe you should just lie low for a while.”

  “I think that’s a good idea. Thank you.”

  I picked up my drink and drained it. “Thank you for meeting with me.”

  He took a swallow of his drink and said, “Not a problem, Miss Nelson. And thank you for the information concerning a leak. I will certainly look into it.”

  I stood to go. Blaine pushed his card into the payment slot on the table, drank the rest of his drink, and stood. We walked out together, going our separate ways at the sidewalk.

  Botulinum toxin was the most lethal poison known. I’d put enough in Blaine’s drink to kill the legendary elephant. It would be a shocker if he survived the night.

  I stepped into an alley halfway down the block and blended into the wall. A couple of minutes later, a man stuck his head around the corner. Not seeing me, he rushed into the alley with a second man trailing him. Both of them carried pistols.

  They ran to the end of the alley and onto the next street. I waited half an hour, then took a circuitous route back to where I’d left my motorcycle.

  Chapter 17

  The following afternoon, I met Wil and his SWAT team inside a Chamber-owned training facility near the airport. One wall had a screen showing the drug house as viewed by the camera of a drone that had landed on a rooftop across the street. Other than a couple of gang members loitering around the entrance, the place looked deserted.

  When I walked in, Wil raised an eyebrow and ushered me into an office off to the side of the conference room.

  “Gareth Blaine died this morning,” he said.

  “Unpleasantly, I hope.”

  “So it would seem. He was alone, but the ME thinks it was some kind of food poisoning.”

  “He probably swallowed one of his own lies.” I met Wil’s eyes. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. You know he sent a couple of hitmen after me yesterday, don’t you?”

  “No, I wasn’t aware of that. How do you know it was Gareth?”

  “One of them was the guy with the port wine birthmark near his left eye.” I pointed to the outer office where I had walked past that very guy only a couple of minutes before.

  Wil’s eyes widened. “You mean the guy out there?”

  “Yes. I didn’t see his buddy this morning. Dark hair and skin, big nose, has a tattoo of a spider on his left hand.”

  He got wild-eyed and rushed out of the room, stopping to confer with someone I didn’t recognize, who then got on his radio. A few minutes later, I heard a short commotion in the outer room, and Mr. Port Wine was brought in by half a dozen armed SWAT officers.

  “Were you ordered to hit someone yesterday?” Wil asked him.

  “I don’t report to you,” the man said, “and I’m not at liberty to discuss confidential business.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Wil said. He turned to another man wearing a suit. “I’m going to have to assume that anyone who isn’t cooperative is involved in Blaine’s conspiracy.”

  Turning back to the SWAT troops, he said, “Lock him up. When you find Karim, lock him up, too, but not together.”

  “Wait! I was just following orders, but we didn’t kill anyone. The girl disappeared.”

  “But you would have killed me if you caught me?” I stormed forward and everyone took a step back. Port Wine didn’t back up far enough. I have very long legs, and my foot between his legs almost lifted him off the ground.

  Maybe it wasn’t very mature of me, but it was awfully satisfying watching him curled up on the floor, vomiting on himself. The rest of the men in the room looked a little paler than they did earlier.

  “Get him out of here,” Wil ordered, and the SWAT team dragged my assailant out.

  Wil turned to me, but before he could say anything, I said, “I guess I should have killed them yesterday, but I thought you’d be happy I showed some restraint.”

  Wil shut his mouth. I batted my eyes
at him and smiled.

  “Miss Elizabeth Nelson,” he said, turning to the man in the suit, “this is Alexi Morales, the new head of security for the Chamber’s Toronto office.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Nelson,” he said. I noticed he didn’t come close enough to shake hands. “I hope we have a better working relationship than you had with my predecessor.”

  I wondered how it could be worse.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about Gareth’s demise, would you?” Morales asked. “I understand you had lunch with him yesterday.”

  “No, I met him for a drink, but neither of us ate anything. Maybe he got something from a food cart.” The itinerant food carts were notorious for a list of food-borne diseases. A lot of chili kills some bacteria and fungi, but not others, and it doesn’t do a thing for viruses.

  Neither Morales nor Wil seemed to appreciate my suggestion.

  We sat around and planned for the next two hours, or that’s what they called it. What they were really doing was waiting for dark. I didn’t understand why they wanted the gangbangers to be awake. I would’ve hit them at noon, when they were asleep. I had that itchy feeling that made me want to move, to go someplace. I tried to figure out exactly what the feeling was, or what it meant. I decided I was just tired of waiting, but it didn’t make it any easier to sit still.

  “You know, in that neighborhood, it might be better to attack them before dark,” I said at one point, only to receive a lecture about night-vision goggles and the element of surprise and a few other things that I didn’t pay much attention to.

  “Yeah, but they’ll be awake after dark. They’re mostly sleeping right now. Everyone in that neighborhood is probably asleep.”

  Morales gave me one of those girls-should-stay-in-the-kitchen-and-bedroom kind of paternalistic smiles.

  Finally, the SWAT team got it together, and we prepared to board the three helicopters awaiting us. Wil held out a flak jacket.

  “I don’t need that, but thanks.”

  “Oh, you’re bullet proof now?”

  “No.” I pulled up my t-shirt and showed him my corset. “Kevlar and ballistic cloth.”