by Jeff Abbott
‘She’s dead, you can’t sell the research, I told you I’ll pay you. Last chance,’ the shooter said.
You want answers, tell this guy you’ve got what he wants. Draw him out, catch him. You couldn’t save Allison but you can find out what the hell happened to her. Except if he did that, he was drawing a giant bull’s-eye on his back, and an attack could come from any direction.
Miles closed his eyes. ‘I don’t have… Frost… but I might know where you can get it.’
‘Where?’
‘Not now. I’ll – have to be in touch with you later.’
‘There is no later. You got right now. You tell me what you know, I’m going to let you live.’
‘You don’t even know who I am.’
‘I know what you are. Greedy. Stupid. In over your head. Listen, jackass, I hunt for a living. I’ll find you, I promise.’
Miles kept his voice steady. ‘You give me a number to reach you at, and I’ll call with Frost when I have it.’
‘Unacceptable. I made you a one-time offer. You’re declining. Suffer the consequences, asshole.’
A cold rage gripped Miles’s chest, stomach, throat. ‘I’ll make you suffer instead.’
When the shooter spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. ‘When I’m done with you, you’re going to think having your face ripped off is a walk in the goddamned park.’ And the shooter hung up.
Miles closed his eyes, saw the house burning, him late for the most important appointment of his life, Allison dead and gone.
She asked you for help and you failed her. He had failed her, failed her as he had failed Andy. I was supposed to save you. He’d wasted his time with her, parrying her therapy, playing smart guy, never letting her within distance of the truth, when all she’d wanted to do was help. He felt her absence in the world like a hole punched into his chest.
But he didn’t have to curl up in a ball. He could make the people who had killed her pay. He got up from the bed, weighed his options.
Ruiz. Had the shooter and his people with the searchlights caught Ruiz? Nathan Ruiz knew his name was Michael Raymond now. Or worse, maybe his cell-phone number had appeared on Allison’s cell. It gave the shooter roads to finding him. The apartment was rented to Michael Raymond, and the shooter could trace the billing address of the number to this apartment. He couldn’t stay here.
But he couldn’t run again, he couldn’t fail Allison again. The man thought Miles had something Allison had stolen. Why? What was Frost? This involved Sorenson, clearly – he’d shown up at Allison’s house after the blast – presumably hunting for Frost as well. But all that mattered right now was getting the hell out of here and hiding before the shooter came calling.
Miles grabbed a bag of clothes, called DeShawn’s number, got no answer. He tried to calm his thoughts, decide what he was going to say. He had to hide from the shooter, but at the same time, he couldn’t let WITSEC move him from Santa Fe. If that happened, he could never nail the shooter, nail Sorenson, nail Ruiz, whoever had killed Allison.
‘Is that the idea?’ Andy said, sitting on his bed. ‘Avenge her – a charming concept – and you’re well adjusted again and I vanish. You’re kidding yourself, Miles. You and I are a team. Forever.’
Miles took his bag and walked alone in the dark to a modest motel off Cerillos that catered to starving artists and hikers. The clerk didn’t ask for ID when he put an extra twenty on top of the night’s rent.
The room was plain but clean. He lay down on the bed and switched on the TV. The local news was all about the terrible explosion in Santa Fe. The fire was out. Firefighters had found badly burned remains in the rubble. The deceased had not yet been identified, but investigators believed it was the body of the woman who rented the office space, a psychiatrist. The reporter, standing before the fire trucks and the ruined shell of the building, said investigators were not ready to comment on the cause of the explosion.
The deceased. Allison was dead and gone, and in the smoke-kissed night beyond the grimy window was the lying Sorenson, and a shooter determined to kill, and a screwed-up kid named Nathan Ruiz, and they held the answers he needed.
Now all he had to do was find them without getting killed.
‘It’s going to be fun, seeing you lose it all again,’ Andy said.
TWELVE
Groote ordered the two security guards to dump the kid on the bed, fasten the restraints to his arms and then to the railings, then told them to get out. They left and shut the door behind them. He clicked the call log back open from Allison’s cell phone that he’d taken from her home. A cell-phone number from the man who had called, coded in Allison’s cell phone as MR.
MR was the walking dead.
He tucked the phone back in his pocket and dumped a pitcher of water on the kid. Nathan Ruiz sputtered to consciousness with a jerk.
‘Hi,’ Groote said. ‘You’ve had a field trip tonight.’
‘I – I…’
‘You’re at a loss for words. Probably because you were expecting to see Doctor Hurley. Well, he’s not suited for this kind of therapy, Nathan.’ Groote sat down next to him. He lit a cigarette, although he hadn’t smoked in ten years, puffed deep enough for the fire to catch hard, blew the smoke without a cough. ‘It’s just going to be you and me.’
Nathan blinked.
‘You’re back where you belong.’ Groote tapped his own temple. ‘You’re not getting out again.’ He let five seconds drip by and said, ‘Your friend took off without you. Guess he didn’t care.’
‘Who?’
‘His initials are MR. You give me the rest of his name, we’re cool, you and I. Cool is good.’ He held up the smoldering cigarette. ‘Hot is not.’
The boy’s expression hardened past the grogginess. Groote could see him summoning up what stray courage remained in his gut. ‘I don’t know his name.’
Groote jammed the cigarette into Nathan’s wrist.
Nathan screamed. Groote withdrew. ‘I’ll do the other wrist, then I’ll do your tongue. Then your eyes. It’ll be incredibly gross.’ He thought: Please don’t make me burn you bad. ‘What’s MR’s name?’
‘I really don’t know who he is – he wasn’t supposed to be there.’
Groote decided to deal the boy a bit of rope. ‘Then who was supposed to be there?’
‘Allison.’ Nathan gritted his teeth against the pain. ‘She gave me a passkey to get past the door… told me to meet her at her house.’
‘And do what?’ He leaned back, as though getting comfortable for their nice chat.
‘Leave here.’
‘Why?’
‘She said… I shouldn’t be at Sangriaville anymore.’
‘Your insurance hasn’t expired, Nathan, so why did she want you to check yourself out?’
‘She said Doctor Hurley wanted to kill me.’
‘Gosh, Nathan, and he only speaks highly of you.’
‘I don’t know anything else.’ Fear clenched his eyes shut.
Groote considered, put himself in Allison’s shoes. You suspect illegal drug testing. You steal the research as evidence. But you also want a patient who’s been guinea-pigged as a show-and-tell for the FDA. Given that, wouldn’t you concoct a better scheme to get him out of the hospital? No – not if you were pressed for time, if you knew Quantrill was ready to move on Frost, shut the operation down now that the testing was complete. ‘Where’s Frost, Nathan?’
‘Frost?’
‘Allison took some DVDs, the kind you use in a computer to store big files. They had information on them for a project called Frost. Tell me where those DVDs are.’
‘I don’t know. I just did what she told me, please don’t hurt me no more.’
‘Oh, I don’t want to, Nathan. Seriously. But I have a problem. Those DVDs Allison took, they’re not in her house. Could be they blew up with her at her office. But it’s awfully convenient, you see, and I don’t believe in that convenient a world. She takes something of great value, she gets obliterated,
and then there’s a group hug at her house. It changes the equation.’ He smiled at Nathan. ‘I read your file while you were napping. You’re quite a special case, Tin Soldier. Maybe you made Allison go boom-boom.’
Nathan shook his head in horror. ‘No, man, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t ever…’
‘You tell me what happened from when you ran.’ Groote rotated the cigarette in his fingers, studied the smoke, reheated the tip with a deep drag.
‘She left an electronic passkey for me. Told me to run at six-thirty, told me how to get to her house. She left a change of clothes for me. She had told me to sit and wait in her bedroom until she came in, but there was a big mirror in there, I don’t like mirrors, don’t do mirrors, no mirrors.’
‘You may like them less when I’m done,’ Groote said quietly.
Nathan kept on: ‘So I went into the den, stood near a window so I could see her come. But a man came. He drove up past her house, left his car, came back down. No sign of Allison. I got scared. He came in and I hit him on the head with this Indian carving she kept on the mantel. I tied him up with sheets and dumped him in the tub. I didn’t know what else to do… I figured Allison would tell me.’
Groote frowned. That matched MR’s story. ‘He wasn’t there when we found you, Nathan. Who was he?’
‘The other guy… said the first guy’s name was Sorenson.’
The name meant nothing to Groote. ‘And you had no idea who the other guy was?’
‘No.’
‘But him you didn’t crack on the head, him you didn’t tie up. Why so nice to him, Nathan?’
‘I wanted him to talk – tell me what was happening.’
‘Did he?’
‘No. He didn’t know… He said Allison’s office was bombed.’
Groote considered. It bothered him, deeply, that an apparent bomb had killed Allison Vance. Bombs were not built on a whim. Bombs were complicated and technical and a pain in the ass. Guns and knives and rope were far easier ways to accomplish the goal of shutting up one person. Bombs meant resources, expertise, time to plan. Bombs meant an enemy who might blow Groote’s ass out of the water.
‘I – I don’t think this guy you want killed her,’ Nathan said.
‘I don’t have a lot of suspects.’
‘That Sorenson guy-’
‘- could just be a story you and your friend hatched to throw salt on the trail if either of you got caught. No, Nathan, I think MR’s the answer to my prayers.’
‘I don’t know anything about MR… I’m sorry, I don’t.’
Groote dropped the lit cigarette at the bottom of the water pitcher. It hissed and died. ‘I’m sorry, Nathan, but cigarettes are too slow.’ He pulled the screwdriver from his pocket, held it up so Nathan could see. ‘You need the right tools for the right job.’
‘Please. Please don’t.’
‘Custom-made for me in Hungary. Precisely balanced. I keep the edge cleaner than an angel’s ass.’
‘I don’t know him! I can’t tell you.’
‘I bet you liked word problems in math class. I mean, launching missiles and shit in the army, you must have gotten at least a C in geometry.’
‘Word problems?’ Nathan, trembling, shook his head.
‘If you’ve got an inch of flesh covering your bones, and the screwdriver can penetrate two centimeters at a blow, how long before the screwdriver reaches bone? I threw in the metric angle because I know you’re just a mathematical genius.’
Nathan fought the restraints. ‘Please… don’t. Don’t.’
‘Don’t? Don’t? Well, sure, Nathan, I won’t. It doesn’t have to be the hard way, not one bit, if you don’t care for math.’ He made his voice soft and intimate, brought the screwdriver close to Nathan’s wide eye. ‘Lots of sick people need Frost, Tin Soldier, you included. Someone I love included. Talk or I work out the word problem on your flesh and bones. Which is it?’
‘I can’t tell you… what I don’t know.’
‘I respect your heroics. Truly.’ Groote gave Nathan an affectionate pat on the cheek. Then he stabbed the screwdriver deep into Nathan’s arm.
THIRTEEN
Wednesday morning at 7:00 A.M., the cell phone rang next to Miles’s head. He came awake instantly, panic settling in his guts, trying to be fully aware before answering the phone and talking to the shooter.
‘Hello?’
‘Where the hell are you?’ DeShawn sounded pissed.
‘I met a woman…’ Miles lied. ‘I spent the night at her place. That allowed, Mommy?’
‘I need you back at your apartment, Miles. Right now, please.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I got bad news. I’ll pick you up. Where are you?’
‘It’s not far. I’ll walk,’ and he hung up before DeShawn could argue. Miles didn’t want to go back to his place, with the shooter likely to be tracking Michael Raymond, but he couldn’t act afraid to be at home; DeShawn would relocate his ass out of Santa Fe in ten seconds flat, and no way he was leaving now.
Miles washed his face, changed into a clean shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He left his duffel in the room and locked up; he’d head back here before the gallery opened and retrieve his stuff. He walked back to the apartment, but no shooters jumped out to blast flesh off his bones. DeShawn’s car wheeled over to him and Miles got in.
‘Doctor Vance is dead,’ DeShawn said.
‘I saw it on the news this morning.’
‘You okay?’
‘I’m upset.’
‘You understand, Miles, this has anything to do with the Barradas, you’re moved in five seconds.’
‘It doesn’t.’
‘You sound very confident.’
‘They wouldn’t kill my shrink. If they found me, they’d kill me. And probably not with a bomb off their own turf – too hard to transport. They’d just put bullets in my head.’
‘You know anything about this tragedy, Miles?’
‘No.’
‘What happened to your face?’
‘Got into a fight last night.’
‘Man, wooing and fighting, you had quite an evening.’ A tone of disbelief tinged his voice.
‘Where are we going?’ Miles started to ask, but then they were there. DeShawn inched the car past Allison’s burned building. Yellow fire-scene tape haloed the lot; a group of firefighters were sifting the ashes toward the rear of the building, a couple of news stations from Albuquerque had parked their satellite wagons down from the wreckage. A spill of people stood along the sidewalk, gawking at the ruin. The lot was empty, Allison’s car towed away.
Miles pointed at the firemen shaking a sifter, ashes tumbling at their feet. ‘They’re searching for the door’s lock, to see if it’s locked or not. A firefighter friend in Miami told me it’s one of the first items of evidence they search for.’ His voice sounded dead to him. ‘I heard on the news they found her. Do you think she suffered?’
‘No, Miles, she didn’t. There was… very little left of Doctor Vance. They’ve only found, um, pieces. I’m sure she died in the force of the blast, she didn’t burn to death.’
Miles put his face in his hands, forced his emotions back under control. He could have stopped it, if he’d found Sorenson’s hidden case. He missed it and she died. ‘Oh, goddamn.’
‘I’ll miss her,’ Andy said from the backseat.
‘I’m sorry, man, I know you said she’d been a great help to you.’ DeShawn put a hand on Miles’s shoulder.
Miles kept his voice neutral. ‘Do they know what happened?’ He was going to catch Sorenson, or whoever was ultimately responsible for Allison’s death, and drag them in front of DeShawn, like a cat dropping a dead mouse at its master’s feet.
‘I talked to the arson investigators. They can’t search the front of the building, where the floors collapsed, until they get heavy moving equipment in from Albuquerque. They got to do chemical tests, see if it was a gas explosion or see if it was a bomb. Don’t know yet.’
They drov
e away from the burned hulk.
‘I have to ask again, Miles, did she know you were in witness protection?’
‘No. I never told her. I was going to – but I didn’t want her to know. I was ashamed.’
‘So her records, no way they survived the blast and the fire, and even if they did, they couldn’t disclose your witness status. That’s our number-one concern,’ DeShawn said.
‘Not that my doctor’s murdered,’ Miles said. ‘Really, it’s nice y’all care.’
DeShawn pulled the car over, parked, gave Miles a hard stare. ‘Do you know for a fact she was murdered?’
‘I know this has nothing to do with the Barradas.’
‘But it’s got to do with something, doesn’t it, Miles? You tell me another doctor, who I can’t find a record of, wants to help Allison with your therapy and that day she’s dead.’
‘I must have gotten his name wrong. Sorenstam, Sorengard, I only met him for a minute. Allison said she used to work with him.’
‘If the arson team finds this was deliberate, you’re answering their questions.’
‘I understand. How soon before they know?’
‘Well, the investigators got to get deep into the building once it’s safe, run those chemical tests, check with the gas company to see if an undue amount of gas fed into the building. But I think it’s got to be a gas leak. All the renovations going on in that building, a worker damaged a pipe, started a leak. Why would anyone bomb a shrink in Santa Fe?’
‘Be a Boy Scout,’ Andy said from the backseat. ‘Tell him nothing but the truth.’
Instead he wondered what else DeShawn might say, if Miles didn’t make a big deal out of the question: ‘Is her house okay?’
DeShawn raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean, okay?’
‘I assume the police or the arson investigators have gone to her house to look for her.’
‘Yes.’
‘It wasn’t, I don’t know, burglarized or anything?’ He kept his gaze fixed on the window. ‘People rob dead people’s houses all the time.’