by Jill Jones
In Jack’s eyes, Garrison Holstedt had long ago discharged his obligation. But Garrison wouldn’t let it go. It was almost as if he felt guilty that he’d survived and John had died.
His latest generosity included this job, along with a substantial percentage of stock in Odyssey Investments International, stock that Jack believed by birthright should have been Brad’s. But Garrison had insisted on it as part of the incentive package for Jack to come on board the multi-national company. “Consider it hazardous duty pay,” he’d said.
Jack looked at his surroundings. His duty hadn’t been too hazardous so far.
His stomach growled loudly, rousing him from his reverie. Jack looked at his watch. It was almost nine. Reaching for the phone, he dialed Brad’s room, which was just down the hall. After six rings, he hung up. If Brad was there, he must be in the shower. More likely, he’d probably already gone to dinner. Jack decided to wait a few minutes and call again. If he didn’t get an answer, he’d just order from room service. Jack hated eating alone in a restaurant. He leaned his head back against the pillows and closed his eyes.
It was then he heard the screams.
They were high pitched screams. A woman’s screams, shrieked in terror. Jack bolted for the door, where he followed the sound down the hallway. He heard a crash just as he reached an open doorway, and one of the hotel’s chambermaids careened out of the room, running headlong into him, nearly knocking him over. He grasped her arm, saving her from a fall, but she twisted away, leaned her head against the wall, and vomited.
Jack glanced at the door, and his blood suddenly ran cold. Whatever had frightened the maid was in this room.
Brass numbers on the door read 716.
Brad’s room.
Cautiously, he edged the door open, wishing he was carrying a gun.
The sight that met his eyes turned his own stomach.
Beyond a shattered lamp the maid must have knocked over in her fright, a woman lay face up on the floor about halfway across the room. Her eyes stared at the ceiling in lifeless surprise. Blood had seeped from the area of her heart onto her pale pink blouse, staining it like a crimson rose. He glanced to the left, where the small entrance hall opened into a larger room and saw the body of a man on the floor just inside the bathroom. Jack’s heart seemed to stop beating.
This was Brad’s room…
He dashed to the doorway of the bath then halted, his eyes wide in horror and disbelief.
Jack had thought he was through with violence. He never wanted to hear another gunshot. See another dead body. Yet here he was, half-way around the world from Los Angeles, staring into the face of his best friend, whose blood was splattered on the white tile wall of the bathroom.
“Oh, my God.”
Jack heard a noise behind him and turned to find several people who had also heard the screams peering around him, trying to see what had happened. “For God’s sake, somebody call the police,” he managed, although he himself was frozen to the spot. This couldn’t be real. This was a bad dream.
He forced himself to move on feet of lead to where Brad lay, careful not to step on him or in the blood that pooled around his head. “Oh, dear God,” he whispered again, looking down on the carnage, his mind reeling, not from the shock, or the blood, but from the sight of a small pistol held in Brad’s right hand that lay across his chest.
Jack knelt by his friend’s side, unable to register the implications of what he saw. His mind had gone numb. He couldn’t think. Tenderly, he touched Brad’s cheek, expecting to find it already growing cold. But it was not. Astonished, Jack pressed on a pulse point at Brad’s throat and felt a faint intimation of life.
Hope suddenly galvanized him, and he ran to the telephone by the bed. Aware that 911 didn’t work in this country but unable to remember England’s emergency number, he hammered at the button to reach the hotel switchboard. “Hello? Hello?”
“Front desk. May I help you?”
“I’m in room 716,” he said, trying to think like a cop, not like Brad’s best friend. “There’s been…an attempted murder. Two murders. Get an ambulance here right now. At least one of the victims might still be alive. And call the police! Hurry!”
Jack’s heart was pounding furiously now, and he started to turn away from the nightstand when his eye lit on a scrap of paper peeking from beneath the telephone. He pulled it out. It was just a scribbled phone number, not in Brad’s handwriting. Probably something an earlier guest had forgotten. Without thinking, Jack stuck it in his pocket and turned to see if by some miracle the other victim was alive.
She was not.
Kneeling beside her, Jack stared down into her face. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, maybe twenty-one. Her beauty was haunting, macabre, the pallor of death peculiarly enhanced by a mane of vibrant red hair that writhed in spiraling waves past her shoulders. He saw something just below her left earlobe and brushed the hair aside gently. It was a small red mark, possibly a birthmark, although it looked more like a minor scrape.
Jack stood up again, trying to absorb facts that his brain refused to comprehend. Who the hell was this woman? And what had she been doing in Brad’s hotel room? Before his mind could get a grasp on these and a thousand other questions, Jack felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Pardon me, sir.”
Slowly, Jack turned to see who was speaking, and he managed to focus on the face of a uniformed policeman. The officer’s voice somehow penetrated the ringing in his ears and the murk in his brain. “I’m sorry, sir.” His lips formed words that sounded as if they came from far away. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to answer some questions.”
Chapter Two
Keely stood at the far end of the jetty that protruded into the ocean outside the harbor, straining with eyes that burned from lack of sleep, hoping without expectation to see her friend returning through the mists.
It had been three days since Genevieve’s frantic flight, and the entire village was in a state of shock. She could not have run away. Not Genevieve. Not Ninian’s beautiful, bright daughter. Their future Healer. Genevieve would never have betrayed the Dragon in such a way. Something must have happened to her.
Everyone was talking about it. Everyone, that is, except Keely and Ninian. And perhaps her uncle Alyn, the Keeper, although she had managed to avoid him since Genny left. Since she was a child, he’d had a way of seeing through her secrets, and she did not want him to know she had aided in Genny’s escape.
The morning after Genevieve had left, Keely had gone to Ninian’s house hoping to find that her friend had returned home and was safe in her bed. Instead, she’d found Ninian, eyes swollen and red from crying, nearly hysterical that Genevieve was nowhere to be found. “I thought mayhap she’d gone t’ th’ grove or th’ circle t’ sort out her thoughts after…well, after what happened,” Ninian said. “But she surely would have returned by now. Alyn’s gone in search of her. Mayhap she’s run to th’ forbidden caves…”
Keely knew that her uncle would not find Genny, in the forbidden realm of the caves or anywhere else on the island, but she held her tongue. She attempted to comfort Ninian, but her efforts felt awkward, hypocritical, as she was too ashamed to admit her own part in the misadventure. She found it odd that Erica, Genevieve’s fourteen-year-old sister, was not there to comfort her mother, but then, the girl had never shown much compassion for anyone other than herself. Or maybe, she told herself more hopefully, Erica, too, had gone in search of her sister.
After a few gentle probes, Keely gave up on trying to learn from Ninian what had caused Genevieve to take flight. Genny’s mother seemed no more disposed to talk of it than Keely was to reveal her complicity. So neither said anything to one another or to the rest of the villagers.
Keely guessed they shared one hope in common—that Genevieve would come back, all would be forgiven, and life would go on in the village as it had for centuries.
For nothing ever changed in Keinadraig.
The village had
existed in peace and prosperity since the laws of the Dragon had been set down some seven centuries before, just after a great plague had ravaged the island and the Black Death had nearly destroyed the isolated community. The laws were simple: As the pestilence had been brought by a stranger, no strangers were to be allowed again on Keinadraig. The Dragoners were sworn to loyalty to the Dragon, and no one who wore the kiss of the Dragon was to leave.
The laws had come to the first Healer in the form of a ballad that had been handed down through the ages. It was sung at sacred ceremonies, over ale in the pub on Saturday night. Young mothers of the village even hummed it to their babes at the breast.
The laws were ingrained in all who lived on Keinadraig, and Keely had never doubted their virtue. Never in over seven hundred years had the town been beset again with pestilence. The villagers had dwelt for ages in comfort and security, most living to a very advanced age.
They had kept the laws, and the Dragon had kept his promise.
Standing her futile watch on the jetty, Keely shivered in the noonday sun. She had a bad feeling, a frightening apprehension that something was terribly wrong. She had never questioned the laws, or thought about the consequences of breaking them because she, like the rest of the villagers, had been content to live with them. She’d never really believed that something bad would happen if a Dragoner actually tried to leave for good. But then, no one had ever left before, at least not that she could remember.
But now…
Gazing across the bay in the direction of Penzance, Keely tried to picture Genny in her mind. Where was she? Had she made it safely to London? Did she like living in the outside world? Or was she frightened but too ashamed to come home? Keely ached with grief clear down to her fingernails. Grief, and guilt. She should have stopped Genny from running. Whatever had sent her off could have been resolved. It was a mistake Keely would likely regret for the rest of her life.
The question of what had caused Genevieve to flee continued to haunt Keely. She had wanted to press Ninian for an answer again yesterday when the older woman hinted at some discord that had transpired between her and Genevieve, but she’d decided against it just then. Ninian’s distress was too great.
Keely had seen Erica around the village earlier in the day, but she not had the chance to speak with her yet. Keely was not fond of the girl, who had always been sullen and resentful of her older sister. But their cottage was small. If Genny and Ninian had argued, Erica must have heard something. Maybe she knew what had occurred between Genny and her mother that was so terrible neither of them could speak of it.
Something that had driven Genevieve away, maybe forever.
For if Genny did not return soon, she would not be able to return at all. The thought sickened Keely, but already talk of excommunication had begun. Once the villagers performed that ritual, Genevieve could never come back. If she were excommunicated by the Dragon, the woman known as Genevieve Sloan would no longer exist. If she showed up again, she would be shunned, invisible even to her own mother.
With a heavy heart, Keely turned and slowly made her way across the gray granite stones toward the village. Behind her the island of Keinadraig rose sharply from the sheltered harbor on the northeast coast to the high ridge on the southwest, where it dropped in sheer, dark cliffs into the sea. Midway up the wide slope, beyond a thick grove of ancient oak trees, lay the mystical stone circle where the Dragon was said to have brought forth the laws.
The laws that when broken brought tragedy to Keinadraig.
Like now.
Why, Genny?
Why?
The three days that had passed since Jack had come upon the bloody scene in the hotel room were among the longest in his life. Brad, who had been rushed to the hospital and was immediately operated on by one of Britain’s top brain surgeons, clung to life but remained in a coma. The prognosis offered little hope.
It had been Jack’s unhappy duty to call Garrison in L.A. and inform him of what had happened, and twelve hours later, to pick him up at the airport and bring him to his son’s bedside where Brad lay unconscious, his head swathed like a mummy, his skin whiter than the bed linens. As Jack looked on helplessly, this giant of international finance, the man who had been like a second father to him in many ways, had crumbled before his eyes. For all his faults, his need to control Brad’s life, maybe even Jack’s own, Garrison Holstedt was a good man. He did not deserve this.
In that instant, Jack had recanted his earlier vow to avoid violence and swore at that moment he would do whatever it took to find the sorry son of a bitch who was responsible for the tragedy.
Sometime during the course of the nightmarish events, he had endured a grueling inquiry by detectives with the Metropolitan Police Service, also known as New Scotland Yard. While his friend was unconsciously fighting for his life, Jack was fighting to convince a certain Inspector Richard Sandringham and his superiors that the crime was not a murder-suicide attempt.
“For one thing, Brad was left-handed,” Jack had informed them. “He would never have shot anyone with his right hand.” He would never have shot anyone, period, Jack wanted to add, but held his temper.
Jack had gained some small satisfaction when he’d seen the inspector’s bushy eyebrows rise slightly on his wrinkled brow. But his satisfaction was short lived. “Perhaps. But stranger things have happened. We’ll have to check the forensics report.” His voice faded away, and he looked thoughtfully perplexed. Then he seemed to shift gears. “Do you know anything about the young lady?”
“Nothing. I never saw her before. Do you have an ID on her yet?”
“No. All we found in her bag were a few items of clothing, a small sum of money, and a train ticket from Penzance to London, dated that same morning, the twenty-first.” He paused, then asked pointedly, “Mr. Knight, why would such a woman be with your friend?”
“I have no idea.” Summoning patience, Jack had explained in detail why he and Brad had come to London, hoping to convince the inspector of Brad’s innocence with his impressive credentials as a businessman. “Brad spent most of his time in meetings. I don’t think he previously knew any women in London, and he wasn’t a womanizer. It’s not likely he picked her up in a bar.”
Jack could read the clear skepticism on the inspector’s face and knew if their roles were reversed, he, too, would be doubtful. This mystery woman had ended up in Brad’s company somehow. A pickup was the most logical explanation.
“She could have been a street walker,” Sandringham speculated out loud. “I suppose the killer could have been her pimp.” He continued musing aloud. “It doesn’t look like a drug deal. We found no paraphernalia…”
“Brad didn’t do hookers,” Jack snapped. “Or drugs. What about robbery? It seems more likely Brad walked in on an attempted burglary…”
“I suppose that’s a possibility. The thief could have shot the girl, turned the gun on Brad, and then planted it on him. Or, it could be just what it looks like. Your friend shot the girl, and then himself.”
“He didn’t shoot her!” Jack jumped up and slammed his fist on the inspector’s desk. “Brad carried no weapon. He hated guns.”
Sandringham sighed. “Very well. So who shot her?”
“The burglar, like you said. The burglar shot them both.”
“Possible, but unlikely. Your friend’s wallet was on his person, full of money. Other valuables were untouched in the room.” He tapped his pencil thoughtfully on the desk blotter. “So, if it wasn’t an interrupted burglary, or a crime of passion, or someone after the girl, or a murder-suicide, why were they shot? Mr. Knight, who might have wanted your friend dead?”
Jack had only stared stupidly at the inspector in reply. Who could possibly want Brad dead? Someone involved in the high stakes investment deal Brad was putting together? Jack had read the dossiers Brad had given him, and although a couple of the investors might not be above manipulation for financial gain, none had the profile of a murderer. He immediately dismissed
the possibility. “No one in his right mind,” he answered.
“A madman?” Inspector Sandringham gave him a cynical look.
Jack raised his head and glared at the inspector. “It makes as much sense as anything else.”
At the conclusion of their interview, Jack had managed to gain Sandringham’s grudging confidence by calling his contacts at the Los Angeles Police Department who gave him exemplary character references. He’d offered New Scotland Yard his skills and experience to help solve the mystery, but he couldn’t say his offer was welcomed with open arms. It seemed professional jealousy wasn’t limited to American law enforcement agencies. But Sandringham had given him off-the-record approval to investigate the crime as Garrison’s hired private eye.
“The truth of the matter is that we are overworked and understaffed,” Sandringham had said at last. “If you come up with something, we’d be happy to take a look at it. Just don’t break any laws, and don’t leave the country. You know you are a possible suspect as well, having been found at the scene of the crime.”
That said, the inspector had provided Jack with a photocopy of a police sketch of the girl and wished him luck in coming up with an ID on her.
But forty-eight hours had passed since then, and Jack was not one whit closer to solving the mystery. Brad remained unconscious, in critical condition. Garrison was barely holding himself together as he kept a vigil at his son’s bedside. The investment deal had gone down the tubes. And Jack’s small victory in procuring the blessing of Inspector Sandringham meant little, for there was virtually nothing for him to go on.
Pacing his hotel room in frustration, Jack thrust his hands into the pockets of his pants, where his fingers encountered a crumpled slip of paper. He drew it out and frowned at the number scribbled on it. How did this get into his pants pocket? And then he remembered. He’d been wearing these trousers the night Brad was shot. He’d found the paper by the telephone in Brad’s room. He’d dismissed it then, forgotten about it even, thinking it irrelevant to the murder. Now…