by Sandra Brown
He was pleased with his new appearance.
True, Howard Clement wasn’t as dashing as Jasper Ford, husband to Talia Shafer, friend to Elaine Conner, member in good standing of an exclusive country club, snappy dresser, and connoisseur of fine wine and cuisine.
But his new look and persona would do. He would never be recognized among the crowd of gawkers on the pier who watched as Elaine became a headline, her life reduced to a sound bite.
However, that was more notoriety than most people got. When looked at that way, Jasper had done her a favor. He had attained for her in death the attention she craved in life.
Her exuberance had been annoying at times, especially when his investment advice paid off in large dividends. On those occasions the two of them celebrated privately. Often Elaine had urged him to let Talia join in. He had refused.
“She’s a conservative investor and would never dare to take the gambles you do, Elaine.” Elaine had preened over that.
He didn’t have a one hundred percent accuracy rate, of course. Whenever his advice resulted in a loss, Elaine had accepted it philosophically, patted his cheek, told him she loved him anyway, then had asked where she should next put her money.
He would trot out inch-thick analyses of various investment opportunities in the US as well as in foreign markets. He would excite her with projections, then dampen that excitement by enumerating the risks. He’d enticed her with estimated yields, but cautioned her to give serious consideration to the volatility of international trade in an unstable diplomatic climate.
Her attention span had been that of a gnat. She’d been easily confused by the vernacular and eventually overwhelmed by the volume of information. “Oh, just pick one and handle it for me.”
Actually, it had been almost too easy. He’d grown a bit bored with her. Ever cheerful and optimistic, she’d rarely challenged anything he proposed.
That was up until tonight. He had called and told her about a squabble between Talia and him that had culminated in the cancellation of a getaway. He’d asked if Elaine would meet him on the Laney Belle. “I need a stiff drink and a good friend.”
He’d been assured that she would gladly provide both.
She’d welcomed him aboard with a sympathetic hug and an open bottle of bourbon. But when he suggested that they take a short cruise, she had balked. The weather wasn’t ideal, she’d said. They couldn’t sightsee with the mist so heavy, and the forecast was for conditions to worsen, not improve. She would rather err on the side of safety and keep the Laney Belle snug in the marina.
On and on, she’d whined, whined, whined until he’d wanted to strangle her. She hadn’t given in until he announced—irritably—that his coming to her for consolation after his quarrel with Talia had been a bad idea, that he was leaving.
“Oh, all right. But only for a little while.”
He’d promised to make it quick. That was a promise she had forced him to break.
He’d persuaded her to let him pilot the boat out of the marina because she’d had several drinks. He’d seen to it that she had two more before suggesting that they give the dinghy a test run.
“Tonight? Talia would scalp me if I let you do that.”
“That’s the point,” he’d said, giving her a conspiratorial wink. “She would never allow it. She’s afraid of the water, you know. Let’s misbehave and do it while she’s not looking.”
Elaine had been unable to resist the thought of misbehavior.
She’d giggled through the process of getting the dinghy into the water and climbing in. There had been a litany of “ooopsy-daisies” and hilarity over her tipsiness. She’d squealed like a little girl whenever the dinghy was rocked by a swell, and she’d been laughing when a wave sloshed into the boat and knocked her off balance.
She’d stopped laughing when he shoved her overboard. Ocean water had filled her mouth, silencing her scream as she went under. He’d gone in seconds after her and had hooked his elbow around her neck from behind as she’d struggled to the surface.
It was a lifesaver’s maneuver, which she’d relaxed against, until realizing that he wasn’t keeping her afloat, but holding her under. Then she’d begun to fight. He’d promised to make it quick, but she hadn’t allowed it. It had seemed to take for bloody ever for her to die.
He’d let go and pushed away from her, swum back to the dinghy, and hung onto the side of it until he’d regained his breath. Once recovered, he’d peeled off his clothes. He’d practiced doing this in shallower swells. It was harder to accomplish than he had counted on, and took more time, but eventually he was down to his Speedo.
He’d sent his shoes adrift and made a tear in his shirt before letting it go. Then he’d tied his remaining garments together and attached them to a fire extinguisher he’d taken from a cabinet on the yacht. He’d placed it in the dinghy while Elaine was pouring another round. The heavy canister sent his bundle of clothing to the depths.
The hardest part of the whole ordeal had been to overturn the dinghy, which, clearly, had been designed not to capsize.
Then he’d swum. He’d estimated that it would take him at least an hour to reach the shoreline, although he couldn’t be precise about how far the dinghy had drifted from the yacht. He’d rested periodically but pushed himself.
He was twelve minutes off on his timing, but had missed his destination by only thirty yards. As he’d walked to where he’d left the car, he’d watched the tide erase his footprints almost as soon as they were formed.
The car was a heap that he’d bought months ago off a we-tote-the-note lot. He’d paid in cash and had the title made out to Howard Clement. He hadn’t bothered to register it. He’d scraped off the VIN number. He was confident it could never be traced to him.
He had parked it in a clump of scrubby palmetto with a lacy overlay of kelp that had washed onto the beach. In the unlikely event that his tire tracks were ever detected, they would be difficult to imprint. He’d pulled on the pair of latex gloves, which he’d carried folded inside his swimsuit, then reached for the magnetic box he’d secreted beneath the car and used the fob inside to open the trunk. He’d lifted out the roll-aboard he had ostensibly packed for a getaway, but which actually contained everything he needed to undergo a metamorphosis.
The backseat of the car served as his chrysalis.
When he’d emerged an hour later, gone were the ponytail and door knocker. He’d shaved his head, leaving only a ring of hair on the lower third. He covered the tan line on his scalp with a khaki Gilligan hat.
He’d dressed in a pair of unshapely cargo shorts and a loud Hawaiian print shirt he’d bought in Key West two and a half years ago, when he’d determined that his next target would be the lovely Talia Shafer who lived in Charleston, a city that attracted thousands of tourists wearing ungodly attire. He’d padded the front of the shirt to simulate middle-age spread. He slid his feet into a pair of rubber flip-flops. He’d chosen eyeglasses that were nondescript and could be purchased for a few dollars in just about any retail outlet.
When he’d looked at himself in the rearview mirror, he’d laughed out loud. Not even his wife, not even the woman he’d just drowned, would recognize him.
He replaced everything he’d used in the roll-aboard for disposal later. Before closing it, he took out a wallet, an old and well-used one that he’d bought at a flea market, and checked to make sure the necessities were there. The driver’s license had been issued in Georgia, the photo taken after disposing of the fuzzy wig he’d worn as Marian Harris’s shy money manager, Daniel Knolls, and before he grew out his hair and beard to become Jasper Ford.
He had a credit card in the name of Howard R. Clement. The card was over a year old and had just enough charges on it to remain active. The wallet also contained the modest amount of currency that Jasper Ford had withdrawn from an ATM three days ago. He’d put the wallet in the back pocket of his shorts.
Last, from a zippered pocket in the lining of the suitcase, he’d taken a
small velvet drawstring bag and transferred it to the front pocket of his cargo shorts, sealing it inside with the Velcro strips attached to the fabric. He’d patted the pocket with affection and smiled.
As of tonight, his collection had a new addition.
After locking the roll-aboard into the trunk, he’d driven off the beach. His initial plan had been to head straight up the coast, perhaps traveling as far as Myrtle Beach tonight, where he would get a room and lay low for several days, at least until the hubbub had died down and the search for him and Elaine was discontinued.
Then he would return and choreograph Talia’s suicide. Acquaintances would conclude that she’d been led to it by grief over the deaths of her good friend and husband, whose body, regrettably, had never been recovered.
It had been a very workable plan. But as Howard Clement had been chugging along a major thoroughfare in his clunker, a convoy of emergency vehicles had forced him and other motorists to pull onto the shoulder so they could pass. They had been headed in the direction of the shore and the marina.
Could it possibly be? he’d asked himself.
Over the course of his illustrious career, he had never made a spontaneous decision. Never. But this one time, he had yielded to temptation. Acting on impulse, he had changed his route.
Now, as he gazed down at the body on the beach, he supposed it had been Elaine’s fake tits, acting as flotation devices, that had caused her body to wash ashore so soon. He had reckoned on it taking a day or so, if indeed it ever did.
But there she lay, faceup, covered with a yellow plastic sheet. A police helicopter flew over. Its downwash flipped back a corner of the sheet to reveal her hand. No one except Jasper seemed to notice.
“Jesus, you just never know, do you?”
Jasper turned. Standing close behind him was a gum-smacking redneck wearing jean cut-offs, combat boots, and a tank top featuring a coiled cobra with dripping fangs. Revolting. “Sorry?”
“When you get up in the morning, you don’t figure on it being your last.”
“You’re right there, buddy,” said Howard, in the nasally twang of his newly assumed persona.
He turned away from the redneck and watched with mounting pleasure as the activity on the beach increased. The audience of onlookers on the pier expanded. Jasper delighted in the comments he overheard.
If they only knew who they were rubbing shoulders with, he thought.
He had been on the pier for over an hour when he was jostled along with others near him who were being elbowed out of the way by a man plowing his way to the railing.
Drex.
Jasper experienced a jolt of alarm.
But he soon realized that Drex wasn’t looking for him. He was fixated on what was taking place on the beach. He’d made it just in time to catch the final act: that of the body being carted away.
Once the ambulance was gone, Jasper allowed himself to be shuffled along with the crowd as it vacated the pier. A bottleneck formed at the steps. Jasper waited his turn, then flip-flopped down. But he didn’t go far, because Drex had stayed behind, gazing out across the water, hands gripping the railing, his body as taut as a bowstring.
Which confirmed what Jasper had suspected all along. He wasn’t who he claimed to be, and he wasn’t writing a novel. One didn’t bug one’s neighbor’s house unless one had a reason for doing so. And now this drowning death had left him obviously upset, which was disproportionate to how long he’d known Elaine.
From the start, the timing of his arrival to the neighborhood had made Jasper uneasy because it had coincided so closely—mere months—with the discovery of Marian Harris’s remains.
That had come as a shock. One evening he had returned home from an errand to find Talia in her study, crying her heart out.
“Remember I told you about my friend Marian who lived in Key West?”
“Of course. The one who went missing a couple of years ago.”
“I just heard from a mutual friend,” Talia had said as she blotted up tears. “They found her remains buried in a shipping crate. It was horrible.”
It certainly had been horrible news to him. None of the others had ever been found. This was an unwelcome first, and it had rattled him. He was brilliant. He didn’t make mistakes. But he would be a fool to ignore the possibility that he might.
He wouldn’t commit a major gaffe. No, the oversight would be something minor, inane, ridiculous, something that, because of its sheer triviality, a genius like him would never think to avoid.
That evening, while Talia was mourning the grisly death of her friend, he had resolved that the time had come for Jasper Ford to evaporate.
His marriage to Lyndsay had been brief, but rife with drama. After her, he’d sworn to remain a bachelor and, for thirty years, he had. Then, ill-advisedly as it turned out, he’d experimented with matrimony again. The intimacy of the union, inside the bedroom and out, spawned risks he hadn’t foreseen when he’d asked for Talia’s hand. Choosing her in particular had been a miscalculation. He would have been better off selecting a bubblehead like Elaine.
Talia was far too perceptive. He had sensed her gradually increasing mistrust, which had resulted in last night’s accusation of an affair. He had never slept with Elaine, but that Talia sensed something amiss was his cue that it was time to bid farewell to Jasper Ford.
But how to go about it had presented him with a unique problem: He had two women to dispose of this time. He couldn’t leave either Talia or Elaine alive to search for him. He was confident that he was up to the challenge of their termination, but the solution had to be well thought out, methodically planned, and precisely executed.
But then Drex’s unexpected appearance had thrust Jasper’s strategy into overdrive. He’d sowed seeds of doubt about their neighbor in Talia’s mind, hoping to thwart any interaction between them until he could formulate another plan.
Then—bless her!—Talia’s mention of a getaway had opened up an opportunity.
Even better, he could broadcast it using the transmitter that Drex had planted. Talk about a backfire. It had been too delicious.
He’d acted quickly, but efficiently, and so far everything had gone splendidly.
But now here Drex was, playing fly in the ointment again.
Jasper risked making himself conspicuous by loitering near the pier, but within minutes another man joined Drex. They talked briefly, then, in a decisive manner, Drex turned away from the railing. The two of them strode along the pier and descended the steps in a hurry. They walked past him without giving him a second glance.
Jasper dismissed the other man as a sidekick.
But he was struck by Drex’s unfamiliar demeanor. No jaunty gait, no dimpled smile. This Drex was no aw-shucks wannabe. There was an intensity about him, an angry determination in his bearing. It couldn’t be mistaken. It definitely couldn’t be dismissed.
And with that thought, the freshly cut hair on the back of Jasper’s neck stood on end.
Drex Easton was him.
Jasper had been feeling him for years, an unknown entity who was invisible, but whose presence he felt. A shadow. Untouchable, but there. More often than he wanted to admit, he would sense him like a ghostly waft of cool air. He would awaken and imagine a menacing presence hovering over him while he slept. Sometimes, in a crowd, he would whip around suddenly in the hope—and fear—that he would spot him, that he would be able to pick him out in a sea of unknowns.
He never did, but he knew he existed. He knew he was corporeal and not just an inhabitant of nightmares and premonitions. He was real and on Jasper’s trail with the unflagging purpose of a bloodhound and the fervor of a pilgrim, undeterred by time or distance or failure.
But how did one combat someone unseen? It would be like fencing in absolute blackout. He couldn’t strike out without giving away his position. He couldn’t beat him at his own game because he didn’t know who he was, what he looked like, or his name.
Until now.
Chapte
r 20
Talia had been home for no longer than fifteen minutes before she was curled up in an oversize upholstered chair and sipping a glass of wine. The compact, first-floor room tucked under the staircase had a desk where she conducted her business, but she’d also furnished it with comfortable pieces, making it as much her retreat as her workplace.
She was enjoying the peacefulness it afforded when the doorbell rang.
Disgruntled by the interruption and mystified as to who would be on her doorstep this late on a Saturday night, she set aside her glass of wine, made her way to the front door, and looked through the peephole.
The two men looking back at her were strangers. With misgiving, she called through the door, “Can I help you?”
“Mrs. Ford?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Dave Locke, this is Ed Menundez. We’re detectives with the Charleston Police Department.” Each held up a badge where she could see it. “Can we please speak with you?”
“The police department?”
“We’d like to speak with you, please.”
She hesitated for a moment then disengaged the alarm, flipped the deadbolt, and opened the door. Dividing a look of perplexity between the two, she asked, “Speak with me about what?”
“May we come in?”
“What’s happened?”
“May we?”
She gave Locke a vague nod of assent and stepped aside. She realized then that she’d left her shoes in front of her easy chair. The marble floor of the entry was cold against her bare feet. She shut the door and turned to the men, repeating, “What’s happened?”
“Are you here alone?” Locke, evidently the spokesman of the duo, was tall and thin, with a pleasant bearing and eyes that drooped at the outer corners.
“Yes.”