by Sandra Brown
“Are you looking for this, Mrs. Ford?”
She spun around.
Jasper stood in the door opening. He was wearing the blazer. Secure in its buttonhole was a single button. Brass, round, with an embossed anchor.
His smile was obscenely obsequious, his voice a perfect imitation of Mr. Singh’s. “It wasn’t lost at all.”
Drex’s outburst startled Menundez. He braked hard, forcing traffic around them to do the same. Tires screeched. Horns blared.
Above that additional clamor, Drex shouted to Locke, “Call Mike. Call Mike. Do it now. Tell him not to go to their house. Call Talia. It’s a trap. Menundez, turn around. Head for Talia’s house.”
Locke looked at him with fury. “What the hell are you talking about? We’re going to court.”
“Jasper’s not going there. Shit! I’ve got tell Mike.” Drex lunged for Locke’s phone, but the detective drew his hand back and kept it out of his reach. Beside himself, Drex shouted, “Menundez, turn the fucking car around!”
Realizing the more deranged he appeared, the less likely they were to listen to him, Drex forced himself to speak calmly. “Please. I know I lost it there for a sec, but you’ve got to listen to me.”
“We have listened. That’s why we’re here. Everybody’s in place. He’s one of ours.” Locke swept his hand toward a guy geared up in latex and a helmet holding up a tricked-out bicycle. He was looking at them with a cop’s wariness.
Drex wanted to weep, wanted to tear at his hair, wanted Menundez to turn around!
“You’ve got to trust me one last time.”
Locke’s phone rang in his hand. Drex lurched forward again, trying to grab it. “Answer, answer, it might be them.”
Locke clicked on. Rudkowski shouted through the speaker. “Where are you? They’re about to call our case. Get that son of a bitch in here. Now!”
Drex didn’t wait to hear any more. He reached for the back seat door handle.
“Don’t do it!” Menundez shouted.
Drex turned his head and stared straight into the bore of the detective’s pistol. “Shoot me then, just get to Talia’s house.” Rudkowski’s screaming was acting like a power drill against his skull. “Hang up on that idiot and listen to me!”
Locke didn’t move. Menundez didn’t lower his pistol. Drex, his voice cracking, said, “I beg you. He set it up to kill her, and he will.”
The two detectives looked at each other. Menundez continued to hold the pistol on him, but he tilted it down. Locke said into his phone, “We have an emergency,” then clicked off, leaving Rudkowski raving. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Locke, hearing Drex’s conviction behind the single word, motioned for Menundez to get them underway. The younger man wasted no time. He popped a magnetic beacon on the roof of the car and, motioning frantically for other cars to move aside, cleaved a route through the logjam. At his first opening, he stamped on the accelerator.
“All right,” Locke said, “you’ve got what you wanted. You had better have a damn good explanation for it.”
“First, call Mike.” The detective did so without argument. They all listened with mounting anxiety as Mike’s phone rang several times without being answered.
Through clenched teeth, Drex said, “Please no, no.”
“He’s all right,” Locke said. “He texted pictures. The envelope is there, right where the tailor said it would be.”
“It may be there, but it wasn’t a tailor who left it. Call Talia’s phone.”
Locke did. “Goes straight to voice mail.”
“I told her to turn it off,” Drex said in anguish. “Menundez, kick it up!”
Locke ordered Drex to calm down. “Why do you think Jasper is at their house?”
“He would never have left those buttons with a tailor. He wouldn’t have left them with anybody. It was Jasper who called Talia and made her, all of us, believe in the fortuitous kindness of Mr. Singh.”
Menundez swore.
Still skeptical, Locke said, “You thought you were right about the courthouse.”
“A mistake I’ll have to live with. Die with.”
“We’ve skipped out on the court, on the prosecutor, Rudkowski. We’re screwed and so are you if this turns out to be a bust. You had better pray to God you’re right.”
Heart in his throat, Drex said, “I pray to God I’m wrong.”
Chapter 40
The man standing in the open bedroom doorway was barely recognizable to Talia as the groom with whom she had exchanged marriage vows. He had shaved his head and beard. Unlike the natty dresser he’d been, he had put the blazer on over a pair of dark cargo pants and a golf shirt, both of which were ill-fitting and sloppy.
But of course the blazer was only for effect, she realized now.
How had he gotten in without Mike intercepting him? Likely, he had already been inside the house when they’d arrived. He had let himself in, turned off the alarm, and reset it.
It sent shivers up her spine to think of him lying in wait, in anticipation of springing this perfectly laid trap.
Her heart was pounding, but she tried to appear unafraid. With as much composure as she could muster, she said, “Hello, Jasper. Since we parted ways at the airport, you’ve been awfully busy.”
“I could say the same for you, sweetheart.”
“Stop talking like that,” she snapped. “You sound ridiculous.”
“I agree wholeheartedly. But it worked to fool you.”
His smile was backed by a condescension that was all too familiar. She wondered that it hadn’t made her skin crawl all those months that she had spent with him, as it did now.
“Maybe you would like the voice of Daniel Knolls better.” He switched from the Indian accent to a throaty rumble. “You don’t remember me the night of Marian’s party, do you?”
She didn’t answer.
“Marian introduced us. You responded politely, but with disinterest.” He strolled farther into the room. She moved backward an equal distance. Her caution seemed to amuse him.
He said, “I, on the other hand, took a great deal of interest in Marian’s young, attractive, and very affluent friend. Marian had grown tiresome. I had already solicited for her replacement on an online dating service, but I never had to pursue it because you were such an ideal candidate. You virtually dropped from that blazing sunset sky and into my lap. That very night, I began contemplating Marian’s demise.”
Talia’s shudder was involuntary.
He noticed it, though, and her revulsion seemed to please him. “In effect, Talia, you’re to blame for Marian’s ghastly end. Come to think of it, Elaine’s, too. If not for your friendship with them, they would still be alive.”
When she flinched, he said, “What’s the matter, Talia? Can’t take the chastening for getting your friends killed?”
“My friends are dead for only one reason. Because you are criminally insane.”
“Who told you that? Dr. Easton?”
Even as she squared off with him, her mind was scrambling to think of a way to get around him, to go through him, to overpower and disable him until help arrived. Surely help would arrive! “Where is Mike?”
He laughed. “The tub of lard?”
“What have you done to him?”
“I’ve put him out of his misery. He was huffing and puffing like a steam engine before I choked the life out of him.”
She couldn’t withhold a mewl of anguish, but she held herself upright by sheer force of will. If she cracked in the slightest, she would shatter completely. If she did that, she was doomed. She probably was anyway, but she wasn’t going to give Jasper the satisfaction of watching her fracture.
“Drex knows that I’m here.”
“Unsurprising. You two have become nauseatingly attached. But he’s at the courthouse, waiting for me to show up.” He tapped his cheek as though in contemplation. “I must say, there was a brief period of time today when I actually entertained the noti
on of going there to witness his fall from grace.”
“Dressed as a woman and wearing a wig?” Talia scoffed. “Drex picked you out of a surveillance camera video, Jasper, and he wasn’t even challenged by its poor quality. You gave yourself away. You’re not nearly as clever as you perceive yourself to be.”
“Yet he’s there while you’re here, eager to get your hands on this.” He fingered the button on the blazer.
“What was in the envelope?”
“A pebble,” he said, grinning. “Evidence of nothing. I confess to having experienced a brief panic attack earlier today when I thought I’d lost this beauty.” He rubbed the button again. “But then I remembered that it was the one button I didn’t switch out. I wanted to have one to wear until the others could be incorporated into my new wardrobe, whatever it might be.
“I came out of the panic when I realized that this blazer, button intact, was in my suitcase the whole time. But the episode gave me an idea about how lure you back here. I really hated to leave with unfinished business between us.”
No doubt the unfinished business meant the finish of her if she couldn’t think of a way to escape him. “Drex knows about your silly button collection. He knows how you think. He’ll figure out that the call from Mr. Singh was a trick. He’ll come after me.”
His lips formed a rueful moue. “Meaning no slight to you at all, dearest, but I think it’s me he’s after. He’s been on the chase for a long time, hasn’t he?”
“Since he was nineteen. That’s when he learned that you had killed his mother.”
He reacted with a start. “His mother?”
“Lyndsay Cummings.”
“Well, well, what do you know?” He laughed. “He’s the child? Lyndsay thought her ex-husband and son were a well-concealed secret, but I knew about them, of course. Just like I know about your little eggs stored in an ice tray.”
She couldn’t hide her shock, and it made him smirk. “I wonder what they do with the ova if they aren’t used before the mother dies. Hmm.” He waved off the thought. “Anyway, after I disposed of Lyndsay, I spent several months trying to pick up the trail of her ex-husband and the boy. I didn’t want to live looking over my shoulder for the vengeful Cummings men.”
“Drex’s father legally changed their names so you couldn’t find them.”
“Did he? Well, no wonder Drex’s name didn’t ring a bell. In any case, I bored of tracking them.”
“You didn’t get bored, Jasper. You failed. Drex, on the other hand, was tenacious. He kept at it until he found you.”
“Which only underscores what a sad, wasted existence his has been. To fritter away one’s life in pursuit of vengeance for a mother who abandoned him?” He shook his head and tsked. “And the really pathetic thing? He’s only begun.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Talia, that he’ll have a real bloodlust for me after I kill you.”
With no more warning than that, he rushed her.
Acting on instinct, she turned and tried to make it into the bathroom, where she could put a locked door between them. But she soon realized that turning her back to him was the worst thing she could have done. From behind, he enwrapped her in a hug that pinned her arms to her sides and made her neck susceptible to the arm he crooked beneath her chin.
“Let her go, or I will kill you.”
Drex’s voice!
Jasper swiveled around, hauling her with him.
Drex hadn’t shouted. He’d made a controlled and imperative statement of fact. He certainly looked deadly enough. His tiger eyes were fixed on Jasper. In his outstretched hands, he cradled a handgun. It was aimed at a spot slightly above and behind her: Jasper’s forehead.
Jasper said, “I’ll snap her neck.”
“The bullet will get there first.”
“You’re not going to kill me.”
“You don’t think?”
“You’re restricted by code. FBI rules. Law and order.”
“If you don’t let her go, there’s no code, no rule, no law, nothing that would stop me from blowing your brains out.”
“You do that, you’ll never know where your mother is buried.”
Drex grimaced.
Jasper laughed. “Ah, I’ve presented you with a dilemma. You want to save Talia, which is romantic to the nth degree. But, if you kill me, you’ll never know your mother’s final resting place.”
“You’re right,” Drex said, lowering the pistol. “I’ll just shoot you in the leg instead.”
He pulled the trigger. Jasper’s body jerked. He cried out. When his leg buckled, he dragged Talia down with him. She used that nanosecond of weakness to lunge away from him.
He caught her by the hair and tried to jerk her backward.
Rapid gunfire erupted.
His grip on her hair was released so abruptly, she fell forward, landing hard on her knees, gasping for breath, deafened by the barrage.
Then Drex was there, kneeling beside her. He took her by the shoulders and gently pulled her into a sitting position. Her hearing was still muffled, but his lips were moving, asking repeatedly if she was all right.
Dumbly, she nodded.
He kissed her forehead, then eased her toward Menundez, who was at her other side, down on one knee. A number of uniformed officers had crowded into the open doorway. Locke was motioning them back, keeping them from entering the room.
She took all this in, but her gaze followed Drex as he walked over to where Jasper had collapsed. He had crumpled against his closet door, listing at a severe angle. He was bleeding from numerous wounds in his chest and abdomen.
Drex crouched in front of him.
With cold objectivity, Drex regarded the wounds he’d inflicted. The one in Jasper’s thigh was the only one that had required some shooting skill. He’d had to make it count without hitting Talia.
The others, he’d gone for center of mass. They hadn’t required careful aim to do fatal damage.
Had he felt any remorse for that, he only had to look into the black, fathomless eyes, from which not a single glimmer of a human soul had ever shone. He had only to think of the women who had suffered and died and been abandoned in ignominious graves.
He said, “You’re already dead. You’ve got minutes, if that. Weston.”
Jasper’s lips formed a rictus of smug delight. “Your mother liked my name. Liked me. So much so that she gave you up to be with me.” He gurgled a laugh. “You’ll never find her, you know.”
“Probably not. But that’s not my heart’s desire. This is.”
Drex reached out and yanked hard on the button of the blazer. With a snap of threads, it came free. Drex bounced it in his palm. “So much for your collection.”
Blood had filled Jasper’s mouth and coated his teeth, making his grin grotesque. He was wheezing for each shallow breath, blowing bubbles of blood, but he forced himself to speak.
“I suppose that you’ll open up my brain and study it, won’t you, Dr. Easton? You’ll want to know what made me tick. You could write a textbook about me.” His laugh was a blood-sputtering travesty. “Probe my brain, slice and dice it, dig into it till the day you die. It will never tell you where to look for your mother.”
Drex leaned in a little closer. “Your brain has absolutely zero value, Weston. It will cook in an incinerator and turn to ash. It will never be dissected and analyzed. You are nobody’s idea of a specimen worth writing about. Know why?” He placed his lips against Jasper’s ear. “You’re too fucking ordinary.”
Seconds later, he watched Weston Graham die an inglorious death, carrying that crushing insult into hell with him.
Talia wept with relief when she learned that Mike was alive.
Drex wanted to comfort her, but they were kept separated while being questioned by investigators from the Mount Pleasant police department. When it came his turn, Locke advised him to let him do most of the talking. Drex was happy to oblige. He was coming down off a bitch of an adrenaline surge.<
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Locke and Menundez explained to the investigators what had brought them rushing to the Ford residence. “We alerted your department to a possible crisis situation,” Locke told them, “but we had a good head start and arrived ahead of everyone else.”
Menundez explained how Jasper had come to be shot by a small-caliber pistol belonging to him. “I carry a spare in an ankle holster. I gave it to Easton before we entered the house.”
Those interrogating them turned as one to regard Drex with suspicion. One asked Menundez, “He was booked today. You didn’t think twice about giving him a weapon?”
“I only thought twice about taking his,” Menundez replied.
Locke picked up. “We entered through the back porch and found Mallory lying prone on the kitchen floor. He was unconscious, not dead.”
Indeed, Mike’s eyes had fluttered open as Drex’s fingers plowed the folds of fat beneath his chin in search of a pulse. Mike had pushed Drex away with one hand and pointed them upstairs with the other.
Locke said, “I stayed behind to call in medical help for Mallory and to apprise your guys of what was happening. I asked them to approach covertly. Easton and Menundez proceeded upstairs.”
“What happened when you got up there?” The question was addressed to Drex.
“We heard their voices. Approached with caution. No sooner had I motioned to Menundez that I was going in than we heard him say that he was going to kill her. When I cleared the door, he had her in a headlock. I tried to talk him into letting her go. He didn’t heed. I shot him in the leg.”
“Tricky shot,” a policeman remarked. “You must have had excellent marksmanship training somewhere.”
“Alaska. A school buddy of mine.”
“A hunter?”
“A hoodlum.”
Just then, Locke was pulled away from the group by a uniformed officer. Drex and Menundez continued to answer questions. When Locke returned, he reported grimly that a woman’s body had been discovered in a local motel. “It’s estimated she’s been dead for at least twelve hours. Cause of death, forcibly broken neck. A button is missing from her dress.”