“You know too much.” He turned his attention to Margaret.
She peered over Raul’s shoulder, her eyes masks of terror. “Kelsey, run!” she shrieked. But before she could say anything further a fifth man loped into the clearing, dragging a fighting ten-year old with him by her hair.
“Ah, you found the imp, Ramone,” Raul said, leering at the child. “Good job.”
“Mommy?” the little girl cried. She turned and saw her father lying on the ground, his blood pooling in the dirt floor. She started wailing.
“Please, leave her alone,” the mother begged. “She’s just a baby. She knows nothing.”
“No witnesses.” Raul Salazar grabbed at Margaret. With a guttural cry, she reached out and ripped her nails down both his cheeks, his blood spurting from his eyes to his mouth in long, vicious streaks. They would scar him for the rest of his life.
Raul hit Margaret in the face and sliced her across her abdomen, eviscerating her. She fell to the ground, but she didn’t die quickly. She lay there, unable to stop the horror which was to come.
She could do nothing as the men attacked her daughter. When they finished, they laughed at the scene they’d created, took the map and left, leaving the barely conscious child lying on the ground. Raul turned back to them just once before the forest overtook him. “No witnesses.”
Two days later the little girl was found, catatonic in her dead mother’s arms.
But alive.
* * * * *
Kelsey blinked back tears and moved through her apartment, past the living room and towards the den to her computer. Sniffling, she pulled up the various search engines and started googling one Desmond Gisborne.
Hours later she found what she was looking for.
Chapter 5
THE CONNECTION
It was late when Kelsey pulled back from the screen.
Googling Desmond proved to provide the basic fundamentals. He was thirty-four, born on July 19th. She had read through his dossier, finding out he had majored in Forensic Biology and minored in Asian Studies while at The University of Pennsylvania. He had stayed on to get his Masters in Criminal Justice from the same school. He was smart and educated, but instead he had chosen to become a cop? Why?
His parents were both scholars. His father had been a professor of mathematics, until he succumbed to prostate cancer the age of 62. His mother was still alive and was a professor of literature at Boston College.
Desmond had grown up in the prestigious Weston Hill neighborhood and attended a private school in northern Massachusetts. There were the usual awards of scholarship merit, a varsity letter in track, articles he published in trade journals while working on his thesis, but when she read further, something caught her eye and made her stomach jump.
A wedding announcement? She clicked the link.
Fourteen years ago, Desmond had married Charlotte Turlane.
Kelsey sat back, startled, and surprised at her reaction. Why was she even remotely affected by this news? So, she hadn’t realized he was married. What was the big deal about that?
She moved her scrutiny to files from the NYPD police department, which she easily hacked into using codes Ari had provided just for occasions like this. What she didn’t find on Google, she found here, but it only confused her more. The guy was a conundrum. He’d been awarded a lot of commendations, but after all this time, he should have moved up the ranks quicker. He’d only made Detective this year. It seemed he specialized in cold murder cases, finding missing children, and taking down drug dealers. He was solely responsible for finding the three kids last year who were kidnapped for a child prostitution ring, taking down the entire operation himself. She didn’t remember hearing anything about his involvement in the media. Apparently, this guy wasn’t in it for the personal glory. She felt a begrudging respect for him.
She searched a bit more for current assignments and there it was. She squinted in confusion. How was this even possible? Desmond was trying to solve a string of cold case murders of Tibetan Monks stemming from killings occurring twelve years ago at the Wat Jokhang-Ling Monastery, a Buddhist temple in upstate, New York. He had spent years trying to find the culprits and had finally pinned it to one Ricardo Perez and Raul Salazar.
Kelsey sucked in her breath, stunned. Both of them working on finding Raul and Ricardo? Murders that occurred the same year her own parents were killed. The Buddhist monastery link. Just the fact that the sand mandala artists at the MET that evening were from the same monastery startled her.
Breathing fast, she read further about the killings. The monks had been traveling to the monastery for a seminar and had been ambushed while they slept.
Kelsey sat back, shocked. Desmond searched for Ricardo and Raul and found her, instead. She had known for years Ricardo and Raul had carried out the murders at the monastery and knew Ricardo had taken a disc from one of the Monks. She also knew he had hidden it in his home in Miami.
She had just been waiting for the right time to strike. She had the disc, which was in Ari’s office, and Seung was now decrypting and translating. The same disc her father had translated for the monks at the Bodhidharma monastery. This same disc, that for some reason, had been brought to the United States where Raul had found and confiscated it. But still, where was the connection to Desmond? Why was he interested in this specifically?
Her fingers flew back to the computer, pulling up the incident and rifled through old articles. Names and faces from the monastery massacre raced across the screen--the victims, Chen Doma, Dawa Li, Dolma Ju, Zhu Ki, Connor Gisborne…
She nearly tipped over in her chair. Connor Gisborne? She quickly focused on him. More articles appeared on the monitor. With a deep breath, she pulled up the first one.
A young American law student on pilgrimage in Tibet returned to the United States with a group of monks from the Bodhidharma Monastery in his company. Staying at a sister temple, the Wat Jokhang-Ling Monastery in the Catskills, he and other members of the cloister were attacked and brutally killed by multiple unknown assailants. Mr. Gisborne was found dead in his bed with multiple gunshot wounds to his body. His sparse room and belongings had been ransacked.
He is survived by his older brother, Desmond, and his parents, Charles and Collette Gisborne and grandparents…
She shook her head. It all clicked together now. Connor was Desmond’s brother and now he was avenging his sibling’s death. Connor and Tibet. The parallels between Desmond and her were staggering and here he was trying to pin a murder on her, when they probably should have been working together. Still, he didn’t know the link and she was not about to tell him.
None of it mattered. She had already taken care of Ricardo. Did Desmond really care about bringing justice to a horror of a man who had murdered his own brother? There had to be more. He had to have known something also about the disc. Had to be searching for it.
Well, he couldn’t have it.
Kelsey pulled up some images of his family and a wedding photo that had run in the society pages surfaced. He looked nothing like his parents and brother. They were olive skinned, with dark hair and eyes. Desmond was like a beacon of light with his pale skin and blue-green eyes and towered over his parents. She vaguely wondered if he were adopted.
Kelsey pulled up Desmond’s home address. 101 West 70th Street. The upper west side of Manhattan. She pictured the street in her mind. Tidy chocolate-colored brownstones lined the tree-rimmed block, his a full home, not one of those that were sectioned off into two hundred and fifty square foot studios for two thousand a month.
So he had money. Sure as hell wasn’t his. Not with teachers as parents and his salary on the NYPD. It had to be his wife’s money. She searched for Charlotte Turlane-Gisborne, and when the first article’s title came up, she swallowed hard.
It was her obituary, dated four years after Charlotte and Desmond had gotten married.
Taking another deep breath, she pulled it up.
On November 11th, during a freak
ice storm that blanketed the eastern seaboard, Charlotte Turlane-Gisborne and her six month old son, Tyler, were struck by a man in a silver colored SUV on I-95 while returning from a trip to visit her parents. Her Lexus was shoved into the medium and then spun out of control, plummeting off the road and into a copse of trees where it crashed, bursting into flames. Witnesses say the speeding SUV careened wildly, but others claimed it looked like it tried to ram Charlotte’s car from behind. When her vehicle crashed, the driver of the SUV ran over to it, appeared to speak to her, and then fled. She and her child did not survive the accident, despite every measure taken by the EMT’s on scene. Charlotte was able to speak one word before she expired due to massive internal hemorrhaging and burns to nearly 60 percent of her body. She uttered the mysterious word, “Xanadu.”
She is survived by her husband, Desmond Gisborne, a twin brother, two sisters and her parents, Roger Turlane and Suzanne Bowery Turlane. Burial services will be held…”
Kelsey stopped reading. Suzanne Bowery Turlane. Yes, of the Bowery’s that owned the majority of the specialized organic grocery store chains in the continental United States.
Her hands started to shake. Charlotte had uttered the word Xanadu before she died. She knew. Desmond knew. This was more than just wanting her disc. He was trying to find Xanadu as well, and now he knew the only way to get there was to go after her.
Well, let him come. She could handle him.
Chapter 6
BACK TO REALITY
Desmond sulked across Central Park and tried to let the cold night air clear his head. What had he been thinking? He had been so sure Kelsey was the girl from Miami.
Her image filled in his mind. When she had taken off her jacket, revealing her incredible, well-proportioned physique, it was all he could do not to stare. He’d been appreciating her from afar, but when he was up close to her, her beauty startled him. Those eyes, so sharp and intelligent, bore into him. And that attitude. He didn’t think she took crap from anyone. Her confidence and acting skills were impressive. But, man, that body. Something about her pulled at his very being and it had taken all his will to stay on point.
He shook his head. Dammit! What was wrong with him? This girl was lethal, his main suspect, and here he was thinking about her body.
He inhaled deeply, his breath smoking in the air and managed to regain his control. Regardless of what had happened in the museum, he felt Kelsey had been capable of the attack and murder, and if so, she was one of the most calculating individuals he’d ever encountered. That made her supremely dangerous. He had taken down many a felon who thought they were too smart for him. But he was smarter.
Well, most of the time he was.
He thought about his job and how much he’d sacrificed to stay on the force on cold cases, just so he could keep the one with his brother and wife alive in the background. Two murder cases he’d never been able to close, but he was sure they were intrinsically linked to one another.
He’d finally made detective and that’s when he had a break in his case and found Ricardo hiding in Miami. He was too close to solving this to let anyone else screw it up and so instead of bringing in the Florida police and dealing with the mountain of paperwork that would be required, he decided to do it himself. The rest was easy. He put in for three weeks vacation, staked out Ricardo’s location, planted his own camera right alongside the other surveillance cameras and waited. He was about to make his move when this spit of a girl showed herself on his own surveillance camera. Shocked was not the word.
He followed her back to NYC, lost her in the airport until he finally located the cabbie who’d taken her to her apartment.
He followed her for a few days, still not sure if it was the same woman, but after researching her background thoroughly, he knew she was capable of doing this crime. Yet for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out her connection or reasoning. What was she, a hired gun or something? A regular student by day and sexy lethal assassin by night? He groaned. It sounded too much like a bad “B” movie.
A homeless man shuffled past him and Desmond gave him a wide berth. He wondered suddenly if he was too close to the case. Perhaps he was blinded, trying so hard to avenge Connor’s death and pin it on someone that he’d latched onto Kelsey too hard. For god’s sake, she was barely twenty-two years old, but his research showed she was one of the most accomplished individuals he’d ever come across. He found a copy of her Stanford-Benet Test and was stunned to see she scored the high figure of 178. Wasn’t Einstein 189 or something close to that? She had been schooled at the elite Woolard Academy where she received straight As. She graduated at the age of seventeen with perfect SAT and ACT scores, a year’s worth of AP credits, and multi-level and upper level graduate school lab work. After that it was a bachelor’s degree at Columbia within two years and now going for either her Master’s or a Ph.D at NYU.
Not to mention this beautiful young woman was also a multi Dan black belt in Tae Kwon Do, ranked #1 in the ITF league in sparring throughout her teenage years.
Still, when he hit her she fell to the floor like a wilted flower. He squinted in sheer frustration. He’d never intended to strike her, but he was maddened when she seemed to be playing him. He wanted her to show herself. What he needed was proof she was the girl from Miami, not what she was capable of, yet he had struck her anyway, trying to provoke her.
Desmond suddenly stopped in mid-stride, his breath catching and his stomach turning over as realization hit him. Oh, my God. She had let him hit her. In fact, she probably saw it coming and purposely didn’t stop him. If that was the case, it meant she knew who he was and may even have known he was following her the past few days.
Groaning, he ran his hands through his hair and started walking furiously, angry at himself. Because if Kelsey knew he’d been following her, she purposely set him up to meet her at the MET. Set him up to find out what he knew! He’d fallen right into her trap.
What if he was wrong? So she took Tae Kwon Do. Lots of teenagers took martial arts to keep in shape and get some discipline. That was a huge jump to Miami and Ricardo Perez, six years later, no less. He could just imagine dragging her into the station and getting his ass laughed off the force when they got a good look at her. It was one of the main reasons he hadn’t hauled her down to the precinct in the first place. He was so damned frustrated with the lack of cooperation he’d been getting on this case that he was determined to do it himself. If he were on vacation, well then, he could do things his way, not the department’s, and they’d have no say about it if he didn’t have to check in.
He came out of the park by 72nd Street and walked south the two blocks to his residence. With each step he became more and more certain Kelsey was the woman in Miami. He was determined to spend the next two weeks finding out why she did it, why she took that disc and what it had to do with the theft at the monastery all those years ago.
He thought about his brother and sighed. Connor had been such a gentle soul. Naïve in so many ways. What happened to him was a travesty that Desmond still couldn’t make right. Connor had just graduated from Harvard and had wanted to take some time off. He’d always been interested in Buddhism and had decided to study with the monks in Tibet before beginning law school and before another set of foreign visitor restrictions came down from the Chinese government. How excited he’d been on that last phone call.
“Desmond,” Connor had said. “I met an American couple who are working on something unbelievable. It’s spiritual and it has to do with the mystical land of Xanadu. They gave me something on a disc that I’m bringing back to the States to show you. It will change everything.”
He never got a chance to see it. Connor returned to the States and mere hours before he was to meet him, he was murdered.
Desmond climbed the steps and unlocked the door to his brownstone. Stepping inside, he shut the door and leaned against the wooden frame. Poor Connor. He never had a chance.
He didn’t turn on the lights as he moved d
own the hall, his footsteps echoing hollowly on the bare wooden floor. Once in the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, its light seeping into the room and reflecting off the mica chips in the black granite countertop. Desmond grabbed a carton of milk, one of the only things in the fridge. Forgoing a glass, he chugged down a quarter of the carton before putting it back and wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve.
He thought about the last connection he had. The one that kept the link between Kelsey and him alive. Kelsey’s parents were killed in Tibet the same year as the murder of his brother. That had been easy enough to find out once he had started digging up her background. Now he believed they were the same couple Connor had spoken about, and if that was the case, then Kelsey might have also known Connor. Of course, she was still alive, so it made sense she was not there during the attack and could have been staying somewhere else at the time of her parents’ murder. It didn’t seem plausible Raul would ever leave anyone alive to ID him.
He moved back down the hallway, kicked off his shoes and threw his jacket on the banister before walking upstairs. Without even taking off his clothes, he fell onto his bed, exhausted. He stretched and picked up a photo of a smiling blond infant sitting in a frame on his nightstand. Staring at it in the moonlight seeping through the windows, he breathed a deep sigh and placed it back on the stand. He turned his attention toward the ceiling, his thoughts drifting back to Kelsey Porter.
What if she was avenging the deaths of her parents and that’s why she killed Ricardo and took the disc? If so, then she might even know what was on the disc and might even know what it had to do with Xanadu.
Closing his eyes, he tried not to think of her, but it was so hard. Those brilliant blue eyes kept staring at him and he fell asleep thinking about them peering into his very soul.
The Hunt for Xanadu Page 4
