Murder is Forever, Volume 2

by James Patterson

  The more she looks, the more she can’t believe an SEC agent would go out in public looking this way.

  She directs her eyes back to the jacket lying on the chair. The man’s badge has fallen out of the jacket pocket and is lying on the floor next to the discarded fedora. She squints. Then her skin goes cold. The badge appears to be a photocopy glued to a piece of cardboard. And it’s peeling off.

  The man’s badge is fake.

  He’s not who he says he is.

  Chapter 9

  Sue snaps out of her thoughts. The man is practically shouting at Leo.

  “I don’t want to hear any more of these lies,” the man says. “Stop covering for the firm.”

  “I’m not covering up anything,” Leo says, keeping his voice as calm as possible. “I’m not lying. I’m not equivocating. I’m being truthful. I’m a sworn officer of the court.”

  The man laughs and barks, “That’s rich.”

  He pushes two fingers into Leo’s chest. Leo squirms away and the man does it again.

  “Stop,” Sue says. “You’re hurting him.”

  Sue has been so focused on the man that she hasn’t been paying attention to Leo. Now she takes a good look at him.

  He looks awful.

  His skin is pallid and clammy. She can see beads of sweat on his forehead and bald scalp. And his breathing seems to be labored. That wasn’t calmness she heard in his voice earlier. He was having trouble speaking.

  He looks like he’s about to pass out.

  Or have a heart attack.

  But the man doesn’t care, obviously. He keeps pressing his fingers into Leo’s chest, barking questions at him.

  “Leave him alone,” Sue shouts.

  She almost adds, You’ll give him a heart attack! But she doesn’t want to put the words out there. If she does, she might stress Leo out even more, push him over the edge.

  “I’ll leave him alone when he starts telling the truth,” the man growls, his teeth clenched.

  Sue opens her mouth to protest again, but she hesitates when she hears the ringing of a cell phone.

  The man steps back, fumbling in his pocket for his phone.

  “Don’t you two move,” the man orders, as he retreats into the hallway to answer his phone.

  “Yeah!” the man says into the phone.

  After a moment, he says, “Not yet…He doesn’t…I will.”

  “Leo,” Sue whispers. “Are you all right?”

  Her husband nods, but he doesn’t look all right. His skin is ghost white, and he’s doing his best to take long slow breaths.

  “Leo,” Sue says, glancing up to make sure the man is occupied on the phone. “He isn’t from the SEC.”

  “I know,” Leo says, looking at her.

  She sees real fear in his eyes.

  “His badge is fake,” she whispers.

  Leo nods. He hadn’t noticed this, but he’s known for a long time that the man is pretending to be someone he isn’t.

  “Nothing about this follows due process,” Leo says, holding up his zip-tied wrists. “He’s broken a half-dozen laws since he rang our doorbell.”

  “Oh, Pie,” she says, unable to hide the fear in her voice. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Leo says.

  They look into the hallway, where the man posing as an SEC agent is pacing back and forth, holding the phone to his ear. He looks nervous, frustrated—frightening.

  “We need to call the police,” Sue whispers.

  Leo’s eyes say all he needs to say: If we try to make a phone call and get caught, there’s no telling what the guy will do with us.

  “What about the panic button?” Sue whispers, making sure to keep her voice down.

  When their security system was installed, the company put in a panel in Leo’s office that allows them to simply press a button to trigger their alarm. The authorities will be called automatically, and a loud siren will begin to wail within the walls of the house.

  The only problem, Sue realizes, is that as soon as one of them hits the alarm, the man will know the police are on their way. He has demonstrated that he’s unstable and unpredictable. Would he flee right away? Or would he try something crazy before escaping?

  Hurt Leo?

  Take Sue hostage?

  Kill them both?

  “I’m going to try a new approach,” Leo whispers to Sue. “I’m going to—”

  The man storms back into the room.

  “I just talked to the boss,” the man says, holding up his cell phone for them to see. “She’s not happy with what she’s hearing. I better get some goddamn answers, and I better get them right now.”

  Chapter 10

  “Look,” Leo says to the man, taking a tone that suggests cooperation and complicity. “It’s getting late. I’m sure we’d all like to get on with our evenings. Please just tell me what you want…what I need to do to make this go away.”

  Those words—what I need to do to make this go away—seem to calm the man. He looks pleased that Leo is willing to play ball.

  “Fine,” the man says, “I need you to let me into your company files. The private server.”

  Leo opens his mouth to object—his natural reaction to such an unlawful violation of his privacy—but Sue gives him a pleading look.

  “Okay,” Leo says. “The computer’s across the hall.”

  “Well, what the hell are you waiting for?” the man says. “Get off your asses and let’s go.”

  Leo and Sue hobble on their zip-tied legs. The man makes hurry-up motions with his hands, but neither Leo nor Sue can move quickly.

  In the hallway, the man’s attention seems to be focused on Leo. Sue takes this opportunity to try to wriggle free of her wrist restraints. No luck. The plastic is locked around her wrists so tightly that her hands are beginning to turn white.

  Inside the office, Sue eyes the telephone on the desk.

  And on the wall behind the desk is the panic button.

  But the man shoves them over toward the love seat at the other end of the room. Leo offers to help, but the man dismisses the offer and orders him to tell him his password.

  “Twist and Shout,” Leo says. “All one word. Capital T. Capital S. Those are our cats,” he adds, trying to sound friendly.

  Inside, Leo feels ill. The man will be able to access the firm’s client list and inner-office communication, which the partners like to keep secret.

  The man settles into the seat of Leo’s leather wingback office chair, again easing himself down as if the act of sitting hurts. The man’s shirt has come untucked, and as he leans against the back rest, Sue can spot a glimpse of the man’s skin on his lower back.

  No—not his skin.

  A beige-colored fabric appears to be fastened to his lower back. It looks like a pain patch—the kind that secretes pain-relieving medicine into the skin.

  Who is this guy? Sue wonders.

  The man rolls up his sleeves—there’s another pain patch on his arm. His hands fly over the keyboard and move the mouse around with lightning speed. Even watching him from across the room, Sue and Leo can tell that the man is very comfortable with computers. Since he walked into their home, the man has seemed out of place. He looks like a thug, dresses strangely, and acts unstable. But now, in front of a computer, he looks at home for the first time.

  He obviously has experience with computers—and with the kind of data that Leo’s files hold. The company uses complicated spreadsheets and legal documents, neither of which can be easily navigated without knowledge of the legal profession and high technological literacy.

  The man seems to have both.

  For the first time, he actually seems to have skills that Sue and Leo might expect of an SEC agent.

  But Sue reminds herself of the weird cardboard badge and all the other unprofessional warning signs, starting with the man blasting Leo with a Taser as soon as he walked in the door.

  There is no way this man could be from the SEC, Sue thinks.
But then who is he?

  Meanwhile, Leo is studying the man as well. He still can’t place where he’s seen him before. There is something familiar about his face…

  “Why don’t you let me help you find what you’re looking for so we can all call it a night?” Leo says, trying to sound as sincere as possible.

  “Don’t play all innocent, Leo. You know what you did. You can act all fatherly and supportive, but really, you’re not a very good person.”

  As he says this, the man’s right eyebrow raises slightly, which triggers a flash of a memory for Leo.

  Chapter 11

  Leo is sitting in his office, typing a memo on his computer, when a shadow passes by the glass window on his door. He looks up, but whoever it was has already passed by.

  He looks back at the file when he hears footsteps in the hall. Someone—a big man by the sound of it—is heading back in the direction of Leo’s office.

  This time, the person stops at the office door and faces the glass.

  The glass is textured, like the door of a shower, and it obscures what is on the other side. But Leo can make out a man’s silhouette, big and broad, taking up most of the glass panel.

  Whoever it is, he is looking into Leo’s office. He steps forward and puts his face right up to the glass, making his features more distinguishable. Leo can see a mouth, a nose, eyes—all blurry and unrecognizable—on a distorted peach-colored face.

  Leo is sure the man can’t see him any better than Leo can see him. Leo figures he probably appears as little more than an unrecognizable human-shaped blob behind the desk.

  But the man’s face changes, as if he likes what he sees. His mouth curves into a big blurry grin. And Leo can see well enough to notice one eyebrow raise involuntarily, as if pulled up by a fishhook.

  Even through the blurry glass, the expression is disquieting. This isn’t the friendly smile of an old friend dropping by unannounced. Or a fellow lawyer coming to ask Leo to lunch.

  The smile reminds Leo of something he recently saw on a Discovery Channel documentary: a hyena grinning maniacally when it spotted its prey.

  Leo opens his mouth to call out to the stranger, but the man quickly turns away and disappears from view.

  Leo rises to his feet and steps warily across his office carpet. He cracks his door and peeks out, seeing a man tromping down the hallway in work boots, jeans, and a baggy hooded sweatshirt.

  Leo steps into the hallway and calls out, “Can I help you, sir?”

  The man keeps walking but turns his head slightly, just enough to give Leo a glimpse of his profile. There is that one eyebrow raised again.

  The man lifts his hand in a goodbye gesture, and then he disappears into the stairwell. Leo stares at the door. His pulse is racing, and he’s not sure why. He tells himself not to be bothered by the encounter.

  He’s sure he’ll never see the man—whoever he is—again.

  Chapter 12

  Leo and Sue sit quietly as the man searches on the computer. The only sounds are the chatter of the man’s fingers over the keypad and a clock that hangs on the wall, clicking away the seconds.

  Leo doesn’t know what to do. His undershirt beneath his sweater is wet with his sweat, and he feels alternating waves of nausea and panic. His heart is thudding in his chest, and he doesn’t know how much more of this stress he can take.

  Sue seems to be keeping it together better, Leo thinks. She has always been strong, able to carry a heavy burden. Leo internalizes his stress, which was part of the problem with his heart. But Sue is more of a doer, a fighter. He knows it’s killing her to sit with her mouth closed and not tell this crazy son of a bitch to get the hell out of their house.

  But Leo thinks antagonizing the man will only make matters worse. He wants to wait out this bizarre “interrogation”—or whatever you’d call it—without incensing their captor. The so-called agent seems volatile, and the only way to get out of this, Leo thinks, is to keep from throwing any gasoline on the fire already burning inside him.

  It’s been Leo’s experience, after more than thirty years in courtrooms, that cooler heads usually prevail.

  Suddenly, the man slams the palm of his hand down on the desk and snaps, “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  Both Leo and Sue jerk, startled by the outburst.

  “What are you trying to hide, Leo?” the man snarls.

  “Hide?”

  “This,” the man says, gesturing to the computer screen even though Leo can’t read it from across the room. “This file marked ‘admin’ is empty. When did you purge those files?”

  Leo shakes his head in bafflement. He vaguely remembers creating a folder for administrative notes, but he never put anything in it.

  “If you would just tell me what you’re looking for,” Leo says, “maybe I could help you.”

  “Yeah, right,” the man says, turning back to the computer. “That way, you could steer me in the wrong direction. I’m not giving you an opportunity to obfuscate this process any more than you already have. I know what I’m d—”

  A beeping noise resounds from down the hall, and the man jumps out of his seat.

  “What is that?” he shouts, his hand going for the pistol in his shoulder holster. “An alarm? Did you—”

  “It’s the oven timer.” Sue practically shouts to make sure the man doesn’t draw his gun and start waving it around.

  The man looks at her and listens with an expression on his face of utter confusion, as if he’s never heard an oven timer in his entire life.

  “Oh,” the man says, apparently finally convinced that the noise he hears isn’t an alarm.

  He settles back into the chair and goes back to work on the computer.

  The timer continues to beep.

  “Would you like me to go turn it off?” Sue asks.

  “No.”

  Beep…Beep…Beep.

  She waits, nonplussed, for almost a full minute.

  “If I don’t get the chicken out of the oven, it’s going to burn,” Sue says.

  Without looking up from the computer screen, the man flicks his wrist at her as if to say, I don’t care if it burns. Stop talking.

  Sue considers saying nothing, but judging by the man’s reaction to the oven timer going off, she would hate to see what this guy will do if the actual fire alarm goes off.

  Beep…Beep…Beep.

  “Sir,” Sue says, her voice like a teacher talking to an elementary school student. “If someone doesn’t take the chicken out of the oven, then there’s going to be a whole lot of smoke in the kitchen. And if that happens, another alarm—a real alarm—will go off.”

  This statement—no doubt using the word “alarm”—wakes the man up.

  “Now would you like me to go take the chicken out of the oven?” Sue says, rising to her feet. “Just cut these ties around my legs and I’ll do it in a jiffy.”

  “Sit down,” the man orders. “I’ll do it.”

  He rises to his feet and heads toward the door. He mutters, disgusted, “Jesus…you people.”

  As soon as he’s gone, Sue rises to her feet. Her legs tremble.

  “Muffy,” Leo hisses, “what are you doing?”

  Sue points to the alarm panel on the wall across the room.

  “It’s worth a try,” she says.

  “Wait,” Leo hisses. “You saw how he reacted from the oven timer. What do you think he’ll do to us if the alarm starts blaring through the house?”

  Sue hesitates.

  The clock on the wall ticks loudly, counting the seconds until the man returns.

  Chapter 13

  Beep…Beep…Beep.

  The man with the gun walks down the hall and into the living room. He can’t believe this house. It must be worth a million dollars. It’s spacious, even though there are certainly larger mansions in the city, but what really strikes him is the décor. Everything in the house tells him that Leo Fisher has money to burn. There is a huge L-shaped couch and a large, comfortable-looking re
cliner, both upholstered in leather. The walls are decorated with expensive-looking landscape paintings. Hardwood flooring stretches from wall to wall, with a plush rug in the center of the room.

  Not only does the big room with expensive-looking accoutrements impress him, but the house is clean from floor to ceiling. There isn’t a dust bunny on the carpet or cobweb on the ceiling. A bookshelf along the wall looks like it’s dusted every day.

  Obviously, Leo Fisher has enough money for a maid to come and clean multiple times a week.

  Some people really do have it all, the man thinks. There’s no way someone gets this rich by being honest.

  The man has no doubt Leo Fisher is an unscrupulous lawyer.

  Devious. Deceitful. Corrupt.

  As crooked as a bolt of lightning.

  The man knows it—he just needs to find the evidence.

  He follows the beeping sound past a dining room with a crystal chandelier over the table to a big kitchen with marble countertops and polished terra-cotta floors.

  Tendrils of smoke creep from the oven door. A cloud hovers just under the ceiling.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the man says, flinging open the oven door.

  A heat wave hits his face, and a fresh cloud of smoke billows out.

  “Damn it!”

  He’s afraid the smoke detector will go off any minute. He looks around the kitchen, trying to find oven mitts so he can take out the casserole dish. He flings open drawers and cabinet doors. Finally, he finds a pile of dish towels. He takes two towels and grabs the casserole dish and flings it into the sink with a clatter.

  The oven is still beeping madly.

  Beep…Beep…Beep.

  He looks around for a smoke detector in this room and sees none. He ventures to the living room, where one is mounted above the doorway. The air in here is hazy with smoke.

  He starts waving the towel in front of the detector. He has to stretch to even get close to the detector, and, as he does so, he feels a sharp ripping pain in his lower back.

  He grunts in agony and doubles over, holding one hand on his knee with the other twisted around, holding his back.