ALSO BY J. A. JANCE
J. P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES
Until Proven Guilty
Injustice for All
Trial by Fury
Taking the Fifth
Improbable Cause
A More Perfect Union
Dismissed with Prejudice
Minor in Possession
Payment in Kind
Without Due Process
Failure to Appear
Lying in Wait
Name Withheld
Breach of Duty
JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES
Desert Heat
Tombstone Courage
Shoot/Don’t Shoot
Dead to Rights
Skeleton Canyon
Rattlesnake Crossing
Outlaw Mountain
Devil’s Claw
AND
Hour of the Hunter
Kiss of the Bees
A Novel of Suspense
BIRDS
OF PREY
J. A. Jance
For Pat Hall and Mary Daise
Contents
Prologue: “Hit me again,” Dr. Kenneth Glass said as the bartender walked past.
Chapter 1. The blonde fixed me with an appraising eye...
Chapter 2. During dinner I did my best to hold up my end of the conversation.
Chapter 3. At six the next morning I was awakened by a determined knocking.
Chapter 4. After depositing Beverly in her cabin, I returned to mine.
Chapter 5. Sometime during the afternoon, the wind died down...
Chapter 6. Beverly and Lars Jenssen must have been up...
Chapter 7. On the way through the ship, I was still stunned by Naomi’s admission...
Chapter 8. There are almost as many reasons for going to AA meetings as there are meetings...
Chapter 9. Eventually first officer Vincente motioned me into a darkened room...
Chapter 10. For the longest time after Chloe left, Leila and I sat in the gathering darkness...
Chapter 11. In the crystal dining room, Margaret Featherman’s table was set for six...
Chapter 12. It wasn’t that late when I got back to my room...
Chapter 13. When I lay down on the cot, it wasn’t with much hope of sleeping.
Chapter 14. After something like that happens, people go into a form of shock.
Chapter 15. We arrived back in Skagway in brilliant late-afternoon sunlight.
Chapter 16. The grilled halibut steaks Naomi Pepper and I had for dinner...
Chapter 17. Once I fell asleep, I really slept.
Chapter 18. Nursing my bruised ego, I went upstairs to the Lido Deck...
Chapter 19. Beverly Jenssen left Lars and me plenty of room for our “man-to-man” chat...
Chapter 20. After downing two more Advil, I came back to bed and lay down again.
Chapter 21. Sitka is a port where there are no docking facilities large enough...
Chapter 22. Without a word, Margaret led me through the vestibule and over to a door...
Chapter 23. Once Dulcie Wadsworth’s phone was in my hand...
Chapter 24. Belvaducci summoned a crewman, who came and collected Margaret Featherman.
Chapter 25. It’s possible that by the time the second seating came around...
Appendix World-Famous Beaumont Bromides!
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
HIT ME AGAIN,” Dr. Kenneth Glass said as the bartender walked past. The man gave Ken a questioning look, and not without reason. There had been cocktails before dinner and wine with. And now he had just finished downing his third after-dinner Glenmorangie. “It’s all right,” Ken reassured the barkeep. “I’m not driving anywhere.”
While the bartender went to pour the next drink, Ken fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket and tried calling home. Again. And still, even though it was well past 2 A.M. back home in Atlanta, Georgia, his wife was not yet home.
“Shit!” Ken muttered as he flipped the phone shut and stuck it back in his pocket.
“Pardon me?” the bartender asked.
“Nothing,” Ken said, taking his drink. “I’ve been calling and calling, but my wife’s still out,” he added in explanation. There was no reason to make the bartender think Ken was mad at him. “You work your butt off, and what does it get you? A wife who likes the money you make just fine, but doesn’t really give a crap about you.”
The bartender nodded sympathetically. “Ain’t that the truth,” he said, turning to answer a summons from another customer.
Ken pulled the drink toward him and then stared down into the glass as if hoping the liquid gold contents might hold the answer to some of his burning questions. He tried to remember the reasons Faye had given him for not wanting to come along on this trip. Let’s see, there was the Buckhead Garden Club meeting, and since Faye Glass was the newly installed vice president, she certainly couldn’t be expected to miss their first spring meeting just because her husband was being honored with a dinner at a national convocation of his fellow neurosurgeons. No, Faye’s garden club meeting was far more important than that! But it was almost 3 A.M. back home in Atlanta, and the garden club meeting sure as hell wasn’t running that late.
Ken took a sip of the single-malt Scotch. Despite the booze he had consumed, he felt he was thinking clearly—maybe for the first time in months. The signs had been there for a long time—all the classic signs of marital discord: disinterest in sex and in almost everything else as well; everything that had to do with Ken, that is. The two exceptions had been the Buckhead Garden Club and Faye’s new laptop computer, which had become her constant companion. She took it with her everywhere, stowed in the trunk of her shiny white Lexus. He had finally smelled a rat, or rather, Ken had allowed himself to smell a rat when Faye had refused to come along on this trip with him, even though she knew how important it was to him to be honored by his peers. Ken had done his best to convince her to change her mind. Baboquivari Mountain Resort was one of Scottsdale’s newest and finest. Always before Faye would have jumped at the chance to accompany him. This time she had simply refused, and no amount of coaxing had persuaded her otherwise.
What if she’s having one of those cyber-affairs? Ken asked himself for the first time. What if she’s picked up some loser on the Internet, and she’s going to leave me for him? The whole idea was almost unthinkable, but Ken forced himself to think about what would be, for him, the worst-case scenario. At three o’clock in the morning, kidding himself about the Buckhead Garden Club just didn’t cut it anymore.
“Is this seat taken?” someone asked over his shoulder.
Ken turned to find himself faced with a handsome young man in his mid-to-late thirties. “Help yourself,” Ken said.
The young man settled onto the barstool while Ken made one more futile attempt to call home. Still no answer. In returning the phone to his pocket, he swung around slightly on the barstool.
“I’ll be damned,” the newcomer exclaimed. “Dr. Kenneth Glass from Emory University Hospital? The people at Disneyland are right. It is a small world.”
Ken gave the man a bleary, puzzled look. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“Your name tag,” the newcomer replied with a grin. “Name tags are always a dead giveaway.” He held out his hand. “My name’s Pete James. Mindy Hudson is my sister. I know Mindy and Rick have thanked you. But let me do the same. Our whole family is eternally grat
eful for what you did for Kelsey. Can I buy you a drink?”
Ken Glass didn’t need another drink, but he was glad to have the company—someone to talk with who might help take his mind off his troubles. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Mindy Hudson was one of Ken’s patients. She and her husband, Rick, had come to Ken’s office pregnant and heartbroken, having just learned that their unborn fetus had been found to have spina bifida. Ken was one of a handful of Vanderbilt-trained neurosurgeons who had taken the school’s pioneering in utero surgical techniques back home to Georgia. The Hudsons had come to Crawford Long Hospital at Emory University hoping to find a way to spare their child from the most crippling effects of that disease. And it had worked. Months after undergoing a delicate surgical procedure while still in her mother’s womb, Kelsey Hudson had been born. At eighteen months she was now a healthy, normal, and mischievous toddler.
“What brings you here?” Ken asked Pete James. “To Scottsdale, I mean.”
“I’m a computer consultant,” he said. “My company specializes in Internet security systems. I’m in and out of Phoenix a couple times a year.”
“Have you stayed here before?” Ken asked.
“At the Baboquivari?” Pete returned. “No, first time. I told my travel agent that I wanted to try someplace different, and she booked me in here. It’s pretty nice, don’t you think? For a hotel, that is. When you stay in hotels all the time, they can get pretty old. What are you doing here?”
“Convention,” Ken replied. His tongue was feeling a little thick against the roof of his mouth, and he did his best to enunciate clearly. There was nothing worse than a yammering drunk. He’d been around enough of those in his time that he sure as hell didn’t want to be one.
“Last one,” the bartender said as he set two drinks down on the counter, and followed those with two checks, one for Ken and another for Pete James.
“Wait a minute,” Ken said angrily. “What does that mean? That you’re cutting me off?”
“Don’t take it personally,” the bartender told him. “We generally close this bar up at midnight. If you want another drink, there’s still the small bar off the lobby that stays open until one.”
“Oh,” Ken said. “That’s all right then.”
Pete James paid in cash and left. Ken, on the other hand, downed his drink in one long gulp and then scribbled his name and room number onto the tab, along with a fairly hefty tip. Faye always accused him of being a light tipper. It did his heart good to prove her wrong.
“It’s late,” he said to the bartender. “S’pose I should hit the hay.”
When Ken stood up, he had to grab on to the back of the barstool to keep from tipping over. It was enough to cause the bartender some concern. “You gonna be all right, Dr. Glass?” he asked. “I can get someone from security to help you.”
“Don’t bother, I’m fine,” he said. “Fresh air’ll do me a world of good.” Ken looked around for the guy who had bought the drink, whose name he had suddenly forgotten, but he was nowhere to be seen. “Thanks anyway,” he muttered.
With that, Ken set off unsteadily across the bar and let himself out through a patio entrance that led past one of the hotel’s several pools to his wing of the massive complex. Standing outside in the nippy March weather, he paused long enough to pluck the phone out of his pocket. Once more he tried dialing home, and once more the phone rang and rang in a house where nobody answered.
Damn her anyway! Ken thought angrily. She’s out somewhere whoring around with some boyfriend instead of being here with me. I’ll show her. I’ll divorce the little bitch and we’ll see how well she does for herself out in the open market.
As Ken fumbled the phone back into his pocket, he heard what sounded like hurrying footsteps behind him. Half-turning and trying to get out of the way of whoever it was, he saw only an upraised arm. There was no time to cry out; no time to defend himself. Ken felt something hard thud against the side of his head, followed by the sensation of falling—of falling into the water. Even drunk, Ken knew enough to hold his breath and to try to rise to the surface, but when he did so, there was something that kept him from reaching air—something that pushed him back down, and not just once, but again and again.
Eventually he couldn’t hold his breath any longer. When Ken Glass finally exhaled, water flooded into his mouth and lungs. He struggled for a while after that, but finally there was no fight left in him and he fell still.
Seconds later, the man who had introduced himself as Pete James climbed unhurriedly out of the pool, toweled himself dry, and then slipped back into the clothes he had left concealed behind a hedge at the pool’s far end. Wrapping the wet towel around the police baton he had used to whack Ken Glass on the head, he made his way back to the rental car he had left in the hotel parking lot.
Other than the bartender, no one in the hotel had seen him or even known he was there. As he headed for the Hertz lot at Sky Harbor International, he couldn’t help but be proud of himself. This wasn’t his first job, but it was certainly his best—clean, trouble-free, and by the book.
“Another one for our side,” he said under his breath. “One more down and God knows how many to go.”
1
THE BLONDE FIXED ME with an appraising eye that left me feeling as defenseless as a dead frog spread-eagled on some high school biology student’s dissection tray. “And what do you do?” she asked.
When the headwaiter had led me through the cruise ship’s plush, chandelier-draped dining room to a round table set for six, four of the chairs were already occupied by a group of women who clearly knew one another well. They were all “women of a certain age,” but the blonde directly across from me was the only one who had gone to considerable effort to conceal the ravages of time. I had taken one of the two remaining places, empty chairs that sat side by side. When I ordered tonic with a twist, there was a distinct pause in the conversation.
“Very good, sir,” the waiter said with a nod before disappearing in the direction of the bustling waiters’ station, which was directly to my back.
For the better part of the next five minutes the conversation continued as before, with the four women talking at length about the generous divorce settlement someone known to all of them had managed to wring from the hide of her hapless and, as it turned out, serially unfaithful ex-husband. The general enthusiasm with which my tablemates greeted the news about a jerk being forced to pay through the nose told me I had fallen into an enemy camp made up of like-minded divorcées. So I wasn’t exactly feeling all warm and fuzzy when the ringleader of the group asked her question. The fact that I was on a heaving cruise ship named Starfire Breeze pitching and bucking my way into Queen Charlotte Sound toward the Gulf of Alaska did nothing to improve my disposition.
With little to lose, I decided to drop my best conversational bomb. “I’m a homicide detective,” I told the women mildly, taking a slow sip of my icy tonic which had arrived by then. “Retired,” I added after a pause.
I had put in my twenty years, so retired is technically true, although “retired and between gigs” would have been more accurate. However, it didn’t seem likely that accuracy would matter as far as present company was concerned. So retired is what I said, and I let it go at that.
Over the years I’ve found that announcing my profession to a group of strangers usually cripples polite dinnertime small talk. Most people look at me as though I were a distasteful worm who has somehow managed to crawl out from under a rock. They give the impression that they’d just as soon I went right back where I came from. Then there are the occasional people who set about telling me, in complete gory detail, everything they know about some obscure and previously unsolved crime with which they happen to be personally acquainted. This tactic always serves to turn dinner into an unpleasant parlor game in which I’m set the lose/lose task of coming up with the solution to an insoluble mystery. No winners there.
Surprisingly enough, the blonde took neither option
A nor option B. Instead, she gave me a white-toothed smile that was no doubt as phony and chemically augmented as the rest of her. “My name’s Margaret Featherman,” she announced cordially, standing and reaching across the table with a jewel-bedecked, impeccably manicured hand. She gave me a firm handshake along with an unobstructed view of a generous cleavage.
“These are all friends of mine,” she chirped. “We went to college together. This is Naomi Pepper, Sharon Carson, and Virginia Metz.” As she gestured around the table, each of the women nodded in turn. “The four of us are having our annual reunion. And you are?” Margaret prompted, resuming her seat.
She had a gravelly voice that made me want to clear my throat. I pegged her as a smoker or maybe an ex-smoker.
“Beaumont,” I told her. “J. P. Beaumont.”
I didn’t voluntarily elaborate on the Jonas Piedmont bit any more than I had on my employment situation. Nothing was said, but she frowned slightly when I said my name, as though it displeased her somehow. It occurred to me that maybe she had been expecting to hear some particular name, and Beaumont wasn’t it.
Although the other three women had been chatting amiably enough when I first arrived, now they shut up completely, deferring to Margaret Featherman as though she were the only one of the group capable of human speech. Whatever it was that had disturbed Margaret about my introduction, she regained her equanimity quickly enough.
“Now that we’re out from behind Vancouver Island, the water is a little choppy,” she allowed a few seconds later. “I suppose your wife is feeling a bit under the weather.” She gave a helpful hint by nodding pointedly in the direction of the empty chair beside me.
“I’m a widower,” I said.
Again, that wasn’t quite the whole story. If a wife dies in less than a day, is her husband still legitimately a widower? And if a first wife dies years after a divorce and it still hurts like hell to lose her to the big C, are you not a widower then? After all, Karen and I may have been divorced, but we had two children together and were still connected in a way no legal document could ever quite sever. Even now I’m surprised by how much her death continues to grieve me. Maybe if I were still drinking, I’d be in such an emotional fog that I wouldn’t notice. But I’m not, so I do, and that wasn’t any of this nosy broad’s business, either.
Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) Page 1
