Fifth Victim

by Zoe Sharp

  ‘Clever,’ I agreed sedately, nodding. ‘I heard Epps sent you after one of the militia groups linked to Fourth Day. What happened – did being a double agent not do it for you?’

  I kept my voice comparatively quiet, so the background roar of traffic overhead would make it harder to hear. And as I watched, he shifted his stance a little, unconsciously edging closer.

  ‘You think I ever intended to spy on those crazy bastards?’ he asked, almost incredulous. ‘Let me tell you, they do not take kindly to that kinda thing. And paranoid? They make guys like Epps look real trusting.’

  ‘He must have been, to turn you loose on a solemn promise to be a good little boy, cross your heart and hope to die.’

  He ignored the mockery in my tone and shook his head, the barrel of the Glock starting to drift downwards. ‘You just don’t get it, do you, Charlie?’ he demanded. ‘I’m hardly a blip on his radar. In fact, Epps is better off with me off of his radar altogether, because then he’ll never have to answer for the errors he made in California. Errors that caused the deaths of his own people.’

  ‘The way I remember it,’ I said tightly, ‘that was down to you.’

  ‘Semantics,’ he dismissed. He paused, gave me a pitying look. ‘You really think I didn’t know they were coming for me tomorrow? You think, even if I wasn’t planning to be gone by then, that I won’t be loose again a month from now?’

  I tried not to show how hard that set me reeling, was suddenly glad of the railing at my back. ‘But you didn’t know I was coming for you today.’

  He laughed. ‘You forget – I spent some time with you, Charlie, and you’re one of the good guys. I had a feeling you might come with them, want to be the one who slapped on the cuffs with a self-righteous air. Didn’t expect you to spring for an advance flight, though. You’ve been tailing me since – when? Saturday morning?’

  So, my surveillance skills really did need improvement. ‘Friday night, actually,’ I said, as calmly as I could manage.

  He smiled. ‘Should change your looks some, if you’re gonna do this professionally. Once seen, never forgotten.’ His eyes suddenly narrowed. ‘Epps told me Meyer survived, so what’s this all about, huh?’

  The implications of his false assumption flashed through my brain as fast as the synapses could fire. For reasons of his own, Epps hadn’t told him Sean was still in a coma.

  So use it.

  ‘You really don’t know?’ I murmured. ‘Never mind about me – you think Sean would be happy to let a little shit like you get away with taking him down?’ I deliberately softened my voice still further. He leant close enough for me to smell his aftershave, strong enough to remind me that he was not a field operative, or he wouldn’t wear something so distinctive in still air. I smiled. ‘You really think I’d come out here after you, alone and unarmed, for any other reason than as bait?’

  I saw the convulsive jump of his Adam’s apple. ‘Bait?’

  I let my eyes slip past his face to a point behind his left shoulder. ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

  His head snapped round, knees ducking his body as he turned, as if to avoid a blow. I kicked away from the railing and jabbed my knuckles hard into the rigid tendons at the back of his right hand. The hand sprang open immediately, a completely involuntary reaction. The gun clattered onto the planking and spun away behind him.

  I followed up with a fast elbow to the throat, both to disable and to silence him. He crashed backwards, scrabbling for the collar of his polo shirt as though the soft cotton was responsible for his lack of breath, and I realised I’d put all my pent-up rage and heartache into that single blow.

  By the time he’d got his senses back under him, I’d picked up the Glock, checked the magazine and was pointing it in his direction. He shielded his head with his arms, palms outward and fingers spread, while he gulped for air and speech.

  ‘Wait,’ he managed at last, rasping. ‘I’m on a boat – in the Riverside Marina. I have money on board! I can pay—’

  ‘Pay?’ I heard my voice crack, harsh and raw, and something else seemed to split open inside my head, my heart, and come pouring out like poison. ‘Do you honestly think there’s enough money on a boat – on a whole fleet of fucking boats – to begin to make up for the damage you’ve caused?’

  Smoothly, easily, I stepped back a pace, brought the muzzle of the gun up until the sights were aligned on the centre of his forehead.

  ‘Charlie, wait! Please—’

  ‘Too late,’ I said, and pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Twelve hours later, I found myself alone in a police interview room, having been temporarily relinquished by the Omaha Homicide detective who was in charge of the case.

  On the scarred desktop by my elbow was a cup of tepid coffee. It had been barely drinkable when it was hot, and was even less so now. In front of me lay a yellow legal notepad with a few scrawled notes written on it.

  I sat with my hands folded in my lap and stared back into myself, trying to work out how I felt about what I’d done.

  Sean had once told me that killing without hesitation or fear was something you got used to. Something that got easier over time. That the danger sign was if you started to enjoy it.

  I had not, I decided objectively, enjoyed killing the man pretending to be Roy Neese. It had seemed necessary and I’d done it, that was all.

  And the fact remained that if I’d killed him months ago – right after he’d taken Sean down, while he was fleeing the scene with the weapon still hot in his hand – there would have been few questions asked.

  But I’d wanted more, and I’d been naive enough to expect the justice system would provide it.

  Not the first time I’d been wrong about that.

  Behind me, to my left, the door to the interview room opened and I turned my head, expecting to see Detective Kershner return. Instead, it was Parker Armstrong who stood there, almost hesitant, as though he’d had to steel himself to face me. He closed the door quietly and moved further into the room, onto the opposite side of the table.

  ‘Charlie,’ he said gravely. ‘You OK?’ He seemed to ask me that a lot.

  ‘Surviving.’ I shrugged, realised I couldn’t read his eyes, and added carefully, ‘I didn’t expect you to come.’

  ‘How could I not?’ He paused. ‘The identity of the … victim has been confirmed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He closed his eyes a moment, rubbed his temple. ‘They gave me the gist,’ he said. ‘Single gunshot wound to the head, gun alongside him. Any chance it was self-inflicted?’

  ‘Would be nice to think he’d finally developed a conscience, wouldn’t it?’ I said, regretful, ‘but you know as well as I do that’s an unlikely scenario.’

  Apparently casual, Parker leant against the wall in the corner right under the camera, where its view was poorest. His gaze was on me fully now, intense to the point of pleading. ‘Why not?’

  ‘The location of the body, for one thing,’ I said. ‘He was probably on his way to the little marina at Riverside, where he had a boat moored. The walkway is neither one place nor another. Suicides tend to go somewhere specific, symbolic even, to do the deed. And the gun had been wiped clean.’

  ‘So he was murdered,’ Parker said flatly, the words almost forced out of him. ‘Could this be a random killing – unconnected to his … past?’

  I shook my head. ‘I doubt it. From what Detective Kershner’s told me of the crime rate in Omaha, it’s a pretty safe town.’

  Parker sighed, as if he was trying his best and I was being deliberately difficult. When he spoke there was a trace of anguish underlying his even tone. ‘Why did you come here, Charlie?’

  I met his gaze squarely. ‘Because certain information came into my hands about his location, and I knew Epps wasn’t going to follow it up fast enough,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want our boy to simply disappear again.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Well, that’s for sure.’

 
‘A round to the head tends to make certain of that,’ I agreed, and saw the anguish turn to active pain.

  ‘Charlie … What have you told them?’

  ‘Everything,’ I said. More or less. ‘It would have been foolish to do otherwise. After all, it was all bound to come out sooner or later. Why hold anything back?’

  He hid a flinch, not well. ‘You know I’ll help you,’ he said. ‘Whatever it takes.’

  ‘Parker, trust me, I don’t need your help.’ I spoke gently, easily, all the time acutely aware of possible listeners on the other side of the mirrored wall. ‘I assume Epps’s boys have finally turned up?’

  ‘Yeah, we came in on the same flight.’

  I nodded. ‘Better late than never, I suppose.’

  The door opened again and Detective Kershner hovered there, checking out Parker with a wary gaze. He was young, home-grown and relatively inexperienced, but sharp for all that. I had watched my step very carefully with him. His eyes slid to me.

  ‘The department would like to thank you for your assistance, Miss Fox,’ he said formally. ‘We have your contact details in New York, should anything else come up, but you can go.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I stood up. ‘And good luck with this one.’

  He gave a wry smile. ‘We’re gonna need it,’ he said. He paused, aware I wasn’t quite a fellow professional, but I wasn’t quite a civilian either. ‘Thought you’d like to know that Ballistics ran the weapon through IBIS and got a hit from an execution-style homicide about six months ago in California, thought to be connected to a militia group out there.’

  Parker’s head snapped up. ‘Wasn’t he supposed to be infiltrating a militia?’ he said, puzzlement in his tone.

  ‘That is my understanding, yes sir.’ The detective nodded. ‘Looks like they got wise to him, maybe followed him here.’

  Parker’s eyes skimmed over me, thoughtful. ‘Yeah,’ he murmured. ‘Looks that way.’

  Kershner walked us out, flicking little covert glances at the pair of us as we went. I realised he’d checked up on both of us. This was probably the first time he’d met anybody with Parker’s credentials, and was trying to work out what made us tick.

  By the entrance, he shook our hands and left us. Parker jerked his head towards the door and I followed him out into bright sunshine. There was a light breeze, just enough to set the Stars and Stripes on the nearest flagpole rippling lazily. It could just have been something to do with the air conditioning in the building, but the air smelt sweet and clean outside.

  Parker let us get as far as the front seats of his rented Chevy Suburban before he spoke again.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what the hell just happened back there?’ he demanded with a dangerous softness.

  I leant back against the headrest and closed my eyes, feeling utterly exhausted. ‘I found the body,’ I said. It was easier to avoid telling the whole truth with my eyes shut.

  ‘You found the body?’ he repeated flatly. ‘Hell, Charlie, I get a call from Epps first thing this morning, telling me the guy was dead and you’re being held by the cops out here.’ He shook his head a little and rubbed a frustrated hand around the back of his neck. ‘Do you have any idea what I thought …? What I felt?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and meant it. ‘But I was being interviewed as a witness. That’s somewhat different from being arrested as a suspect.’

  I couldn’t deny, though, that as I’d watched the last flicker of life expire from my target’s eyes, I’d debated on simply surrendering to fate and the police, in that order.

  But, I realised I’d made the decision to overcome this before I’d even taken the shot. By stepping back, making it a non-contact wound, I’d avoided the inevitable blow-back mist of blood. I’m still not entirely sure what made me do that, other than some inbuilt survival instinct. A desire to distance myself from this crime.

  Moments later, I’d wiped down the gun and dropped it alongside the corpse, walked back to my hotel forcing myself not to hurry. I didn’t look back.

  My clothes had gone straight into the hotel laundry, right down to the trainers I’d been wearing. Even though I was almost certain my sleeves had covered it, I scrubbed my waterproof Tag watch in the bathroom sink, left it to soak while I stood braced against the tiles in the shower for as long as I could manage.

  Even so, I’d waited until the early morning for any possible remaining gunshot residue to dissipate before I retraced my steps towards the river. I confess that I was half expecting to see the police already on the scene, or the body vanished like part of some bizarre murder mystery.

  Neither scenario played out. The body was exactly as I’d left it, with the exception of a couple of inquisitive seagulls. I ventured just close enough to verify the gun was still alongside him, then jogged to the nearest building and called it in.

  The rest, Parker knew – or suspected.

  They’d checked the time I arrived back at the hotel, but there was enough leeway with time of death for that to be inconclusive. As a matter of course, they also tested my hands and clothing for gunshot residue and found nothing, which had seemed to allay their immediate suspicions. I guessed the discovery of the murder weapon’s unexpected provenance would do the rest.

  Parker started the engine, dropped the Suburban into gear, and cruised sedately back towards my hotel without needing to be given directions.

  ‘Charlie, why did you come here?’ he asked when we were almost there, sounding weary.

  ‘I told you,’ I said, keeping my voice even. ‘I wanted to make sure he didn’t run again before Epps’s people caught up with him.’

  ‘And that’s all?’ Parker persisted.

  I could have lied to him. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I twisted slightly in my seat.

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘I …’ He sighed, and I saw his hands flex around the rim of the steering wheel. ‘No,’ he said at last, sounding more defeated than I’d ever heard him. ‘You should have told me. I would have come with you. This is not something you should have tackled alone. If I’d had any idea where you were, or what you were doing …’

  ‘I thought you knew,’ I said slowly. ‘Why else the emails?’

  He acknowledged my admission that I’d ignored his messages with a bitter quirk of his lips. ‘Your cell was switched off. I couldn’t reach you. I thought maybe you’d … decided to do something stupid.’

  And maybe I had. I shied away from going there. It was a dark corner I would not look into.

  ‘Do away with myself, you mean?’ I asked dryly. ‘You really think, Parker, after all the shit I’ve been through, I’d take the easy way out now?’

  He pulled up outside the entrance to the Embassy Suites and glanced over at me, his gaze coolly assessing.

  ‘It would have been the ultimate cruel irony, if you had,’ he said, and something in his voice sent my pulse buzzing, tightened my chest.

  No. Oh, no …

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘If you’d opened those emails, you’d know,’ he said. He paused, a wealth of conflicted emotions in his voice, his face. ‘Sean’s awake.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Parker and I flew back into New York by scheduled flight, landing at Newark late that same evening. On the journey, I’d asked him over and over for more details about Sean, but he knew little beyond the bare facts.

  He told me that Sean’s brain activity had started to pick up on Friday afternoon, not long after I’d left the hospital. I wondered about the cause of that, whether the sound of a weapon being readied reached far deeper into his psyche than touch or smell could ever do. The memory of violence overcoming intimacy.

  Parker received the call from the hospital not long after my text message came in. He’d tried to contact me, but my phone went straight to voicemail – hardly surprising as I’d switched it off before I left. When calling the apartment brought no response, Parker had Bill Rendelson check
the airlines for a ticket in my name. Needless to say, there wasn’t one.

  Though he’d reported all this in a matter-of-fact tone, I could tell that was the moment he’d begun seriously to worry. He’d sent his first email that night, and kept sending them, from his PDA at Sean’s bedside.

  He relayed what the doctors had told him, that Sean seemed distressed, like a man trapped in a nightmare. His heart rate and temperature had soared, rapid eye movement increasing as he became more restless.

  ‘It was like watching someone clawing their way out of the grave,’ Parker said, his voice hollow. ‘Like he was fighting for his life.’

  And I hadn’t been there, fighting alongside him.

  Instead, I’d been out committing cold-blooded murder in his name.

  Through Saturday, as I’d tracked Roy Neese through his normal daily subroutines in downtown Omaha, Sean had become increasingly lucid, and increasingly disturbed. It was soon apparent that he recognised nobody around him and remembered nothing of how he came to be shackled to a hospital bed in a strange country with his body wasted and his mind in fragments.

  And I hadn’t been there to anchor him.

  Now, as Erik Landers drove us in from the airport with blatant disregard for the posted speed limits, my heart was clenched tight in my chest. It didn’t matter how many hours I’d sat by Sean’s bedside during those three long months of his unconsciousness. All I knew – all he would know – was that I hadn’t been there at the moment he needed me most.

  I was wracked with a faithless dismay, stripped to the bone by guilt and fear, that by not being the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes, the memory of what we had would be somehow squandered.

  And I hadn’t been there to reinforce it in his mind.