Double Take ft-11

by Catherine Coulter

  “No, his father was dead.”

  “Dead? What happened, Julia?”

  All right, all of it. “Ben Taylor flew one of the Saud family’s private jets. Only three months before Linc’s accident, terrorists managed to plant a bomb on the plane. The plane exploded over the desert in a ball of flame. Ben, his copilot, two flight attendants, and all six passengers died.

  “Dozens of people were apprehended after the murders, but then it sort of faded away, probably because it was distant cousins who were killed and not any of the royal family proper. I think if King Fahd had been on that plane, the Saudis would have joined hands with the U.S. to find bin Laden. King Fahd died shortly thereafter, and Abdallah took over.

  “What really surprised me was that a week after Linc’s funeral I received a check for half a million dollars delivered by special messenger from King Fahd, along with his regrets and condolences.”

  “I’m sorry about your husband.”

  “Thank you. The thing is, Ben was an ex-Army Ranger. I learned too late he wasn’t a domestic sort of guy and never would be, even though he did try for a while. He loved flying, and most of all he loved his status as a pilot for the royal family. He loved being in the Middle East, practically lived in Saudi Arabia. He lived like a prince in Riyadh.” She stopped, sighed again. “I was disillusioned, of course. I was very close to asking him for a divorce. It wasn’t fair to Linc to hardly ever see his father; it wasn’t fair to me either. But then, all of a sudden, Ben was dead. And then Linc.”

  Cheney wanted to comfort her, he really did, but what came out of his mouth, all matter-of-fact, was “How did you meet August Ransom?”

  “I worked for the Hartford Courant. I wrote an article about him. When Linc was in the hospital, he came, every single day. When Linc died, he, well, he helped me, comforted me. I came to believe he could really speak to Linc sometimes, believed it to my soul. He spoke to Linc several times after we married. And now August is dead too.”

  She turned away from Cheney, walked to the dark brown leather sofa, and sat down. She leaned her head back, her hands limp in her lap. “I never asked anyone else to contact Linc for me. I guess I’ve never believed in any of the rest of them, only August.” Julia looked at the empty fireplace grate. “People believed I married August for his money. What with the money from King Fahd, I had no need to marry anyone. I was fine all by myself, and I had a skill. I’d already proved I could support Linc and myself.”

  “Didn’t your husband send you money?” Her smile was bitter. “Yes, but I put all of it in Line’s college fund. I guess it was some sort of weird point of honor to me. After Linc died, I gave all the money to a children’s medical research foundation. I, well, I simply couldn’t bear to use it.”

  After a moment of silence, Julia said, looking away from him, looking at something he couldn’t see. “Everyone died. Everyone I ever loved has died.”

  He didn’t think, simply said right out, “I won’t die anytime soon, Julia. And you won’t either. And we’re going to find out why August died, together. Tell me more about your husband—I know he was quite a bit older than you. From reading the inspectors’ notes, that was why they believed you wanted out. They believed you wanted a divorce, he wouldn’t give you one, so you had him murdered.”

  “I know.”

  “Were you his first wife?”

  “No. August married for the first time when he was in his late thirties—yes, I know, a late bloomer. His first wife, a musician, died after only a couple of years, of pancreatic cancer. She was only in her twenties, younger than I am now, as a matter of fact. He didn’t remarry. When I was interviewing him for my newspaper, we spent a good deal of time together. I liked him; he seemed to really like me as well. I always held back, truth be told, because his big claim to fame was that he was a psychic medium and I simply didn’t know if I could buy that—until Linc.

  “He didn’t demand sex from me, never even seemed interested, maybe not a big surprise since he was so much older. And I was frozen anyway. But I cared deeply about him, and he about me. I admired him, I was loyal to him, faithful to him, although that doesn’t make any grand statement about my morals—I was simply never tempted. If someone else had come along before he was murdered, well, that might have made things difficult.”

  “Are your folks still living, Julia?”

  “I suspect you already know most of these answers. Isn’t everything in those files?”

  “A lot of it, yes, but it’s not from your mouth, with your feelings, your own thoughts.”

  “They died skiing at Vail the year before Linc died. It was a stupid accident, really, and entirely their fault. Both Dad and Mom loved to ski off-trail, always ignored all the off-limits warnings. An avalanche got them in a posted avalanche area. No, Cheney, I don’t have any brothers or sisters, as you most certainly already know.”

  She looked suddenly beaten down and he hated it. He carefully laid all the files back onto August Ransom’s desktop. He started to tell her—he didn’t know what—when his cell phone rang.

  “Yeah?”

  “Cheney, Savich here. Get to a computer, I’m sending you an e-mail with an attachment of the guy we believe tried to kill Julia Ransom. We need you and her to verify. Call back whether it’s the guy and I’ll tell you about him.”

  “You got it, Savich,” Cheney said. “Let’s get on your computer, Julia.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Cheney called up the attachment and stared at the full-color image of the man’s face. “That’s him,” Julia said immediately. “I’ll never forget his face.”

  Cheney nodded, and used the study’s landline to punch in Savich’s number.

  “That him?” Savich said.

  Cheney pressed speakerphone on. “Savich, this is Julia Ransom. Julia, this is Agent Dillon Savich. He ran the sketch through a special FBI facial recognition program, picked this one as the most likely.”

  Julia said without hesitation, “Yes, that’s him, Agent Savich. Please tell me you’ve caught him.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Ransom, we’re not the ones to catch him, that’s the SFPD. I’ll be sending his photo out to Captain Paulette, telling him you’ve confirmed his identity. The SFPD will have this photo plastered all over the Bay Area in no time. You are certain, Mrs. Ransom?”

  “Yes, Agent Savich, I’m very sure.”

  “What can you tell us about him?” Cheney asked.

  “His name is Xavier Makepeace. His mother’s Jamaican, his father a Brit. He’s thirty-seven years old, very successful in his chosen career, which, as you may have already guessed, is assassin.

  “I would have to say that as a professional assassin, it wasn’t bright of him to try for you a second time, Mrs. Ransom, since it turns out your initial police sketch was right on and there was already an APB out on him. If he moves again at all, this picture should nail him.”

  “The problem,” Sherlock said, “is that this man’s got a good deal of pride in his work, doesn’t accept failure easily. Oh yes, I’m Agent Sherlock, Dillon’s wife. That’s Agent Dillon Savich.”

  “You’re married?”

  “Yes, we are,” Savich said. “Cheney, what have you got?”

  “There haven’t been any alerts yet from local doctors or hospitals and no sighting of Makepeace as of yet. I agree with Sherlock. This guy may not be ready to give up. Being bested by an amateur and a woman—that sure wouldn’t look good on his resume. And Julia actually shot him.”

  Sherlock said, “Steve in Behavioral Sciences believes what he did is out of character. He should have left the city by now. He thinks Makepeace might be taking this personally now, seeing her as his nemesis, that he’s not about to turn tail and head out of town. He’s got to see her die. Sorry you had to hear that, Mrs. Ransom.”

  “But I shot him,” Julia said. “I had to shoot him. Shouldn’t he be as afraid as I am?” She paused a minute, sighed. “Well, isn’t that a stupid thing to say? He’s about as afraid of me as
he is an ant. Sorry, I feel like I’m on Mars here. Do you have any idea who hired him?”

  Savich said, “Captain Paulette is the man to keep you posted on that. Maybe if they can catch Makepeace, they can find out.” But Savich didn’t believe that for a minute and neither did Cheney or Sherlock. Xavier Makepeace was a professional. Even if the cops managed to capture him, he wouldn’t talk.

  Cheney said, “You said Makepeace’s dad is a Brit. Does the son have an English accent?”

  Savich said, “We don’t know. But he’s worked all over the world. He could probably manage whatever accent he wants. And he seems to have no particular loyalties. We think he’s worked for the Israelis, for the mullahs, even for MI6 on one occasion. He has no standard M.O.—well, he does prefer to garrote when he can, using wire—but he uses what’s expedient to him in the given situation, he’s very thorough in his planning, at times even bizarrely complex, and he’s been at it for nearly fourteen years. Very few have gotten close to him, and no one close enough to catch him.”

  Julia said, “August was garroted.”

  “Yes, we know; soon so will the SFPD,” Savich said.

  Julia said in a small voice, “He’s very scary.”

  “Yes, he is,” Sherlock said matter-of-factly. “But you’ve got Cheney with you. He’s a rottweiler.”

  Savich said, “Mrs. Ransom—”

  “Please, call me Julia.”

  “Julia, do you remember your husband having a client by the name of Thomas Pallack?”

  “Yes, of course. He and Mr. Pallack were together for a very long time, more than ten years, I believe. Why?”

  They heard Savich draw a deep breath. “We just might have some overlap with another case. I think Sherlock and I are going to come over to San Francisco along with a sheriff from Virginia and another FBI agent from Headquarters. A pleasure to speak to you, Mrs. Ransom—Julia. We’ll probably see you tomorrow.” When Cheney hung up the phone, he turned to Julia. “Yep, think of me as your rottweiler. Nothing’s going to happen to you on my watch. You ready to see Wallace Tammerlane?”

  CHAPTER 25

  Cheney kept his eyes on the green Camry weaving around in front of him on Lombard Street. When the Camry driver was finally off his cell, Cheney said to Julia, “The videotapes we watched—I swear I wanted to tell you it was all a load of crap, but your husband, he was very good, Julia, very believable. The others too, but August Ransom was the one who really drew me in completely, despite my being the skeptic from hell. How much do you think was excellent performance and how much was real? It was hard for me to tell.”

  Julia laughed. “I felt the same way before August was with me in the hospital. I remember rolling my eyes when the editor initially gave me the assignment to interview August. I was thinking all he wanted was a lovely positive fluff piece after I found out his wife had used August to contact her dead father and wouldn’t stop singing his praises.

  “He changed my mind, I’ll admit it. I saw him in action, saw how he worked, how he dealt with grieving people, how he eased them into accepting the continual presence of their dead loved ones. He spoke openly to me about how many charlatans there are in the field, that some of them would do anything to earn a buck, and if someone had the talent—the charisma, I guess, the verbal facility, and the ability to make people buy into them—then only God knew many times who was for real and who wasn’t. Grieving people, he said, were the most vulnerable people in the world. As I already told you, I still wasn’t certain until Linc.”

  “But you were grieving, deeply.” She nodded.

  He turned his Audi off into the Presidio to weave smoothly through the immense former army base, and came to a stop next to the cemetery. He turned to face her. “But you believed he was really in communication with your son?”

  “Yes. There is no doubt in my mind at all. Don’t you want to go see Wallace?”

  “We have time.” He wanted to ask her why she had no doubts, but instead, he said, “All right, why don’t you tell me what you think of Wallace Tammerlane.”

  “You already know that both he and Bevlin Wagner are fond of me, that they admired August, that they’ve grieved at his loss with me. I remember when the police kept pressuring me to give them names of people who could have killed my husband—other than myself, of course—I couldn’t say Wallace or Bevlin, I simply couldn’t. They’re both my friends. But—” She stopped, turned her face away from him. “It’s okay. Take your time.”

  She took a deep breath, expelled it, and turned back to face him. “The truth is, I’ve felt so helpless since August’s murder, like the police had painted a bull’s-eye right between my eyes. And then this assassin, Makepeace, came after me.” She reached out to touch his arm. “Cheney, I want you to know I’ve decided to keep practicing with my gun so I’ll get better. I’m going to keep protecting myself. And you know something? Maybe there’ll come a time when I can protect you too, when I can watch your back.”

  Cheney said slowly, “Not all that many people have ever offered to watch my back. Thank you.”

  Julia smiled. “You’re welcome. So what did you think of the police files on Wallace Tammerlane’s interviews?”

  “There was only one interview. Not all that much there.”

  Julia lowered her voice, leaned close to his right ear. “Did you know some people believe Wallace killed his wife back in Spain in the late eighties?”

  He could only stare at her. “That’s a kicker. You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No, really, it’s true. I don’t believe it for a minute, of course, but I don’t know specifically what happened since it was way before my time.”

  “There wasn’t anything about a murdered wife in the files. Maybe if they’d known about this they would have checked into it. Why didn’t you tell them?”

  “That’s easy. August never believed Wallace was a murderer and neither do I.”

  “Tell me. Don’t edit, Julia.” He covered her hand. “Look, Makepeace’s two attempts to kill you are obviously tied to Dr. Ransom’s murder. I’ve got to look at everything again, and I need all the information I can get. Don’t hold back on me, believing you need to protect anyone, okay?”

  She nodded. “August said Wallace and his wife Beatrice lived in Madrid for close to seven years, moved there in the early eighties. Wallace became the psychic to all Spaniards rich and famous, even King Juan Carlos and his prissy crowd, the Spanish A-list. August said Beatrice was a lovely woman, very beautiful in an ethereal blond sort of way, but she was more like Wallace’s cipher, his companion shadow, quiet and watchful. He said he’d rarely even seen her speak to another man. She was focused entirely on Wallace.

  “In 1988, Wallace took her with him to visit a client in Segovia. She jumped off the Roman aqueduct. It was ruled a suicide even though a witness reported seeing a man with her on the aqueduct. Since no one could find this man, they didn’t rule it the Spanish equivalent of death by misadventure, but rather suicide.”

  “Did Tammerlane have an alibi?”

  “No. He’d already left his client.”

  Cheney shrugged. “Still, it seems suicide is probably exactly what happened. Was there a reason for her to kill herself?”

  “August said she was unstable, that Wallace tried to hide the extent of her illness, that he tried to protect her from talk. I guess she finally broke. So, of course the rumor mill started grinding something fierce. When the Spanish media got up to full steam, even King Juan Carlos’s name was bandied around. The king wasn’t happy about it, needless to say. Wallace left the following week, accompanied his wife’s body back to Ohio.”

  Cheney asked, “Where is August buried?”

  “In Connecticut, outside of Hartford. That’s where he was born and grew up, where his elderly mother still resides. He wanted to be cremated, he even wrote it in his will, and so I had it done here. His mother hasn’t spoken to me since then because she’d wanted to bury him next to his brother and sister, and his father.
”

  Cheney fell silent for a moment. Then he reached out and took her hand again. “Julia, let me say this fiat out. I know you didn’t kill your husband, so don’t ever wonder about that, all right?”

  There was that surge of gratitude toward him again. She smiled at him, leaned close—”You wanna guess Wallace Tammerlane’s real name?”

  “Bernie Swartz?”

  “Worse.”

  He grinned at her vivid face. “I give.”

  “Actis Hollyrod.”

  “Come on, Julia. Actis? What kind of a name is that?”

  “His parents must have been spaced out on drugs when he was born, don’t you think?”

  “Something for sure. Actis. What a thing to do to a kid.”

  “Another thing, Cheney. Wallace likes young girls.”

  “So do a lot of older men. Wait, don’t tell me he’s a pedophile.”

  “Oh no, certainly not, but he appears very partial to females who haven’t quite yet reached voting age.”

  “Do you know this for certain? Or are these rumors in the psychic world? Or did his colleagues simply read his mind and see visions of what he was doing?”

  She cocked her head to one side, sending her hair falling beside her face. “Do I hear a bit of snark in your tone?”

  “I’m trying to be open about all of it. When did Wallace start preferring younger women?”

  “I’m not sure. I hope it was after his wife died. August found it funny. He’d say that even though I was way over-the-hill for Wallace, he, August, still appreciated me.”

  Cheney noticed her eyes then, maybe because of the way she’d angled her head toward him. Her eyes, a quite nice light green, were bright today. He thought of the woman he’d saved the previous week—pale, hunched down, drawn in on herself. She’d changed, and the change had begun when she’d saved herself. She still looked thin, but not fragile, leached-out thin—she looked sleek and strong. She looked ready to vibrate, she was so solidly in the present, focused and involved. Yes, involved, that was it, no longer a victim, no longer helpless.