Kill Chain

by Meg Gardiner

  Sweat shone on her face. “Rio’s doing something to him.”

  “Who put you up to this?” He put out a hand to steady himself. “What did you put in that joint?”

  “You don’t understand. We have to get Christian out of here. We have to get him away from Rio.”

  My head was thundering. I knew now why she hadn’t shot him: She was pregnant. She couldn’t bring herself to kill the father of her child. That was what she had turned her back on.

  “She’s doing something to him, dosing him with something. That’s why she came to Bangkok.”

  The gun wavered, and Hank stared at her. “She came to see me.”

  “But that’s not the only reason. Christian isn’t healthy.”

  Sanger’s face was suffused with blood. Half-drugged, he staggered toward Jax, gun hanging heavily from his hand. She tried to crawl out of his way but he loomed over her.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

  “Hank, she’s grooming him.”

  In the background, the doorbell rang. Sanger glanced out the bedroom door at the living room, alarmed, and back down at Jax.

  “Quiet. Absolutely quiet, or I put the next one . . .” He aimed the gun at her head.

  The doorbell rang again, and then whoever it was began knocking. Loudly. Dimly a young voice called out, “Hank?”

  His head snapped around. “Fuck.”

  “Hank?” The knocking stopped and there was the sound of a key turning in the lock. “Pop?”

  Sanger stage-whispered at Jax, “Not a sound, not a single sound, or I kill both of you.”

  He lurched out, shutting the bedroom door. Through the wall came the sound of a young teen’s voice.

  “Pop, how come it took you so long? Hey, I—”

  “Christian. What you doing here, mijo?”

  In the bedroom Jax tried to roll over, and a creature sound slipped from her throat. She clapped her hand over her mouth, stifling it.

  Falling back against the floor, she dug her hand into her back pocket and pulled out a phone. In the other room Sanger and Christian kept talking, the teenager chattering away, Sanger trying to shunt him off, get him to leave. Jax dialed and put the phone to her ear. When she spoke it was in a rushed whisper, holding back sobs.

  “I’m down. It’s blown,” she said. “I need evac. Get me out of here, now.”

  She fell back to the floor.

  The video jumped ahead: Jax had managed to roll over and crawl toward the bed. A dark slick of blood traced her path.

  Out in the living room, Sanger said, “Let’s go get something to eat. Come on. I’ll take you out.”

  “Can’t we stay here? I hate going out. I go out all the time. Come on, Hank.”

  Without warning came the sound of the front door being thrown open. Jax looked toward the wall, unable to see what was happening in the living room.

  Sanger said sharply, “What are you doing here?”

  “Don’t move. Gun on the floor, slide it over to me.”

  My stomach knotted. It was my father’s voice.

  “What’s going on?” Christian said.

  “Kid, move away from him and come over here. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  Sanger said, “Christian. Stay where you are.”

  “Hank, don’t even think about it. Where is she?” Dad said.

  “Fucking Judas. You’re in on this?”

  “Sit down and lace your hands behind your head.”

  “Fuck you, Delaney. You can—”

  Gunfire barked. Jax threw her arms over her head. Christian began screaming. And screaming.

  Dad shouted, “Down on the floor, now. You want to live, get down and put your hands on your head, Christian—goddammit.”

  Another gunshot split the air.

  The bedroom door flew open. Christian charged in, his face wild with horror. He stopped short, gaping at Jax.

  She screamed, “Phil.”

  Christian threw a look back toward the living room. A cry flowed from his throat, and he careered past Jax out to the veranda. From the living room my father came charging after him, his monstrous handgun aimed at the bedroom door. Christian leaped over the veranda railing and took off across the garden.

  Dad flattened himself against the wall outside the bedroom and peered around the doorjamb, gripping the gun in both hands. Crouching low, he spun through the doorway and ran to the French doors. He scanned the terrain. Christian was gone.

  Pulling the shutters closed, Dad holstered the gun under his windbreaker and in two strides was at Jax’s side.

  She began to cry. “I blew it.”

  “It’s okay.” He began checking her wound. “I’m getting you out of here.”

  His voice, with its slow prairie rhythms, seemed to steady her. My eyes were stinging.

  Because it wasn’t okay. None of it. Behind them, through the doorway, across the house, beyond the French doors wide-open to the sunset, Hank Sanger lay splayed on the far edge of the veranda that ran outside the living room. The left half of his face was a mass of blood and pulp. A dark lake of blood shone beneath the remains of his head.

  “Hang on; you’re going to be all right.” Dad took off his belt and cinched it around her leg as a tourniquet. She arched her back, clawing the floor, and grabbed his arm. He put a hand on her forehead.

  “I couldn’t pull the trigger. And then he . . .”

  “Save your strength.”

  He knelt, preparing to gather her up like a wounded bird. She pointed at the ceiling.

  “Camera. In the smoke detector.”

  Swiftly he climbed on a chair, pried open the smoke detector, and yanked on the wire. Though the view splintered the sound continued.

  “Phil . . . Hank’s—”

  “Dead. Single round to the head. And we’re gone.”

  For a second the video returned. My father was staring at the camera, almost at me, calm and unremorseful. With a single motion he ripped its guts out of the wall.

  The video faded out and an address appeared.

  8 Larkdown Chase

  London W8

  My screen went dark, but I kept staring at it. Christian’s wild eyes seemed to stare back, streaming grief and fear as he ran from the man who was coming to gun him down. A man he recognized, a man he had stopped near the jukebox in his mother’s club. I pressed my hands to my face but still saw Christian’s hungry eyes. The eyes of the raven-haired waif in Rio’s club, putting his hand on my father’s chest. Christian Sanger was one of Rio’s prostitutes.

  Christian awoke to the sense that the house had tipped over. Something . . . What was it? He opened his eyes and the sun pierced his vision. It was in the wrong place in the sky. It was morning.

  Out in the kitchen, one of the girls was screaming.

  Rio was sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, hands clasped, lips pressed white.

  “What?” he said.

  “They killed Bliss.”

  The pain wrenched his chest, and a sound blurted from his throat. He balled the sheets in his fists and pressed them to his mouth, but the sound kept erupting, a sound like Bliss’s dog made after she disciplined it with the cane. Rio looked at him as if he were a dog himself, and he had to make the noise stop, make it stop.

  “You’re sure?” he said.

  “Yes. Shiver saw her body.”

  He bunched the sheets and bit down on them, telling himself to stop it. He pulled his knees to his chest. Rio put a hand on his leg.

  “I know she was like a sister to you, but get up.”

  He rolled over. Sisters, as if that were the problem. All their girls thought of him in a sisterly way. Like doing my brother, one of them even said after they made it. Freaky but boring.

  “The file. What about the file?” he said.

  “Shiver got part of it.”

  “Only part?”

  Rio stood up, pulling the covers off him. “You need to get moving. The Delaney girl is going to Lond
on. Jax Rivera put her little whelp there.”

  He sat up. “London? We’ve pinpointed the location?”

  “Shiver is on her way, but you can be sure Rivera is too.” She urged him out of bed. “And Shiver listened to a video call that Delaney made. Talking to a man somewhere around here.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Fuckable, smart, and full of attitude.”

  “In a wheelchair?”

  “She said nothing about that.” She mulled it over. “It may be the man we heard that Rivera married.”

  “So why was Delaney talking to him?”

  “That I don’t know. It may not be him, but watch out. Presume he is dangerous.”

  She was pushing him toward the dresser, getting out briefs and socks and a clean sweater for him.

  “Me? Why me?”

  “I’m sending Shiver to London.”

  “To do what?”

  God, why did she have to give him that look, like, What did I do to deserve you? Nobody killed Rio’s girls and got away with it.

  “She’ll make it painful, won’t she?” he said.

  His mother stepped toward him. “No. You will. Do her, then do her, split her wide-open. Can you handle that?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Get dressed. You’re going too.”

  25

  Thursday

  Standing in the vein of passengers winding toward Immigration at Heathrow, I tried to focus. My joints ached, and my ears hummed with the siren call to lie down and sleep, right here on the floor. My body clock was about to blow its springs. It was early morning, judging from the sharp sun rising in the east.

  Sleep had eluded me on the endless flight in the endless night. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the horror on Christian Sanger’s young face, and the gun in my father’s hand.

  And to think I had convinced myself that Dad cared about Jax and her daughter as much as he cared about a video that caught him committing an extrajudicial killing and attempting to kill a witness to the crime. No wonder Jesse couldn’t bring himself to tell me the truth.

  The line inched forward. The family ahead of me was edging from fatigue to pissiness. The kids were cranky, the parents itchy for a smoke. Their twelve-year-old daughter wore track bottoms and a hot-pink T-shirt with the word JUICY written across the bust.

  Change clothes, I wanted to say.

  Mom, get your daughter out of that advertisement. Girl, change into a shirt with the Powerpuff Girls or God Save the Queen, on it anything but clothing that draws men’s eyes to your young body and announces its succulence. Juicy tells them to pull you apart and sink themselves into you. Pop, tell her she’s not up for auction. And for chrissake, keep her away from the middle-aged European men traveling alone on my flight, looking tan and sated and disreputable.

  I went to rub my eyes, and poked my fingers into the eyeglasses I was wearing. Good one, Delaney.

  Larkin. Kathleen Rowan Larkin.

  My head hummed louder and my vision swam, a headache building. Sexualized children, turned into prostituted teens. And Rio Sanger had turned out her own son.

  Down behind my heart, fear and shame were writhing. How the hell had I managed to get in this position?

  When I learned that my father had been kidnapped, I ran from the police and set out to rescue him. I set out to get the information the Sangers wanted, use it to ransom my father, and then do more. I was going to use the Riverbend file to exonerate my dad from all the smears that had been made against him. And I was going to manipulate the information to get revenge on the kidnappers, hunt them down and punish them. I thought if I got the files that Rio demanded, I would be in a strong position to do that, because I knew those files implicated Rio. I was going to copy everything, stash it someplace new and safe, and turn pertinent parts over to Tim North, the FBI, or the U.S. Attorney, and get them in on the bust.

  Fool.

  The whole time, I had been hunting down a little girl for Christian and Rio Sanger. The whole time, I had been unearthing the darkest secret of my father’s life. He had killed a man in cold blood.

  I had let desire drive me, and in response, karma had kicked my butt. Straight into a pit, which I didn’t know how to get out of. Maria Auxiliadora had remained mute on this topic.

  And deep in the guts of my laptop, the down-ticker was chewing away. I had less than three hours left. I was running out of time to get the final flash drive. The headache crawled through my skull.

  Finally I stepped up to the desk. The woman ran my passport, eyed me, asked the purpose of my visit.

  “Pleasure.”

  She stamped the passport and handed it back. Outside the terminal I stepped into seeping cold. A black cab was waiting at the curb with Jax inside.

  Detective Lily Rodriguez sat in the open doorway of her car, staring across the dark driveway at Jesse’s house. The lights were off and his truck was gone. The surf lashed the beach. Beneath the rustling of the Monterey pines, the voice on the other end of her phone was about to drive her nuts.

  “Not home, that doesn’t cut it,” Nicholas Gray said. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Find out.”

  “He didn’t go to work today, but the law firm’s not talking,” she said.

  “Make them talk,” Gray said.

  She didn’t flinch. Nicholas Gray may have been a U.S. Attorney, but he wasn’t her boss. He had no authority over her. All he could do was insult her, and if she thought hard enough, she could picture him as a gerbil she was dropping into a jar. Then Gray’s affronts sloughed right off.

  “All we know is that Evan booked a flight out of Bangkok to Malaysia but never checked in,” she said.

  Gray clucked. “Blackburn gamed you, Detective.”

  “I disagree.”

  “He’s in on this with her.”

  A skinny bald gerbil, and when she screwed the lid on the jar, he clawed helplessly at the glass. “With all due respect, that’s a stretch, sir.”

  “She’s Phil Delaney’s daughter. Delaney was a black ops type; you don’t think he levered that expertise and set his kid up to slide under the radar?” Gray paused dramatically. “Find Blackburn. He’s going to be with her.”

  “We’ll check his credit card transactions. If he’s traveling, it’ll show up.”

  “And find out where his brother is. See if you can’t apply some pressure there.”

  Lily got a sinking feeling. This was why Nicholas Gray had called her in the first place, she felt sure. It was why he wasn’t hassling one of his underlings or the Santa Barbara police, but her—because she had been the investigating officer in the case against P. J. Blackburn.

  “What about Boyd Davies?” she said.

  “What about him?”

  “His phone records. We want to find out if he’s in contact with Phil Delaney’s kidnappers.”

  “Delaney hasn’t been kidnapped. Your office is wasting time opening that investigation.”

  “He was a bounty hunter. His job was to track people down. We’re certain that he contacted these people the Sangers. We’re waiting for his phone records, and for the Las Vegas police to execute a search warrant on his office.”

  “Tell me something new.”

  “What does your office know about Rio Sanger’s background in prostitution?”

  “Your compulsive interest in this Sanger woman is a wild-goose chase. Stick to the real case, Detective.”

  Lily gazed up at the moon. “Fine. Will do.”

  “I hope that what I hear in your voice is eagerness. Get back to me.”

  Dismissed, Lily gave a little smile. The gerbil had run out of hot air left in the jar.

  “Find Jesse Blackburn, and you’ll find Evan Delaney. Get her in shackles on a capital murder warrant, and you’ll get her father to come out of hiding to help her. Got that?”

  “Yeah, I got it.” She slammed her car door. “Like a case of lice.”

  Horns were honking all around, a wave of noise be
hind and on either side, cars swerving around them. The sun was low on the horizon, blindingly bright.

  “You’re in neutral,” Jesse said. “Put it in first gear.”

  P.J. shoved on the gearshift. The transmission groaned.

  “Clutch,” Jesse said.

  This gutless rental car probably had only a couple dozen teeth on the gears, and if P.J. didn’t calm down he was going to strip them all off. A dirty white van squeezed past, the driver shouting as he weaved by inches from the nose of the car.

  “Wankers!”

  “Hey, man.” P.J. threw up his hands. “It’s not my fault.”

  Jesse grabbed the wheel. “Easy. Don’t panic.”

  P.J. gave him a look, eyes bulging. “Panic? It’s this roundabout—how does anybody get around these things?”

  They were moving at three miles an hour. The air was chill and biting.

  Jesse pointed ahead. “Just keep going. Don’t let the car stop.”

  “I told you it’s been three years since I drove a stick. And this car’s backward. How am I supposed to shift with my left hand?”

  “It would have taken them an hour to get an automatic. It was a battle we didn’t have time to fight.”

  “You were too pissed off that they didn’t have a car you could drive. You should have known, Jesse, this is . . .” He stomped on the clutch, rammed the gearshift into first, and gunned the engine.

  Jesse bent over the map, tracing their route. In his head he counted to ten, then to twenty, thinking, Stay cool. They were going to make it into the city. Give P.J. time to adjust to the car and they would pick up speed. The engine revved and P.J. went to shift, reaching out with his right hand and flipping on the windshield wipers.

  “Left hand.” He saw P.J. go pale and shut off the wipers, drifting toward the Range Rover coming up on their left. “It’s okay, just . . . Shit.”

  He flinched away from the door. There was a heavy thump and the Range Rover zoomed past. Outside his window the wing mirror hung twisted, swinging back and forth by a few wires.

  P.J.’s knuckles were glue white on the wheel. “Be quiet.”

  “Just keep going.”

  Getting there was all that mattered, and he reckoned they needed to get there in under an hour. He glanced at the speedometer: five mph.