He opened the front door, which opened straight into the sitting room. The latter was large, with dark oak flooring and a large Persian rug.
In the centre of the floor was a large comfortable looking couch made from brown fabric, that sat opposite a large fireplace, above which was a wall-mounted sixty-five-inch flat-screen television.
Next to the kitchenette ran a long corridor leading to three bedrooms and two bathrooms. A large panoramic window gave a breathtaking view of the city and the park below.
Since his parents’ murder some eleven years ago, John Steel had become lord of the manor of the English village where the family came from, as well as inheriting the sizeable estate, which included prosperous businesses.
He had no need to work for a living, he certainly didn’t need to be a detective.
John could have just stayed and taken over the family businesses and properties, but leading a pampered, privileged existence was not something he wanted. John Steel had served with the British Special Forces, but after the tragedy that had claimed the lives of so many of his family members, he knew he had to disappear for a while. His wife had been the daughter of an American senator, who had helped John to join the highly prestigious US Navy SEALs. Here he could disappear until he was ready to turn the tables.
Steel had been a British soldier, then part of an elite naval military unit, and now he was a cop. But in the end, he was just a man who wanted justice for his family and for all those who had been killed by the organisation known as SANTINI.
This was the organisation that had hunted him for so long.
But now he was the hunter and not the prey.
*
Steel leaned into the large walk-in shower and adjusted the water’s flow, and slowly he stripped the tattered clothing from his muscular body and threw them onto the floor instead of the clothes hamper: they were as good as rags now, battered and torn from the events of the previous night.
He stepped under the warm water and let it flow over his body, his flesh tensed and relaxed as the soothing flow engulfed him. His body was more like that of an athlete, the muscles taut as steel cable under his firm tanned flesh.
John Steel stood for a moment with his arms propped against the wall and just let the water pass over him. The liquid felt refreshing as it ran over his body but he also knew he could not stay in there forever, he had work to do.
John towelled off and then wrapped the cloth around his middle before wiping the steam from the large mirror that hung above the sink. He looked up at himself.
His fingers reached up to the round scars on his body. Six exit wounds: there was one in each shoulder and one in his stomach, and these ran down in an almost V-shape, and there were three in the centre near his sternum. The strange pattern made the shape of a bird or the ‘Mark of the Phoenix’ his Japanese gardener-and-saviour had called it. Not that Steel could ever see this pattern. But then he was never good at seeing the star configurations either. No matter how many times his father had showed him diagrams in books of Taurus, Pisces or any of the other constellations of the zodiac, while trying to explain how the brightest stars could be viewed as being joined together to make an image. Steel smiled as he thought back to his dad’s frustration every time little John Steel would shrug and tell him, “I don’t get it.”
He had virtually died with his family that day, but something had dragged him back to the land of the living and so began his rebirth.
As he stared at himself, observing his dead, soulless emerald eyes, his vision began to blur and he slipped into another place.
He saw darkness at first and then a bright light, as if a torch had been shone directly at him. Then he felt the warmth from that summer’s day as if he were actually there, the day of his return from the tour of duty. He knew about the surprise party even though he wasn’t meant to—he was sure that his mother had let the news slip out, as a way of ensuring that he came home.
The driver of the black cab was chatting away about something, but his mind was elsewhere as they drove down the long drive to the family home. Home? He often smiled at the thought of the word. Everyone else had a home but he grew up in the kind of place that people paid money to visit on a weekend.
The massive estate had been in the family since the time of Charles I, the same length of time there’d been a ‘Lord Steel’.
He stared out of the cab’s window as he rested his head against the cool glass, taking in the surreal view of trees and greenery, things he had taken for granted until he had spent so much time with British military forces in the desert.
Steel’s hands gripped the sides of the washbasin as his memory took him through gunfire and death. So many lay dead on the back lawn of his home as the masked gunmen went through, killing as many people as they could.
Steel had, in turn, taken out many of the mercenaries, enabling some of the guests to escape the horror, but so many of them he was too late for, including his father, who lay dead on the patio.
His memory took him to a dark place once again: the attic. The darkness of the room had been broken by streams of light that beamed through small skylight windows.
He stopped. Before him lay a woman with her back to him but he knew who it was, his beloved wife. Steel’s knees buckled under the strain of the sight.
Slowly he made his way to her as if some great force was pulling him back, John fell to his knees before her and picked her up and stared into her pale, beautiful face.
His cries of anger and emotional pain rang through the attic like the keening of an injured beast. Steel’s heart stilled as she opened her eyes, and her pale blue eyes stared up at him with a look of fear and joy.
A loud explosion filled the air, six shots rang out from a hand cannon. There was laughter, pain, darkness. And then a voice repeating one name: SANTINI.
Steel cried out and stepped back from the washbasin, but no tears came from his eyes, there was only the burning sensation, almost as if his tears—if he had any—would be of fire. He looked down at the gushing water from the space were the basin had once been and reached underneath for the stopcock, then switched off the water.
“Oh great, not again!” he mumbled as he mopped up the water, hoping that the neighbours downstairs didn’t complain, as they had on the other occasions when he’d torn the basin from the wall.
TWENTY-SIX
The figure of Megan Armstrong wasbathed in shadow as she stood next to a group of street vendors and blended in as though she wasn’t even there.
She had followed Judge Mathews for most of the morning and now she was sitting in the same restaurant as before having a coffee with her ‘mystery man’. Megan knew it wasn’t an affair—to her it looked more like business.
Megan watched for a while, still hoping to catch a glimpse of the man’s face or anything to identify him, but he was masked by a giant ceiling support pillar. Her gaze would shift to the street just in case the goons from the other day had come back. She was still puzzled as to who they were and what they wanted.
At first she had thought it was a ‘detail’—an officially authorised tailing operation—that the judge had put on her just in case of trouble, but that would mean that the judge knew about her, and due to Mathews’s activities that didn’t seem to be the case.
Megan’s gaze fell back on the judge, who now had a look of sheer terror on her face as she stood up. The terror turned to anger as she stormed out of the dining room.
The young woman smiled at the judge’s misfortune and got ready to continue the pursuit. A black town car pulled up and she watched with disappointment as Mathews got in.
The watcher bit her bottom lip out of frustration and decided to call it a day anyway. It was past lunchtime and she was beginning to feel hungry.
She got her bearings and smiled fondly as she knew that just a block away her uncle (he was no relation, just a hot dog salesman who had taken her in and looked after her), had his stand.
Megan started to walk, keeping wi
th the crowds of people. The walk would take her a good ten minutes if she was lucky.
She approached the corner into the main street and turned around it. Megan stopped halfway along the road and watched as she saw a man in a black suit talking to Uncle Vince. She waited, watching from afar, as the man gave her uncle a roll of cash before disappearing into a black sedan which sped away into the daytime traffic.
The watching girl slipped back around the corner, her back leaning against the hard stone of the building for support.
Had she been given up by the very man she trusted so dearly? Maybe it was nothing. Megan knew that Vince was more than a hot-dog salesman—a lot more.
Vince was ‘connected’—meaning he had links with the Mafia—and he did favours for people. To say he was directly linked to the mob was perhaps not entirely accurate, but she suspected that it was not far from the truth. That was probably why she felt so safe around him.
Megan exhaled a lungful of air, as if she was blowing out the bad thoughts. If she was going to know what had just happened there would be only one way to find out, and that was to simply ask him.
She walked round the corner and headed towards the vendor with a smile, and as she approached she could see Vince mixing the onions in a small metal pan.
“Hey, Uncle, what’s on special today?” she asked.
Vince looked over and saw the girl walking towards him. “Megan, where the hell have you been? You found another hot dog stand?” he said, putting on a pretend ‘hurt’ look. The two of them embraced and he returned to his stand and started to put together a dog for her.
“So, what you been up to?” Vince asked. “I ain’t seen you in a while.”
Megan nodded and took the fully loaded hot dog from him. “I got a job. It’s only night work but still it’s a job.”
Vince looked at her with a proud smile on his face. “Good for you, kid. So what is this job that keeps you away from me?” He waited until she had finished her mouthful of food.
“It’s a cleaning job at a school, the pay isn’t much and the hours suck but it’s a start.”
He nodded, the proud look still on his face. “You know, if you need anything you just have to ask, okay?”
The look in her eyes was a mixture of happiness and relief: relief he was not who she suspected him to be.
The cash he’d just taken was probably payment for something else and nothing to do with her. Megan gave him a hug and a small peck on the cheek.
“I have to go but I’ll come back tomorrow, okay?” she told him.
The big man laughed and waved her goodbye as she ran off back the way she came, the hot dog in her hand.
His face became serious as he took out his cell phone. “It’s me,” he said into the phone. “Yeah. She was just here. She said she will be back tomorrow.”
*
Detective John Steel arrived back at the precinct at around five o’clock holding two coffees—the plumbing work to repair his bathroom had taken longer than expected. As he stepped out of the elevator McCall looked over to him and raised her watch arm jokingly.
He just gave her a smile and shrugged.
“So, did our guy say anything?” Steel asked as he passed over one of the fresh brews then sat on the chair next to her desk. McCall smiled as he made himself comfortable—it was a warming sort of smile, as though things were back to how they used to be.
“What?” she said, shaking her head, snapping out of her daydream after realising he had said something.
“Oh, nothing really,” Steel went on. “I just wondered what he had explained to you. Strikes me he was just some poor bastard they had set up.” He looked across the office to where the visibly shaken figure of Garry Sanchez was being led to a waiting room and handed a coffee by a large black uniformed officer.
Garry nodded as if to thank the giant of a cop before being left alone to gather his thoughts.
“What are you thinking?” Samantha asked as she sensed that Steel was thinking hard about something.
“Garry Sanchez said that he was contacted by a cop to meet him there, with reference to his missing daughter.” Steel sat back into the chair, and his black leather three-quarter length jacket creaked as it was pressed against the backrest.
“Yeah so someone lied to get him there, using the idea of meeting a cop to lure him there.” McCall was tired. It had been a long day and she just wanted to go home and relax in a hot bath.
“Yes, I get that. But how did they know he was looking for his daughter?”
McCall sat back in her chair and shook her head. Her brown hair shone as it caught the light from the ceiling lamps. “Beats me. Maybe they followed him, maybe they have his kid and that’s how they knew to set him up!” She saw the grin appear on John’s face as if he had had the same thought all along.
In a way she was relieved that he wasn’t going on the ‘dirty cop’ route, plus that made more sense. However, that led to the question of how did they know to take that particular kid? Steel looked at the white evidence board and took a sip from his cardboard cup.
“There is something wrong here and we are just not seeing it,” he commented.
McCall gave him a puzzled look as he studied the board.
“Someone is going to a lot of trouble to stop us looking into this, don’t you think?” he suggested.
She had to admit that things had been a little close of late: the meeting in the parking lot where she’d almost been killed, and then last night’s attempted ambush.
“I know one thing. The new chief of detectives wants constant updates on this,” McCall told him, nodding towards the captain’s office. They could see him waving his hands about as he spoke on the phone to someone. The two detectives had the feeling that it was the chief on the other end.
“Are the guys at the morgue?” John asked, looking over at Tooms’s desk.
McCall spun around to face in the same direction. “No, they have gone to the security guard’s apartment, hoping to find something. I think your girlfriend went as well.”
Steel scowled at her, which made her smile wickedly.
“Trust me, she is not my girlfriend,” Steel told her firmly. McCall could sense his anger just at the thought of such a thing.
“Yeah, well whatever. So they are looking into him much more closely. If that guy did have anything to do with it there might be a trail they can follow.”
Steel stood up and studied the pictures of the victims once again, this time more closely.
“Why were they injected with truth serum?” she went on. “It don’t make sense. They didn’t know each other by all accounts, so why do it?”
Steel shook his head. He had a million theories but that’s all they were. The killer could have been smart and done it just to add a false clue, but Steel felt that was unlikely. They knew something.
“Yeah, very Cold War stuff, you know KGB, CIA. Hey, why don’t we ask your—?” McCall stopped. She could see that the joke had run its course and Steel had real anger in his face, and this led to another question. What the hell had that woman done to him all those years ago?
McCall quickly apologised and got back to her real reasoning, hoping to change the subject. Hell, the last thing she needed was an angry John Steel. She had seen a glimpse of it and she really didn’t like what she saw. It was the sort of rage you would see from a rabid T-Rex on heat.
“Anyway they stopped doing that years ago, right?” She chuckled.
Steel leant over and grabbed the files on the victims. “Ten years ago, something happened to these men. Look. Our schoolteacher leaves his job and bums out and our reporter starts doing a story from something that happened ten years ago.”
McCall was still sitting with her cup half tilted towards her mouth as she listened to his idea. It was a theory that made a lot of sense.
“Okay. We need to find out what happened back then,” Steel went on.
McCall shot him an evil look: she had plans—more specifically she had
plans with Daniel Cruise. “Look, Steel, I have plans for tonight, we can worry about all this tomorrow.”
The Englishman looked at the time. It was getting on and it had been a hell of a day. He nodded and shot her a smile. “Go home, Sam, and I’ll take care of this.”
McCall blew him a kiss to thank him, and Steel smiled like a Cheshire cat.
“So who is the lucky man?” Steel thought for a moment then his jaw dropped. He shot to his feet and grabbed McCall. “It’s that editor bloke, isn’t it? You can’t go out with him—he’s a suspect.”
Sam McCall looked confused at this news. “Since when?” she asked suspiciously. The whole thing sounded like a sordid plan of Steel’s to ruin her evening.
“Since phone records showed that our victim Edward called Daniel at his office but he never picked up; however, Edward tried your boyfriend’s cell phone and he did pick that up.”
McCall grabbed the piece of paper with the information on it and read the incriminating facts. Her face went pale as she read the rest. “It says here it pinged off a tower near the victim’s location. In fact he was close to both victims’ locations on the night they died.”
Steel felt bad about telling her but knew that she would find out sooner or later.
McCall sat down hard, making the chair slide back slightly, her eyes staring into nothingness as her brain tried to sort out a simple explanation, but came up short of one.
“Look, Sam, I am sure there is a simple explanation for this and that he is innocent,” John Steel said calmly. “However, for now we have to treat him as a suspect.”
McCall nodded and shot him a broken smile. She knew he was right and that he was only trying to save her from a massive mistake.
Samantha looked over at the Edward Gibbs file, which lay on top of the stack of others. “So what the hell happened ten years ago that started all this?”
False Witness (John Steel series Book 3) Page 15
