The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  Hair of the dog, he liked to call it. Really, during these protracted booze binges that had become a defining feature of his life since he’d shed any vestiges of responsibility, alcohol had become both disease and cure. He was intensely interested in finding some magic elixir to calm his zinging nerves. He felt a bit desperate, like he could crawl out of his own skin. He thought briefly about the curative powers of a leap from the hotel window to put a permanent stop to the infernal vibration of body and thought, but he dismissed the idea as beyond his fortitude to execute.

  “Sonuvabitch.” He surveyed the impressive collection of empty mini-bottles en route to the mini-fridge in his hotel room. No wonder he was in rough shape. He opened the fridge door, steadying himself on the adjacent wall.

  Empty.

  This was going to be a problem. Cologne wasn’t Las Vegas. There was no place to get a drink before the restaurants opened, an infinite number of minutes away.

  He found a few mini-bottles with visible dregs and drained them into his mouth. There was barely enough alcohol to sting his tongue, much less sedate his nervous system, which was on fire by now. He felt like his entire body was a waking limb.

  Could he raid the hotel bar? Get the deskman to put it on his tab? Jesus, he hoped so. Then he recalled that he had somehow managed to book himself at what must have been the only hotel in Germany not to have its own bar. Goddammit.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, ran his hands through his hair, and tried to relax. He should really just man up and deal with the withdrawal symptoms for a few days, he thought, just get it out of his system. It wouldn’t be that bad, really, and he was overdue to dry out anyway.

  But he wasn’t up for that kind of thing at the moment. A man had been bashed to death in his bed less than twenty-four hours earlier. Kittredge knew in his bones that he didn’t have the strength to dry out while trying to deal with all of that.

  Back to the problem at hand: booze, now, before his brain shook itself out of his ears.

  Kittredge’s eyes wandered to the door conjoining his room to the adjacent one. He hadn’t gone anywhere since three the previous afternoon, and he hadn’t heard anyone enter or leave the other room. He was pretty sure there was no one staying next door.

  So he did what any serious booze hound in dire straits would do. He forced the lock, broke into the vacant room next door, and kidnapped an armful of mini-bottles. He didn’t hold them for ransom. He killed four of them within half an hour. He didn’t even bother to pour the first two over ice. He just needed them in his bloodstream, stat.

  He relaxed. He could breathe again. He could smile. His thoughts made sense. His hands stopped their unbearable shaking.

  Gotta break the cycle, he thought to himself.

  Maybe tomorrow. No need to rush into anything. Sobriety could wait. It would always be there for him, whenever he got ready for it. He had way too much work to do today.

  In fact, there was no time like the present. He filled an empty water bottle half full of tap water, then added in the contents of three mini-bottles of vodka. Thus fortified, he exited his room for the hotel lobby.

  Upon his arrival, which, bolstered by the surge of smile-inducing booze in his veins, felt an awful lot like unbridled opportunity, he asked the deskman to point out the computer room.

  It wasn’t a room, per se, as much as an alcove. It featured two computers, both well past their prime. Kittredge availed himself of the one further from the door, took a healthy swig of his doctored water, and set about sleuthing. “Sergio Delafuentes Copenhagen,” he asked the world’s most intelligent organism.

  Google had many millions of suggestions for him in response. Perhaps he was interested in Sergio’s, a Copenhagen tapas diner. Or, perhaps he meant Sergio De La Fuentes, a deceased Spanish luminary who had once wowed staid Copenhagen crowds with a rousing one-man stage show, which had run for two weeks and then folded.

  Kittredge wasn’t interested in those things, or in any of the other helpful Google suggestions his patience permitted him to peruse.

  He changed his tack. Inspector Strauss had mentioned that Delafuentes, or De La Fuentes, however the hell Sergio might have spelled it, wasn’t Sergio’s original last name. And Strauss had also asked whether Kittredge had ever been to Copenhagen. What if Sergio was a Copenhagen native? What if he was born there?

  Kittredge decided he’d search Copenhagen’s birth records, which had, Kittredge learned, been the object of a large digitization effort that had begun in 2002. The records were in Danish, sadly, but a foreign language was no obstacle at five a.m. with a healthy buzz going.

  Kittredge estimated Sergio’s age to be between twenty-four and thirty. He did the math, and searched for everyone named Sergio who was born in Copenhagen between the appropriate years.

  The little ball whirled in front of him while the server searched through the Danish archives. He wondered, was he completely off-base? Was he wasting his time? Had Sergio ever set foot in Copenhagen? Was that smug bastard Strauss just jerking his chain with that Copenhagen question? Kittredge didn’t know any of those answers, but it felt good to be doing something.

  Seventeen. There were seventeen Sergios born in Copenhagen in the six-year span that Kittredge had defined in his search. That was a lot of Sergios, actually, but he supposed Copenhagen was a big town, and it had to have some immigrants who were willing to name their kid Sergio. It would have been a stupid name for a Dane, he thought absently as he began writing down their details. Sergio Javier Altaveda. Sergio Vazquez Delacruz. He was careful to check the spelling of each name. An error could misspell a person right out of existence, at least as far as Google was concerned.

  He wasn’t a private investigator, and he really hadn’t thought through what he might do with a list of Danish Sergios.

  He hatched an elegant, brilliant plan, if he did say so himself. He decided to phone each of them. If they answered the phone, they weren’t dead, thereby making them the wrong Sergio. He would cross all living Sergios off of his list, and try to learn more about the dead one. Or ones. How many of the seventeen could have died? They weren’t that old yet. Consequently, almost all of them should be alive, Kittredge figured, which would cut down on the false leads.

  False leads. Listen to him, thinking like a detective, using detective-speak. He smirked to himself, finishing the final name, and deciding that he’d written each of them legibly enough to read at some later time. He wasn’t certain when that might be, as he felt as though this particular round of motivated initiative had run his course, and he was now interested in sex, food, or a nap. Or all three. The world was his oyster. The sun hadn’t even risen yet. Possibilities were limitless. Swallow more vodka, already.

  What was the buzzing in his pants?

  Goddamn phone. “Hello?”

  “Herr Kittredge?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Polizeikommissar Jürgen Strauss. I’m sorry to disturb you so early on a Saturday. I need you to come down to the station right away, please.”

  Kittredge found himself presently in a new interrogation room. He still had his vodka-water bottle with him, which bolstered both courage and resolve. It also wafted a distinctive smell, which didn’t escape Polizeikommissar Jürgen Strauss. “Have you been drinking this morning?” Strauss asked.

  “Maybe a nip,” Kittredge replied. “To take a bit of the edge off. The weekend didn’t start out so great, as you know.”

  “Do you frequently drink before noon?”

  “Only if I’m awake.”

  Strauss didn’t laugh. Such a Kraut, Kittredge thought. Wouldn’t know a joke if it crawled up his ass and farted a polka.

  “Would you say you have an alcohol problem?”

  Kittredge smiled. “Only when I can’t find any alcohol. Otherwise, no problem.”

  An impatient look crossed Strauss’ face. “Herr Kittredge, people who have been drinking make decisions they otherwise might not make. They do things they might not otherwise do
. Do you see why this is a concern?”

  “Are you trying to imply something?”

  Strauss stared hard into Kittredge’s eyes. “Only that the facts in this case seem to point in one direction. Yours.”

  “I didn’t beat Sergio to death,” Kittredge said. “We’ve been over this a dozen times already.”

  “Actually, we’ve been over it three times,” Strauss said. “But here is the problem. You had been drinking heavily, your alibi is but a single person who might also have been your accomplice, and our lab just informed me that your fingerprints are all over the murder weapon.”

  Kittredge’s eyes widened. “Murder weapon?”

  “A forty millimeter Howitzer shell. Left over from the Great War.”

  “My umbrella stand?” Kittredge asked slowly, recognition in his voice.

  Strauss shrugged his shoulders. “A large brass cylinder, a third of a meter long, five kilos, with a sharp, heavy edge at the end. Herr Delafuentes’ blood was all over it. And your fingerprints.”

  Kittredge shook his head. “It’s my goddamn umbrella stand. Whose fingerprints do you think would be on it?”

  Strauss looked impatient again. “Herr Kittredge, there are only your fingerprints on the shell casing. Nobody else’s.”

  “Maybe the guy used gloves. I’m telling you, Franz, I didn’t kill Sergio. I was actually really excited to have sex with him again when Nora and I found him murdered.”

  Strauss scrunched his eyes. “Please stop calling me Franz. And if someone else had used gloves to grip the shell casing, they would have smeared, smudged, or otherwise obscured the fingerprints that were found on the shell. Your fingerprints, however, were not obscured in any such way.”

  Kittredge sat back in his chair. The breath left his lungs, and with it, his entire body seemed to deflate. He took another swig of vodka water. He noted Strauss watching him, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Killing Sergio? The idea was simply absurd. What motive could he possibly have? And what kind of mental midget bludgeons someone to death at his own house, then calls the police? It just didn’t make any sense.

  A thought struck. “What about my credit card company?” Kittredge asked. “Did you talk to them? I paid for breakfast with Nora.”

  Strauss nodded. “That is the only reason I have not arrested you.” He looked hard at Kittredge again. “Yet.”

  Kittredge shook his head. “Listen, think about this. What kind of an asshole kills someone in cold blood, then calls the cops? If I had done it, why wouldn’t I just run, get out of town?”

  “People do strange things, Herr Kittredge.”

  “But not me! I didn’t do a damned thing to Sergio. I didn’t even know him, except for a few hours in a bar and a few hours in bed.”

  “There were no signs of forced entry, Herr Kittredge. Does anyone else have a key to your apartment?”

  Kittredge shook his head.

  “And you haven’t lent your key to anyone recently?”

  Kittredge started to shake his head again, but then he had a realization. “Holy shit,” he said. “Nora. Nora borrowed my key, yesterday morning. She left her purse in my apartment and ran back to get it. Do you think she could have had something to do with…”

  “Did you time her absence?” Strauss asked.

  Kittredge shook his head.

  “Was she distraught when she returned?” Again, no. “Out of breath?” Not that Kittredge could remember.

  “She probably took the elevator back up to the seventh floor,” Kittredge conjectured. “She wasn’t out of breath, and she wasn’t gone but a minute or two.”

  “You’d be surprised how little time it takes to crush someone’s skull, Herr Kittredge.”

  “Do you really think that Nora killed Sergio? I mean, look at the size of her. She probably couldn’t even lift that shell casing.”

  Strauss exhaled. “Herr Kittredge, at this point, I don’t officially think anything. When was the last time you spoke with her?”

  Kittredge thought. “It was right before you guys interrogated us yesterday.”

  “And you haven’t seen or spoken with her since then?” Strauss asked.

  Kittredge shook his head.

  “You didn’t call her to talk about your evening,” Strauss asked, eyebrows arched, “or to talk about your mutual sex partner, whom you discovered together, dead and bloody in your bed?”

  Kittredge shook his head again. “I don’t have her number.”

  Strauss was incredulous. “You spent the night with her, but didn’t get her number?”

  “We hadn’t said our goodbyes yet,” Kittredge said. “Everything got crazy after we found Sergio, and we never exchanged information.” He looked at Strauss. “Do you know how to get in touch with her?”

  “Of course,” Strauss said.

  “Can you give me her number?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Will you at least relay a message for me?” Kittredge asked.

  “Did you really just ask whether I would relay a message from one person of interest in a murder case to another person of interest in the same murder case?”

  Kittredge grimaced. “I see your point.”

  “Herr Kittredge, I must advise you that you must not, under any circumstances, leave Cologne.”

  Kittredge looked at Strauss. “I’m free to go?”

  “Unless there is more you’d like to tell me.”

  “I’d like to tell you who the hell did this to Sergio. But I obviously don’t know.”

  “It’s not so obvious to me what you do and don’t know, Herr Kittredge. Please remain available.”

  Kittredge rose, gathered his bottle of vodka water, and walked unsteadily out of the interrogation room.

  9

  Evelyn Paulson stared blankly at the droning television in the hospital waiting room. She had endured the lengthy decontamination process and doffed her hazmat suit to take care of a pressing biological need, and she hadn’t yet mustered the will to suit up again in order to return to her vigil at little Sarah’s bedside.

  What a nightmare. Wasn’t Sarah’s last gymnastics meet just three weeks earlier? Sarah had earned a place on the podium for her balance beam and floor routines, and Sarah had positively beamed with pride. Her body was strong, supple, flexible — many times more so than the average pop-tart-gobbling nine-year-old American kid. Evelyn shook her head, images of Sarah’s ravaged body lying bent and decimated in the hotel room, a machine now oxygenating the blood that had pumped with such pride and athleticism a scant couple of weeks earlier.

  This on top of Sarah’s father. They’d lost him last year. He was forty-two. The cancer had been at stage four when he started having symptoms. He had died a miserable, painful death within two months of diagnosis.

  Evelyn didn’t know what she was going to do. She’d lost touch with her family over the years, and she felt completely alone. Evelyn tried to breathe deeply. Her chest felt heavy, constricted. How had it come to this? A playground fall, a successful surgery to repair a bad break, except that it had opened the door for the deadliest bacteria anyone had ever heard of. The universe was hostile, cold, mean. Worse than that, really. It was totally indifferent.

  A familiar face appeared on the television screen. It was one of the doctors from the hospital where Sarah was being treated. He was on television, being interviewed about something. Evelyn rose and found the volume control, turning it up so she could hear.

  “This is the most virulent strain of bacteria any of us has ever seen,” the doctor said. “We’re taking all necessary precautions and then some, and we’re providing the finest care within modern medicine’s capacity to provide, but we’re still seeing mortality rates higher than Ebola.”

  Tears welled in Evelyn’s eyes for the thousandth time. The horror of Sarah’s sudden and devastating illness was certainly real enough, but there was a definitiveness about the doctor’s mien, a certainty regarding the deadliness of
the disease, that suddenly made Evelyn sure that Sarah would never recover. Deadlier than Ebola.

  The newscast flashed to another distinguished-looking man, standing in front of a large sign that read “Centers for Disease Control.” Dr. Fred Farnsworth, the caption read. He reassured the public in unconvincing tones that current developments involving medication-resistant bacteria were being investigated to the fullest extent of the CDC’s ability, and that while all appropriate precautions should certainly be taken, there was no cause for undue concern. While the disease was serious and deadly, the number of cases was small, and the likelihood of an outbreak was miniscule.

  Evelyn recognized the language as that of a government official doing his best to convince people not to panic, that everything would be okay. Something inside her knew that the exact opposite was true.

  “Ms. Paulson,” a familiar voice said. “Ms. Paulson, I need to speak with you.” It was Sarah’s internist. “This way, please.”

  The doctor led Evelyn to a private room near the waiting area. Evelyn recognized the move to a more private setting as a precursor to more bad news.

  “I’m afraid Sarah has taken a turn for the worse,” the doctor said.

  Evelyn began to shake. “I haven’t been gone more than half an hour. How could she have taken a turn?”

  “We’ve been by for an examination. Her vital signs indicate that she is deep in endotoxic shock.”

  “She’s been deep in endotoxic shock for days,” Evelyn said.

  The doctor nodded. “Unfortunately, the disease is progressing, and the bacteria continues to multiply inside her system. I’m afraid that Sarah is now in a coma. Her autonomic nervous system has been affected by the disease, and her life is now being completely sustained by the respiration equipment.”

  Evelyn’s shoulders shook, and tears flowed freely down her face. Losing Sarah would be devastating in a way that Evelyn couldn’t recover from. She was sure of it. Since her husband’s passing, Sarah’s smile lit Evelyn’s days and lifted her spirits and helped her find her own strength. She didn’t know how she could possibly carry on without her daughter. Sarah had become her reason for living, for enduring the heartache and heartbreak that her life had become, and she couldn’t envision life without her little girl.