Shit!
Moving as fast as he dared or could, he stowed the Pepsi back in the refrigerator, then rinsed the spoon and dropped it into its drawer. After crumpling the plastic cup, he shoved it into his pocket as he hopped-limped for the back door. He eased it closed behind him and found a dark corner of the backyard that allowed a good view of the kitchen.
Lights went on as Moonglow crossed the dining room and disappeared.
Where'd she go? Not straight to bed, he hoped. Too early. Maybe the bathroom?
After a couple of minutes she reappeared and he pumped a fist as she went straight to the fridge and pulled out the Diet Pepsi. He tensed as she paused and held up the bottle. Had he left any sediment? No. The roofies had been completely dissolved when he'd poured in the solution. She must be thinking she'd left more in the bottle.
She shrugged and emptied the bottle into a glass, took a long gulp, then carried the rest to somewhere else in the house.
Yes!
He'd give it time to work before he got down to business.
And then it would be bye-bye Moonglow.
18
"Come on.!"
Jack sat behind the wheel and fumed. Traffic had come to a standstill, leaving him trapped on the eastbound LIE between Mount Zion Cemetery and Maspeth. He'd passed this way just an hour ago traveling west and everything had been fine. Had to be an accident.
And then he heard sirens and saw flashing lights in his rearview mirror. A cop cruiser and an ambulance passed him on the shoulder.
Swell. An accident with injuries.
He turned off his car and reached for his phone. Better call Christy and tell her he'd be late. Just what he wanted to do: Draw this out.
No answer. Probably taking a shower, something he wished he were doing.
He plugged his iPod into the radio, selected shuffle, and let her rip. Nils-son's voice filled the car. Vicky's favorite viewing these days was a DVD of the old TV special, The Point, and Jack had become a fan of the sound track.
"This is the town and these are the people …"
19
Jeremy heard Moonglow's phone start to ring. He knew from his multiple calls tonight that her voice mail picked up after the fourth. He counted four rings.
Time to check her out.
He limped up to the dining room window and peeked in. Empty. But it of-lered a line ol sight into the living room at the Iront ol the house, and there he spotted her, sprawled on the couch.
Excellent.
He let himself in and made his way to where she lay with her eyes closed and mouth open. He nudged her.
Nothing.
Nudged her again—hard.
Nothing. Completely conked out.
Excellent.
He slipped his arms under her and lifted. Groaning with the pain in his knee, he carried her upstairs, stopping ever few steps and leaning against the wall to relieve the weight on his leg. Finally he made it to the master bathroom where he laid her gently in the tub—didn't want any bruises.
As he stepped back to stare at her, she began to snore.
Decision time: clothes on or off? Tough one. Different people did it different ways. Much as he'd love to see her naked again after all these years—what a fine piece of ass she'd been as a teenager—he decided to keep it simple.
Leaving her clothes on, he started the water, nice and warm.
While the tub was filling he returned to the kitchen where he loaded two baggies with ice cubes—Dawn's first aid for his bruises had given him this idea—then limped back upstairs. He arranged Moonglow's arms and hands on the edges of the tub, palms up, then placed an ice bag over each wrist.
During his seemingly endless years at Creighton, Jeremy had devoted a lot of time to planning his own suicide. He'd been sentenced to two consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole, so he was sure he'd never get out, and just as sure that he'd failed his daddy and the Bloodline. So what was the point of living—especially if it meant spending another thirty or forty years like that?
Of course if he'd known he was going to be let out for this drug trial, his attitude would have been different.
He'd been allowed to draw books from the Creighton library with all its medical texts, and he'd read a lot about suicide, especially accounts of failed attempts and the reasons they'd failed. Often it was ignorance—taking non-lethal doses of drugs or cutting a vein in the wrist instead of the artery, not knowing that a vein will often clot up long before the person bled to death. More often it was failure of nerve—the rope is tied to the beam and knotted around the neck, but the clown just can't make himself step off the chair; or the pistol is loaded and cocked with the muzzle pressed against the side of the head, everything in place except the guts to pull the trigger.
Jeremy had known he'd never have a chance at a gun, but getting hold of something sharp enough to slice through his skin was not all that far-fetched.
The most surefire way was to slice through one oi the big arteries in the neck, but Jeremy wasn't sure he could cut his own throat. And if he botched it—if his hand faltered and he didn't cut deep enough to get it done—he'd be on suicide watch the rest of his life.
He could slit his wrists, though. At least he thought so. So he'd studied up on wrist-slitting techniques, learning why the failures failed and the successes succeeded. The key was something called the radial artery. It lay closest to the surface at the wrist, on the near side of the base of the thumb—where doctors and nurses like to take the pulse. Put a deep long cut into one—or better yet, both—and life would pump out of you pretty damn quick.
The ice packs were his own innovation. He didn't know how far down the eight roofies had put Moonglow, so he figured the numbing effect of the cold would keep her still. The last thing he wanted was her waking up and starting to struggle when the blade bit into her arteries. The whole idea was to make this look well thought out and deliberate on her part: Her only child was pregnant and had moved out after a terrible fight. Her behavior had become increasingly weird. Finally, in a fit of depression, she took her own life.
Boo-hoo-hoo.
Poor Moonglow. Or Christy. Or whoever.
The water level had risen almost to her chin. He shut it off but left the ice packs in place a little longer—the more numb her wrists, the better. To kill time he wandered through the house, keeping an eye peeled for a certain Tal-bot's bag. Had she put that quarter mil back in the bank? If not, it sure as hell would come in handy. No good to her after tonight, that was for damn sure.
He found it lying on its side in the bottom drawer of her dresser. Take it or leave it? Who knew she had it? He, Dawn, her bank, and maybe—this was a long shot—her detective. Who had she told she was planning to use it to buy off her daughter's boyfriend? The bank? Hardly. The detective? Maybe, but he'd have no reason to believe she hadn't redeposited the money, and no way to find out.
He grabbed the bag and returned to the bathroom. He'd find a safe spot to stash it at his place for the big rainy day that was sure as hell on its way.
Okay. Let's get this over with.
He removed the ice bags, then pulled the utility knife from his pocket. He wrapped the fingers of her right hand around the handle, then guided the point of the blade toward her left wrist—she was right-handed so it made sense that she'd cut her left first. As he pushed it beneath the surface, he felt water fill his glove. Taking a breath, he made a deep, long cut along her radial artery. She gasped as crimson spurts swirled into the water. Her eyes opened and gave him a glassy stare that lasted maybe two seconds, then closed again.
Quickly he switched the knife to her left hand and sliced open her right wrist. Another gasp, and this time she twisted in the water, but that was over in a few heartbeats and she returned to snoring.
He let the knife slip from her fingers and fall to the bottom of the tub. He dumped the mostly melted contents of the ice packs into the bathtub and shoved the empties into his pockets. He removed his sodden glov
es and wrung them out over the water, then settled back to watch.
He stroked her forehead. Sorry, sis. Why'd you have to interfere? Everything would be fine now and you'd be going about the rest of your life if you'd only minded your own damn business.
He realized her death would cut off a branch of the Bloodline, but it couldn't be helped. And Moonglow wasn't a branch that was going to bear more fruit anyway, so no big loss.
He watched her face grow paler as the water grew redder. She stopped snoring. Then she stopped breathing, or at least it seemed that way. Her body shuddered, then relaxed. As her mouth and nose slipped beneath the surface, he knew she was gone. He watched a couple of minutes longer for insurance, then gathered up his gloves and the money bag and started for the back door. As he stepped out onto her rear patio he heard her phone begin to ring.
He heard her outgoing message in his head: Vm sorry, I can't come to the phone right now…
Damn right you can't.
He'd thought he'd feel happy. After all, he'd just removed a big obstacle to the Plan. Instead he sensed a deep sadness and a vague queasiness, as if he'd done something terribly wrong. But how could anything done to preserve the Bloodline be wrong?
No… as the feeling persisted he realized that it wasn't quite that he'd done something wrong, it was that he'd made a terrible blunder. As if with this act he would set in motion a force that would destroy him.
Ridiculous. He'd been careful, he'd been thorough. He'd left nothing to connect him to what he'd already begun referring to as "that poor, troubled woman's suicide."
20
Jack pulled up in front of Christy's house and parked. The traffic had put him on edge—this trip had taken twice as long as it should have, and hours spent sitting in traffic were hours he'd never get back. Christy's refusal to answer her phone hadn't helped. What was it with this woman?
He sat a moment. He'd had plenty of time to prep himself, but still he hesitated. This was going to be rough.
Finally he forced himself out the door and up the walk to her front step. He knocked, he rang… nothing. He tried the door—locked.
Well, the lights were on. Wasn't anybody home? She had to be. She was expecting him. Why would she leave?
The nape of his neck tingled as he hurried around the garage to its rear window. He shone the little flashlight through the glass. Christy's Mercedes sat to the right.
He moved to the back door and knocked. Still no answer, so he tried it: open. He stepped inside.
"Christy? Christy?"
No response.
She had to be here.
With his gut steadily tightening, he did a quick check of the first floor and found a glass containing a remnant of what looked like cola, but nothing else. He hurried upstairs.
"Christy?"
He froze in the doorway to the master bathroom. He saw red-red water, saw the upper half of a woman's head. Jack had an inane flashback to the scene from The Tingler when a hand rose slowly from a blood-filled bathtub.
A lump formed in his throat as he stepped forward. He knew who it was, recognized the ash-blond shade of hair, but had to be sure. He saw her half-open blue eyes staring across the top of the water; her mouth and nose hidden beneath.
Beneath the shock and dismay lurked a growing sense of deja vu—Gerhard dead in his tub.
He knelt beside her. No way Christy could be alive, but just to be 110 percent sure he touched her eye. No blink.
Her hands had floated to the surface. He lifted one by an index finger and saw the two-inch-long, lengthwise incision over the artery. She'd known what she was doing.
Or at least someone had.
Had she done it? He couldn't believe that—not now, not when she was waiting to hear what he'd learned. Later, after she knew the awful truth, it might have been in the realm of possibility. But not now.
He released her finger and stepped back to survey the scene, looking for signs of foul play, a struggle. But no… everything looked neat and in place. She'd filled the tub and made the cuts beneath the surface, preventing the arterial spray from splattering the walls. Perfectly in keeping with Christy's orderly personality.
But he still didn't buy it. It reeked of Bolton.
Okay… if Jack was going to create a scene like this, how would he go about it?
His mind ranged over the possibilities, and came up with only two: Force Christy to kill herself under the threat of death or worse to someone she loved more than life; or drug her into oblivion and fake it.
Jack couldn't see how there had been time enough for the first, so that left the second…
And, remembering the glass downstairs, what was the one thing Christy could be counted on to drink?
He stared at her a moment longer, feeling again the lump in his throat as he fought a sense of failure. He hadn't failed her in a true sense. She hadn't hired him for protection, only to gather information, and he'd gathered that—in spades. Yet still he felt he'd failed her. How could he not? She'd been alive when she'd come to him and now she was dead, by either her own hand or someone else's. In neither case could he be held responsible, so why this sense of guilt?
Because.
Sometimes that was reason enough.
He had to know what happened here. To find out, he needed to learn if Christy had been drugged.
He went downstairs. Using a paper towel to avoid leaving prints, he bagged Christy's Diet Pepsi bottle and almost-empty glass. He wiped off the doorknobs as he left.
Back in his car, he got moving and called the local police to tell them that if they went to a certain address they'd find the owner dead. He closed with, "Be sure to run drug and tox screens."
He didn't know if they could. He didn't know if she had any blood left in her for testing, or if the blood in the bathwater would be of any use. What he did know was that his call would raise the official index of suspicion and have them treat Christy's house as a crime scene.
Maybe they'd turn up something, maybe they wouldn't. Either way, Jack intended to pursue his own course. For that he'd need Levy's help.
And Levy would help—whether he wanted to or not.
21
"Is something wrong, Jack?"
He looked up and found Gia standing at his side, staring down at him. He realized he'd been lost in thoughts about Christy.
"Sorry. I've been lousy company, haven't I."
"If you mean being here in body alone, yes."
He'd returned late after driving to Rathburg and placing Christy's glass and bottle in Levy's hands. Gia had reheated some of the veggie stir-fry she'd made for dinner and filled a couple of tortillas with it. He guessed he hadn't said much then. Vicky had gone off to bed and now they sat in the library with something playing on the tube and Jack staring at the screen without seeing it.
"You know that woman I told you about, who wanted information on her daughter's boyfriend? I found her dead tonight."
"Good God!" Gia stepped closer and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Please don't tell me she was murdered."
"It looked like suicide, but I don't know."
"And if you find out it wasn't?"
He looked up at her. "I don't know."
That was true—at the moment. He'd put off making plans until he heard from Levy.
She settled herself on his lap and clasped her arms around his neck.
"Whatever you do, be careful."
"What makes you think I'd be anything but?"
"You have a look in your eyes… not the look you had when you learned Vicky had been taken to that ship full of monsters—God, I don't ever want to see that look again—but there's something a little scary in your eyes right now."
Vicky… Kusum… the rakoshi… it would be two years this coming summer. Where had the time gone?
Where had his family gone? Bolton was supposedly obsessed with his bloodline. Jack had never given much thought to his own, but now, when he considered it, his had been virtually wiped out. The only one left
that he knew of was his uncle Gurney, and he wasn't all that closely related—his mother's uncle.
"I—" He froze as he saw the label on Gia's water bottle: Ramlosa. "Where did you get that?"
"The Gristedes down on fifty-seventh. Why?"
The name… Ramlosa… an anagram of Rasalom. And Rasalom was always playing games with his name. He'd called himself Sal Roma when Jack first met him.
He grabbed the bottle as calmly and gently as he could. "What do you know about it?"
"Well, it's good, and it's sparkling. What else do you need?"
The label said it was established in 1707. But labels could lie. And Rasalom had been around forever.
"I don't know if you should drink this."
She laughed. "I've been drinking it for a month now."
"You have?" He'd never noticed.
"Yes, and I'm fine. Look, I've been thinking… about you coming up from underground."
Jack had known the subject would rear its head again sooner or later.
"Abe and I have discussed—"
"I don't think you should."
Jack paused, wondering if he'd heard correctly.
"Did you just say what I thought you said?"
She nodded. "Yes. Abe's plan—it's too dangerous. You'd be in a country where you didn't speak the language, dealing with hardened international criminals who might find it simpler to kill you and take your money should things start to go wrong."
She had a point. Even though Abe vouched for his contacts, the process of sneaking into the Balkans and reemerging with a dead man's identity was fraught with risks.
"Besides," she added, "it doesn't matter."
Jack stiffened. "What do you mean, it doesn't matter?"
She shrugged. "It just… doesn't."
They'd gone around and around about this before her pregnancy, but the baby had brought matters to a head: Jack could not claim fatherhood without an official existence. And in today's world a man simply could not appear from nowhere, with no Social Security number, no history of 1040s filed, no work history or licenses or documentation to prove his identity, and not wind up in serious trouble with Homeland Security, the IRS, the FBI, INS, and other denizens of officialdom's Acronym City. Thus the elaborate Balkan scheme.
Bloodline rj-11 Page 33
