A second later she realized her error. Adrian Naff often made fun of Derek, his straitlaced secretary, and one of the many things Adrian found so amusing was that Derek had such an unshakeable aversion to automobiles that the young man claimed to have never set foot in one. Why had he lied about parking his car?
Lucia didn’t waste time untangling the puzzle. She snatched up the briefcase and stepped into the hallway. Twenty yards down the corridor, the elevator dinged.
A surge of panic sent her at a trot down the hall, empty except for a maid’s cart three doors down. She had only a few seconds before Derek would emerge from the elevator and see her fleeing.
She slipped past the cart, ducked, and folded herself behind it. Across the hallway, Dolores, the red-haired maid who’d serviced Lucia’s room each day this week, stepped out of the room she was cleaning and saw Lucia crouched behind her cart.
Lucia waved a warning hand and pressed a finger to her lips and pointed down the hallway. Taking a careful look around the edge of the cart, Lucia saw Derek rapping on her locked door. Though it was ten in the morning on a weekday, Derek was dressed too informally for work. He had on a dark hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and running shoes, and he wore a pair of sunglasses.
Dolores busied herself with her cart, rearranging drinking glasses and bars of soap and bottles of shampoo.
“Is he dangerous?” she whispered to Lucia.
“I think he may be, yes.”
“I shall roll the cart to the door of the room I just cleaned. Stay behind it and he won’t see you. You can hide in the room. The guests checked out this morning.”
Lucia mouthed a thank-you.
As Dolores steered the cart toward the open door, Lucia duckwalked behind it. A foot from the doorway, Dolores halted.
“He’s coming,” she murmured and she moved alongside the cart to block Derek’s sight line.
Lucia saw his running shoes and the cuffs of his trousers approach.
Dolores said, “Puis-je vous aider, monsieur?”
“J’ai perdu la clé de ma chambre—405.”
Dolores switched to English: “I will need to see your identification papers, sir. It is hotel policy.”
“I have no ID with me. I’m Lucia Campos’s husband, the woman staying in 405. Please give me the key.”
Again, Dolores refused politely.
“All right. You will either give me a key to the room or I will be forced to speak to the management about your insubordination.”
“Sir, if it is what you desire, I will call management myself and let you speak to them. But I cannot give out keys to rooms. If I do so, I will lose my position.”
“You’ll lose more than your job if you don’t give me the goddamn key immediately.”
“I cannot do that, sir. It is forbidden.”
“This is your last chance. Give me the fucking key.”
Lucia heard Dolores draw a long breath.
“Non, monsieur. Even a pistol will not change my answer. I cannot provide you with a key.”
“Goddamn it, woman. Goddamn it.”
A few seconds later there were two muffled thumps like a hammer striking rotten wood, and the maid’s cart was jarred several inches to the side. To Lucia’s right, visible around the edge of the cart, Dolores fell against the corridor wall and slid to a sitting position on the carpeted floor. At the breast of her white blouse were two ragged punctures.
Only a few inches from Lucia’s face, Derek’s pale hand patted Dolores’s clothes and searched her pockets until he located the white plastic card that served as the master key.
He cursed under his breath and she heard his retreating footsteps, then the sound of a door opening down the hall. When she heard it shut behind him, she came to her feet, felt Dolores’s throat, and, finding no pulse, turned and ran for the fire exit at the end of the hallway.
“I searched her room and found nothing.” Derek Müller held the cell phone in his left hand, his right hand gripping the Heckler & Koch 9mm inside the pocket of his hoodie. There was a tremor in the joints of his hand, and the muffled sound of the two shots he’d fired into the insolent maid’s chest still echoed in his ears.
“And Campos?”
“She’s gone. Her clothes and suitcase are still there, but no documents. I searched thoroughly.”
“The little bitch.”
“I’m sorry. I did my best.”
“The hotel maid is dead? You’re sure of this.”
“Yes, I felt I had no choice. She was going to call the front desk.”
“Was it a messy scene?”
“You’re asking me to describe it?”
“Maybe later. Where are you now?”
“In the street outside the hotel. Watching the police go in and out.”
“You should leave. You don’t want anyone to notice you.”
“Yes,” Derek said. “I should leave.”
“Are you all right? You sound ill.”
“Does it ever get easier?”
“What’s that?”
“The thing with the maid, the thing I had to do.”
“Are you truly a man?”
“Of course I am.”
“Then start acting like one. You wanted an opportunity to improve your position, all right, I gave you such a chance. Stop whining.”
“I thought I was going to be sick. It was terrible.”
“Müller, listen to me.”
“Yes.”
“Dispose of the weapon immediately.”
“You don’t want it back? It’s a very expensive pistol.”
“No. Throw it in the river, in the lake, deep water somewhere. Do not keep it. Is that clear?”
“Throw it into deep water. I understand.”
“You should leave. You’re not thinking clearly. You should get away from there now.”
“Yes,” Derek said. “I’m leaving.”
“And you may take the rest of the day off. Go somewhere, have a stiff drink, I’ll be in touch soon. I have an idea where Campos may have gone.”
NINETEEN
Hospital Universitario La Paz, Madrid, Spain
With second-degree burns on both legs extending from his feet to his thighs, Nick Roberts was in severe pain, but the doctors assured Harper that his injuries were not life-threatening.
Nick spent half a day in the intensive care burn unit of Madrid’s university hospital before being transferred to a private room. Mottled blisters, cracked and peeling skin showed at the edges of his bandages. For the next two days, he drifted in and out of consciousness, but as his meds were adjusted, his spirits improved and now he was awake and alert for more hours than asleep.
His room had a long-distance view of downtown Madrid and was stylishly furnished with a sleek leather couch, a matching recliner, and a teak desk topped with a potted orchid in bloom. The soft gray walls were decorated with small, detailed line drawings that depicted mythical creatures leaping and dancing, like modernized cave art.
The decorations were no doubt meant to soothe and uplift and enhance a patient’s recovery. Maybe the room’s aesthetics helped Nick, but it would take more than tasteful furnishings to ease Harper’s remorse. This had been her nightmare from the start—putting her loved ones in jeopardy. The firebombing had been meant for her, not these innocents.
She spent long hours at Nick’s bedside, stepping away at his request during the daily ordeal when the moist gauze dressing on his legs was changed. Several times a day she looked in on Daniela, who was so heavily sedated that she was unaware of Harper’s presence.
During Nick’s waking hours, she read to him from the International Herald Tribune, articles she thought might interest him, or at least divert his attention for a while. She played soft music she’d downloaded to her smartphone, his favorite vocalists, Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, Rhiannon Giddens. Throughout the day, she adjusted the window blinds, because even indirect sunlight caused him pain.
Two beefy twins, Marvin and Benjamin R
ossi, wearing skintight T-shirts and jeans, rotated shifts in the hallway outside the door to Nick’s room and the reception area downstairs. Without consulting Harper, Sal Leonardi had flown the Rossi brothers in from Philly, where Sal’s former employer, the Tessalini family, still held sway.
Nice enough guys for hired muscle, but a needless layer of security as far as Harper was concerned. She believed Gerda Bixel had lost their trail in Andalusia when they’d been flown to Madrid from the local hospital where they’d been triaged immediately after the fire.
At first the hospital administrator objected to the presence of the Rossi brothers, but Sal spoke to the woman privately and slipped her a hefty soborno, and her protests ceased. Sal also brought in a specialist from Doctors Hospital in Augusta, Georgia, one of the top burn units in the United States. Again, the hospital administrator objected strenuously, but this time Sal didn’t need to dig out his wallet, because the attending Spanish physician intervened. The Spanish doc was well acquainted with the reputation of Dr. Roger Ford from Georgia and said he would be greatly honored to work alongside him.
“Where do you find these people?” Harper asked Sal.
“You’d be surprised how many mobsters get burned one way or another. Forty years paying Tessalini’s bills, I got to know a shitload of burn docs. Ford’s the top of the heap.”
From the Diario de Sevilla and Madrid’s El País, Harper managed to put names to Gerda’s growing victim list. Besides Ricardo Ramírez, whom she’d strangled in that Sevilla alley, there were two women Gerda had carjacked, both also murdered. Two days after the castle fire, Ricardo’s friend Ángel Gallardo was discovered on his front stoop by his own nine-year-old son. Another victim of strangulation.
Mateo López, the silver-haired butler who’d met Nick, Sal, and Harper at the door at Castillo de Aranjuez, had escaped the fire because he’d spent the evening with his seventy-three-year-old novia, who lived in a nearby village. For days now, Mateo had sat silently in the reception area, waiting for Daniela Aguilar to regain consciousness.
On the night of the fire, Daniela had smelled smoke and left the bedroom to investigate. When Nick woke to Daniela’s screams, he rushed into the hallway and found her writhing on the floor at the head of the stairs with her legs already badly burned. He scooped her up and carried her down two flights of stairs through the thickening flames, and out into the night air.
With third-degree injuries on her legs and lower torso—30 percent of her body—Daniela had already endured a dozen escharotomies, surgical incisions in her feet and stomach to relieve the pressure from swelling tissues. Dr. Ford was prepping Daniela for debridement surgery, to be followed by her initial skin graft, when she spoke her first words since the fire. Struggling for breath, she asked if Nick had survived. Dr. Ford assured her that Nick was recovering nicely, exactly as she would be soon.
The anesthesiologist waited for the go-ahead from Dr. Ford, and when Daniela absorbed his words and sank back into repose, Dr. Ford nodded and the drugs were administered. Two hours into the surgery, with her blood pressure crashing, Daniela Aguilar’s pulse flat-lined.
Ford promptly identified Daniela’s condition as an allergic reaction, perhaps to latex, perhaps some ingredient in the anesthesia itself. In any case, Ford injected a dose of epinephrine into Daniela’s lateral thigh muscle, standard procedure, but the drug failed to revive her.
The Spanish surgeon called for the defibrillator paddles, but Dr. Ford waved him off, drew another syringe from his medical bag, and injected Daniela in the other thigh muscle. It was, he explained later, a newly released drug that Ford and his colleagues in Georgia had helped formulate. The FDA had only recently approved it, and it was not yet available outside the United States. The drug revived Daniela’s pulse. After monitoring her for several minutes, Dr. Ford resumed the grafting operation with no further complications. According to the lead Spanish surgeon, had anyone but Dr. Ford been managing the operation, it would have been the end for Daniela.
“I told you he was good,” Sal said.
“Took seventy years,” Nick said, “but Sal’s criminal career finally paid off.”
After the night nurse who delivered Nick’s bland evening meal left the room, Sal unzipped his jacket and produced a jar of olives, a hefty wedge of manchego, a baguette, and a bottle of rioja.
Nick, woozy from his pain meds, skipped the wine but feasted on the bread and cheese. As he was finishing the last of the manchego, he said, “So now what, Harper?”
She drew a breath and searched for a reply.
Sal said, “She’s guilt ridden. Paralyzed with shame, doesn’t know what to do. This is why she disappeared in the first place, didn’t answer her phone for months, why she’s been pushing us away. Afraid it would put you and me in the crosshairs, which it did. Now she’s lost her nerve, not sure she should keep going.”
“Is that true, Harper?”
“I haven’t lost my nerve.”
Sal said, “Okay good, then you’re going ahead, going to settle the score. For Ross’s sake, for Leo’s.”
A hard knot of words backed up in Harper’s throat. During her month of training with Marco, she’d focused all her energy on her body, its power and speed, its killing potential. Like everything else in Marco’s world, conversations were stripped bare to their kernel. In those weeks of near silence, she’d lost some of her emotional fluency, her ease with speaking from the heart.
Though she couldn’t put words to it at that moment, she knew full well what was driving her. Since losing Ross and Leo, a brew of grief and rage and pain had been boiling within her and, now, added to that toxic mix was an immobilizing dose of guilt.
“Don’t be stupid, Harper,” Nick said. “It’s the only way you’re ever going to heal. I know you. You’ve got to finish this, that’s who you are. You’ll never be whole again unless you take Albion down.”
She nodded.
“By the way, just so you know,” Sal said, “I screwed with your phones.”
“What?”
“I asked myself, How the hell did Gerda track us down?” Sal said. “Not like we left a trail of breadcrumbs to that castle. How’d she do it? Had to be the phones. People back at Albion doing the hacking, breaking into cell towers, monitoring traffic. Had to be that.”
“What do we do,” Nick said, “throw them away?”
“Like I said, I fixed them. Installed a spoofing program, it broadcasts fake GPS markers, bounces your signal from one cell phone tower to another, so from this point on, there’s no way anybody can tell where the hell you are. You’re good to go.”
“Your hacker neighbor taught you how to do this, Sal?” Nick said.
“Basic stuff. Coding is what keeps my brain ticking. Otherwise, Christ, what would I be doing, playing pickleball and mah-jongg? Hell with that.”
“When did you do this?” Harper asked.
“First day we were here, Nick was doped up in the ICU, you were asleep in the waiting room. I helped myself to your phones. Hope that’s okay, ’cause I assumed you’d give your permission. Did I assume right?”
Nick smiled, the first Harper had seen from him since the fire.
After a few moments of silence, Harper asked if she could take another look at Sal’s phone, those photos of Gerda.
He unlocked it, handed it over.
She scrolled through the dozen or so images of Gerda. As she’d thought, in every one Gerda was wearing a scarf, usually black, sometimes camo or checked. Gerda varied the styles, using wrist wraps, a cowgirl ascot, a bow tie, a turban wrap, each one blending in with her outfit of the day, unobtrusive but always present.
Harper enlarged a couple of the images and studied the knots. She couldn’t tell for sure, but they all seemed to be slipknots, easily loosened, quickly employed. A low-tech weapon that would pass any security screening and, when used, leave few identifying traces behind.
The obvious drawback of a scarf as a killing tool was that it required face-to-face proxim
ity. And Gerda’s close-in fighting skills, offensive and defensive, seemed limited. Perhaps her quickness, strength, and her jumping prowess compensated. And as Marco often warned, “Cuidado con el aficionado. Es valiente y tiene sangre fría.” Beware the amateur. He’s brave and cold-blooded.
Sal said, “So we’re assuming it was Gerda who set the fire?”
“It was,” Harper said.
Nick asked how she could be sure.
“I smelled gasoline on her fingers.”
“On her fingers? When?”
Harper described her encounter with Gerda in the parking lot.
“And you’re just now telling us about this?”
“The condition you were in, I didn’t want to upset you.”
“You actually tangled with her?” Sal said.
“Yeah, and you were right about her jumping ability.”
“I know, I know. Woman’s part kangaroo.”
“So what set her off?” Nick said. “She’s been shadowing you for weeks, hanging back, then out of nowhere she attacks. Why now?”
“Her orders must have changed,” Harper said.
“But why?”
“Maybe I’m getting closer to something. I’ve bumped a trip wire. I don’t know. Does it really matter?”
“Well, I guess it’s good news,” Sal said. “You wanted to draw them out in the open, so there you go, it’s working.”
Marvin, one of the Rossi twins, cracked open the door and stuck his shaggy head in the gap. He held up a two-way radio.
“Somebody showed up downstairs,” he said. “Looking for Harper.”
She came to her feet.
“Who?” Sal said.
“Don’t know. Somebody poking around, asking questions and whatnot. Benjy’s got ’em incarcerated in a broom closet.”
Harper headed for the door.
“Go with her,” Sal told Marvin, “and make sure nobody gets hurt too bad.”
TWENTY
Hospital Universitario La Paz, Madrid, Spain
It was a janitor’s closet tucked away at the bottom of a stairwell on the first floor. A tiny room filled with mop buckets, brooms, dustpans, white uniforms hanging from pegs. Two fluorescent bulbs flickered overhead, giving the room the garish feel of a carnival sideshow.
When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2) Page 14
