Beg Me (4 page)

Bullets wouldn’t help it either.

Crack!
Both of us had enough experience in trouble spots to recognize that sound. With a chivalrous hand, Lee yanked my arm, and we both ran for cover. We heard another shot through the steady hard pattering of raindrops, and now I saw where the shots came from. The threat was two guys in a
tuk-tuk,
which gunned its engine and roared toward us. The Thai guy drove while a white dude fired. At Lee. That much was clear.

Breathing hard now.

This. Is bad.

We ducked down an alley, and the creeps in the cart behind us overshot. I had no idea where I was, of course, but Lee must have known. In a moment, I saw we were trying to reach our own private
tuk-tuk
that had brought us down to the restaurant, and at thirty yards Lee shouted something to his driver in panicked Thai. The poor fellow at the wheel looked at us completely bewildered and started the engine.

The guys after us were catching up, and I felt helpless, like a tiny figure in my brother’s Hot Wheels cars from childhood, zinging along the narrow streets, hitting a main road and passing a palace, passing great mural portraits of Thai royal family members, and where were the cops? When I looked back, another shot slammed into the metal bar that held up the awning.

“Okay,” I whispered. “We won’t do that again.”

Car chases were fine for movies, but I was riding on what amounted to a rickshaw on a lawn mower with a thyroid condition.

Lee had told me that most of the
tuk-tuk
drivers came from northern Thailand and they didn’t have to have “The Knowledge” like London cabbies—they didn’t have to have any training at all. But Lee considered having his own personal driver and
tuk-tuk
yet another “precaution for business.” We sloshed up a low hill, parting the rainwater like a motorboat, and came out on another main road.

Traffic jam. A sea of red taillights in front of us. I thought we were in trouble, until I spotted what looked like two police cruisers parked three cars up ahead—a fender-bender was helping to clog things further.

“Come on!” I yelled. “Let’s run like hell for them!”

Lee tapped me frantically. “No, look!”

He’d barely noticed his driver was already hightailing it—not in the direction of the cops, mind you, but he was off.

“Look!” Lee was still telling me.

The guys in the
tuk-tuk
chasing us must have spotted the cruisers as well. But now they were boxed in as cars filled in the alley behind them and alongside. My guess was they had stolen their vehicle anyway, and now they were abandoning it. The flashing cherry lights on the cruisers were scaring them off. They ran.

“Go tell the cops,” I told Lee.

“Teresa! Where are you going?”

I paused all of two seconds to explain. “After them. They’ll disappear.”

“Are you crazy, Teresa? First they’re chasing us, now you’re chasing them? They have
guns
!”

“Yeah, but they’re looking forward.”

He was right. This was mad. If they heard me behind them, all they had to do was stop, turn, and fire. I kinda stood out here. Let’s see, black woman on a street in Bangkok, and we only saw her a moment ago with our target—

I have this problem with planning ahead.

On the bright side, it had stopped raining.

“Don’t follow me!” I whined, because Lee wasn’t moving to the police cruisers but loping twenty feet behind me.

Shit.

I ran to catch up to our would-be assassins. I thought I had seen them splitting up, but I couldn’t be sure. Not being a complete fool, I focused on the Thai guy, since he’d been the driver, not the shooter. He was already slowing down from a jog to a natural walk, not wanting to draw attention. He didn’t seem aware of me at all. But where was his partner?

Into another side street with signs I couldn’t understand, more Thai massage parlors, a closed amulet shop, a launderette—and now my quarry had disappeared.

As I rounded the corner, still waving at Jeff not to follow me but to get to safety, the big fat shin of this meaty leg flew up and
walloped
me right in the shoulder.

Ow. Huge ow. I staggered to my knees, and I actually had tears of pain in my eyes, because that bloody well hurt. And another shin was flying toward my head.

If I hadn’t ducked, I’m sure a blood vessel would have burst inside my brain from the impact, and I’d be dead. I
hate
guys who know Muay Thai. And here I was in Thailand, the country that invented it. Terrific. I’m fighting a guy who knows a martial art where fanatics toughen their shins by swinging them against tree trunks.

I was trained in karate, so instead of roundhouses, I was better at front snap kicks and proper straight punches. And now, since I was down on my knees, I sent a lovely one into his balls, just to teach him not to try that again.

A flurry of elbows came at my face when we reengaged, and it was block, block, block, block, until I nailed him square in the chest. I heard his wind go, and then I popped him in the sweet spot just below the nose. But it wasn’t over. One, two, three, and as he fell on his ass, he reached into his jacket, and it was the first time I had met anyone who wore one of those cliché shoulder holsters for pistols.

I thought only his partner had a gun.

Wrong.

A 9mm Glock was in my face, and
yes,
of course I didn’t know what it was at the time—I know very little about guns, except that I knew I certainly didn’t like the idea of being shot by one—and my heart was racing too fast, and I was thinking too fast, and the gun hovered, and I decided it was an appropriate time to panic. Yes. Now would be good.

Adrenaline is wonderful. It makes you do amazing stunts like swing out your foot and bat a loaded pistol out of a guy’s grip, making it clatter on the ground six feet away. This would have looked really fearless and cool, no doubt, if I hadn’t emitted a cowardly, feminine yelp—something like the reaction you have when you see a huge spider in your kitchen. “Aaahhh!”—right before I did it. You get the idea.

That was when the
really
strange stuff began to happen. Behind me, Ah Jo Lee was doing the hundred-meter dash for his life with the white guy behind him. Our second assailant was tall with dark brown hair and a dimpled chin and glowering eyes. Bad suit.

I had told Lee to go to the cops, get to safety, because I assumed both assailants were running now that they’d blown their chance. Wrong again. The white guy had obviously doubled back down another street or something while I went chasing after Mr. Kickboxer here. It was a stupid mistake, but as a “consultant” in this line of work, I was a one woman band forced to make split-second decisions on my limited resources. Now my client was running for his life again, and the second bad guy…

I watched him look straight past Lee at his partner and fire.

He shot the Thai guy dead in front of us.

I had all of a few seconds to scoop up the gun on the ground and do something with it, because now he was back to aiming at Lee, and the ugly object in my hand exploded and bucked with its recoil.

Bad Suit let out a roar like a bear. Goes to show my proficiency with firearms. I’d been aiming at his chest. I hit him in the biceps. The wound made him drop his gun, and, still in shock like Jeff, I took a step forward, trying to make the Glock barrel stop shaking.

“What the hell’s going on?”
I yelled. “Who are you and why are you trying to kill my friend?”

“Fuck you!” he said.

Charming. And too little to tell where he was from. At least I knew he spoke English.

He had shot his partner. He had shot his partner instead of Lee first because Kickboxer was on the ground, easy to shoot. If he shot Lee in the back, he couldn’t dummy up another drug-buy-gone-bad scenario like in New York—

“Jesus, kill this guy,” said Lee, panting hard.

“Yeah, sure, Jeff.”

“I mean it, Teresa, I can’t afford this kind of profile.”

“I am
not
going to kill this guy for you, Jeff! Are you mad? We’ll call the police and sort it out. It’s not like you’ve done anything—”

“Teresa, this isn’t London—”

“Jeff, he might have answers for you!”

“Creeps like this never do!” he shouted back.

He was right.

“Hey, hey,
hey!
” I said with increasing force, because Bad Suit had pulled something out of his jacket with his good arm. He knew by now that I wasn’t going to shoot him, so he went about his business, quickly and efficiently, and Lee and I were both mesmerized. We didn’t understand at all what he was trying to do, but I think we both suspected it was suicidal. He looped these cords around his ankles, and a long rope led to a collar that he snapped on around his neck—

“Stop!” I yelled. “Stop!”

Lee moved first. His hand gripped the cord, trying to keep the tension out of it, because we couldn’t understand the mechanism but it looked like he was going to choke himself. It was utterly surreal. Didn’t he know we wouldn’t give him that kind of time?

The collar was tightening around his neck.

Lee and the guy were wrestling now, the assailant no longer interested in killing Lee, only himself.

He clumsily shoved Lee away and then fell on the sidewalk, and I watched his legs straighten. We heard this hideous
snap
—the most horrible, haunting sound. The guy’s eyes popped, his mouth went slack, and blood cascaded over his collar, leaked under it—

“Oh, my God,” I whispered.

There were some kind of grotesque studs, barbs, on the
inside
of the collar. When he pulled the cord taut with his legs, he had sent them shooting out, and they had cut his carotid artery. He was dead within seconds.

He had killed his partner to prevent him from being defeated and captured. He had killed himself when he was beaten.

Fanatics.

Lee insisted we get out of there as fast as possible, and we trudged back to our vehicle. He drove. As the little engine whined along, I thought of the killer fetishist who made his collar into a bear trap.

Lee was convinced that his attackers had nothing to do with any of his enterprises.

They must have been sent, he argued, after he had dispatched his own men to interview Anna’s boyfriend, Craig, in London. Someone must have been keeping an eye on Craig Padmore to make sure he didn’t raise a stink over Anna’s death, and when Lee’s henchmen showed up, they had traced them back to Bangkok. “Whoever killed Anna doesn’t want me solving her murder,” he insisted.

“Then why send the photos to taunt you?” I asked. “They didn’t have to tip you off that someone else was involved. They could have kept their mouths shut and let you think the worst about her—that she was a drug addict. Why send the photos at all? It’s almost like the killer changed his mind.”

He wasn’t interested. To him, it made sense:
Look, we got away with it, but don’t try coming after us.
I wasn’t so sure.

This was his city, and he had contacts within the Bangkok police, who confirmed that the Thai killer had been a rent-a-thug, strictly freelance. The white guy, Mr. Bad Suit, was an unknown. Interpol didn’t have his prints and neither, it seemed, did any American or British database. Unless you were in the system, you didn’t track. It could take months or years before somebody identified him.

I suggested I hang around a few more days, but Lee said no. “I can get bodyguards, Teresa. Please! Do the job I’m paying you for!” Then he apologized for being so abrupt. “Anna…She never did anything to anybody.”

“I know.”

“Hurt them for me.”

1

H
ome again. One day someone will tell me why Heathrow can simultaneously stay modern and yet keep this drab, dingy feel to the area around the luggage carousels. The atmosphere of oppressive gloom begins the minute you hit customs, continues through luggage collection, and past the newsstands selling all the tabloid irrelevancies. Good thing was that Helena was on time to pick me up and drive me back into town. In style. A kiss on both cheeks, and then it was the back of the limo.

“How was the flight?” she asked politely.

“Pleasant enough. Thai Airways presents you with a wet flower when you get onboard that you don’t really know what to do with. Then they punish you with an American teen comedy that you wouldn’t waste even a minute on while channel-surfing.”

“He didn’t make you fly coach, did he? I
told
Lee when he called you’d expect business class and—”

“It was fine,” I assured her. “It’s off season over there, and it wasn’t a full flight, so I didn’t care.”

Helena shook her head, muttering how she’d never put up with it over thirteen bloody hours from the Pacific Rim.

Helena Willoughby. She enjoyed the best for herself, and she insisted on getting it for her friends, which I had always found both sweet and refreshingly uncommon for her class. Born in Knightsbridge, product of the best schools, beautiful and blond and in her late thirties, she ran the most successful male escort agency out of her house in Richmond-upon-Thames. Now she sighed at me, indicating our small talk was over.

“Fitz is pretty shaken by Anna’s death,” she offered.

“I expect so.”

Fitz was one of Helena’s escorts and a past lover of mine. He was about to open his own massage clinic, and I knew that he’d wanted to lure Anna away to come work for him. She had even sent him an e-mail from New York suggesting that, yes, she was interested in coming home if the pay was right. She must have sent it when she became disenchanted with her new cult friends.

This just made us all feel worse—that she had been close to extricating herself from whatever dark storm had claimed her.

“Where do you think you’ll start?” asked Helena.

“With this Craig character. Her boyfriend—ex-boyfriend?”

“Oh, God, that’s right!” Helena said suddenly. “You don’t know. You couldn’t possibly…”

“Know what? What are you talking about, darling?”

“Craig Padmore? Anna’s ex-boyfriend? He’s dead, Teresa.”

And he was my one lead.

At twelve-thirty the next day, I walked up the steps of the National Gallery, reminding myself I should really stop by sometime and catch the show about American painters in Paris in the Sainsbury Wing.

In the midst of all the giggling students on vacation from Austria and the Koreans in shirts with bizarre tropical patterns and camcorders sat this pear-shaped fellow in a suit, who waved me over. He was quite swarthy, his five o’ clock shadow come early at noon, and under his head of thick curly hair, two bushy black eyebrows were narrowing and wondering what trouble I was up to now. This was Detective Inspector Carl Norton of the Metropolitan Police.

He had a packed lunch on his lap, a black leather satchel propped up against his knee, and was leafing through a thick tome called
Impressionism and Nineteenth-Century English Poetry.
If England is full of eccentrics, then Carl is on their electoral roll—he was working these days toward a doctorate in literature that would rescue him from Homicide. (Don’t ask me why he considered life in academia better—hey, I’m the daughter of a professor at Oxford; I did my best to warn him.) Carl and I regularly traded favors, but I often got the better part of the deal.

“You bring it?” I asked, kissing him on the cheek.

“Hullo to you too.”

“I just figured you were pressed for time.” I nodded to the book. “Good God!”

“It’s fascinating stuff,” he said defensively. “Paris Commune and revolutionaries with early English Socialism and—all right, all right, don’t look like that, I know you don’t give a toss. Here—”

He dug into his leather satchel and handed me the file on the murder of Anna’s boyfriend. There were grisly photos of the crime scene. Craig Padmore had been shot dead in his own apartment in Brixton, two bullets to his head.

“Nine-millimeter Glock,” I whispered.

I knew who was at the other end of that gun, but that got me nowhere. Padmore’s murder had happened only four nights ago. Call it a couple of nights for our mystery assassin, Mr. Bad Suit, to reach Bangkok, get his bearings, and hunt down Lee, and it was clear someone was moving things fast. I told Carl he should put in a call to the Bangkok police.

“Any leads on why Padmore?”

“Not a one. As far as everyone is concerned, Craig Padmore was a nice guy, no outstanding debts, paid his credit cards every month on the same date, cranked up his stereo once in a blue moon. He was an accountant. Went to New York this summer on a contract with one of those big health-care providers the Americans have. Most of the time he did accounting work for a dental surgeon in Brixton. How do you make enemies out of that?”

“I don’t know about you, but I hate going to the dentist,” I said.

I turned to a blow-up shot of the body. Written in blue ink on Padmore’s arm was a strange little cartoon. “Is that what I think it is?” And Carl nodded. It was a ballpoint-pen sketch of a chessboard bishop.

“What’s the significance? Was Padmore a chess freak?”

“Not that we know of. There were no board games found in his apartment. We know our killer drew it, because the strokes show right-handedness. You can see it’s on Padmore’s right arm so it was impossible for him to do it himself. Cleanness of the line impressions and skin samples pretty much confirm it was drawn at time of death.”

“Weird,” I mumbled.

Padmore was killed execution style, with a symbol obviously intended as a message. But if he was a clean, upstanding citizen, who was it a message for?

Stranger still when you considered that Anna had no such drawing on her body, just the gang tattoo. Another red herring?

“What’s your interest in Padmore?” asked Carl. “And how do
you
know his killer’s dead in Bangkok?”

I thought I could charm my way out. “Carl, do you really want to know this stuff?”

It was no sale. I should have known better.

“You never cease to amaze me, Teresa. You can be time zones away and still wind up in my case load. Who’s your client this time?”

“Ah Jo Lee.”

He didn’t reply for a second, frowning at me.

“You’re frowning at me,” I said.

“That was too easy.”

“He’s in Thailand—wants me to investigate the murder of his sister in America. Cloy Hen Lee. Anna.”

He stared at me. “And Anna Lee was Craig Padmore’s ex-girlfriend. Oh, that’s bloody marvelous. That’s just…Christ, Teresa!” He started rubbing his eyes, still swearing behind his hands as I went through a quick summary of the facts I knew and showed him the pics of Anna and clips about her death from news sites. He looked and went back to covering his face in his hands wearily. “Shit, shit, shit, shit…”

Because usually when I was involved, folks with peerages or at least a lot of money got into compromising sexual scandals, intelligence agencies wound up playing bang-bang in the West End, and there were plenty of unanswered questions left that made things untidy.

“Carl, I need to see Padmore’s apartment.”

“
No.
It’s a crime scene, Teresa.”

“Carl—”

“Absolutely not!”

“Carl, there’s an excellent study of correspondence between the fighters of the Paris Commune and—Well, I guess you wouldn’t be interested.”

“Teresa…”

“You know they have some of the original letters kept in the archives at—but, oh, that’s right, you can’t help me.”

“Teresa.”

Padmore had kept his apartment in Brixton neat and tidy. No dust on the TV, no ashes in the fireplace. Even the fridge was nice and clean. He had been in his mid-twenties; his CD rack was full of the latest hip-hop album releases, and a stack of PlayStation games sat on a bookshelf next to a small but impressive collection of volumes about Trinidad and West Indian history. The secrets we keep so very private…You would never think this guy was into a BDSM cult. Why would you? Not like there was any paraphernalia lying around or even hidden in a bottom drawer. And if he ever had any, perhaps he chucked it all after suffering the guilt that he was the one who introduced Anna to the group, who had helped start her spiral down.

According to Carl, Padmore’s murderer had made no attempt to even disguise the killing with a fake struggle or burglary. The assassin had somehow talked his way in and shot the poor guy down then and there.

But that didn’t mean things hadn’t been removed. Craig Padmore’s e-mails had all been efficiently erased, said Carl. The killer had gone through his desk drawers—this was obvious because they had been carefully wiped down. But since the Met hadn’t a clue as to what would even prompt someone to want to kill Padmore, they couldn’t speculate on what was taken.

“Boot up the computer,” I suggested.

Carl shrugged. “Don’t know what that’ll get you. Our blokes had a pretty thorough go.”

“I know, I know. But you were working blind. Just humor me, please?”

While we waited for the hard drive to go through all its paces and the annoying Microsoft Windows to finish its entrance on the screen, I looked around, bored.

“Carl?”

“Yeah?”

“You notice a couple of strange things?”

“Such as?”

Padmore naturally had photos of what looked to be friends and family up on the walls of his living room—some alone, some two-or three-shots arranged in a frame. I stood close and discovered that a few were digital prints while others were older, made from conventional camera negatives.

What first caught my eye was that one pic—a shot of Craig Padmore with what seemed to be his mother and brothers—had fallen out of place and sat at the bottom of the glass. I pulled it down and removed the backing.

“Check it out,” I told Carl. “The glue’s recent, but our killer didn’t put enough of it on for the picture to stick to the backing.”

Carl understood. “The original that was there was a threat somehow.” He went over to the computer and clicked the mouse on a desktop folder labeled
Photos.
“He printed out a replacement. But we can’t be sure what was there in the first place.”

“Anna.”

Carl shook his head. “I don’t think so. This is her, right? There are plenty of shots of this girl in the folder. He could have wiped them all. You break up with a girl, and you naturally take her photos down and move ’em off your desktop. No one would suspect a thing.”

“Jeez, Carl, don’t you have one sentimental bone in your body?”

He laughed at me and answered, “I’m married, Teresa. First rule is, you are
not
allowed any photos of past girlfriends.” He adopted an angry falsetto. “Why do you keep these? Why do you want them? Don’t you love me—”

“I get the idea,” I said.

He pulled up each and every photo Craig Padmore had kept of his ex-girlfriend. There were shots of her in Bangkok, shots of her with Craig, a few shots of Anna in what appeared to be New York. Maybe the killer had erased the incriminating picture, but as Carl had asked, why not erase them all?

I had a theory. The logic might have been that trying to erase Anna from Craig’s life completely would have had the opposite effect—calling attention to her importance. Anna had been his girlfriend long enough that neighbors here, friends and family, would remember her. No, something
else
had been in the photo with her.

But if it had been erased from the hard drive…We might never know.

I noticed a book left open on Padmore’s coffee table. It was used, the pages slightly yellow with age. “Look at this, Carl.”

He shrugged. “So what?”

“Carl, think about where you are,” I said. “Look at the other books on his shelf. You’re in the house of a West Indian male. All those books over there are about Trinidad, Jamaica, and so on. Look at his album collection. You’re a scholar, Carl, but you said yourself, this guy crunched numbers for a living. So what is he doing with this?”