Private: #1 Suspect (27 page)

CHAPTER
127

JUSTINE TOOK ROCKY for a run. She needed the exercise more than he did, wanted to flat-out drive the tension right out of her body and mind.

A half hour later, she and her doggy were back on Wetherly Drive, going up the path to her wonderful old house. It had been built in the late 1930s as a carriage house and had terrific architectural details.

More than that, the house gave off a sense of permanence, very different from the modern place she’d bought a couple of years ago with Jack.

There was no ocean to hush her to sleep here, but there were other sounds she liked as much: kids biking on the sidewalks, sprinklers chunking out spray over the close-cropped lawns, TV laughter coming from living rooms on her street. This all felt cozy and right to her.

Inside the kitchen, Justine fed Nefertiti and Rocky, and went to close the cabinet doors she had opened when Jack had called and cajoled her into having a drink and a conversation.

The ten sets of cabinet doors in her kitchen had been written on inside from top to bottom. Different pens had been used and different hands had penned little notations that told the family history of the Franks, who had lived here for three generations, right up until the time she had bought the house.

The door she was looking at now had notations from the 1940s: a baby had been born, Eleanor Louise Frank. There were stars around the little girl’s name. A year later, there was a new Packard in the garage. John and Julie got engaged. Saul got polio at the age of ten. Puppies were born in a closet. There was a wedding in the backyard. And a cousin, Roy Lloyd Frank, had gone off to war.

Justine closed the cabinet door.

She had a good life. No question about it. She had a home of her own and a good job, and her life was the way she wanted it.

Just today, she’d brought in a new case: a twenty-four-year-old fashion model had inherited a fortune from her now-dead eighty-year-old billionaire boyfriend. And the dead man’s family wanted Private to investigate the woman.

This was a plum job, a nine-to-five kind of case. There would be no shooting. No mobsters. No one would get shoved off a cliff. She was going to enjoy this case and until she had the time to rest, work would fill her days in a fine and satisfying way.

When the doorbell rang, Justine angrily jerked her head toward the front door. Rocky ran to the living room, threw his front legs up against the door, and whined.

He knew who was ringing the bell and she did too.

It was after ten. It was a weeknight. The man at her door couldn’t open up and he couldn’t settle down. He was a good boss, but in every other way, he was a waste of her time.

Damn it.

Her phone rang.

She said, “What is it, Jack?”

“Let me in, Justine. Please.”

She clicked the phone off, went to the living room, and shouted through the door, “Jack. Go home. I mean it. I don’t want to see you.”

Her phone rang again.

She pressed the button and held the phone to her ear, slid down the wall, and sat on the floor. And she listened to him telling her what she already knew.

“Two weeks ago we were on track, Justine. I made a bad mistake, a backslide, that I deeply regret. But we were making our way back to each other after a long time apart. We were building on all of it, everything we know about each other. There is nothing we can’t work out. You can’t turn your back on love, Justine, not ours. Please, sweetheart. It’s just me. Let me in.”

“Oh, Jack,” she said into the phone.

He loved her. Jack still loved her.

And damn it, damn it, damn it. She still loved him.

Acknowledgments

We’re grateful to Captain Richard Conklin of the Stamford, Connecticut, PD and Elaine M. Pagliaro, forensic science consultant, MS, JD, for sharing their valuable time and expertise. Thanks too to our researcher, Ingrid Taylar, and to Lynn Colomello and Mary Jordan for their unflagging support.

LET THE KILLING BEGIN.

FOR AN EXCERPT,
TURN THE PAGE.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 2012, 11:25 P.M.

THERE
ARE
SUPERMEN and superwomen who walk this earth.

I’m quite serious about that, and you can take me literally. Jesus Christ, for example, was a spiritual superman, as was Martin Luther, and Gandhi. Julius Caesar was superhuman as well. So were Genghis Khan, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Adolph Hitler.

Think scientists like Aristotle, Galileo, Albert Einstein, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Consider artists like da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Vincent van Gogh, my favorite, who was so superior it drove him insane. And above all, don’t forget athletically superior beings like Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and Jesse Owens, Larisa Latynina, and Muhammad Ali, Mark Spitz, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Humbly, I include myself on this superhuman spectrum as well, and deservedly so, as you shall soon see.

In short, people like me are born for great things. We seek adversity. We seek to conquer. We seek to break through all limits, spiritually, politically, artistically, scientifically, and physically. We seek to right wrongs in the face of monumental odds. And we’re willing to suffer for greatness, willing to embrace dogged effort and endless preparation with the fervor of a martyr, which to my mind are exceptional traits in any human being from any age.

At the moment I have to admit that I’m certainly feeling exceptional, standing here in the garden of Sir Denton Marshall, a sniveling, corrupt old bastard if there ever was one.

Look at him on his knees, his back to me, and my knife at his throat.

Why, he trembles and shakes as if a stone has just clipped his head. Can you smell it? Fear? It surrounds him, as rank as the air after a bomb explodes.

“Why?” he gasps.

“You’ve angered me, monster,” I snarl at him, feeling a rage deeper than primal split my mind and seethe through every cell. “You’ve helped ruin the games, made them a mockery and an abomination of their intent.”

“What?” he cries, acting bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

I deliver the evidence against him in three damning sentences that turn the skin of his neck livid and his carotid artery a sickening, pulsing purple.

“No!” he sputters. “That’s…that’s not true. You can’t do this. Have you gone utterly mad?”

“Mad? Me?” I say. “Hardly. I’m the sanest person I know.”

“Please,” he says, tears rolling down his face. “Have mercy. I’m to be married on Christmas Eve.”

My laugh is as caustic as battery acid: “In another life, Denton, I ate my own children. You’ll get no mercy from me or my sisters.”

As his confusion and horror become complete, I look up into the night sky, feeling storms rising in my head and understanding once again that I
am
superior, a superhuman imbued by forces that go back thousands of years.

“For all true Olympians,” I vow, “this act of sacrifice marks the beginning of the end of the modern games.”

Then I wrench the old man’s head so his back arches.

And before he can scream, I furiously rip the blade with such force that his head comes free of his neck all the way to his spine.

THURSDAY, JULY 26, 2012, 9:24 A.M.

IT WAS MAD-DOG hot for London. Peter Knight’s shirt and jacket were drenched with sweat as he sprinted north on Chesham Street past the Diplomat Hotel and skidded around the corner toward Lyall Mews in the heart of Belgravia, some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

Don’t let it be true,
Knight screamed internally as he entered the mews.
Dear God, don’t let it be true.

Then he saw a pack of Fleet Street jackals gathering at the yellow tape of a London Metropolitan Police barricade that blocked the road in front of a cream-colored Georgian townhome. Knight lurched to a stop, feeling like he was going to retch up the eggs and bacon he’d had for breakfast.

What would he ever tell Amanda?

Before Knight could compose his thoughts or still his stomach, his cell phone rang and he snatched it from his pocket without looking at the caller ID.

“Knight,” he managed to choke. “That you, Jack?”

“No, Peter, it’s Nancy,” she replied in her Irish brogue. “Isabel has come down sick.”

“What?” he groaned. “No. I just left the house an hour ago.”

“She’s running a temperature,” his full-time nanny insisted. “I just took it.”

“How high?”

“One hundred. She’s complaining about her stomach too.”

“Lukey?”

“He seems fine,” she said. “But…”

“Give them both a cool bath, and call me back if Isabel’s temp hits 101,” Knight said. He snapped the phone shut, swallowing the bile burning at the back of his throat.

A wiry man about six-foot with an appealing face and light-brown hair, Knight had once been a special prosecutorial investigator assigned to the Old Bailey courthouse. Two years ago, however, he had joined the London office of Private Worldwide at twice the pay and prestige. Private had been called the Pinkerton Agency of the twenty-first century, with offices in every major city in the world staffed by top-notch forensics scientists, security specialists, and investigators such as Knight.

Compartmentalize, he told himself. Be professional. But this felt like the straw breaking his back. Knight had already endured too much grief and loss in his personal life. Just the week before, his boss, Dan Carter, and four of his colleagues had perished in a plane crash over the North Sea that was still under investigation. Could he live with another death?

Pushing that question and his daughter’s illness to one side, Knight forced himself to hurry through the sweltering heat toward the police barrier, giving the Fleet Street crowd a wide berth, and in so doing spotted Billy Casper, a Scotland Yard captain he’d known for fifteen years.

He went straight to Casper, a blockish, pock-faced man who scowled the second he saw Knight. “Private’s got no business in this, Peter.”

“If that’s Sir Denton Marshall dead in there, then Private does have business in this, and I do too,” Knight shot back forcefully. “Personal business, Billy. Is it Sir Denton?”

Casper said nothing.

“Is it?” Knight demanded.

Finally the captain nodded, but he wasn’t happy about it, and he asked suspiciously, “How are you and Private involved?”

Knight stood there a moment, feeling lambasted by the news, and wondering again how the hell he was going to tell Amanda. Then he shook off the despair and said, “London Olympic Organizing Committee is Private London’s client. Which makes Sir Denton Private’s client.”

“And you?” Casper demanded. “What’s your personal stake in this? You a friend of his or something?”

“Much more than a friend. He was engaged to my mother.”

Casper’s hard expression softened a bit, and he chewed at his lip before saying, “I’ll see if I can get you in. Elaine will want to talk to you.”

Knight felt suddenly as if invisible forces were conspiring against him.

“Elaine caught this case?” he said, wanting to punch something. “You can’t be serious.”

“Dead serious, Peter,” Casper said. “Lucky, lucky you.”

SUPERVISING INSPECTOR ELAINE Pottersfield was one of the finest detectives working for the London Metropolitan Police, a twenty-year veteran of the force with a prickly, know-it-all style that got results. Pottersfield had solved more murders in the past two years than any other inspector at Scotland Yard. She was also the only person Knight knew who openly despised his presence.

An attractive woman in her forties, the supervising inspector always put Knight in mind of a borzoi dog, with large round eyes, an aquiline face, and silver hair that cascaded about her shoulders. When he entered Sir Denton Marshall’s kitchen, Pottersfield eyed him down her sharp nose, looking ready to bite at him if she got the chance.

“Peter,” she said coldly.

“Elaine,” Knight said.

“Not exactly my idea to let you into the crime scene.”

“No, I imagine not,” replied Knight, fighting to control his emotions, which were heating by the second. Pottersfield always seemed to have that effect on him. “But here we are. What can you tell me?”

The Scotland Yard supervising inspector did not reply for several moments, grew disgusted, and finally said, “The maid found him, or what’s left of him anyway, an hour ago out in the garden.”

Flashing on Sir Denton, the learned and funny man he’d come to know and admire over the past two years, Knight felt his legs go wobbly, and he had to put his vinyl-gloved hand on the counter. “What’s left of him?” he repeated.

Pottersfield grimly gestured at the open French door.

Knight absolutely did not want to go out into the garden. He wanted to remember Sir Denton as he was the last time he’d seen him, two weeks before, with his shock of startling white hair, scrubbed pink skin, and easy, infectious laugh.

“I understand if you’d rather not,” Pottersfield said. “Captain Casper said your mother was engaged to Sir Denton. When did that happen?”

“New Year’s past,” Knight said. He swallowed and moved toward the door, adding bitterly, “They were to be married on Christmas Eve. Another tragedy. Just what I need in my life, isn’t it?”

Pottersfield’s expression twisted in pain and anger, and she looked at the kitchen floor as Knight went by her and out into the garden.

The air in the garden was still, growing hotter, and stank of death and gore. On the flagstone terrace, five quarts of blood, the entire reservoir of Sir Denton’s life, had run out and congealed around his decapitated corpse.

“The medical examiner thinks the job was done with a long curved blade with a serrated edge,” Pottersfield said.

Knight again fought off the urge to vomit as he tried to take in the entire scene, to burn it into his mind as if it were a series of photographs and not reality. Keeping everything at arm’s length was the only way he knew to get through something like this.

Pottersfield said, “And if you look closely, you’ll see some of the blood’s been sprayed back toward the body with water from the garden hose. I’d expect the killer did it to wash away footprints and such.”

Knight nodded and then, by sheer force of will, moved his attention beyond the body, deeper into the garden, bypassing forensics techs gathering evidence from the flower beds, to a crime scene photographer snapping away near the back wall.

Knight skirted the corpse by several feet and from that new perspective saw what the photographer was focusing on. It was ancient Greek and one of Sir Denton’s prized possessions: a headless limestone statue of an Athenian senator cradling a book and holding the hilt of a busted sword.

Sir Denton’s head had been placed in the empty space between the statue’s shoulders. His face was puffy, lax. His mouth was twisted to the left, as if he were spitting. And his eyes were open, dull, and, to Knight, shockingly forlorn.

For an instant, the Private detective wanted to break down. But then he felt himself swell with outrage. What kind of barbarian would do such a thing? And why? What possible reason could there be to behead Denton Marshall? The man was more than good. He was…

“You’re not seeing it all, Peter,” Pottersfield said behind him. “Go look at the grass in front of the statue.”

Knight closed his hands into fists and walked off the terrace onto the grass, which scratched against the paper booties he wore over his shoes, making a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard. Then he saw it and stopped cold.

Five interlocking rings, the symbol of the Olympic Games, had been spray-painted on the grass in front of the statue.

Over the top of the symbol, an
X
had been smeared with blood.