Sidney Sheldon - Chasing Tomorrow

“HOW LONG HAS SHE been like this?” the young doctor barked at Blake Carter.

“Waters broke about four hours ago.”

“Four hours ?” For a moment Blake thought the doctor was about to hit him. “Why the hell did you wait so long?”

“I didn’t realize what was happening. I wasn’t . . .” The words caught in the old cowboy’s throat. Tracy was already being wheeled into the operating room. She was still screaming and delirious. She kept calling for someone named Jeff. “Will she be okay?”

The doctor looked him square in the eye. “I don’t know. She’s lost a huge amount of blood. There are some signs of eclampsia.”

Blake Carter’s eyes widened. “But, she’ll live, right? And the baby . . . ?”

“The baby should live,” said the doctor. “Excuse me.”

THE PAIN WAS THERE, and then it was gone.

Tracy wasn’t afraid. She was ready to die, ready to see her mother again. She felt suffused with an immense sense of peace.

She had heard the doctor. Her baby would live.

That was all that mattered in the end.

Amy.

Tracy’s last thought was of Jeff Stevens and how much she loved him. Would he find out about his daughter eventually? Would he come looking for her?

It’s out of my hands now.

Time to let go.

BLAKE CARTER COLLAPSED IN sobs in the young doctor’s arms.

“I shouldn’t have been so rough on you earlier,” the doctor said. “This wasn’t your fault.”

“It was my fault. I should have insisted. I should have driven her here right away.”

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Mr. Carter. The point is, you brought her here. You saved her life.”

Blake Carter turned to look at Tracy. Heavily sedated after her emergency cesarean—she’d needed a blood transfusion while they stitched her back together—she was only now starting to come around. Her baby had been taken to the ICU for tests, but the doctor had assured Blake that everything looked good.

“My baby . . . ,” Tracy called out weakly, her eyes still closed.

“Your baby’s just fine, Mrs. Schmidt,” said the doctor. “Try to rest a little longer.”

“Where is she?” Tracy insisted. “I want to see my daughter.”

The doctor smiled at Blake Carter. “Will you tell her or should I?”

“Tell me what?” Tracy sat up, wide-awake now and panicked. “What’s happened? Is she okay? Where’s Amy?”

“You might want to rethink that name.” Blake Carter chuckled softly.

Just then a nurse walked in, holding the swaddled infant in her arms. Beaming, she handed the bundle to Tracy.

“Congratulations, Mrs. Schmidt. It’s a boy!”

PART TWO

CHAPTER 8

PARIS

NINE YEARS LATER . . .

INSPECTOR JEAN RIZZO OF Interpol stared down at the dead girl’s face.

It was black and bloated, from the strangulation and from the drugs. Heroin. A huge amount of it. Track marks ran up both her arms, an advancing army of red pinpricks, harbingers of death. Her skirt was pushed up around her hips, her underwear had been removed, and her legs were splayed grotesquely.

“He positioned her after death?”

It wasn’t really a question. Inspector Jean Rizzo knew how this killer operated. But the pathologist nodded anyway.

“Raped?”

“Hard to say. Plenty of vaginal lesions, but in her line of work . . .”

The girl was a prostitute, like all the others. I must stop calling her “the girl.” Jean Rizzo chided himself. He checked his notes. Alissa. Her name was Alissa.

“No semen traces?”

The pathologist shook her head. “No, nothing. No prints, no saliva, no hair. Her nails have been cut. We’ll keep looking, but . . .”

But we won’t find anything. I know.

This was another of the killer’s signatures. He cut the girls’ nails after death, presumably to remove any traces of his DNA if they’d fought back. But there was more to it than that. The guy was a neat freak. He arranged his victims in degrading sexual positions, but he always brushed their hair, cut their nails, and left the crime scenes spotless. He’d been known to make beds and bag up trash. And he always left a Bible next to the corpse.

Today he’d chosen a verse from Romans:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.

Eleven murders, in ten different cities, over nine years. Police forces in six different countries had spent millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours trying to catch this bastard. And where had it gotten them? Nowhere.

Somewhere out there, a fastidious Christian with a grudge against hookers was laughing his sick ass off.

Jean Rizzo stared out of the window. It was a rainy April morning and the view from Alissa Armand’s dingy studio apartment was relentlessly depressing. Alissa lived in an HLM, France’s version of a housing project, in the rough northern Parisian suburb of Corbeil-Essonnes. Unemployment in this neighborhood ran at well over 50 percent, and the wreckage of addiction was everywhere. Beneath Alissa’s window was a litter-strewn courtyard, its gray concrete walls covered in graffiti. A group of bored, angry-looking young men cowered in a doorway out of the rain, smoking weed. In a few hours they’d be onto something stronger, if they could afford it. Or down in the métro, armed with knives, terrorizing their affluent white neighbors to feed their habits.

Jean hummed under his breath. “I love Paris in the springtime . . .”

The pathologist finished her work. Two uniformed gendarmes began moving the corpse.

“Can you believe there are guys who would pay to sleep with that?” one of them said to his buddy as they zipped up the body bag.

“I know. Talk about rough. I’d rather stick my dick in a meat grinder.”

Inspector Jean Rizzo turned on them furiously. “How dare you! Show some respect. She’s a human being. She was a human being. That’s somebody’s sister you’re looking at. Somebody’s daughter.”

“Sir.”

The two men returned to their work. They would save the raised eyebrows for later, once the Interpol busybody had gone. Since when was a little black humor not allowed at a crime scene? And who the hell was Inspector Jean Rizzo anyway?

INTERPOL’S PARIS HEADQUARTERS WERE small and simply furnished but the view was spectacular. From Jean Rizzo’s temporary office, he could see the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance and the white dome of the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre in the foreground. It was all a far cry from Alissa Armand’s squalid, lonely flat.

Jean Rizzo ran his hands through his hair and tried not to let the sadness overwhelm him. A short but handsome man in his early forties, with wavy dark hair, a stocky, boxer’s build and pale gray eyes that glowed like moonstones when he was angry or otherwise emotional, Jean was well liked at Interpol. A workaholic, he was driven not by ambition—few people in the agency were less interested in climbing the greasy pole than Jean Rizzo—but by a genuine zeal for justice, for righting the wrongs of this cruel world.

Addiction had ravaged the Rizzo family. Both Jean’s parents were alcoholics and his mother had died from the disease. Jean passionately believed that addiction was a disease, although growing up in Kerrisdale, an affluent suburb of Vancouver, he encountered few people who shared that view. Jean remembered neighboring families shunning his mother. Céleste Rizzo came from an old French-Canadian family and had been a great beauty in her youth. But drink destroyed her looks as it destroyed everything. When the end came, there was nobody there to help her.