James Carol: The Quiet Man

‘I had to make sure he was going to stay down.’ He nodded toward Gifford’s unconscious body. ‘So was it all worth it?’

Anderton’s smile lit up her whole face. ‘Totally worth it.’

Atlanta has the busiest airport in the world. More than a quarter of a million people use it every single day, catching a thousand flights to all points of the globe. Today Winter was just passing through, waiting for a connecting flight. Three hours from now he’d be in the air and on his way to Madrid. Another day, another killer to hunt down. The bar he was sitting in was loud, everyone talking at once. One wall was made entirely from glass and looked out over the runways.

The TV screen was tuned to a news channel, the sound muted. Even so, it was a fairly straightforward process to work out what was going on. The script was pretty much the same as it had been yesterday, the same as it would be tomorrow. Winter had one eye on the TV screen, and one eye on the planes taking off and landing on the other side of the window. Killing time, because that’s what you did in airports. The whisky was overpriced, but it was going down easily enough. Too easily. One more and he’d call it quits. His plan was to anaesthetise himself to the point where he slept the whole way to Spain.

The story onscreen changed to a new one that made him immediately sit up and take notice. More than five months had passed since he’d been in Vancouver, long enough for the whole episode to get buried in his memory. He’d been halfway around the world since then, worked another half a dozen cases. The face on the screen sent him tumbling back in time. They were using Gifford’s police mugshot. The board he was holding up gave his number as 325-676-21. The top of his head was level with the line for five foot four. His face was completely expressionless. No joy, no sorrow, and nothing in between. He still managed to look guilty of all the sins of mankind, though. According to the ticker at the bottom of the screen he’d just been murdered.

Winter grabbed his carryon bag and pushed his way to the bar, ignoring the protests and shouts. One guy went to grab his arm and he shook him away. The guy must have seen something in his expression because he backed off immediately, hands held high to pacify. On screen, Gifford’s photograph had been swapped for Nicholas Sobek’s. This picture dated back to the days when he’d been a mover and a shaker. They’d had to use this one because they didn’t have anything more recent. His hair had been short and tidy back then. No beard. He looked a totally different person. Until you saw the eyes. Then there was no doubt that this was the same person.

‘Turn up the TV,’ Winter called out.

The barman ignored him and carried on serving a customer.

‘Hey!’ he hollered.

The barman stopped and turned. Some of the other travellers had turned as well, everyone staring like he was a dozen different kinds of crazy. An empty space had suddenly opened up all around him.

‘I said, turn up the volume!’

‘You need to calm down, sir, or I’m going to call security.’

‘No, what I need is for you to turn the volume up on the TV.’

The barman kept on staring, working through his options. Winter took a twenty from his billfold and slapped it down on the bar. Which added a new option into the mix, one that was hopefully more appealing than calling security.

‘I’ll give you twenty bucks to turn up the volume. So long as you do it now.’

The barman looked at him for a second longer, then picked up the twenty and went to find the remote. By the time he got the sound going, the story had finished. It took a couple of minutes for Winter to find somewhere quiet enough to make a call. He was in some sort of service corridor, away from the noise and bustle. He scrolled through the contacts list on his phone, looking for Anderton’s number. She might be retired, but he was betting that her winged monkeys were as efficient as ever. She answered on the seventh ring. There was no preamble, she just jumped straight in with, ‘You’ve heard the news then?’

‘It was Sobek, wasn’t it? He killed Gifford.’

‘Sobek has an alibi,’ she replied. ‘Gifford was in prison at the time of the murder. Sobek wasn’t.’

‘He was involved, though. He’s got to be. We’re back to those quacking ducks again, Anderton.’

‘Of course he was involved. The police know that, too. That’s why they’re so keen to talk to him.’

‘Which shouldn’t be too difficult. All they’ve got to do is rock up to his house and knock on the basement door.’

‘That was the first place they looked. The house was deserted. Jefferies reckons that he hasn’t been there in the last forty-eight hours.’

‘You better run me through what happened,’ Winter said.

‘Okay, Gifford was enjoying a nice relaxing shower when someone slashed his femoral artery. Despite the fact that there were six other people in the shower at the time, nobody saw a thing. Jack Datt says that the wound was consistent with an improvised shiv, possibly a toothbrush. It wouldn’t have taken Gifford long to bleed out. The warm water would have sped things up even further.’

‘It should be easy enough to work out who did it. All you’ve got to do is talk to the wives and relatives of the guys who were in the shower with him. If any of them are driving brand-new cars or booking exotic holidays then you’ve found your man. Sobek had the means and motive. The only thing missing was opportunity, and it sounds like he solved that particular problem. So where is he if he’s not at home?’

‘Right now that’s the million-dollar question.’

‘The Cessna?’ Winter suggested.

‘Still at Boundary Bay. And both cars are still in his garage. That’s one of the things that make this so weird. It’s like one second he was there, the next he’d disappeared.

‘And like that, he’s gone.’

‘Yeah, I saw that movie, too.’

‘Not that the cars would have been a whole lot of use,’ he continued. ‘If he’d driven up to a border checkpoint in an Aston Martin or a top-of-the-range Mercedes, people would look twice. Right now, he’s going to want to exist below the radar.’

‘Way below,’ Anderton agreed.

‘Heading to the US makes sense, though. Sea-Tac is only a couple of hours from Vancouver. From there he could fly anywhere in the world. If he’s worried about Seattle being too close he could keep going south to Portland. There’s an international airport there. Or maybe he’ll do the tourist thing and drive down the Pacific Highway and catch a plane from LAX. Whatever he decides to do, he’s got plenty of options.’

‘That’s the theory the police are currently working on. They’ve been talking to the car rental agencies, but no joy so far.’

‘It’s unlikely he’d go down that route. He wouldn’t want to risk the car being fitted with a tracking device. It’s more likely that he picked up something cheap and anonymous from a dealership, somewhere happy to deal in cash and not too concerned about paperwork.’

Anderton sighed. ‘And that’s the theory I’m working on.’

The line went quiet. The only sound was the gentle static wash created by the signal travelling up to space and back again.

‘What is it?’ Anderton asked. ‘I can hear you thinking.’

‘Sobek’s not going to be happy.’

‘Why not? The person who murdered Isabella is dead. That’s got to be a cause for celebration.’

‘Yes, but he wasn’t the one who did the actual killing.’

‘You think that matters?’

‘I think he would have liked to have done it,’ Winter said. ‘However, I also think that he values his freedom too much to do anything stupid. He proved that much back in Delaney’s kitchen. He could easily have killed Gifford. Believe me, he was tempted. I could see it in his face. It took every ounce of willpower he possessed to stop himself from pulling the trigger.’