James Patterson - #1 Suspect

I headed toward my room, but instead of going in, on impulse I opened the fire door and walked up a flight of stairs to the bar on the roof.

The air was cooling down, and looping strands of pin lights twinkled like stars, illuminating a scene rich with possibilities of sex with a stranger or maybe even romance.

A jazz trio was playing “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” at the far end of the deck, the music wafting across the swimming pool. Couples flirted at the bar, leaned toward each other on the chaises around the pool. Flaps were closed on the white canvas cabanas.

I stood at the edge of all this hazy, hedonistic optimism, then took a seat at the freestanding bar. I asked the bartender, “What am I having?”

He looked at me, then answered by pouring me a double Chivas straight up.

I’m not a big-time drinker. But if I ever needed hard liquor, this was the night.

I lowered my head so that there was no mistaking my purpose at the bar. I didn’t want company. I wanted oblivion.

But I felt someone’s eyes on me. When I looked up, a woman at the end of the bar was staring at me intently. She was in her late twenties, dark hair tied back into a ponytail, the lines of her slight frame camouflaged by loose clothing that was too dark for California and too big for her.

The woman looked familiar, but I didn’t know her. I looked away, got the bartender’s attention, and ordered another double.

When I looked up from my drink a few minutes later, the woman was gone.

Two young business guys in neon-colored shirts sat down in the empty seats at the end of the bar. They ordered screwdrivers, talked about the stock market and their shrinking expense accounts that wouldn’t cover a free weekend at the Beverly Hills Sun.

I blotted out their voices by concentrating on the music and the glowing scotch in my glass. I thought about Sci’s report of that two-second phone call made from the landline inside my house to Tommy’s cell phone at around the time of the murder.

That call was bad for me because it seemed to establish that I had been in my house when the crime went down.

But I hadn’t made that call.

I hadn’t called Tommy, so…had he called himself from my phone to make it seem that I had been home?

Or had Tommy commissioned a hit?

Had Colleen’s killer called Tommy from my house to tell him that Colleen was dead? Job done. Had Tommy been right outside on the beach, and that’s who Bobbie Newton saw, thinking Tommy was me?

I sat on that barstool, but in my mind I was driving to Tommy’s house. I wanted to confront my brother, to beat the truth out of him. And then I wanted to keep beating him until he didn’t look anything like me. So that, guilty or not, he could never play my double again.

But Justine was right.

I needed proof. Without it, the semen in Colleen’s body would be enough evidence to convince a jury that I was her killer.

I emptied my glass, left cash on the bar, and took the stairs down to the fifth floor.

I turned toward my room and again I noticed the woman who had been sitting at the bar a half hour before. Now she was on the far side of the elevator bank, twenty feet away. Her back was turned to me and she was fumbling in her handbag as if looking for her key.

I had twenty-twenty vision, and as a pilot I’d been trained to see anomalies from the air: a puff of dust, a moving shadow, a glint of steel ten thousand feet down in the dark.

I noticed this woman, but I blocked out that something was wrong with her attitude, her posture, her looks-something.

I walked away from her. I put my card key into the slot, opened my hotel room door-and felt a stunning blow to the back of my head.

I went down.

When I came to, the pain radiating from the back of my head was dazzling. I recognized the sunburst patterns on the carpet under my chin. I was on the floor of a room at the Beverly Hills Sun.

I closed my eyes, awoke to the shock of ice water in my face. The woman I’d seen at the bar and then again in the hallway was stooping over me, her hands on her knees, and she was cursing. I didn’t understand her thick Irish accent, but I knew her eyes.

They were Colleen’s eyes.

I said, “Colleen,” and she began cursing again. Through the pain, and as my vision cleared, I saw that although this woman resembled Colleen, she was older.

“Siobhan?”

The cursing intensified.

I pulled myself up into a sitting position and screamed back into her face, “I don’t understand you. Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

“Aym nah shuh’in’ up, Jack-o,” Colleen’s sister shouted into my face. “Nah ’til ye tell me why you kilt ’er.”

I’d been beaten twice in the past twenty-four hours and both times by people who had loved Colleen. First Donahue had clocked me. He’d also apparently told Siobhan where to find me. And now I’d been clobbered by Siobhan.

The couch was a beauty, eight feet of down-filled cushions. I took a seat and put my feet up on the coffee table next to the sap Siobhan had used to knock me down.

Siobhan was tough, but she brought me a pillow, then took a bottle of water out of the bar fridge and gave it to me. She sat in the chair across from me and stared at me.

“Start talkin’,” she said.

I did. I told her repeatedly that I hadn’t killed Colleen. I explained where I’d been when Colleen had been shot, and I told her how much I cared about her sister.

“You made love to her,” Siobhan said accusingly. “Colleen called to say you took her to bed before you left Los Angeles. Do you deny it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You were fooling with her.”

“I loved her. Just not enough to give her what she wanted,” I said.

I thought about Colleen’s last birthday. We’d gone to dinner at Donahue’s, sat at the same table where I’d sat with him last night. Donahue and a gang of waiters had brought out the birthday cake and sung to Colleen.

She had started out very happy that night.

I had known that, after a year of going out, what Colleen wanted for her birthday was a ring.

I had let her down. The best I could do had hurt her, terribly.

“You loved her? Then I don’t understand ‘not enough,’ ” Siobhan said. Her lips trembled. Tears slid down her cheeks. “Why would you have taken her to bed if you meant nothing by it?”

“Why did you sap me?”

“I had to do it.”

I paused to let her words stand alone.

“I missed her, Siobhan.”

I wanted to say more, but nothing I said would make sense, even to me. It had been a mistake to sleep with Colleen. If I hadn’t gone back to her hotel with her, maybe she’d still be alive.

Siobhan struggled to interrogate me through her grief.

“And so, if you didn’t kill Colleen, who did? Aren’t you supposed to be good at this sort of thing-investigating murders?”

Siobhan was sobbing now.

I stood up, reached out my arms to her.

She shook her head no.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”

She came to me and I held her as she cried.

“Find the bastard. You owe that to Colleen.”

“If it can be done, I’ll do it.”

“I miss her,” Siobhan choked out. “I loved her so much. She and I were best friends. Never a cross word. No secrets. I don’t know how I’m going to go on without her.”

“I’m so sorry, Siobhan. Losing Colleen-it’s a terrible thing.”

My voice cracked and then both of us were crying. It had been years since I had let myself cry. Sadness for Colleen swept through me. Holding her sister felt to me like saying good-bye to Colleen again.

Maybe Siobhan felt as if Colleen were saying a last good-bye to me.