Jeff Abbott - Fear

‘I don’t know anything else.’ Fear clenched his eyes shut.

Groote considered, put himself in Allison’s shoes. You suspect illegal drug testing. You steal the research as evidence. But you also want a patient who’s been guinea-pigged as a show-and-tell for the FDA. Given that, wouldn’t you concoct a better scheme to get him out of the hospital? No – not if you were pressed for time, if you knew Quantrill was ready to move on Frost, shut the operation down now that the testing was complete. ‘Where’s Frost, Nathan?’

‘Frost?’

‘Allison took some DVDs, the kind you use in a computer to store big files. They had information on them for a project called Frost. Tell me where those DVDs are.’

‘I don’t know. I just did what she told me, please don’t hurt me no more.’

‘Oh, I don’t want to, Nathan. Seriously. But I have a problem. Those DVDs Allison took, they’re not in her house. Could be they blew up with her at her office. But it’s awfully convenient, you see, and I don’t believe in that convenient a world. She takes something of great value, she gets obliterated, and then there’s a group hug at her house. It changes the equation.’ He smiled at Nathan. ‘I read your file while you were napping. You’re quite a special case, Tin Soldier. Maybe you made Allison go boom-boom.’

Nathan shook his head in horror. ‘No, man, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t ever…’

‘You tell me what happened from when you ran.’ Groote rotated the cigarette in his fingers, studied the smoke, reheated the tip with a deep drag.

‘She left an electronic passkey for me. Told me to run at six-thirty, told me how to get to her house. She left a change of clothes for me. She had told me to sit and wait in her bedroom until she came in, but there was a big mirror in there, I don’t like mirrors, don’t do mirrors, no mirrors.’

‘You may like them less when I’m done,’ Groote said quietly.

Nathan kept on: ‘So I went into the den, stood near a window so I could see her come. But a man came. He drove up past her house, left his car, came back down. No sign of Allison. I got scared. He came in and I hit him on the head with this Indian carving she kept on the mantel. I tied him up with sheets and dumped him in the tub. I didn’t know what else to do… I figured Allison would tell me.’

Groote frowned. That matched MR’s story. ‘He wasn’t there when we found you, Nathan. Who was he?’

‘The other guy… said the first guy’s name was Sorenson.’

The name meant nothing to Groote. ‘And you had no idea who the other guy was?’

‘No.’

‘But him you didn’t crack on the head, him you didn’t tie up. Why so nice to him, Nathan?’

‘I wanted him to talk – tell me what was happening.’

‘Did he?’

‘No. He didn’t know… He said Allison’s office was bombed.’

Groote considered. It bothered him, deeply, that an apparent bomb had killed Allison Vance. Bombs were not built on a whim. Bombs were complicated and technical and a pain in the ass. Guns and knives and rope were far easier ways to accomplish the goal of shutting up one person. Bombs meant resources, expertise, time to plan. Bombs meant an enemy who might blow Groote’s ass out of the water.

‘I – I don’t think this guy you want killed her,’ Nathan said.

‘I don’t have a lot of suspects.’

‘That Sorenson guy-’

‘- could just be a story you and your friend hatched to throw salt on the trail if either of you got caught. No, Nathan, I think MR’s the answer to my prayers.’

‘I don’t know anything about MR… I’m sorry, I don’t.’

Groote dropped the lit cigarette at the bottom of the water pitcher. It hissed and died. ‘I’m sorry, Nathan, but cigarettes are too slow.’ He pulled the screwdriver from his pocket, held it up so Nathan could see. ‘You need the right tools for the right job.’

‘Please. Please don’t.’

‘Custom-made for me in Hungary. Precisely balanced. I keep the edge cleaner than an angel’s ass.’

‘I don’t know him! I can’t tell you.’

‘I bet you liked word problems in math class. I mean, launching missiles and shit in the army, you must have gotten at least a C in geometry.’

‘Word problems?’ Nathan, trembling, shook his head.

‘If you’ve got an inch of flesh covering your bones, and the screwdriver can penetrate two centimeters at a blow, how long before the screwdriver reaches bone? I threw in the metric angle because I know you’re just a mathematical genius.’

Nathan fought the restraints. ‘Please… don’t. Don’t.’

‘Don’t? Don’t? Well, sure, Nathan, I won’t. It doesn’t have to be the hard way, not one bit, if you don’t care for math.’ He made his voice soft and intimate, brought the screwdriver close to Nathan’s wide eye. ‘Lots of sick people need Frost, Tin Soldier, you included. Someone I love included. Talk or I work out the word problem on your flesh and bones. Which is it?’

‘I can’t tell you… what I don’t know.’

‘I respect your heroics. Truly.’ Groote gave Nathan an affectionate pat on the cheek. Then he stabbed the screwdriver deep into Nathan’s arm.

Wednesday morning at 7:00 A.M., the cell phone rang next to Miles’s head. He came awake instantly, panic settling in his guts, trying to be fully aware before answering the phone and talking to the shooter.

‘Hello?’

‘Where the hell are you?’ DeShawn sounded pissed.

‘I met a woman…’ Miles lied. ‘I spent the night at her place. That allowed, Mommy?’

‘I need you back at your apartment, Miles. Right now, please.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I got bad news. I’ll pick you up. Where are you?’

‘It’s not far. I’ll walk,’ and he hung up before DeShawn could argue. Miles didn’t want to go back to his place, with the shooter likely to be tracking Michael Raymond, but he couldn’t act afraid to be at home; DeShawn would relocate his ass out of Santa Fe in ten seconds flat, and no way he was leaving now.

Miles washed his face, changed into a clean shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He left his duffel in the room and locked up; he’d head back here before the gallery opened and retrieve his stuff. He walked back to the apartment, but no shooters jumped out to blast flesh off his bones. DeShawn’s car wheeled over to him and Miles got in.

‘Doctor Vance is dead,’ DeShawn said.

‘I saw it on the news this morning.’

‘You okay?’

‘I’m upset.’

‘You understand, Miles, this has anything to do with the Barradas, you’re moved in five seconds.’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘You sound very confident.’

‘They wouldn’t kill my shrink. If they found me, they’d kill me. And probably not with a bomb off their own turf – too hard to transport. They’d just put bullets in my head.’

‘You know anything about this tragedy, Miles?’

‘No.’

‘What happened to your face?’

‘Got into a fight last night.’

‘Man, wooing and fighting, you had quite an evening.’ A tone of disbelief tinged his voice.

‘Where are we going?’ Miles started to ask, but then they were there. DeShawn inched the car past Allison’s burned building. Yellow fire-scene tape haloed the lot; a group of firefighters were sifting the ashes toward the rear of the building, a couple of news stations from Albuquerque had parked their satellite wagons down from the wreckage. A spill of people stood along the sidewalk, gawking at the ruin. The lot was empty, Allison’s car towed away.

Miles pointed at the firemen shaking a sifter, ashes tumbling at their feet. ‘They’re searching for the door’s lock, to see if it’s locked or not. A firefighter friend in Miami told me it’s one of the first items of evidence they search for.’ His voice sounded dead to him. ‘I heard on the news they found her. Do you think she suffered?’