Lee Child - First Thrills

They sat and she looked at him with her red-rimmed eyes. An uneasy moment later he asked, “You’re wondering what a cop’s doing here.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Other than just being a fan, wishing to pay condolences.”

“You could’ve written a letter.”

“The fact is, this is sort of personal. I didn’t want to come sooner, out of respect. But there’s something I’d like to ask. Some of us in the department were thinking ’bout putting together a memorial evening in honor of your husband. He wrote about New York a lot and he didn’t make us cops out to be flunkies. One of them, I can’t remember which one, he had this great plotline here in the city. Some NYPD rookie helps out Jacob Sharpe. It was about terrorists going after the train stations.”

“ Hallowed Ground. ”

“That’s right. That was a good book.”

More silence.

Malloy glanced at a photograph on the desk. It showed a half dozen people, in somber clothing, standing around a gravesite. Jane was in the foreground.

She saw him looking at it. “The funeral.”

“Who’re the other people there?”

“His daughters from his first marriage. That’s Aaron, his co- writer.” She indicated a man standing next to her. Then, in the background another, older man in an ill-fitting suit. She said, “Frank Lester, John’s former agent.”

She said nothing more. Malloy continued, “Well, some folks in the department know I’m one of your husband’s biggest fans, so I got elected to come talk to you, ask if you’d come to the memorial. An appreciation night, you could call it. Maybe say a few words. Wait. ‘Elected’ makes it sound like I didn’t want to come. But I did. I loved his books.”

“I sense you did,” she said, looking at the detective with piercing gray eyes.

“So?”

“I appreciate the offer. I’ll just have to see.”

“Sure. What ever you’d feel comfortable with.”

“ You madehim feel bad. He nearly got capped on that assignment.”

Malloy said to his partner, “I’ll send him a balloon basket. ‘Sorry I was rude to my favorite snitch.’ But right now I’m on to something.”

“Give me particulars.”

“Okay. Well, she’s hot, Prescott’s wife.”

“That’s not a helpful particular.”

“I think it is. Hot… and thirty years younger than her husband.”

“So she took her bra off and gave him a heart attack. Murder- by-boob isn’t in the penal code.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You mean she wanted somebody younger. So do I. So does everybody. Well, not you, ’cause nobody younger would give you the time of day.”

“And there was this feeling I got at the house. She wasn’t really in mourning. She was in a black dress, yeah, but it was tighter than anything I’d ever let my daughter wear, and her red eyes? It was like she’d been rubbing them. I didn’t buy the grieving widow thing.”

“You ain’t marshalling Boston Legal evidence here, son.”

“There’s more.” Malloy pulled the limp copy of Prescott’s obit out of his pocket. He tapped a portion. “I realized where my feeling came from. See this part about the personal physician?”

“Yeah. So?”

“You read books, DeLeon?”

“Yeah, I can read. I can tie my shoes. I can fieldstrip a Glock in one minute sixteen seconds. Oh, and put it back together, too, without any missing parts. What’s your point?”

“You know how if you read a book and you like it and it’s a good book, it stays with you? Parts of it do? Well, I read a book a few years ago. In it this guy has to kill a terrorist, but if the terrorist is murdered there’d be an international incident, so it has to look like a natural death.”

“How’d they set it up?”

“It was really smart. They shot him in the head three times with a Bushmaster.”

“That’s fairly un natural.”

“It’s natural because that’s how the victim’s ‘personal physician’ ”-Malloy did the quote things with his fingers “-signed the death certificate: cerebral hemorrhage following a stroke. Your doctor does that, the death doesn’t have to go to the coroner. The police weren’t involved. The body was cremated. The whole thing went away.”

“Hmm. Not bad. All you need is a gun, a shitload of money, and a crooked doctor. I’m starting to like these particular particulars.”

“And what’s particularly interesting is that it was one of Prescott’s books that Aaron Reilly co-wrote. And the wife remembered it. That was why I went to see her.”

“Check out the doctor.”

“I tried. He’s Spanish.”

“So’s half the city, in case you didn’t know. We got translators, hijo. ”

“Not Latino. Spanish. From Spain. He’s back home and I can’t track him down.”

The department secretary stuck her head in the doorway. “Jimmy, you got a call from a Frank Lester.”

“Who’d be?…”

“A book agent. Worked with that guy Prescott you were talking about.”

The former agent. “How’d he get my number?”

“I don’t know. He said he heard you were planning some memorial service and he wanted to get together with you to talk about it.”

DeLeon frowned. “Memorial?”

“I had to make up something to get to see the wife.” Malloy took the number, a Manhattan c ell-phone area code, he noticed. Called. It went to voice mail. He didn’t leave a message.

Malloy turned back to his partner. “There’s more. An hour ago I talked with some deputies up in Vermont. They told me that it was a private ambulance took the body away. Not one of the local outfits. The sheriff bought into the heart-attack thing but he still sent a few people to the place where Prescott was hiking just to take some statements. After the ambulance left, one of the deputies saw somebody leaving the area. Male, he thinks. No description other than that, except he was carrying what looked like a briefcase or small suitcase.”

“Breakdown rifle?”

“What I was thinking. And when this guy saw the cop car, he vanished fast.”

“A pro?”

“Maybe. I was thinking that co-author might’ve come across some connected guys in doing his research. Maybe it was this Aaron Reilly.”

“You got any ideas on how to find out?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

Standing in the dim frosted-glass corridor of a luxurious SoHo condo, Jimmy Malloy made sure his gun was unobstructed and rang the buzzer.

The large door swung open.

“Aaron Reilly?” Even though he recognized the co-author from the picture at Prescott’s funeral.

“Yes, that’s right.” The man gave a cautious grin.

Which remained in place, though it grew a wrinkle of surprise when the shield appeared. Malloy tried to figure out if the man had been expecting him-because Jane Prescott had called ahead of time-but couldn’t tell.

“Come on inside, detective.”

Reilly, in his late thirties, Malloy remembered, was the opposite of Jane Prescott. He was in faded jeans and a work shirt, sleeves rolled up. A Japanese product, not a Swiss, told him the time and there was no gold dangling on him anywhere. His shoes were scuffed. He was good-looking, with thick longish hair and no wedding ring.

The condo-in chic SoHo-had every right to be opulent, but, though large, it was modest and lived-in.

Not an original piece of art in the place.

Zero sculpture.

And unlike the Widow Prescott’s abode, Reilly’s was chock- a-block with books.

He gestured the cop to sit. Malloy picked a leather chair that lowered him six inches toward the ground as it wheezed contentedly. On the wall nearby was a shelf of the books. Malloy noted one: The Paris Deception. “ J.B. Prescott with Aaron Reilly” was on the spine.