Sandra Brown - Ricochet

It was almost verbatim what he’d said to DeeDee a half hour earlier, but hearing it from Elise made his blood run hot with fury.

“I even knew that’s what you expected me to do,” she continued. “Detective Bowen, too. She would have expected me to play the whore. So I guess I proved you both right.”

“Well, it was a wasted effort.”

“I know. You didn’t believe me.”

“Not then, and for damn sure not now.”

“I hoped you might have changed your mind.”

He didn’t allow himself to be taken in by her wounded look. “What happened on the bridge?”

She shook back long hair that was no longer there, a reflexive gesture Duncan recognized as what she did when collecting her thoughts. Or fabricating lies. “After you left, I fell asleep.”

“Oh, right. You the insomniac.” She really was a priceless liar. She would like for him to believe that she had drifted off following their lovemaking, when she’d been unable to sleep after sex with her husband. Lest he fall for the manipulation, he yanked his mind back to what she was saying.

“I slept for over two hours. When I woke up, I panicked, knowing Cato would be looking for me. I rushed back to my car. Napoli was waiting for me in the backseat.”

“As arranged.”

“No.”

Trying to trap her in a lie, he said, “But you recognized him immediately.”

She shook her head emphatically. “I’d never seen him before. He introduced himself, even gave me his business card.”

Duncan had wondered why, if their meeting was prearranged, there’d been any need for the transponder and why Napoli ’s card had been in the seat of her car. He’d raised those questions once with DeeDee and Worley, but they’d shrugged them off as insignificant details.

“Okay,” he said, “ Napoli ’s in your car. Then what?”

“He held a gun to my head and told me to drive to the middle of the Talmadge Bridge. I did as he said, but when we topped the bridge I called his bluff and kept going. He dug the barrel of his pistol into my temple and threatened to pull the trigger unless I turned around. So as soon as we reached the other side, I made a U-turn.”

That explained why the car had been in the inbound lane. But she could have heard that in the news reports.

“This time, when I reached the crest, I stopped. He told me to leave the key in the ignition, get out, and walk to the wall. I kept stalling, asking him what he wanted, offering him money. He said he’d already struck a deal for more than I could ever pay him.”

“With who?”

“Who do you think?”

“Don’t dare say your husband. The man’s been shattered by this.”

“You’re wrong.”

“And you’re lying,” he fired back. “For ten days I’ve watched him. I’ve seen him disintegrate bit by bit. He’s devastated.”

“That’s what he wants you to think.”

“He’s faking it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sticking to that story?”

“Yes.”

He started pressing digits on his phone.

“Wait! Duncan, I beg you. Listen to me.”

He stopped dialing, but kept his thumb poised over the buttons.

She clasped her raised hands in a gesture of appeal. “Gary Ray Trotter failed, so Napoli had to finish the job himself. He gave me the choice of jumping off the bridge, or of being shot. Either way was fine by him, he said. I wouldn’t survive the two-hundred-foot fall into the river. People would think I’d killed myself. If he shot me, it would look like another carjacking. Either way, I’d be dead and he would be richer, courtesy of Cato.”

“Why would your husband pay a creep like Napoli to get rid of you?”

She hesitated; Duncan laughed shortly. “We never get further than that, do we?” He pressed another of the digits on the telephone. “Motive trips you up every time. But you had plenty of motive to shoot Napoli, didn’t you?”

“Yes. No.”

“Well, which is it?” he shouted.

She put her hand to her butchered hair. “You’re confusing me.”

“Welcome to the club, lady. I’ve been a little confused myself lately.”

“I had motive to shoot him, but I didn’t. I got away from him and ran. He chased me. He stepped on the heel of my sandal and it snapped off. I stumbled, fell. Napoli hauled me up by my arm. He wrenched it hard and I screamed. That startled him. I took advantage of his surprise and grabbed for the gun. I yanked it out of his hand and threw it into the river. He hit me in the face.” She pointed to her eye. “I swatted at his head, grabbed his hair, and pulled hard. He fell back, and I took off running again.”

“At some point you shot him in the stomach with your husband’s old twenty-two.”

“I don’t know anything about a twenty-two,” she cried. “In any case, I didn’t shoot Napoli.”

“Well, somebody plugged him in the gut.”

“Savich.”

His breath came out in a gust of disbelief, almost amusement. “Savich?”

“That’s right.”

He laughed. “What a convenient scapegoat. First you used his name to get me to the old house for our secret meeting. Now you’re trying to-”

“It’s the truth!”

“You watched Savich shoot Napoli.”

“Yes.”

“And he let you get away?”

“He didn’t see me.”

Laughter as well as patience deserted him. Giving her a hard look, he said, “Try again.”

She took a deep breath as though ready to launch into a long and complicated story. “I was running from Napoli -”

“On second thought, save your breath. I’m sick of your bullshit. You killed Napoli. Otherwise you would have notified the police.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t?”

“I knew everyone would think that I had killed him. Like Gary Ray Trotter. No one would have believed me.”

He didn’t. Certainly not this crap about Savich, especially now, knowing what good friends they were. But for the time being, he played along. “Okay, so you ran and miraculously escaped Savich. Where have you been for the last ten days? How’d you live? What did you do for money? We’ve had cops up and down the East Coast from Miami to Myrtle Beach checking hotels and motels, from the ritziest to the sleaziest. Bus stations, airports, boat rentals and charters, car rental companies. Anything that moves, we’ve checked. Bicycles, motorcycles, and pogo sticks,” he finished angrily. “How did you manage to disappear? Did you have help?”

“Help? No. I had a contingency plan to disappear. For months I’d been preparing for it. I had some money stashed away, a credit card in another name, a fake ID, a place to go.”

“You didn’t go to the house where I met you.”

She tilted her head. “You went back there to look for me?”

“Yeah, I went back.”

“Alone? Or with your partner?”

He avoided that. “You hid out until tonight when the search was called off. Now, nobody’s looking for you or your remains. So why’d you come back? Why’d you come to me? Why didn’t you just stay dead?”

It was a vicious thing to say and she reacted accordingly. But he let the question stand.

Finally she said softly, “I came back because I have unfinished business.”

“Yeah, I know about that. You’ve got a smooth operation going with Savich.” Reading her shock, he moved toward her in a measured tread. “I saw the pictures. The ones Napoli was using to blackmail you.”

“Blackmail me? What are you talking about? What pictures?”

The thought of hitting a woman was repugnant to him, but remembering the photographs with her and Savich raised the level of his frustration and brought him close to slapping her. At the very least giving her a hard shake to dislodge the phony perplexity in her expressive eyes.