Джеймс Паттерсон - Three Women Disappear

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

“And still you didn’t call 911?”

“I did,” I said. “At least I tried. I was in shock.”

“I don’t believe in shock.”

“Denial, then.”

“Why don’t you skip what you were feeling and tell me what you did?”

I nodded, thinking to myself, You’ll get through this, Sarah .

At first it didn’t occur to me that he might be alive. There was so much blood. So many holes. Gashes up and down his legs, his back. His clothes nearly shredded. I just stood there staring at him. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t make myself move.

And then he coughed.

“Anthony!” I yelled. “Oh, my God, Anthony.”

I ran across the kitchen, slipped on his blood, nearly toppled, then righted myself and knelt beside him.

“Can you hear me, Anthony?” I said. “I’m calling 911. You’re going to be all right.”

He made a raspy, muffled sound. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to speak. I couldn’t tell if he knew I was there.

“Just hold on,” I said.

I stood up, spotted my purse lying on the far counter. I riffled through it, turned it upside down, and shook out the contents. No phone. Maybe I’d left it at home. Maybe I’d dropped it in the woods.

I returned to his side, leaned in close, touched his hand.

“You’ll be okay, Anthony. I’m not leaving you. I’m just going to find the house phone, all right?”

His eyelids were fluttering, but they wouldn’t open. I jumped up, ran to the console in the foyer, but the phone wasn’t in its cradle. I sprinted back through the house, thinking, Blood loss, coma, organ failure . Thinking every second mattered. No phone in the guest room, the game room, the sun room. I finally found it in the most obvious place: under a couch cushion. I picked it up, dialed. Nothing. The line was dead.

I held the phone away from my ear and looked at it. The buttons were dark. I scanned the room. Everything was dark: the television, the DVR, the hi-fi. I went over to the light switch, flicked it up and down. Someone had cut the power.

There was one hope left. I ran back into the kitchen, took a knee beside Anthony. His eyelids were still fluttering, and his right hand had started to twitch.

“That’s right,” I said. “Just keep breathing.”

I knew better than to move a person in his condition, hovering between shock and death, but I had to access his front pockets. I raised up into a crouch, placed my hands on his side, and pushed. My legs shot out from under me; I landed belly down in his blood. I tried slipping my hand under his waist but didn’t get very far. The man weighed three hundred pounds—even before I started cooking for him.

I was at my wits’ end, biting back tears, fighting the urge to crumble completely. I wandered over to the kitchen window, stood staring out at the far-reaching wilds of Anthony Costello’s estate. And then it hit me: the reason I’d been out there in the first place.

I’d been chasing him.

Or her—I didn’t get a very good look. It was dawn. I’d just started the coffee brewing when I heard a door slam. I looked out, saw a figure I didn’t recognize struggling with the gate’s latch, then saw that same figure tear off across the lawn, headed for the woods.

“And you ran after this phantom figure?” Haagen cut me off. “Like you were one of Charlie’s angels? Sorry, but I find that a little hard to believe.”

“I must have,” I said. “I must have climbed up on that boulder to see if I could spot him.”

“And then conveniently passed out?”

“It didn’t seem convenient to me.”

“Let’s get back to the part where you’re staring out the window while your employer lies dying at your feet.”

“I was collecting myself,” I said. “Piecing things together. Coming up with a plan.”

“And that plan was?”

“To drive for help.”

I’d decided to break my promise, leave Anthony behind while I sped to the nearest gas station and called 911. But when I turned around, he was moving, trying to drag himself forward across the floor. He crawled a few inches, collapsed, then lifted his head and pointed. I walked over to him, crouched down.

“Easy now, Anthony,” I said. “Just relax.”

He made no effort to speak—just kept pointing. I lowered myself onto the floor, searched for whatever it was he wanted me to see.

“Oh, thank God,” I said.

His phone, lying far back under the industrial-size refrigerator. I ran to the hall closet, fetched a broom, used the handle to bat the phone out. Not a speck of dust came with it: Serena’s a maniac for detail.

Cavalry had arrived in the form of a cellular device. My heart was beating hard, my hands shaking. I lit up Anthony’s home screen, found a string of missed-call alerts: five in a span of ten minutes, all from “UV,” the most recent stamped forty-five minutes ago. “UV” stood for Uncle Vincent, head of the Costello family. Vincent Costello only used the phone for holiday greetings and dire emergencies.

“Oh, no,” I said out loud. “Oh, my God, no.”

A quick scan of outgoing calls confirmed my suspicion: Anthony had reached out to Vincent just minutes before the missed calls started. His attacker had left him for dead, and instead of dialing 911, Anthony had gone straight to the person who’d always made things right: his uncle, don of Central Florida, the Mafia boss who’d lived to a ripe old age without spending so much as an hour behind bars. Anthony, stuck and bleeding, must have managed a few words, then dropped the phone. A frantic Vincent had tried desperately to get his nephew back on the line.

“All right,” I told myself. “Don’t panic. Just go ahead and call the paramedics.”

I had my thumb on the 9 key when I looked over at Anthony and saw it was too late. His eyes were open and still, and his back had quit rising and falling with every labored breath. I went over and checked his pulse just to be sure. Then I stood and dropped the phone. I may have screamed—I can’t remember. Vincent lived in a gated mansion on the outskirts of Tampa, maybe an hour away. He would have sent help of his own. Mobsters who’d be pulling up the drive any minute. And they’d find me, the wife of a cop, alone in the house, dripping with Anthony’s blood. Anthony, who’d been killed with a kitchen knife. Me, his personal chef.

CHAPTER 3

“SO YOU ran?” Haagen said. “All the way to Texas?”

I nodded.

“Texas is just where I wound up,” I said. “The running was the important part.”

Haagen sat back in her chair.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Just how much of this do you expect me to believe?”

“All of it.”

“Every word?” she asked.

Breathing the air in that room was like chewing on thirty-year-old cigarette smoke. I felt tired, cold, anxious, sweaty, frightened, lonely, and above all eager to win Haagen over.

“Every word,” I told her.

She folded her hands behind her head and grinned, as if she knew something I didn’t.

“Why do you hyphenate your last name?” she asked.

“What?”

“Roberts-Walsh. You hyphenate your last name. Why?”

Changing topic midstream was Heidi’s way of keeping a suspect off-balance. It worked. You could never tell what was coming next.

“Sorry,” I said, “but how is that relevant?”

“Would you say that you have marital issues, Ms. Roberts-Walsh?”

“ Issues is a bit vague.”

“Problems, then.”

“No more so than any other couple.”

“So everything’s fine at home?”

“Have you ever been married, Detective Haagen?”

She let the question pass.

“What’s interesting is that you’re very similar to your husband.”