Джеймс Паттерсон - Three Women Disappear

I got behind the wheel of the coupe, tossed the travel bag on the passenger seat. Anthony must have searched far and wide to find the slowest-moving automatic garage door in Florida. I watched it inch its way off the floor, counted to fifty before it even cleared the front bumper. “Come on, come on, come on,” I begged. My nerves got the better of me. I hit the gas too soon, clipped the bottom of the door, heard an unholy scraping as it ripped the paint from the Bentley’s hood. Outside, I floored it, saw Vincent’s men sprinting for their sedan in my rearview mirror.

I took our winding, gravel access road at eighty miles per hour, kept expecting more of Vincent’s goons to pop out from behind the bushes. If they had, I swear I’d have run them over. But the only button men I had to worry about were in the sedan on my tail, Defoe behind the wheel. And they were gaining steadily, as if the Bentley was a Model T and they were driving a tricked-out Aston Martin.

My best hope was to make the highway, then let the Bentley’s engine put some distance between us. I ran every red light in the local town, passed a truck around a blind turn, took the on-ramp doing a hundred. They were right there with me. I darted between lanes, looked up to see Defoe grinning, our cars not five feet apart. I got onto the shoulder and floored it. I figured this would end one of two ways: with a caravan of state troopers in my rearview or with a clean getaway. I couldn’t allow any third option.

They kept pace for a long stretch, then started to fade. Maybe the Bentley wasn’t such a bad choice after all. When there was enough distance between us, I slipped into traffic, got off at the next exit, zigzagged down suburban streets until I was sure I’d lost them.

I pulled into a strip mall and practiced my deep breathing, willing my pulse to slow. Then I started for Tampa, taking back roads all the way.

CHAPTER 8

DETECTIVE SEAN WALSH

ANTHONY COSTELLO was an old-fashioned accountant: he hoarded paper. If he bought a stick of gum back in 1990, he still had the receipt, and he demanded the same from his clients. Lucky for me, he was also cautious, bordering on paranoid. Anthony hung on to every scrap, but he didn’t keep any of it—incriminating or otherwise—in the house. He rented adjoining storage units at Pete Owens’s Stow-and-Go on the outskirts of Tampa. I know because I helped him find the place.

I first met Pete Owens back when I was working Robbery and he refused to testify against one of his cat burglar tenants. A weekend in jail did nothing to change his mind. That’s the kind of guy you want watching your stuff. Pete didn’t so much as bat an eye when Anthony signed the lease “Jonathan Dough”—maybe because Anthony agreed to pay triple the rent, plus ten grand for permission to knock down the cement wall between the units.

Of course, I hadn’t told Heidi about the Stow-and-Go. Or anyone else, for that matter. Call it pleading the Fifth in advance. Why implicate myself over five hundred square feet that no one knew existed? Not to mention that having Anthony’s business files in my back pocket gave me a leg up on my former partner.

I waited for the lunch hour to pass, then drove to the facility, punched in the access code, and watched the steel gates slide open. Anthony’s units were at the back, in an alcove beyond the sight lines of his fellow tenants. Picking the industrial lock—Anthony, like his uncle, trusted me only so far—took longer than I care to admit. I stepped inside, flicked on the overhead, pulled the door shut behind me.

If I’d been the one writing Anthony’s eulogy, I’d have led with this: He was the most compulsively organized human being I’ve ever met . The walls of the double unit were lined with identical floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, each cabinet representing a calendar year. Turn to the left once you walked through the door and you could go from 1995 all the way to 2017 without finding a single sheet of paper out of place. I turned to the right. The year I wanted was 2015.

My knees knocked a little as I stood there flipping through manila folders. Something about being in a dead man’s storage unit spooked me, as if maybe his ghost was camped out here, contemplating its next move. Lucky for me the living Anthony had made things so easy: Serena Flores’s personnel file was right where I’d expected it to be, halfway into a row marked DOMESTIC HIRES.

According to the paperwork, Serena was in her late twenties, just five feet tall, single, or had been when Anthony hired her. Previous address: a town in Mexico called Tecomán. A note penciled in the margins said Tecomán was a drug-smuggling hotbed midway down the West Coast. Maybe Anthony thought Serena would be amenable to more than housework. Maybe he’d offered her a lucrative little sideline, then pressed too hard when she said no. I wondered if that was a motive I could sell to Vincent. Something to get him off Sarah’s tail. And mine.

Serena’s next of kin—Símon Flores, older brother—lived in the Bowman Heights section of West Tampa. He was a vet tech. The file gave no info beyond his occupation, address, and work number. With any luck, at least one of the three would still be valid. I jogged back to my car, took out the burner phone, and started dialing. A woman answered. I heard barking in the background.

“I was hoping I could talk to Símon Flores,” I said, cranking up my slight southern accent. A little charm never hurts.

“Sorry,” the woman said, “he’s in with a patient. Can I take a message?”

“No, thank you. I’ll catch him later.”

She’d already told me what I wanted to know: a) Símon still worked there, and b) he was on duty right now.

Fifteen highway miles and a stretch of side streets later, I arrived at Ybor City Animal Hospital. The receptionist was busy handling a small backup of incoming and outgoing customers, some straddling carrying cases, one with a cockatoo perched on his shoulder. I slipped into the waiting room, picked up a magazine, kept my eyes open for a Mexican male in scrubs. An elderly woman sat down opposite me and started weeping at full volume into a floral handkerchief. I figured things weren’t looking good for Fido.

I’d called in a background check during the drive over. Símon had come to the US in 2005, applied for and received citizenship in 2014. Nothing on his record said he was anything other than hardworking and upstanding. The kind of guy a sister with a conditional visa might lean on when her employer turned up DOA. Especially if she was the one who’d killed him.

I didn’t have long to wait before a Latino in blue scrubs pushed his way through a set of double doors and sat down next to the old woman. The name tag above his breast pocket confirmed he was Símon Flores. I looked him over. North of thirty, tall, hefty. Not hefty like Anthony, but large enough to get noticed on the street. The way he carried himself—shoulders back, chest out, eyes full of compassion—you’d have thought he was the vet instead of the tech. Maybe he’d been promoted. Maybe he’d put himself through canine med school and was now Dr. Símon Flores. I hoped it was true. The more he had to lose, the easier my job became.

He set a hand on the weeping woman’s back, called her Carol, spoke to her in hushed tones. His best guess was that her cat had eaten a poisoned mouse. The news was more than Carol could bear. Her weeping turned convulsive. She seemed to want to say something but couldn’t find the breath. I understood what she was going through. I’d seen the look on her face—equal parts remorse and sorrow—countless times before. Símon, without meaning to, had just accused her of killing her cat. He leaned in and draped an arm around her shoulders. For a second I thought he was going to kiss her forehead.