Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

“You’re lying.” Peter’s voice rose. “You can’t touch me. You can’t come in here and threaten me. I take good care of those brats. You’re incompetent. Do you honestly think anyone will believe you?”

“Honestly, Peter? Yes, because Ballard is talking. He’s with the police now. The only way you’ll get leniency is if you confess to bilking your nieces and nephews. Or the brats , to use your pet name for them.”

“You can’t prove anything.”

“The body isn’t Chris’s. The case will be reopened. A mother was executed. The press, the public, will go nuts.”

“Fat lot of good that will do for my sister.”

“As if you care.”

Peter stood up and stared at Nunn, then he got another cocktail glass and poured an inch of whiskey into it. He looked at the glass and added a second inch. He took a long sip. “You think I hated my own sister? Maybe. But maybe I loved her too.” And for one awful moment Nunn thought Peter would cry into his whiskey. A huge, shuddering breath rocked him.

“Where is Christopher, Peter?”

Peter drank the top inch of whiskey in a long, hard swallow. “He’s dead. Rosemary killed him.”

“It’s not Chris’s body.”

“He’s dead. He’s dead.” Peter backed away along the galley counter. “He’s dead and locked in the maiden.”

“Peter. Where. Is. Christopher?”

Peter threw the glass at Nunn’s face. Nunn ducked, the splash of whiskey burning his eyes, the crystal slamming against his forehead. Peter tried to run past Nunn, and Nunn closed his fist around Peter’s collar. Peter might once have been an athlete, but the liquor had bled too much of his muscle and will away.

Nunn, gripping Peter’s collar, blinked away the sharp sting. He yanked Peter down to the floor, dragged him toward the glittering shards of the broken cocktail glass. He seized Peter’s thinning hair, forced his face above the sharp fragments.

“Tell me. Tell me where Christopher is.”

“No, no. No!”

“Peter. Think of it this way. If you stole from the kids, and you can give them their father back, then the judge is going to like you way better than Ballard. Maybe he’ll even let you keep the boat.”

“The boat,” Peter repeated.

“The boat. Tell me. Or I’ll dust up the broken glass using your face as my broom. It will hurt.”

Peter Heusen took three ragged breaths while Nunn counted silently to ten. When Peter stayed quiet, Nunn shoved his face toward the glass.

Peter screamed. Nunn stopped. “The Trompe l’Oeil Hotel! He’s at the Trompe l’Oeil Hotel. I mean, I think he is.”

Nunn knew the hotel, a four-star, not far from Union Square. “Don’t lie to me, Peter.”

“I’m not but-”

“But what?”

“You won’t recognize him. His face-”

“Got himself some plastic surgery, did he?”

Peter nodded. “So he says. He obviously won’t be using his real name there. And I don’t know what he looks like now, I haven’t seen him in a decade. That was our agreement.”

“But you’ve talked to him.”

“Yes. And yesterday he called me. I thought he was gone from San Francisco but he’s been here.” Peter almost sounded afraid.

“How do you know he’s at the Trompe l’Oeil? Did he tell you?”

“No. But when he called me… I could hear background noise. Music. A jazz singer. It sounded like the singer they’ve had at the Trompe’s lounge for years, a very throaty alto. I drink there. So I think that’s where he is…”

Peter, Nunn thought, was a good detective as long as all the clues involved a bar.

“Why would he call you?” Then it sank in. “You helped him hide. You helped him run.” Nunn took a step back from Peter.

“You think I’m so bad?” Peter sobbed.

Then Peter cracked. Guilt or booze finally loosened his grip, and in a low voice he confessed how he had helped Christopher fake his death and vanish.

“Christopher came up with the plan,” he said. “A replacement body. He killed an errand boy, some Chinese guy, who supplied him with hash and coke, a nobody. He stuffed his body inside the maiden.”

“Name?”

Peter thought. “He had a nickname like a James Bond character… Odd Job, or something.”

Odd Body .

“Christopher sliced off his own finger, left it in place of the dead guy’s. Did it here on the boat. I had to cauterize the wound, bandage it up for him.” Peter made a gagging sound. “Then he broke off a piece of his own tooth, put it in the guy’s shirt pocket.”

Nunn felt ill, remembering the nearly unidentifiable body. He remembered the tooth and what the forensics guy, McGee, had said about the one intact finger.

“Then you helped frame your own sister.”

“It was Christopher’s idea-every bit of it!” Peter screamed.

“Go on.”

“He had one of her blouses-he stained it with his blood after he cut off his finger. It was like he was painting it, I remember. Then he took hair from her hairbrush and put it in there with the body. And later, we had someone put hash and coke in her office for the police to find…”

Nunn listened to the murmured, slurred words with an unforgiving silence.

Then Nunn released Peter, who staggered away from him, collapsing by the sink, fingers testing his face for glass. Only a slight scrape, barely bloodied, lay along his cheek, and he almost hummed in relief.

Nunn pulled out handcuffs from the kit in the small of his back and he latched one onto Peter’s wrist, cuffing the other one to the oven handle.

“You’re not a cop anymore, you can’t handcuff me!” Peter screamed.

“Ballard had a reason to stay put. You’re on a boat that could be in international waters in short order. I’m not trusting you.”

“Nunn, please. Let me go. I told you. I’ll pay you.”

“Second bribe I’ve been offered in an hour,” Nunn said. He took the whiskey bottle and stuck it between Peter’s legs. “I’m going to call the police for you, Peter.”

Peter made a noise between a cough and a snuffle.

Nunn jumped off the Désirée and ran down the dock.

Christopher Thomas, alive, and within reach. He could finally solve the case. Maybe he could get real justice for Rosemary. Maybe he would get his job back.

And maybe, Nunn thought, he could get himself back.

I’m afraid I can’t understand you.” Christopher set the duct tape on the bar beside the Colt. “You really should work on your enunciation. It separates one from the lower classes.” He picked Artie’s glass off the plush carpeted floor, washed and dried it, then poured himself a couple of neat fingers of the same single malt. “That and money, of course.”

Artie whimpered. His face was pale. Sweat dripped off his chin as he tried to crawl. It was impressive, actually. As Christopher watched, the man fought to lift one arm and flop it forward a scant couple of inches. He looked like a man possessed, as if agony were a razor-clawed demon inside his skin.

The blood that pumped from his stomach was dark against the white weave of the carpet. Almost black.

Christopher took another swallow, savored the burn. He felt alive in a way that he usually associated with sex. Not orgasm, which had a vulnerability, a giving of himself. But that perfect instant when the next Taylor-or Haile or Justine-surrendered herself. The flicker of submission in her eyes before the clothes ever came off. The moment she let go.

Only Artie wasn’t letting go, and that just stretched it out more sweetly.

Christopher watched for another moment, then turned, walked to the bedroom. Snapped on the light and looked around. One gunshot, even from a.357, would be written off as street noise, a bottle rocket, or a backfiring truck or even what it was, gunfire. No one would believe that it had come from inside a $4,000-a-night suite.