Scott Mariani - The Cassandra Sanction - The most controversial action adventure thriller you’ll read this year!

Ben felt a brother’s grief hit him like a fist to the face. He went silent. Glanced again at the woman’s picture over the desk, and now he could see it. The similarity in the eyes, the nose, the cheekbones. The same fine, lean Latin features. He looked back at Raul, feeling suddenly torn between walking away and staying to hear more.

‘My sister did not kill herself,’ Raul said, with as much absolute rock-solid unflinching certainty as Ben had ever heard in a person’s voice. ‘My sister is alive.’

Ben made no reply. He hesitated, then sat down again. It was the least he could do for the guy to listen.

‘They’re saying she drove her car off a cliff into the ocean,’ Raul said. ‘Just let it roll right off the edge. They say it was suicide.’

Ben could imagine it. The beautiful dark-haired young woman in the picture sitting at the wheel. Her face strained with terror and resolution as she let off the handbrake and let herself trundle towards oblivion. The car falling into space, plummeting down to smash itself to pieces as that fragile body inside it was pummelled and broken. He pictured torn metal and shattered plastic and bloodied glass. But something about the picture was wrong. Something Raul didn’t believe. Ben remained silent for a moment longer before he said, ‘Are you going to tell me there was no body inside the car when they found it?’

Raul’s eyes brightened visibly, the way a prisoner’s on death row light up when they tell him about the last-minute stay of execution that’s just been granted. ‘Exactly. All they pulled out of the water was an empty car. What does that tell you?’

‘It tells me the body could have been flung free of the car, Raul.’ He hated dashing the guy’s hopes like that. But better to face reality than to be tormented by wishful fantasy for the rest of your life.

Raul flinched as if Ben had pulled a gun on him. ‘How would you know? How can you assert something like that?’

Ben wished he’d said nothing at all. The thing he’d wanted to avoid was happening. He was getting sucked in. ‘Tell me where this happened, Raul.’

Raul calmed a little and replied, ‘Germany. Catalina moved there, for her work. She’s a scientist. Well, kind of a bit more than that.’

Still resisting speaking about his sister in the past tense, Ben noticed.

‘I know this is hard, Raul. But did Catalina have any reason to harm herself?’

‘Why should she? She’s successful, she’s achieved all she ever wanted and more. She’s a happy person.’

‘People can look happy on the outside,’ Ben said.

‘While inside they suffer such torment that they want to end it all. I get it. I know. But I know my sister, don’t you see? I know her better than anyone in the world and I know she wouldn’t have killed herself. She’s a happy person. She has everything to live for. When she walks into a room, she fills it up with laughter and smiles. People love her.’

‘An accident, then,’ Ben said.

‘You think I haven’t thought about that? Okay, let’s say she accidentally drove to the edge of the cliff and then accidentally forgot to stop, and the car went over. Same story. There’s the car, but where’s she?’

Ben could have told him there were a hundred ways for a corpse to vanish at sea. The tides could draw it miles out, where it would eventually sink to the bottom before the bacteria inside the gut and chest cavity would start to produce enough methane, hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide to float it back up to the surface. That process could take days, during which time the cadaver would become an ever more appetising meal to the numerous species of shark and other carnivorous fish that frequented those waters. Such details were best left unmentioned under the circumstances, so he kept his mouth shut.

‘I mean,’ Raul went on, ‘it’s been nearly three months. A body would surely have turned up by now.’

Ben looked at him, surprised. ‘Three months? I thought this must have only just happened.’

Raul sank back deep into the cushions of the sofa, as if suddenly deflated. ‘It was July sixteenth. Eighty-three days ago. A place called Rügen Island. She apparently drove for hours to get there from her home in Munich. She …’ He closed his eyes for a moment, as if it was too painful to say more. ‘The German police closed the case not long afterwards. There was all kinds of bureaucratic bullshit. My parents, they flew out there. Neither of them had ever been on a plane before. Never even left Valdepeñas de Jaén until then.’

‘Did you go with them?’

Raul shook his head sadly. ‘Couldn’t bring myself to go. I felt like a dog about it then and I still do. I just couldn’t deal with it. Had to let them go alone. They were there for five days. My father, he looked like a little old man when they got back, with nothing to show but a wad of police reports. Three more weeks went by, still no body. Can’t have a funeral without a body, right? So they had a service for her at the church in Valdepeñas de Jaén. Now they won’t even speak to me, because I wouldn’t attend it. They think it’s like I don’t care. Like I cut myself away from the whole thing, and from them.’

‘They might have needed your support at a time like that,’ Ben said.

Raul turned the red-rimmed eyes back on Ben. ‘Yes, and that’s something else for me to feel like shit about, isn’t it? But I didn’t want to be there, because to be there would have been like accepting that Catalina was dead. How could I go through the motions of a phony funeral when I was completely certain that my sister was still alive? They’d all given up on her; I hadn’t. As they were all gathering to mourn her, I was searching the internet for someone who could help me. That’s when I found Klein.’

‘You mentioned him before. Who is he?’

‘A former police detective who’s supposedly the best private investigator in Germany. Certainly the most expensive. I hired him to find out what the police couldn’t.’

‘And did he?’

Raul sighed. He dug in his jeans pocket and came out with a rumpled, folded envelope that he handed to Ben. ‘This came two days ago.’

The postmark on the envelope, stamped MÜNCHEN – FREISTAAT – BAYERN, was five days old. Ben took out the letter and unfolded it. The letterhead on the single sheet said LEONHARD KLEIN, DETEKTEI – NACHRICHTEN, with an address in Munich, email contact and web address. The rest of the letter was written in English. It was brief, stilted and to the point, expressing the investigator’s professional opinion that, despite the absence of a body, after extensive researches he had been able to uncover no evidence to disprove the tragic and unavoidable fact that Ms Fuentes was, in fact, deceased as the official reports stated. He was willing to continue working on the case, although he was ethically and professionally bound to instruct his client that such a course of action was inadvisable and that any further investigation was futile at this stage and would only represent a further waste of his time and the client’s money, etc., etc. The letter signed off with a couple of short lines of stiff-sounding condolences.