Tess Gerritsen - Last to Die

“I can hear it in your voice. You don’t believe me. But you’ll find out soon enough. So here’s my advice: Keep looking over your shoulder. Everywhere you go, pay attention to the faces, and you’ll notice some of them start to look familiar. The guy in the coffee shop. The gal in the airport. Then one night, you’ll notice the van parked outside your house. The van that just stays there.”

Frost shot a glance at Jane, and it was not missed by Parris.

“Yeah, okay. You think I’m nuts.” He shrugged and reached for his martini. “Just keep digging and things will start squirming out of the mud.”

“What things?” said Jane.

“You’ve probably already got ’em stirred up, just by coming here and asking questions.”

“Having to do with Neil or with Olivia?”

“Forget Olivia. Poor gal was just in the wrong plane at the wrong time.” Parris waved at the waitress and pointed at his empty martini glass. “If you don’t mind,” he called out.

“You think the motive was professional?” asked Frost.

“When you rule out jealous lovers and pissed-off neighbors and greedy relatives, you’re kind of down to the workplace.”

“You know what his research was at NASA, right?”

Parris nodded. “Alien life. Word is, he and his buddy Brian Temple thought they might’ve found it, even if no one at NASA will go on the record and say it.”

“Because they’re suppressing it?” asked Frost. “Or because it’s not true?”

Wyman leaned forward, his face flushed from the alcohol. “You don’t get blown up when you’re wrong. It’s when you’re right that things get dangerous. And I have a feeling …” He suddenly stopped, his gaze fixed on something behind Jane. She started to turn, and he whispered: “Don’t.”

“What is it?”

“Guy with glasses, white shirt, blue jeans. Seated at six o’clock. I think I saw him at a highway rest stop two hours ago.”

Jane let the napkin slide off her lap onto the floor. She bent to pick it up and caught a look at the man in question, just as a woman with a toddler in hand slid into the booth beside him.

“Unless they’re hiring three-year-olds as spies,” said Jane, straightening, “I don’t think you need to worry about the guy with the glasses.”

“Okay,” Parris admitted. “So I got that one wrong. But there’ve been other things.”

“Like vans outside your house,” she said, voice neutral.

He stiffened. “I know how it sounds. When this started, I couldn’t believe it, either. I kept fishing for a logical explanation, but stuff kept happening. Voice mails got lost. Things on my desk got moved, files went missing. That went on for months.”

“And it’s still going on?”

Parris paused as the waitress returned with a third martini. He stared at his drink, as if weighing the wisdom of dumping any more alcohol into his bloodstream. At last he picked it up. “No. The weird stuff stopped happening around the same time the case ran out of steam. Government agencies we were working with—NTSB, FBI—told me their investigation was at a standstill. I guess they had other priorities. It all went quiet. The strange vans went away, and my life went back to normal. Then, a few weeks ago, I heard from the New Hampshire police about the Temples’ farmhouse, blown up with Semtex.” He paused. “Now you’re here. And I’m just waiting for the vans to show up again.”

“You have any idea who’s sending them?”

“I don’t want to know.” He slumped back against the seat. “I’m sixty-four. Should’ve retired two years ago, but I need the income to help out my daughter. This is my job, but it’s not my life , you know?”

“The trouble is,” said Jane, “there may be other lives at stake here. Neil and Olivia’s son, for one.”

“That’d make no sense, to go after a fourteen-year-old boy.”

“Makes no sense to go after two other kids, either.”

Parris frowned. “What kids?”

“During your investigation, did you ever come across the names Nicholas and Annabelle Clock?”

“No.”

“What about Erskine and Isabel Ward?”

“No. Who are these people?”

“Other victims. Other families who were murdered the same week Neil and Olivia died. In each of those families, a child survived. And now those three kids have been attacked again.”

Parris stared at her. “Those other names never came up in my investigation. This is the first I’ve heard of them.”

“The parallels are eerie, aren’t they?”

“Is there a connection with NASA? Can you tie them together that way?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“So what do you have linking these kids?”

“That’s what we hoped you could tell us. What the connection is.”

He sat back, eyeing them over his empty dinner plate, now pooled with blood. “You know as much as I do now, about the Yablonskis. So tell me about the Wards.”

“They were shot to death in a London alley, appeared to be a mugging gone awry. He was an American diplomat, she was a homemaker. Their eleven-year-old daughter was shot as well, but managed to survive.”

“Ward was a diplomat, Yablonski a NASA scientist. What’s the connection? I mean, astrobiology isn’t exactly a hot diplomatic issue.”

Frost suddenly sat up straight. “If ET’s intelligent, we’d have to establish diplomatic relations, wouldn’t we?”

Jane sighed. “No more Star Trek for you.”

“No, think about it! Neil Yablonski and Brian Temple are about to fly to Rome, to meet with Vatican scientists. Erskine Ward was once assigned to Rome, so he had connections there, at the embassy. He probably spoke fluent Italian.”

“What about the Clock family?” said Parris. “You haven’t told me about them. Do they have a link to any of this?”

“Nicholas Clock was a financial consultant in Providence, Rhode Island,” said Jane. “He and his wife, Annabelle, were killed aboard their yacht off Saint Thomas.”

Parris shook his head. “I’m not seeing any connection with the Yablonskis or the Wards. Nothing that ties these three families together.”

Only that their children are all in the same school . A fact that Jane didn’t reveal, because it made her uneasy. A killer needed only to track them down to Evensong, and it would be one-stop slaughter.

“I don’t know what any of this means,” said Parris. “All I can say is, this scares the hell out of me. RDX brought down the Yablonskis’ plane. Semtex blew up the Temple farmhouse in New Hampshire. These are not amateurs. Killers like that, they don’t give a damn that we’re cops. They’re operating on a whole different level, with special training and access to defense-grade explosives. You and me, we’re just cockroaches to them. Remember that.” He drained his martini and set down the glass. “And that’s about all I have to tell you.” He waved to the waitress. “Check, please!”

“We’ll take care of dinner,” said Jane.

Parris nodded. “Much appreciated.”

“Thanks for meeting with us.”

“Not that I could add much,” he said, rising from the chair. Despite the three martinis, he seemed perfectly steady on his feet. “In fact, I should thank you .”

“Why?”

The look he gave her was one of sympathy. “This gets me off the hook. Now they’ll be watching you.”

JANE TOOK A HOT shower and flopped onto her motel bed to stare up at the darkness. The cup of coffee with dinner had been a mistake. Caffeine, plus the day’s events, kept her wide awake, mind churning over what she and Frost had learned, and what it all meant. When at last she fell asleep, the turmoil followed her straight into her dreams.