Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

Pawnhill finished his cake. Asking for the check, he threw some bills down on the table, leaving his customary large tip, and went out. It was late morning, humid, the clouds yellowish with the threat of a storm coming up from the south. He walked for a couple of blocks until he spotted a cruising taxi and took it to within three blocks of Billy Warren’s apartment. After the crime scene investigators were done with it, Billy’s father had slept there for a couple of nights, further impeding Pawnhill’s access. But now the people Pawnhill had surveilling the building reported that the father was gone. The apartment was empty; it hadn’t been visited in more than forty-eight hours.

Time, Pawnhill thought, to go in.

WHEN THE Syrian didn’t hear from Baltasar at the appointed time, he spent a fruitless thirty seconds trying to raise him on his sat phone. Then, with a grim expression, he went to where Caro sat hunched over her computer and whispered in her ear.

Her fleeting startled expression was quickly replaced by one of resignation. All her work was either on her laptop or on remote servers in Holland. Nothing was ever saved on the desktop here. Still, she shut it down, removed the hard drive, and destroyed it. Then she packed up her laptop. The Syrian had gone to talk to Xhafa. She unlocked the drawer, removed The Little Curiosity Shop, and lovingly nestled it into the case beside the laptop.

As she was walking to where her shoes sat beside the front door, Taroq appeared.

He eyed her laptop case. She hardly left the compound, and never at night. “Where are you going?”

“The Syrian and I have a meeting outside the compound.”

“At this hour?” Taroq frowned. “I was told nothing about a meeting.”

Her expression hardened. She had no time for Taroq’s jealousy. “You’re told what you need to know, nothing more.”

He stood looking at her for a moment. He was hurt, of course, but something had stirred his inner alarm. The Syrian was exceedingly deliberate in all his appointments and meetings. The word “spontaneous” did not exist in the Syrian’s world, therefore anything that smacked of it was suspect.

She was spared further discourse on the subject as the Syrian returned and joined her at the door.

“Taroq, we’ll be gone for several hours,” he said without a hint that anything might be wrong. “In the interim, keep Xhafa here.”

Taroq blinked. “Here?”

The Syrian offered an encouraging smile. “He’ll be safer inside the compound.”

They took the big black Lincoln Navigator that had been imported as a gift by one of the entities he supplied. He had many cars; he’d paid for none of them.

“You didn’t want to take Taroq or a driver with us?” Caroline asked.

“In this situation,” he said tersely, “it’s best to travel light, the better to ensure that we arrive at our destination.”

He drove very fast and with the lights off. He knew these back roads well.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

“The enemy has arrived.” He made a sweeping turn, then stepped heavily on the accelerator. “The enemy is coming.”

She sat cradling her laptop case as if it were an infant. She supposed she should feel concerned, but, as usual, she felt nothing at all. “And just where is our destination?”

The Syrian stared straight ahead and smiled.

PAWNHILL MADE three circuits of Billy Warren’s building without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Via his Bluetooth earpiece, he was in constant cell contact with his surveillance team, who reported no police activity anywhere in the vicinity. It appeared as if the neighborhood had returned to the sleepy state it had been in before Warren’s torture-murder caused a media frenzy. Since no photos of the crime scene had been leaked, even the tabloids, both print and online, had moved on to fresh fodder. And in America in this day and age there were more than enough scandals in Hollywood and inside the Beltway to feed even their insatiable appetites.

Pawnhill set a slim attaché case on the ground and opened it. The case was considerably smaller inside than out, but there was still room for a number of items, including a one-inch-thick laptop, a small zipped leather case, and latex gloves, hood, and booties. These he put on, then he took out the leather case, and snapped the lid shut.

He possessed an aptitude for vocations other than finance. These had been taught to him by the Syrian during the crazy time they’d enjoyed at Oxford. Unzipping the leather case, he selected several professional picks from a set. In no time, he was through the rear door. Warren’s apartment was on the third floor. Pawnhill took the stairs; since childhood he’d had a fear of being trapped in an elevator. The same could be said for revolving doors.

The building was old, the stairs bare wood. He removed his loafers, climbing in absolute silence. Reaching the third floor, he went along the hall. He could hear a radio playing, also a baby crying briefly. Then only the music, muffled to almost all percussion, rose up the stairwell. No one was in the hall.

For some time he stood in front of Billy Warren’s door, simply breathing. The yellow crime-scene tape had been taken down; everything appeared normal. Then, leaning forward, he put his ear to the wood. When he was certain no one was moving inside, he picked the lock. Then slowly he turned the doorknob and pushed the door inward.

He let the door swing all the way open. Standing on the threshold, he stepped back into his loafers. From the attaché case, he produced a plastic hood with elastic around the opening for his face. He slipped it over his head and adjusted it. Now he was protected from inadvertently leaving a hair in the apartment. Then, softly and silently, he entered, closing the door behind him.

He found himself in a small three-room apartment, bright and relatively neat, considering all the recent activity. It was furnished in fairly upscale style, tasteful in a modern way, but without much flair. Placing his attaché case on the carpet beside the coffee table, he stood in the center of the room, turning slowly in a circle in order to take in everything that came in sight. He went methodically through the bedroom and bathroom without finding anything. Returning to the living room, he let his eye fall on one piece of furniture after another—the sofa, the pair of easy chairs, the rug, a Travertine marble–topped coffee table on which was a ceramic decorative vase, a green crystal sculpture of a frog, a stack of coasters, along with a single coaster marred by a water stain. Pawnhill looked more closely. It was logical to assume that the glass that had recently sat on the coaster had been taken by the forensic team, along with Warren’s personal computer and cable modem.

Against one wall was a modern lacquer sideboard above which was a cabinet that held a bookshelf stereo, stacks of CDs, a flat-screen TV, a cable box, Blu-Ray DVD player, and a couple of popular commercial DVDs. The rest of the space was taken up by books—mostly texts, but also a handful of contemporary thrillers—and a couple of photo albums. Pawnhill leafed through one without interest. He wasn’t interested in a visual chronicle of Billy Warren’s early life. The second held Warren’s doctorate paper, according to the title page. Pawnhill slid it back beside its twin. Then he opened every CD jewel case and DVD package. In this case, he was looking for a DVD onto which Warren might have burned the incriminating data. He’d already tried to hunt down a USB thumb drive that Warren might have used for the purpose.

The result was that after spending almost an hour carefully ransacking the apartment, he had found nothing. He was on his way out when his gaze happened to fall on the stack of coasters, which were discs that seemed to him larger than normal. He went through each one in the stack, but they were precisely what they purported to be.