Killer Focus (24 page)

F
ischer took a call as he drove. Tate was out of danger, although, like Shaw, he would be in recovery for days. The drug Colenso had used should have put them both into cardiac arrest. Their survival was owed to Bridges getting them almost immediate medical attention.

Relieved, he set the phone down and tried to concentrate on driving. After what had happened last night—and this morning—his normal level of concentration was shot. After months of meticulous planning, nothing about the investigation, or Taylor, was predictable.

The sun glanced off the windshield of a passing car, a spot of brightness in a dull day, and without warning, the road seemed to disappear. For an endless moment he was staring at a face, although this time it wasn't his father, it was Taylor.

The image dissolved, replaced by the windscreen of an oncoming car. He wrenched the wheel and the truck swung back onto the right side of the road. The car flashed past, fishtailing. His right front tire hit the verge and the truck slid sideways, plowing through a ditch before coming to a halt inches short of a fence.

Throwing the truck into Reverse, he depressed the accelerator. The tires spun and the rear wheels dug more deeply into the mud. Unbuckling his seat belt, Fischer shoved the door open, climbed out of the cab and adjusted the hubs. Seconds later, he put the truck in four-wheel drive and drove off the verge. As soon as he hit the hard surface of the highway, he adjusted the hubs for on-road use, did a U-turn and headed back toward Cold Peak.

He wasn't psychic. He had only had one other vision before, and that had happened when he had been eight years old and his father had died. Back then, the image of his father's face had been accompanied by a suffocating pressure in his chest. This time there had been no physical symptoms.

His phone vibrated. It was Bridges. Colenso's body had just turned up at the Portland morgue. He had been executed: a double tap to the back of the head.

Fischer's jaw tightened. “Call Bayard. Tell him his man is in Cold Peak. It's Martin Tripp.”

 

Taylor stopped to listen. The wind rustled gently in the trees, emphasizing the damp chill of the day. Next door, she could hear the television playing out a morning soap. In the distance was the steady hum of traffic. The wind gusted, branches scraped against windows and dry leaves flipped along the ground.

She hadn't seen any sign of Buster outside, and she didn't have a cell phone, so she couldn't ring from the safety of Tate's car and ask Neil to step out of the house. The sensible thing to do would be to leave.

Moving slowly, she retraced her steps. She was beginning to feel faintly ridiculous. Neil was sick and obviously bedridden. Buster was probably sleeping on the end of his bed. Colenso had been sighted south of Portland that morning. It was unlikely he could have made it to Cold Peak by now.

On impulse, she stepped closer to the house and peered into a window. Through a gap in the curtains she could make out a pair of feet tied to the end of a bed. The metallic click of a round being chambered made her freeze. She let out a breath. “What are you going to do, Tripp? Shoot me in the back of the head?”

“I've thought about it.”

“Shooting me in Cold Peak wouldn't be smart, and I think you're a lot smarter than you've ever made out.”

“Put your hands on your head. Turn around and face me. That's better.” He indicated with his gun that she move away from the side of the house. His gaze was cold and as steady as the hand that held the gun. “When I was twelve, tests showed I had an IQ of one hundred and seventy.”

“And I bet your daddy's IQ was even higher.”

“Both of my parents had genius IQ's.”

She cocked her head on one side. “Helene Reichmann?”

Tripp's expression didn't change. “Don't try the psychological stuff. I'm better at it than you.”

“If it wasn't Reichmann, who was it? I bet you lost someone near and dear. Three cabal members have been murdered—”

“Four. We killed the final mark.”

A shadow flickered. Her gaze followed the movement. She caught a flash of white fur.

Tripp's mouth flattened. “Don't bother with the tricks—”

A sound halfway between a howl and a wail jerked Tripp's head around. Taylor took a gamble and launched at him, chopping at the gun. Tripp's fist caught her in the jaw, knocking her sideways. She hit the ground, twisting and rolling to lessen the impact. The gun detonated and dirt kicked up, showering her face.

She surged to her feet. Tripp leveled the gun for a second shot and seemed to slow, stop, as she looked directly down the barrel of the gun. A split second later the side of Tripp's head vaporized. Another round punched through his chest, but the insurance wasn't required: he was dead before he hit the ground.

Taylor stared at the lone figure stepping through the front gate, the Bernadelli still held in a two-handed grip and aimed at Tripp's prone body, and wondered why she was surprised to see Fischer.

With a shudder she wiped her palms, which were speckled with blood, on her jeans, and stepped around Tripp. When he had aimed at her the second time, her arms must have flung up to “stop” the bullet, although she had no memory of doing it.

Her legs were distinctly shaky as she walked toward Fischer

He had made the shot from the sidewalk with a handgun. That had to be more than seventy feet, yet he had been pinpoint accurate, aiming at Tripp's head.

Normally, in a high-risk situation, it was standard procedure to shoot for the chest area but a chest shot didn't ensure that the target was taken out, whereas the head shot did.

He surveyed the grounds and the house. “Is there anyone else?”

“I checked out the house before Tripp turned up. There doesn't appear to be anyone in there except Neil, and he's tied to the bed.”

Still holding the gun on Tripp, he jerked her into his arms. “I thought I was going to be too late.”

Taylor's heart squeezed tight at the rawness of Fischer's expression, at everything he hadn't said but which was plainly present in his eyes. And in that moment she decided the pros and cons of falling in love with him didn't matter; she loved him, period. She had obsessed about his motives for getting close to her, but the reality was he had been there for her in the exact moment she had needed him most. With Fischer's degree of accuracy with a handgun he could have chosen to wound Tripp and keep him alive, but he had made a choice; he had blown Tripp away, choosing
her
instead of preserving a major lead in his investigation.

Her arms clamped around his neck, the movement convulsive. She'd read that scent was the most powerful sense, and right then she could attest to that. Fischer smelled hot and edgy and wonderfully familiar.

Dipping his head, Fischer fastened his mouth on hers. Long seconds later he lifted his head and released her. “Time to go to work.”

After Taylor and Fischer had conducted a comprehensive search of the property, Taylor located a kitchen knife and cut Neil's legs free. The cuffs Tripp had used to fasten his hands to the bed took a little longer, because she had to find the keys. Luckily, she located them in Tripp's briefcase and didn't have to search the body.

Pushing to his feet, Neil stared out of the window at Tripp's body. “Is he dead?”

“Would you have a problem if he was?”

Neil turned away from the window, his expression stark. “No.”

Fischer walked in the door, the gun still in his hand. “Muir's here.”

Taylor recognized two of Cold Peak's finest with Muir—Driscoll and Hart—along with two other officers she hadn't met.

Within minutes the house was cordoned off, and Neil was taken to the Cold Peak medical center for a check over, although from an initial examination his only physical symptoms were chafing on his ankles and wrists and dehydration. Half an hour later, with the coroner's clearance, Tripp's body was bagged and removed, and the complications of jurisdiction had been smoothed out with a phone call from Fischer's boss, Rear Admiral Saunders. Muir wasn't happy. Cold Peak was front-page news, and the paperwork would keep him tied to his desk for weeks, but he couldn't argue with the fact that his double homicide had been solved.

With Tripp's body out of the way, Taylor and Fischer did a circuit of the house, searching for Buster. Taylor gave the flattened area of grass where Tripp had been lying a wide berth as she began calling. At the first call, Buster began to howl.

Crouching down, she parted the leaves of a dense rhododendron. It took long minutes, and Fischer retreating several yards, before Buster finally materialized from the shadows. Seconds later, she scooped him up. He was tense and on edge, his pupils dilated, but the reason he was so desperate was plain. He had lost weight, and if Tripp had picked him up two days ago, he probably hadn't been fed since.

Fischer opened the door of the cat cage. Taylor pushed Buster in, slammed the door and fastened it before he could double around and shoot back out. The moment was oddly warming. Not exactly your quintessential family snapshot, but close enough.

T
he house in Portland, Maine, was relatively new, an expensive designer aerie set on a cliff overlooking a wild coastline. Xavier studied the waves surging in against dark rocks. Despite the extensive plantings there was clear evidence that there had been a large house here before. When he had rung the local council the previous day, his findings had been verified. This had originally been the site of the old Webster mansion, which had been built in the nineteen hundreds. It had burned to the ground in 1954, the same year his father had disappeared.

At the time the mansion had burned down the owner had been listed as Charles Everett Richmond. Richmond, a reclusive millionaire, had perished in the fire, and the house had passed to his daughter, Elizabeth, who had sold it soon after. The property had changed hands just once more, when Tripp had bought it.

Xavier's spine tingled as he studied the lay of the land, and his conviction that he had found the location of Reichmann's house—and the site of his father's murder—grew. According to the original plans of the Webster mansion, which he had viewed in the local historical society's archives earlier that afternoon, there had been a cellar beneath the house that had linked with a series of natural caves. He hadn't found anything resembling a cellar entrance in the house that presently occupied the site, which meant the entrance had to be somewhere in the gardens.

Fifteen minutes later, one of Xavier's agents, Tony, jimmied open the lock of a garden shed. Xavier stepped inside and immediately noted the unmistakable outline of a trapdoor.

Flicking on the flashlight he'd brought with him, he lifted the trapdoor, tested the first step of the ladder, then descended into the cavity and waited for Tony to join him.

The cellar was cavernous and empty. Breath pluming on the stale, cold air, Xavier conducted a circuit of the room, ducked beneath a beam and found a second door. Within minutes, Tony had broken the locks and Xavier stepped inside.

The beam of the flashlight caromed off thick stone walls, and caught on the glint of a cap badge and the dull gleam of boots. For an electrifying moment, childhood fear and illusion fused, imbuing the sagging uniforms of Himmler's
Schutzstaffel
with horrifying life.

Emotion grabbed at Xavier, sharper and more intense than he'd expected as he trained the beam on the faded collection of uniforms and studied the evidence that his father had found. Evidence he had waited decades—and traveled thousands of miles—to find.

 

Within minutes the cellar and the connecting caves had been searched. Apart from the uniforms, a dusty table and a squat safe, circa 1920s, its door still hanging open, every room and cavity was empty.

There was evidence from the scrapes on the floor that heavy objects had been stored here. There was nothing to indicate that those objects had been the crates transported on the
Nordika,
although logic dictated that they must have been. It was inconceivable that Reichmann would have relinquished control of the wealth. After Reichmann's death, Helene would have had to secure the treasure and establish control of the cabal. The artifacts and gold bullion would have been transported to another location within days.

The safe was a different matter. It weighed a ton. Lifting it out would have required a great deal of effort for no discernible gain. Back in the fifties it was the kind of safe that had been routinely owned by thousands of businesses. The only aberration had been that Helene had left the uniforms behind.

The risk that the moldering clothing represented had been small. Colenso had owned the property and if anyone but Xavier had found the uniforms, they would have been no more than a curiosity. The mistake revealed arrogance and Helene's belief in her own invincibility, distinct flaws in an otherwise clinical approach. At a guess, she had enjoyed the knowledge that Reichmann and the officers under his command still lived on, if only in the hidden, tattered remnants of their uniforms.

Footsteps echoed. Light flickered as Tony ducked under the beam and paused in the doorway. “We've completed the search of the grounds. Sorry, no sign of a graveyard.”

The faint hope that his father's body had been buried somewhere on the property was extinguished. “That's it, then.” It was far more likely that Helene would have disposed of Stefan's body in a way that guaranteed he wouldn't be found. It was even possible she had dumped his body at sea, although that would have been difficult to organize without involving someone local in the process.

Tony trained his flashlight on the uniforms, his expression registering his distaste. “Why don't you check out the local cemeteries and parish registers. If Stefan died in the fire at the same time as Reichmann, it's possible his body was found before Helene could dispose of it. If that was the case, when the postmortem was finished she might have had the influence to destroy the paperwork, but she would have been forced to bury his body. Even if she managed to remove his papers and substitute a false name, the date of death would be the same as Reichmann's.”

Xavier stared at the sagging uniforms and felt the first lightening of his mood since he had climbed down into this crypt. Sometimes his thinking was too serpentine. He looked for complications where there were none, which was why Tony was so valuable. He was blunt, efficient and, best of all, he had no time for European fatalism.

 

The grave, when Xavier found it five days later, was marked only by a bleached wooden cross on which the lettering had long since faded. Emotion swelled in his chest. More than eighteen cemeteries and sets of parish registers had been searched, but finally, twenty miles north of Portland in the village of Freeport, he had found Stefan le Clerc, and incontrovertible proof that his father hadn't died alone. He had taken Reichmann with him.

Fierce satisfaction filled him, not because Reichmann—or Richmond as the incised lettering on his headstone in Portland had proclaimed—had been killed, but because his father had succeeded in his quest. He had found Reichmann, and he had stopped him.

For Stefan's name to be recorded by the parish meant that his identification had been recovered by the police before Helene could destroy it and, as Tony had surmised, she had been forced to bury him. Helene had subsequently destroyed the coroner's reports and police records, blocking any investigation into his disappearance through those channels. For the parish records to have survived meant she either hadn't been able to access them, or she had decided it was unlikely anyone would go to such extreme lengths to find his father.

Long minutes passed as he stared at the lichen-encrusted cross, at the grassy dip in the ground, and when the emptiness of loss couldn't be contained, he walked into the church. He paused in the dim coolness of the aisle, then took a pew and stared at the brilliant hues of a stained-glass window, at the gentle face and the iron resolve of a man who had given everything and finally found peace.