Kiss Her Goodbye (A Thriller) (28 page)

 The bedspread. One of the bedspreads was missing.

 Had someone used it to transport the body?

 When investigating a crime, it’s easy to come up with a half dozen different theories, different ways the job could have gone down. Each one is kept in mind as the crime scene is processed, but no matter how many theories you come up with, there’s always one that stands out. One that makes the most sense. One that sticks in your mind even before the evidence is collected.

 The one in Donovan’s mind went something like this:

 Nemo drove straight to the motel, which meant he’d been here before. He knew Charlie Kruger, had met him sometime in the past, and he knew that Kruger was hiding Luther. Pissed off and wanting his money, he grabbed Kruger and forced him to take him to Luther’s room.

 Once inside, Nemo demanded the cash, shooting Kruger in an attempt to scare Luther into giving it up.

 Then something unexpected happened. An uninvited guest arrived, shot Nemo, winged Luther, and chased him through the bathroom window and onto the field.

 Luther had been shot twice.

 And Nemo?

 Judging by the pattern of the stain, Donovan would guess he’d suffered a head wound. Probably a single shot, close range.

 Which meant three rounds from the same weapon.

 Nemo’s head, Luther’s arm and back.

 Glancing uneasily at the Glock and its cartridge in his hands, Donovan shifted his gaze to the cigarette butts crowding the ashtray.

 The killer had smoked a cigarette, flicked it onto Luther’s chest, then calmly walked back to the motel room, grabbed a bedspread, and rolled up Nemo’s body.

 But why? And where had he taken it?

 A sudden thought occurred to Donovan, accompanied by a surge of panic.

 Bracing himself, he took the keys from the ignition, then climbed out of the Chrysler and moved around to the trunk. Shoving the key into the slot, he hesitated a moment, then slowly turned it.

 The latch popped open with a loud
thunk.
 

 Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, Donovan carefully raised the lid, knowing exactly what was in there before he even looked inside.

 To his surprise and relief, however, he was wrong. The trunk was empty. No bedspread, no Nemo.

 Not that this changed anything. He had no doubt that Nemo was dead, nor did he harbor any illusions about who had pulled the trigger.

 But again he wondered, where was the body?

 Then he remembered the Del Sol.

H
E FOUND IT
in the back of the gas station, only yards from where he’d parked last night. It sat in the middle of a row of cars in various states of disrepair. They looked as if they’d been there for half a decade.

 The gas station was closed, just as it had been the night before, and judging by the condition of the pumps and the graffiti on the windows, it wouldn’t be opening anytime soon.

 Donovan exited the Chrysler and crossed toward the Del Sol, pausing when he realized the driver’s seat was occupied.

 Bobby Nemo.

 He put a hand under his coat, touching the butt of his Glock, a precautionary habit more than anything else.

 “Bobby?” he said, not really expecting an answer.

 He didn’t get one. Nemo didn’t move. No reason he should. He was dead, the missing bedspread wrapped around him, a single gunshot wound to the right side of his head.

 Donovan leaned in for a closer look and something caught his eye: a folded scrap of paper protruding from between Nemo’s lips.

 He hesitated. What the fuck?

 With trembling fingers, he reached in through the open window and pulled it free.

 There was a logo just above the fold. Motel stationery, a dozen years old, printed back in the days when the Wayfarer Inn was halfway respectable.

 His name was written across it in black ink:

 
SPECIAL AGENT JACK

 Not knowing what to expect, Donovan slowly unfolded it and found more black ink with nine underlined spaces beneath:

 
AUTOGENOUS WORK THAT CAN GET YOU ARRESTED
 

—  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —

 A makeshift crossword puzzle.

 Knowing he’d just stepped off a high cliff into the abyss, Donovan mulled the clue over in his mind a moment, trying to make sense of it.

 
Autogenous work that can get you arrested.
 

 
Autogenous.
 

 Produced from within.

 It took him a moment longer, but when Donovan finally solved it, there was no doubt in his mind who the message was from and what it meant.

 Alexander Gunderson was back among the living.

48

R
ACHEL WAS IN
the shower when her doorbell rang.

 It was just past 8 a.m. and she’d already been up for hours, unable to sleep. Ever since she’d left Jack yesterday afternoon she’d felt anxious and uneasy. And at the root of it was the story he’d told her.

 His trip to the other side.

 Rachel had never been deeply religious, but she
was
a believer. Growing up in a Chinese-American household with a grandmother who, as a little girl, had come straight from Tai Wo, Hong Kong, she’d heard her share of ancient stories. Tales of gods and goddesses, ghostly apparitions, the Ten Courts of Hell. Stories told with a quiet reverence and a conviction born of faith.

 She remembered the fireworks and the colorful dancing dragons on the streets of Chinatown during the Chung Yuan Festival—Ghost Day—which celebrated the rising of souls from the bowels of hell to visit their earthly homes. Every year, Grandma Luke lit incense and set out plates full of mango, peaches, and roast duck on a card table in the living room, an offering to appease the restless spirits.

 Against her family’s wishes, Rachel had made the mistake of marrying David in August, smack in the middle of Ghost Month. And while she didn’t exactly blame the denizens of hell for the disaster her marriage became, at times she had to wonder. Had they been cursed from the start?

 Rachel wasn’t a strong believer in the stories Grandma Luke had told her—every religion had its share of tall tales—but she believed enough to feel just a tickle of anxiety whenever the subject arose. That anxiety had been reinforced the moment Jack had told her about his otherworld encounter with Alexander Gunderson.

 The possibility that he might have imagined it all, that his mind had conjured up some bizarre death dream, was not a thought she even entertained. She knew that what he’d experienced was all too real.

 And potentially dangerous.

 Now, according to Sidney, Jack had been cut loose from the investigation, asked to step aside while the fools upstairs took over the case. She understood that they were simply following procedure, that the leeway they’d given Jack was a courtesy they weren’t obligated to extend. But she wondered how they could turn him away. Why deny a father access to the resources that might help him find his own daughter?

 Now, with Jack at loose ends and still reeling from his encounter with death—and with time ticking at its ever relentless pace—the probability of disaster loomed large.

 Jessie could die.

 And a part of Jack would go with her.

 Rachel was thinking about these things and rinsing the soap from her body when her doorbell rang. She quickly finished rinsing and shut the water off.

 The bell rang twice more before she got to the front door, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe. Despite the perfunctory swipe of a towel, her hair was still tangled and dripping wet. She knew she looked a mess, but didn’t much care. She had been waiting for hours to hear from Jack—he hadn’t returned her calls—and the doorbell ringing at eight in the morning only compounded her anxiety.

 Feeling like a military wife waiting for her husband to be shipped home, she pulled the door open, only to be overcome by a sudden surge of relief.

 Jack was in the hallway.

 Unfortunately, he looked (as David used to say on those many mornings after) as if he’d been pulled through a knothole.

 “Jack, my God, what is it? What’s wrong?”

 “It’s all gone to shit,” he said, then stumbled into her arms.

D
ONOVAN KNEW HE
had no right to do this to Rachel.

 Sure, there was a bond between them, had been from the moment she’d first stepped into his office over two years ago. But she didn’t owe him anything. No reason she should. And throwing the weight of his troubles onto her shoulders was, to say the least, unfair.

 Then again, Rachel was more than just an IA who had managed to catch his fancy. She was, Donovan had come to realize, the only one he could trust.

 The only one he
wanted
to trust.

 When she opened the door, he had practically collapsed in her arms, raving like a street-corner lunatic. But she didn’t falter. Not for a moment. She guided him to the sofa and sat him down and listened attentively as he sputtered on, telling her about the blistering headache, the night he couldn’t remember, and the untimely deaths of Luther Polanski, Charles Kruger and Bobby Nemo—two of whom he was certain he had executed.

 That she didn’t immediately pick up the phone and call the boys with the butterfly nets was, to Donovan’s mind, a testament to her strength.

 Instead, she brewed him a cup of tea and sat beside him on the sofa, a gentle hand on his shoulder, lightly stroking it as he opened up to her for the second time in the last twenty-four hours.

 It felt good to be with her. To share his demons. His fears. His pain.

 When he told her about the note and its cryptic message, she said, “Show me.”

 He pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to her, watching her carefully as she unfolded it.

 “Looks like your handwriting,” she said. “But … different.”

 “Read it,” Donovan said.

 She did as he asked, reading aloud. “ ‘Autogenous work that can get you arrested.’ ” She stared at the nine underlined spaces drawn beneath it. “A crossword puzzle clue?”

 Donovan nodded. “Two words.”

 Her brow furrowed as she thought it over. Then her expression changed and she looked at him. She’d gotten it much quicker than he had.

 “Inside job,” she said.

 Donovan nodded again.

 “And you think this means you killed those men? That’s ridiculous, Jack. You’re not built that way. You don’t have it in you.”

 “That’s just it,” Donovan said, trying to keep his desperation under control. “I
do
have it in me.” He pointed to the note. “You’re right about that being my handwriting, because
I
wrote it.” He paused. “Only I didn’t.”

 “That doesn’t make sense.”

 “Inside job,” he said. “Get it? It’s a message. A joke. When I blacked out last night, I did things I wouldn’t normally do because I wasn’t in control of my own body.”

 Rachel stared at him for a long moment. And in that moment he thought he’d lost her. She was willing to go only so far with this stuff and now he’d crossed a line. Her hand stiffened on his shoulder, a ripple of fear just beneath the surface of her fingertips.

 Then she surprised him.

 “Gunderson. He’s doing this.” And when she said it, he wanted to put his arms around her and hold her forever.

 “He’s inside me, Rache. Last night he managed to take control and he wants me to know it. That’s why he played hide-and-seek with Nemo’s body. It’s just the kind of move Gunderson would make.”

 It was a ridiculous notion, of course. Something you’d hear on the mental ward at Mercy Hospital. But was it any more ridiculous than what he’d been through these last couple days? Unlike Sidney Waxman, he’d already suspended any inkling of disbelief that may have plagued him.

 Apparently Rachel had as well.

 She stood up, heading toward an adjacent hallway. “Give me a minute to get dressed.”

 “Why? Where are we going?”

 She turned, looking at him with concern. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

49

T
HEY TOOK TWENTY-SIXTH
out of Bridgeport and headed into Chinatown.

 Rachel drove, weaving her Celica in and out of traffic with the seasoning of a pro, reminding him for a moment of A.J. Donovan, watching her watch the road, the concern still in her eyes. How long, he wondered, before this steely support of hers broke down?

 Chinatown was eleven blocks of gaudily painted pagoda-domed buildings, nestled among two-story walk-ups, dry-goods stores, and restaurants, plenty of restaurants. Dim sum and roast duck were the specialties, advertised on multicolored signs written in various dialects.

 No matter the time of day or night, the streets always seemed to be crowded. Businessmen, shopkeepers, students, prostitutes, and just about every type of petty criminal you could name.

 On its surface, Chinatown was no different from any other cultural stronghold in the city. But beneath the surface, Triad rule had wormed its way into every crevice of the small district, a fact Donovan had become well acquainted with many years ago, when he’d worked a case down here. He’d learned quickly that what happens in Chinatown stays in Chinatown.

 Unlike Vegas, however, they didn’t advertise.

 There were no parking spaces on the street, so Rachel pulled into a public lot near the train station and they walked the two blocks to her mother’s apartment.

 Rachel’s mother and grandmother lived in a second-floor walk-up, just above a restaurant called Ling Su’s. The strong odor of clams and roasted garlic assaulted Donovan’s nostrils as they climbed a dilapidated flight of stairs to a door marked 1.

 Above the doorframe, a sheet of yellowed paper featuring an ornate drawing of a scowling Chinese warrior was held in place by a blue plastic pushpin.

 Rachel had said little since they’d left her apartment and wasn’t offering much now. She knocked, showing him a small, timorous smile as they waited for an answer.