Nine Man's Murder (10 page)

The trainees had been investigating for a week when someone tampered with the brakes of Julian Hayward’s stunt car before a chase scene—fortunately, producing no injuries. Reeve’s inspection of the sabotaged vehicle uncovered in the car’s engine a gold ring, subsequently identified as Adam Burke’s.

But just when the case seemed sewn up, a discovery of Bryan’s opened a seam of doubt. Indulging a nagging suspicion, Bryan learned that one day before the accident (when the car’s brakes had still been intact), Burke had, after removing his ring, injured the finger on which it had been worn. After Julian’s car accident, Bryan tried unsuccessfully to place the ring on Burke’s injured finger, which was too swollen to accept it.

If, Bryan argued, Burke had been wearing the ring when he had “sabotaged” the brakes, it could not possibly have fallen off the swollen finger. The ring, therefore, had been stolen and planted to incriminate Burke.

The one responsible for planting the ring, it turned out, was Reeve.

“You considered it more convenient to fabricate evidence than uncover it,” Bryan reminded Reeve. “You never understood that you can’t make the facts yield to you by bullying them into submission.”

“When the facts don’t fit,” Reeve said, “you make them fit. As for Adam Burke, he was guilty. While you were all sitting around indulging your egos in fancy talk about inference and deduction, I was out catching a criminal.”

“No one was ever convicted, if you recall,” Amanda pointed out.

“My point exactly. Sometimes the only way to nab a culprit is to make creative use of your resources.”

“Resources?” Bryan exclaimed. “Phony evidence is your idea of a resource? What about professional ethics?”

“Ethics? Look who’s talking about ethics! Who was the one Damien took off the movie set case fifteen years ago, Bryan? Not me—you. And why? Breaking and entering.

“Let me tell you something about ethics, Mr. Holier-Than-Thou. I was just helping convict a criminal. But your interference cost me the career chance of a lifetime. I had been offered a job with Strathmore Investigations. I would have been a detective, not a babysitter for some underworld crime lord.”

“Look,” Gideon said, “that was a long time ago. I don’t see what good it does to rake it all up again.”

But Hatter had no intention of putting down the rake. “Perhaps,” he told Reeve, “you didn’t get the Strathmore job because you simply weren’t smart enough for them.”

Whatever had been capping Reeve’s rage was blown off. “I’ll kill you, Hatter—”

The grip of Bryan’s and Jonas’ hands around his wrists was all that stood between Reeve’s wrath and Hatter’s windpipe. It was not until Reeve’s fury had subsided that Bryan and Jonas released him.

“Can we stop fighting among ourselves long enough to figure out what we’re going to do?” Gideon asked. “There’s a killer among us. How do we protect ourselves?”

“We stay together all weekend,” Jonas said. “In the same room. There’s safety in numbers. What can one murderer do against seven people watching him?”

“You’re crazy,” Amanda said, “if you think I’m spending the night in a room with six men. I can take care of myself.”

“Amanda’s right,” Reeve agreed. “I’m a bodyguard for the mob. I’m not afraid of some amateur.”

“He’s done all right so far.”

“He got Damien when he was alone and not expecting anything. He got Carter before we started taking his note seriously. Now that we’re on our guard, he’s lost his key advantage.”

Jill disagreed. “We all have to sleep sometime. I don’t know about any of you, but I can’t stay awake for three days straight. And I have no intention of falling asleep in a room with a murderer.”

“We can take turns standing guard,” Gideon suggested.

“And how do you know that the guard is not the killer?” Hatter asked. “You’ll be letting the fox guard the henhouse.”

“He’s right,” Bennett agreed. “Did you notice that among our provisions, all of the coffee and tea is decaf? There’s no soda. No energy drinks. No chocolate. Nothing with caffeine. Nothing to help us stay awake. I may be speaking solely for myself, but if I fall asleep, I’d rather do so locked safely in my room than out here and vulnerable.”

“Bennett may have a point,” Bryan said. “If we lock the doors and windows of our rooms, what can the killer do? Bust down the door? I don’t think so. Have you seen how these doors are constructed? Break a window? By the time the killer clears away the glass and climbs in, the victim will be out of the room. And the murderer will be identified and caught.”

“He has the guns, remember?”

“Which he can use at any time. If we’re all sitting ducks trying to capture him, imagine what that makes us just loitering here not even knowing who he is.”

A vote decided the issue: The guests would barricade themselves in their rooms and stay alert. Yet no one left the parlor room.

31

J
ill was feeling
better. Still shaken, but much better than this morning. An almost unnatural calm had descended upon her, not unlike the comfort she knew as a child when Daddy, dashing and flirtatious, would ruffle her hair. You take care of your family, he had told her. You protect the ones you love. Whatever it takes.

Jill stared across the room at Bryan and felt the need for a drink. She gazed at the photograph of Imogen in the pendant Bryan had given her fifteen years ago. Imogen had sliced a path through the jungle of her dark soul. What could make up for Jill’s loss, now that Imogen was gone?

As if sensing her pain, Amanda came over and joined her.

“You’re thinking about Imogen, aren’t you?” Amanda squeezed Jill’s hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll get her back.”

“I’m so sorry …”

“It wasn’t your fault. Right now you’re just overwrought. She’s your daughter.”

“She’s your daughter, too.”

“You’ve been raising her for five years. I know you think of her as your own.”

“But you gave birth to her. And I’m—”

“We’re going to get her back,” Amanda assured her. “Whatever it takes.”

* * *

I
t would be
a slow death for each of them, Hatter thought. Slow enough for them to reflect on their lives, as on sleepless nights, regretting mistakes for which you can’t forgive yourself. Like young Hatter choosing … no, wearing the same clothes and hairstyle as his peers, trying to be like everyone else, if only to please German parents who tried to fit into anti-German America between two world wars by becoming passionate conformists, changing their name from Kätte to the less German-sounding Cates. The crime of being no one.

Hatter had not been expecting Bennett to sit down a few feet from him on the sofa.

“I just want you to know that I have read some of your books,” Bennett said.

“Oh?” Hatter replied cautiously. “And what did you think of them?”

“Fascinating. I was most impressed with the realistic detail,” Bennett continued. “Especially the ‘accidents’ that keep befalling the characters who do not believe in the supernatural. It was like you were describing something you had seen with your own eyes.”

Jonas, talking with Bryan and Gideon, glanced over at Hatter as the latter shifted his weight on the sofa.

“I also could not help but notice some fascinating coincidences,” Bennett added.

“Coincidences?”

“In one of your books, Spirits of the Dead, a young woman spills salt, and shortly afterwards she slips off a subway platform into the path of an oncoming train. Eleven months before the book was published, the newspapers carried a story about a woman who fell off a platform in the L.A. Metro—police never determined if she fell or was pushed—and was killed on impact by the arriving train.

“In another one of your books, Wednesday’s Child, an old man purposely steps on sidewalk cracks, when the steering and brakes of a passing truck mysteriously malfunction and the truck spins out of control, striking the man and killing him. A year before that book was released, a seventy-year-old man was walking home from the theater with his wife at 11:00 at night, when the emergency brake of a big rig parked on a hill suddenly went out. The truck rolled down the hill and hit the man, narrowly missing the wife. The old man died in the hospital seven hours later.

“There are countless other parallels between your novels and real-life accidents, involving black cats, broken mirrors, horseshoes, arson, boating accidents, and accidental shootings. But the most intriguing part is how closely the ‘fictional’ accidents in your novels resemble their real-life counterparts—not only the details of the accidents themselves, but the aftermaths as well. It’s amazing how similarly everyone, fictional and real, is affected by the tragedies. It’s almost as if you were there when the real-life accidents occurred and recorded everything in your books.

“But how could you possibly have been there? I mean, how would you know when and where accidents are going to occur? You would have to be psychic or something. How else can a person guarantee that he’ll be at the scene of an accident when it happens?”

Bennett’s brown eyes were strangely dull, though his evil grin told Hatter they should be twinkling. Hatter tried to meet those eyes with defiance.

Out of the corner of his eye Hatter caught sight of Jonas glancing in his direction.

* * *

W
hat was so
important, Reeve wondered, that Amanda needed to speak with him privately, in the dining room? Well, he was about to find out.

“I don’t know how to say this tactfully,” Amanda began, “so I’ll just come right out and say it. You remember … the things we did together six years ago?”

“I have some vague recollection.”

“Please, Reeve, don’t make this harder for me than it already is. The thing is, there’s something I never told you.”

“You never told me why you simply disappeared.”

“I’m telling you now. Reeve, I had a child. Your child.”

“What?” Reeve finally managed to croak.

Amanda cast her eyes to the floor. “I’m sorry.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“You don’t understand. It’s complicated.”

“Give me the Cliff Notes.”

“All right. I work for the D.A.’s office, Reeve—”

“You what?”

“I’m a deputy, but I’ve had my eye on assistant D.A. from the start. The thing is, my boss has some very strict views on promotion. He expects his assistant to have single-minded devotion to the job. He considers family a distraction. A woman with a husband—or, God forbid, a child—he would never even consider promoting.

“I’ve worked hard to get where I am, Reeve. I couldn’t let a child get in the way. I couldn’t let anyone know about it—not even you. I couldn’t risk it.”

“So what did you do? You didn’t—”

“No. Of course not. The only person I told about it was Jill. I didn’t know what else to do. And she made me an offer. She offered to raise my child—our child. For the last five years, Jill has been raising our daughter, Imogen.”

Everything was happening too fast. Reeve’s head felt like it had been swept up by a tornado.

“So why are you telling me about it now?”

For the first time, the cool, self-possessed deputy district attorney gave place to the panicky mother. “Oh, Reeve, they found out. They took her away—”

“Slow down.”

“My hands are tied. If Peyton finds out what I did, my career is over. You’re our only hope, Reeve. You’re the child’s father. You’re the only way to hold onto her—”

Reeve bolted up from the dining table chair. “Now hold on a minute. Six years ago, you come to me out of the blue. You give yourself to me, for heaven’s sake. Then you disappear, and now you tell me that you have a child, and I’m the father. What kind of game are you playing, Amanda? Why did you get involved with me to begin with? You never even liked me back at Anderson’s. You were in love with …” Of course. “Is that it? Were you on the rebound from Jonas?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. He had just become involved with …”

Too late Amanda clamped her lips.

“So that’s it. He was in love with Jill fifteen years ago. Is that what happened? The man you loved got intimate with your best friend? And you licked your wounds by running to me?”

“What difference does it make, Reeve? All that matters now is that you’re a father.”

“I hate to break this to you, Amanda, but this is not a very good time for me to become a daddy. I’m kind of on the run from Antonio Capaldi. He thinks I betrayed him.”

“Because of that key they found in the back room of the warehouse?”

“Someone had to have stolen that key from Capaldi’s secret drawer. But the only people who even knew about the drawer were … Wait a minute. How did you know they found the key in the back room? I read all the accounts in the newspapers. None of them mentioned where in the warehouse the key was found.”

“I work for the district attorney, remember? I have access to information like that.”

“No, Amanda. I don’t think so. I told you about that key … didn’t I? I think you stole it and planted it in the warehouse. That’s why you got involved with me. I was your bridge to Capaldi.”