A Spill of Blood Ch. 05

The reality hit me. Not that I was breaking the law and maybe facing a sentence. The reality that this wasn't his first time. One of the things I'd learned was that the girl's mother was the latest in a string of live-in girlfriends and occasional wives for this prick. I should have dug into those more closely because now I was certain I'd find a disappeared daughter in some of those stories. He saw that realization hit. The smug smile grew.

I leaned down but he didn't flinch. "Where are they?" I demanded.

He shrugged. "Who knows? When things got stale, we'd take a long trip down to the border and part ways, you know? Maybe they found a new boyfriend down there. Or maybe they just liked the climate and got a job." The malevolent glint gave me nothing concrete, but I knew what some of those border towns did for business.

The silence dragged on, his smile growing by the second. Finally, he couldn't hold it in.

"Go on, call the cops. One girl living here, not like I got some stable of chicks. That makes it nothing more than a pissant Class D offense even if they do believe you. And they ain't gonna believe you, not after she gives a statement. They got other things to do ... like prosecuting fuckers who break in and assault others. You're goin' down, asshole. Me? After maybe twenty-four hours, all I'm goin' is to Pennsylvania to do a pickup. And when things get stale, there're other lonely MILFs out there."

Even two years later, that smirking face still reached in and triggered something. The stepfather had been right. He'd have won because there was nothing the law could do if the granddaughter said she was his girlfriend. There was no evidence of a crime other than mine.

It hadn't been that I'd get arrested. It hadn't been that I'd lose my license if I got a felony conviction. It hadn't even been that I might go to jail.

It had been the girl's eyes: beyond resigned ... dead.

That had been the moment my gut clenched. The law was powerless because it was the law. Leges sine moribus vanae—laws without morals are useless, as the mug in Charlie Everett's study had said. Sometimes the laws were victims too: those without morals could twist them into tools, weapons to do their work.

The girl's dead eyes became a link in a chain of others—brown, blue, green, gray—stretching backward and forward in this man's life.

Now, lying next to a woman with eyes anything but dead, I felt an echo of that rage that had flooded through me then. It hadn't been the first time I'd been furious in my life, but it was the first time it brought with it an icy, calculating fury at outraged justice and the plight of something helpless before something evil. The beast, I'd named it afterward.

Like studying a perfect photograph, my memory played every detail of his face in that instant when he realized what was coming, the utter shock that he hadn't won, that the world wasn't going to give him a free pass yet again.

"I gave him just enough time to realize what was coming, then shot him through the head."

I heard the tiny gasp beside me. We lay there, me wondering if she was about to scoot out of the bed to get away from me. She surprised me.

"Go on."

"There's not much more to tell. What I did wasn't okay with Amber. She left."

"No, Harry. You hate her too much for that. Go on with the story."

I balked at going on. What came next was a segment of my life, a fragment of the larger story, that I'd decided a year ago needed to be walled off and never looked at. Only three people knew the whole story: me, Amber, and Jess. Possibly four if Amber had told her husband everything, though I doubted that. It didn't make her look good, and Amber liked to look good. He'd heard some minimalist, whitewashed version.

Only three people knew, and then it was locked away so that life could go on without the bottle.

But now I had a new woman in my life, someone who seemed more than the fuckbuddies I'd had since then. Someone who, when I glanced down, had a look on her face that was scared but also determined to give things a chance.

"She saw me as a monster," I admitted, "like a cancer. If she'd called me that and left, it would have hurt badly, but I'd have survived. I wasn't sure whether I was one or not myself. But she didn't."

"What did she do?"

"Nothing. She went about life like we were angry with each other but we'd get past it. There'd be some distance between us until we'd processed things, then we'd figure it out. But that was a façade."

"How so?"

"She started an affair with someone else in our world. He owned one of the agencies, a big one, mostly executive vetting and protection, that kind of thing. He wanted her, had made a play for her at some seminar we'd gone to, but she'd shut him down. She'd even told me about it at the time, and we'd laughed. Now she reeled him in. I was oblivious, believing the stories about staying with friends to get distance and jobs that took her out in the field. I was too stupid to notice the billings weren't telling the same story.

"But I was a little bit of a mess myself, not focusing, distracted. Once in a while, I'd get hammered and never notice she wasn't there those evenings. For seven long months, she fucked his brains out. Then she was ready and pulled the plug. 'I'm leaving you,' she told me. 'And I'm taking the business with me.'"

"How could she do that?"

"She'd spent those seven months convincing our clients that I was no longer reliable. She'd had her boyfriend's people document every single time I had a drink—I never did on the job, but she made it look like I had. They created different versions of case reports that showed failures as my fault and successes as luck or solely due to her involvement. They called in a few anonymous tips that got me before the licensing board answering questions ... nothing that stuck, but where there was smoke, there was fire for some of the Nervous Nellies.

"They'd even gotten a plant to act as a potential client but deliberately piss me off until things got heated. They recorded it without me knowing and edited it to seem like my anger issues were out of control. About the only thing she didn't tell them was that I'd killed someone. She couldn't do that. It would have implicated her since she'd been in the middle of a felony too. But that fucker's people did a good job. She probably took eighty, eighty-five percent of our clients with her when she knocked the stilts out. And with the clients went almost every employee."

"To the other company?"

I nodded. "A new division of it focused on general investigation, with her running it. Being the boss's mistress and then wife is a good path to the top." I could hear the bitterness in my voice. I didn't care.

"What did you do?"

"At first I got really angry." Then, realizing she'd just listened to a story about how I killed someone, I rushed on. "No, not like that. I didn't want to hurt her. I was angry that that was the first I was hearing about it, that there was no 'Harry, we've got a problem.' I wanted to talk, to try to make it work between us. Fuck ... go to counseling if she wanted!

"I wasn't quite aware of her straying at that point in the conversation, and I wasn't thinking clearly. She'd deliberately caught me after a couple of drinks, and all she'd said about that was, 'I've met someone.' I hadn't quite worked through that 'met someone' probably meant 'fucked someone.'"

I grimaced in wry humor at the naïveté of Harry-then.

"That ignorance lasted only a few more seconds. 'You're a monster, and I'm with someone who's twice the man you ever were, professionally and personally.' I was stupid enough to ask what that meant. 'It means in bed and out, Harry. He's better in both places. I've been sleeping with him since two weeks after Connecticut, and now I'm done hiding it. Go back to drinking, Harry, you're no good at anything else.'"

Sydney made a little sound of protest.

"Yeah," I said, "brutal. She was trying to hurt, trying to kill things as quickly as possible. It worked. She walked out without me saying another word, took most of the business with her along with my ego and what was left of my sobriety. I hadn't realized that I was leaning on her and work during that time, anchors while I came to terms with myself. I think she knew, knew that when she went like that ... brutally ... I'd fall over, and her job would be done. I'd be gone."

"How does a person like that live with themself?"

I was silent for a long time, contemplating that question. It was a contemplation I'd done a lot over the last two years. "You know, most people aren't the villains in their own stories. She had a good life, one she'd worked hard for. A cancer spot appeared in it and was eating away from the inside. She hated that spot. When you fight cancer, you try to kill it quickly and completely while keeping as much of the surrounding tissue as you can. That's what she was doing, killing a cancer."

I let that idea sit there for a moment, then snorted ... a deep, sarcastic sound.

"And for all that I figured out that mature, rational perspective, if you think it's mine, you're nuts. It was a dark time pulling out of it and coming to terms with myself, but I had some help and I did it. I'm better than before because now I know who Harry Morgan is. I'm more than okay with what I did that day in Connecticut. And while I won't say I'm not bitter, I'm more than okay with her gone too."

I tightened my arm around her for a second.

"I know I joke with Jess about putting a bullet in her, but that's just blowing off steam. The honest truth is, what I really pray for is that someday karma gives me a moment when she needs me ... needs me bad ... and I can look at her with a shit-eating grin all over my face and say, 'Bite me, bitch!'"

Sydney burrowed more tightly into me. "I'm glad you came to terms with that day because I think a Harry who hadn't couldn't have kept me alive." The hand that was tracing idle patterns on my chest got more purposeful. "As for the other ... well ... not to bring up a delicate subject or anything, but you ... umm ... you might say I'm a bit of an authority on men in bed. And she was talking out her ass on that one."

She pushed up on one elbow and grinned down at me. "I'm not saying you're the greatest penis to walk the planet. I don't want you getting a swelled head. But you're definitely on the high side of the curve." The hand darted from my chest to somewhere else. "Other things swelling is okay by me."

Some sleep, three eggs with bacon and toast, and a cup of strong, dark coffee made all the difference in my perspective. Well, that and a night with Sydney.

Nothing was over. Regan still wanted his money, and that money was in the wind. Mitchell was still a murderous cloud on the horizon. Kenneth Hopkins was still going to be buried, and Emerald ...

No, call her by her name, Harry.

... and Cara Gowin too. Nothing was over, but things weren't the same.

Before, I'd had nothing but strands exploding in all directions, a giant afro of a situation. Now those strands were starting to plait together, weaving to become a larger thread that joined others in turn to form a braid.

Larry Beck had had the certificates. Ergo, regardless of whose light fingers did the actual lifting from Regan's desk, Larry Beck was the thief and the one out of that original thirteen I needed to get eyes on. He had cash and he wanted to disappear.

Sydney had given me the second strand. It's funny how two questions, when shoved next to each other, become an answer.

"I'm really surprised," she had said earlier. "He seemed hung up on Nikki. I guess thirty-two million and he can find some other girl to be hung up on, huh?"

"He's an odd duck. Why leave those certificates in the briefcase? Was he just taunting Regan?" I'd answered.

"I thought about those two questions on the drive here," I said now to Jess as I savored a second coffee in the office, "and I have a theory."

"Hit me, Einstein."

"What if he really is hung up on Nikki? What if he put those certificates in the briefcase as a way to calm her down? I think she was panicking. I don't think she knew that guy at Sydney's apartment was indirectly working for him; I think she thought that guy was working for Regan and there to kill everyone, including her.

"Beck doesn't want to freak her out any more than she is. So, he tells her he's giving the certificates back to take some heat off. He tells her to give me the case, and that while I'm returning it to Regan, the two of them will take off. He doesn't tell her he's already moved the money and the certificates are worthless. That explains her surprise when I said they weren't there. That plan goes to hell when Gibson changes things up and decides to kill me up at Beck's apartment rather than down in the alley out of Nikki's sight."

"Okaaay," Jess said. "That's not a bad theory for why the bonds were in the case, but what makes you think he's that hung up on Nikki? He's gone and she's not. Maybe he just didn't want her to be a problem while he made his plans to disappear. Why couldn't he just be taking all that money and hunting another woman far, far away from all this who'll beat him with a riding crop?"

As much as I enjoyed the tiny bit of discomfort I caught in Jess's seemingly blasé description of Nikki, it was a good question. My theory had an answer.

"Because Gibson told me he changed the plan."

"What do you mean?"

"Beck's already shown he's willing to kill ... or at least, to have people kill for him. Not just kill a guy like me. He had Cara Gowin popped because she had a picture that maybe implicated him. If he was going to bolt on Nikki, she knew far too much to leave behind. She could finger him for sure. She had to go too.

"Say you're Gibson and his crew, and you've got orders to kill both of us. Do you kill the guy in an alleyway and then, even though maybe somebody saw or heard something and police are on their way, go inside a building and knock on the door of a woman who's half-panicked already and try to talk your way inside to kill her? Do you do this when you know the guy you're trying to kill is going to that woman's apartment and she'll open the door for him?

"No, you hide next door and step out when she lets me in. You do us both at the same time. Then you leave us in her apartment—maybe stage it like murder–suicide if you can—while you get the hell out of Dodge. The way that Gibson tried to double-cross Beck makes me think that Larry Beck isn't done with Nikki Hill."

Jess sat and thought it through. "Okay, Einstein, you've got me half-believing. What are you going to do about it?"

"Not me, you." I dropped a set of keys Sydney had given me on the desk, grinning at her confusion.

"Nikki knows me and Sydney. She doesn't know you. You look to me like someone who's subletting Ms. Alessandra's apartment right now because she doesn't want to be there. This is New York; people kill for sublets."

Bad choice of words, Harry. Jess thought so too, her expression said.

"Anyway, that will keep you close enough to get a signal from a motion detection camera. There's a ceiling light fixture in the hallway where we can tuck a tiny one. Nobody looks up. Yay, twenty-first century." I shrugged. "Would have been nice if the building had cameras in the tenants' areas, but this will have to do."

"We're gonna cherchez la femme just like they say." She grinned. I could see it tickled her to be on a stakeout. I grinned along with her. "What do you want me to do if he shows?"

"I doubt he will. I think he'll have her get anything he needs out of his place and then come to him. See, I think he bolted in a hurry. He realized that Gibson was onto him somehow, but at the last minute. If it had been earlier, he wouldn't have set me up the way he did."

"How do you figure?"

"Because, first of all, killing me to keep the name Larry Beck out of this mess was moot by that point. That ship had sailed. Just ignore me and run. Second, he'd have no way of knowing that Gibson would follow through. It was equally likely that Gibson would go after him. No, I think Beck got out with minutes or even seconds to spare.

"So, I suspect he'll want some stuff that's in that apartment. But I think it'll be a couple of days. It's still part of a crime scene, and he's got to figure that people are going to be watching Nikki. There's no way the cops aren't paying attention. Even if Gibson's mouth is sewn shut, I said enough to Officer Allen that they suspect Nikki's involved. The only question is whether she's a material witness or an accomplice. They didn't have enough to hold her, but they haven't forgotten her.

"But far more important, he knows, even if Nikki doesn't, that Regan's still hunting the money. Which means he knows I'm probably still around, and so is Mitchell. He may connect you with me. I'd be surprised if he doesn't, a new person showing up in Sydney's apartment at this exact moment and all."

"Will I be in danger because of that?"

I hastened to reassure her. "I don't think so. There's nothing to be gained by any more deaths because the cat's out of the bag, and you don't open the door for anyone but me. Look, if you're nervous, then I can get—"

"Jesus! I'm fine, Harry! I just like to know where things stand."

She was. There was none of the quasi-panic in her voice that Sydney and Nikki had had at various points. She was tense but controlled, wanting information. Exactly the way she should be. I nodded to show I realized it. And respected it.

"I think they'll give it a couple of days for things to quiet down, and then she'll go out on some 'normal' errand and just never come back. So, watch TV. Do the crossword. I don't care. If Nikki goes to his place, call me right away. That'll be our warning that the starter's gun is coming. I'll sit outside and when she leaves the building, we see what we can see."

"What are you going to be doing in the meantime?"

I debated whether to tell her. It wasn't a habit in our relationship. But I realized that at some point in all this ... somehow, somewhere ... Jess had started to slide from 'administrative assistant' to 'partner' in my mind, and you don't keep partners in the dark.

"There's something bigger here, Jess." I gestured at my face then down at my ribs. "This wasn't done because I was getting close to Beck's name. I mean, it was for that reason, but those guys didn't know that when they did it. They thought they were warning me off something else. They hurt me, and I'm pissed off enough now that I want to know what that something else is."

I tapped the two bond certificates still sitting on my desk, the two that had been in the briefcase but didn't bear the Cypriot Interconnect heading.

"Beck gave us something. This bond dodge isn't something only Regan had going. We already suspected Bertram was his partner. The fact that Beck had these other certificates tells me he was in on it too. And it's a logical jump that all of them are. I'm going to chase it from that end. I don't think it's a coincidence that Charlie Everett and Jordan Regan used the exact same words to describe their business: labor relations consulting."

"What could that be? Union-busting? Didn't that go out a hundred years ago?"

"Damfino. But it's a start."

I could see wheels turning. I thought she was trying to figure out what that job description meant, but her mind was going in a different direction.

"Harry, do we need the headache of making this bigger?"