Killer Move

“Didn’t kill him,” the man said, contradicting my thoughts. “Had a mind to. He was the one person I was absolutely prepared to go down that road with. But . . . he escaped.” He held out the picture to me again. “Guy you didn’t recognize? That’s Warner, right there.”

“That’s not the guy I saw.”

“Can’t help that. I blame myself. When I left him last night, I told him the cops were taking an interest in his house. I was just fucking with his head. Only thing I can think is he pushed himself off that ledge up there, still tied to the chair.”

I looked up. “Christ.”

“Right. What’s going to make a man do that?” He closed his eyes, rubbed them. “Shit,” he muttered. “I got to get my head straight. There’s too much new information floating around. Got to integrate.”

We sat in silence for five minutes, interrupted finally by a buzzing sound. The man frowned. It took me a moment to realize what we were hearing, too. I only got it on the fourth ring, when I saw that my phone was starting to migrate across the concrete floor.

“It’s on vibrate,” I said.

The man looked at the screen. “Still not used to these things. Somebody called Hallam. Who’s that?”

“He’s one of Barclay’s deputies.”

“You want to talk to him?”

“Are you serious?”

“I can trust you not to be unhelpful about discussing your whereabouts, right?”

He picked up his gun, watched my face to check I’d got the message, and brought my phone over to me.

I hit the answer and speaker buttons simultaneously, uncomfortably aware that the man was now walking toward a point where he’d be standing behind me.

“Hey, Deputy,” I said, acting out a role in a drama called Everything’s Okay, and a Man with a Gun Is Not About to Shoot Me in the Back of the Head, Probably. “Thanks for calling back.”

Hallam’s voice came out of the tinny speaker sounding a little breathless. “Where are you?”

When I’d tried to get hold of him earlier, I’d been about to tell him everything I knew. Now I decided to stick to facts of current relevance.

“On Lido.”

“I only just got your message. You sounded freaked out. Is your wife still missing?”

“No. I know where she is now.”

There was a pause, and I heard the sound of a piece of loud, grinding machinery being used in the background of wherever Hallam was. “She okay?”

“She’s fine.”

“Get yourself back to The Breakers,” he said, sounding distracted. “Do it now.”

“I will,” I said. “But you know the falling-down apartment block at the end of Ben Franklin Drive?”

He raised his voice against background noise. “What? Yeah, I know it. What about it?”

“Go there. Look in apartment 34.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

I ended the call.

There was silence from behind me. I waited maybe thirty seconds—long, treacly seconds—before deciding that, if he was going to blow my brains out, I’d at least like to be facing him when it happened.

I turned slowly from the waist.

He wasn’t there.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Hallam barely heard the last few sentences with the Realtor. Despite him flapping his free hand at the guy with the angle grinder, the asshole kept on cutting around the lock on the door they’d found in the Warner basement. Every other route had been exhausted, and after dead-ending in his attempt to talk to the sheriff, Hallam had given the go-ahead to move to quick and dirty solutions.

The noise from the doorway behind him abruptly changed in tone and pitch and then cut out, accompanied by the sound of something falling to the floor.

“We’re in,” the guy said.

The second door was as heavy as the first, and Hallam had to lean his full weight against it to get it to move. It opened onto pitch-darkness. The air that seeped out was cool. He reached his hand around the side of the door frame and slid it up and down. No switch.

“Get me a flashlight,” he said.

He took a step into the space in the meantime. It remained colder than an enclosed space should be, which suggested it was as climate controlled as the rest of the building. It was almost perfectly odorless, too, although after a moment he detected something, a low, acrid note, and sniffed hard. The noise rebounded flatly.

“Here,” the remaining tech said, and Hallam took the flashlight and turned it on. At first all he could make out was rebounding white light. Once his eyes readjusted, he got that he was seeing tiles. He turned back toward the doorway and played the lamp along that wall until he spotted the switch, positioned an unusually wide distance from the opening. He flicked it, and three banks of fluorescent lights came on in unison.

“Oh,” said the tech, sounding relieved.

A low-ceilinged room, twenty feet deep by sixty feet wide. The ceiling, floor, and four walls were tiled in white, orderly rows of nine-inch squares. It was entirely empty, not a single object to be seen. There was something eerie and a little inhuman about the space.