The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia (читаем книги онлайн TXT) 📗

"The call?"

"Called him to meet. That wasn't too hard. I'm an agent," he enjoys reminding me. "Carrie handled it from there. Carrie and that whacko scarface she got hooked up with."

"So you set him up," I say, simply. "Probably helped Carrie escape, too."

"She didn't need much help. Just some," he replies with no inflection. "She was like a lot of people in this business. They get into the goods and fuck up an already fucked-up brain. She started doing her own thing. Years ago. If you guys hadn't solved the problem, we would have. She was at the end of her usefulness."

"Involved in the family business, Jay?" My eyes pin his. The gun is by his side and he leans against the door. He has no fear of me. I am like a bowstring wound too tightly, about to snap, waiting, listening for any sound next door. "All these women murdered_how many of them did you sleep with first? Like Susan Pless." I shake my head. "I just want to know if you helped out Chandonne or did he follow you and help himself to what you left behind?"

Jay's eyes focus more sharply on me. I have probed the truth.

"You know, you're much too young to be Jay Talley, whoever he was," I say next. "Jay Talley with no middle name. And you didn't go to Harvard, and I doubt you ever lived in Los Angeles, not as a child. He's your brother, isn't he, Jay? That horrible deformity who calls himself a werewolf? He's your brother, and your DNA is so close that on a routine screening you could be identical twins. Did you know your DNA is the same as his on a routine screening? At a four-probe level, the two of you are exactly the same."

Anger flashes. Vain, beautiful Jay would never want to

think that his DNA was even similar to someone's as ugly and hideous as Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

"And the body in the cargo container. The one you helped us believe is the brother_Thomas. His DNA had many points in common, too, but not as many as yours does_yours from the seminal fluid you left in Susan Pless's body before she was brutalized. Thomas a relative? Not a brother? What? A cousin? You kill him, too? You drown him in Antwerp or did Jean-Baptiste do that? And then you lure me over to Interpol, not because you need my help with the case, but because you want to see what I know. You want to make sure I don't know what Benton was probably starting to figure out: That you are a Chandonne," I say, and Jay does not react. "You probably mastermind the business for your father and that's why you got into law enforcement, to be an undercover asshole, a spy. God knows how much business you've diverted_knowing everything the good guys are doing and then turning it against them behind their backs." I shake my head. "Let Lucy go," I tell him. "I'll do what you want. Just let her go."

"Can't." He doesn't even begin to argue with what I have said.

Jay glances at the wall, as if he can see through it. I can tell he is wondering what is going on next door, why it is so quiet. My nerves wind tighter. Please God, please God. Please. Or make it quick, at least. Don't let her suffer.

Jay pushes the lock in and fastens the burglar chain. "Take your clothes off," he says, no longer using my name. It is easier to kill people you have depersonalized. "Don't worry," he bizarrely adds. "I'm not going to do anything. I just have to make it look like something else."

I glance up at the ceiling. He knows what I am thinking. He is pale and sweating as he opens a dresser drawer and pulls out several eyebolts and a heat gun, a red heat gun.

"Why?" I ask him. "Why them?" I refer to the two men I now believe Jay murdered.

"You're going to screw these into the ceiling for me," Jay tells me. "Up there in the crossbeam. Now get on the bed and do it and don't try anything."

He places the eyebolts on the bed and nods for me to pick them up and do what he orders. "It's all about what becomes necessary when people get into something they shouldn't." He gets a rag and rope out of the drawer.

I stand where I am, just looking at him. The eyebolts gleam like pewter on the bed.

"Matos came here to find Jean-Baptiste and it took a little coaxing to know exactly what he had in mind and who gave him the order, which wasn't what you think." Jay takes off his leather jacket and drapes it over a chair. "Not the family, but a first lieutenant who doesn't want Jean-Baptiste to start talking and ruin a good thing for a lot of people. One thing about the family…"

"Your family, Jay," I remind him of his family and that I know him by name.

"Yeah." He stares at me. "Fuck yeah, my family. We take care of each other. Doesn't matter what you do, family is family. Jean-Baptiste's a fuck-up, I mean, anybody can look at him and see that, and understand why he's got his problem."

I say nothing.

"Of course we don't approve," Jay goes on as if he is talking about a kid who is shooting out streetlights or drinking too much beer. "But he's blood, our blood, and you don't touch our blood."

"Someone touched Thomas," I reply, and I have not picked up the eyebolts or climbed up on the bed. I have no intention of helping him torment me.

"You want to know the truth? That was an accident. Thomas couldn't swim. He tripped over a rope and fell off the dock, or something like that," Jay tells me. "I wasn't there. He drowned. Jean-Baptiste wanted to get his body a long way from the shipyard, away from other stuff going on there and didn't want him identified."

"Bullshit," 1 reply. "Sorry, but Jean-Baptiste left a note with the body. Bon Voyage Le Loup-Garou. You do that when you don't want to draw attention to something? I don't think so. Maybe you better recheck your brother's story. Maybe your family takes care of family. Maybe Jean-Baptiste's an exception. Sounds like he doesn't take care of family at all."

"Thomas was a cousin." As if that lessens the crime. "Get up and do what I say." Jay indicates the eyebolts, and he is beginning to get angry, very angry.

"No," I refuse. "Do what you're going to do, Jay," and I keep saying his name. I know him. I am not going to let him do this to me without my saying his name and looking him in the eye. "I'm not going to help you kill me, Jay."

A thud sounds next door, as if something has turned over or fallen to the floor, and then an explosion and my heart lurches. Tears choke me and fill my eyes. Jay flinches and then his face is impassive. "Sit down," he tells me. When I don't comply, he comes closer and shoves me down on the bed as I cry. I cry for Lucy.

"You fucking son of a bitch," I exclaim. "You kill that boy, too? You take Benny out and hang him, a goddamn twelve-year-old kid?"

"He shouldn't have come out here. Mitch shouldn't have. I knew Mitch. He saw me. There was nothing I could do." Jay stands over me as if not sure what to do next.

"Then you killed the boy." I wipe my eyes with the backs of both hands.

Confusion flickers in Jay's eyes. He has a problem with the boy. The rest of us don't bother him, but the boy does.

"How could you stand there and watch him hang? A kid? A kid in his Sunday suit."

Jay swings back his hand and slaps me across the face. It happens so fast I don't even feel it at first. My mouth and nose go numb and begin to sting, and something wet drips. Blood drips into my lap. I let it drip as 1 tremble all over and stare up at Jay. Now it is easier for him. He has begun the process. He pushes me down on the bed and straddles me, pinning my arms with his knees, and my healing fractured elbow screams in pain as he forces my hands above my head and struggles to tie them with the rope. All the while he is snarling about Diane Bray. He is mocking me, telling me that she knew Benton, and didn't Benton ever tell me that Bray had a thing for Ben-ton? And if Benton had been a little nicer to her maybe she would have left him alone. Maybe she would have left me alone. My head pounds. I barely comprehend.