part0008

AS SOON AS EVAN inserted the tension wrench from his lock pick set into the lock on Todd Strange’s front door and applied a gentle pressure, he knew something wasn’t right. The door opened immediately. It hadn’t been locked. He stepped quickly inside, closed the door behind him. Then stood with his back against it, head cocked, breathing on hold. Listening.

And if something seems to be too good to be true, it usually is. But for now, there was nothing except the silence of an empty apartment. Maybe the police had been careless, left it unlocked. Because despite Guillory’s belief that her colleagues weren’t taking her or her abduction seriously enough, it was obvious to him that they were. Standing in the hallway of the small apartment, it was clear that the police had been here before him.

He guessed they’d had the same expectation of success as he was feeling now. None whatsoever. There would be no little black book of names and addresses with the names of the targets and amounts paid in the margins next to them. Besides, if the police had found anything, he’d have heard about it from Guillory.

Something immediately struck him as odd. From where he stood with his back against the front door, he had a line of vision into the living room. Sitting on a side table beside the sofa was a table lamp. It was on. The electricity hadn’t been disconnected. Which meant that somebody was still paying the bills.

Taking a closer look, he saw that it was plugged into a timer in the wall socket, the sort of thing that turns the lamp on at a predetermined time to give the impression that somebody’s at home. To deter burglars. Because that fools the burglars every time.

It might be that the payment was being taken automatically despite the account holder being dead. Or it could be that somebody else had a good reason to keep the power on. It sure as hell wasn’t for security. There was an alarm control panel on the wall at the side of the door. The illuminated lights on the front indicated that it still had power. No doubt the police had disabled it, not bothered to re-set it when they left. Or lock the door.

All of which was an unexpected bonus. Nonetheless, a cold shiver rippled across the back of his neck. If an alarm, why not CCTV? Was somebody watching him at this very moment?

He glanced around the room, saw nothing obvious. But a camera can be hidden anywhere.

The spare bedroom had been turned into a home office. Looking around the room it was immediately obvious that Todd had been obsessive about everything in his life, a good trait in a man who kills people for a living. The desk was shiny clean and ready for business, everything on it arranged neatly around an empty space where a computer or laptop had sat, the power cord pulled out and left lying on the desk. On a shelf under the desk a wireless router was still connected to the phone socket. If he’d felt as if he was simply going through the motions earlier, that feeling now intensified.

Above the desk, the wall was crowded with framed photographs. There were lots of Todd, on his own or with other people. Two of those others were of interest, both of them women. The first one was significant because she was present in so many of the photographs. A woman in her late twenties who looked a lot like Todd himself. She was slim, almost emaciated, with a figure that lacked a woman’s curves. Her dark red hair was cut close to her head and looked as if she’d taken the kitchen scissors to it herself after a night on the town. It was only the softer features and fuller lips that made you realize you were looking at a woman. It had to be his sister, if not his twin.

The other photograph that caught his attention was unframed, tacked to the wall with a thumb tack. That wasn’t what made it interesting. What made his breath catch was that it was of Kate Guillory. Standing outside the Jerusalem Tavern. The neon sign over the door was clearly visible behind her. She had an expression on her face he recognized only too well. It brought a soft smile to his lips, a renewed determination despite the blatant futility of his current illegal search for information. Studying the photograph, he knew that if Todd had waited another minute before taking it, he’d have seen himself in it as well, having caught up with her after going to the men’s room on the way out. Hence the long-suffering look, why do you always wait until it’s time to go?

He was surprised the police had left it.

It seemed wrong in some way. Disrespectful. It said something about the man that Todd Strange had been, one of the runts of evolution who displayed an image of his next victim alongside all the photographs of family and friends. What it said was that for him, Kate Guillory had not been a person like all the others around her. She’d been an assignment, a job to be done. A way to make a bit of cash. Cash that could then be spent on the people he cared about, maybe take his sister on vacation for her birthday, or just because he was feeling generous, the going rate for a cop being so good.

Evan forced down the rising tide of anger that was surging up inside him, concentrated on the task in hand. Todd Strange was beyond his vengeance. The man who hired him was not.

He pulled the photograph off the wall. Held it by the edges in his latex-gloved fingers, turned it this way and that, angling it towards the light. It was spotlessly clean, not a fingerprint in sight. Whoever had supplied Todd with it had been careful. As you would if you were contracting to have a police officer killed. Even so, he’d have expected the police to take it for a more thorough investigation in the lab. It couldn’t be that Guillory was right, that they didn’t give a damn.

He tacked it to the wall again, then got out his phone and took a photo of one of the images of the sister. He enlarged it, studied her face, couldn’t help but wonder again what kind of a person she was. Was she in the same line of business herself? A brother and sister team.

They were questions he would soon have answers to.

There was nothing else of any interest in the room. The lack of any paperwork told him that whatever information there might have been, it had been on the computer or laptop.

Another power cord was still attached to the electrical socket in the wall under the desk, the end that had been pulled from the piece of equipment lying on the floor. From the scattering of fine paper dust and small slivers around it, he guessed a small shredder had been plugged into it. Good luck to whoever had the job of piecing together the shredded paper only to end up with a bunch of last month’s junk mail.

There was no point wasting any more time. Todd and whoever had employed him had been careful. The police already had what little information there might have been. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Actually, he did. And he’d been proved right. It had been a complete waste of time.

With a cheese and ham sandwich clamped between her teeth, she fished her phone out of her pocket. At first, she hadn’t realized what the sound was. It had never gone off before. It was the app that alerted her as soon as an intruder triggered the hidden CCTV camera in her brother Todd’s home office.

She watched the guy as he poked around, wasting his time looking for things that weren’t there. Then he saw what was there, the thing he was meant to see. The picture of the cop Guillory that she’d tacked to the wall after the police had finished with the apartment. She couldn’t tell you what made her do it.

But now it had done its job.

The guy holding it, looking for prints that also weren’t there, knew her. She saw it in his face. He wasn’t happy at all, looked like he wanted to spit. He wasn’t police. A friend, then. She opened the image gallery on her phone, found the copy she’d taken of Guillory’s photograph.

The guy wasn’t in it. But she had a funny feeling that the bar Guillory was standing outside was somewhere they frequented together. It was worth checking out. The name of it was highlighted in neon behind her head. Like an open invitation.