Chapter 24

There was no avoiding a trip to the local police precinct house this time. We’d been involved in a shoot-out where three hitmen and three members of the public had died. There were four others seriously wounded and a couple with minor injuries from flying glass. And there was one unconscious killer.

We chose to take our Fifth Amendment right until Walter arrived. The cops weren’t happy, but Walter had us kicked loose under rules governing the arrest and incarceration of active CIA agents. We made nobody any the wiser. As soon as we were off the record, I told the homicide detectives what I knew about our attackers. It wasn’t much. I didn’t mention a possible connection to Wetherby because I wasn’t sure that there was one. Then we went and collected our weapons from where they’d been stored after they were seized as evidence. That raised the anger level tenfold, but there was nothing the cops could say or do at the time.

I seriously pissed off the lead investigator, Lieutenant Jonah Hawke, a big, red-faced detective with twenty years under his belt, when I asked to look at the file concerning the murders at Luke Rickard’s apartment. I actually thought that he was going to swing for me and we had an awkward moment before Walter stepped in and made the request official.

‘I only want a look at the suspect’s face,’ I told the cop.

‘Can’t help you. He’s not on record. He wasn’t the type to keep snapshots either; there were no photographs of him lifted from his apartment.’ Hawke was more than a little smug in the way he announced this. ‘We’ve checked his prints. They’ve come up in connection with a few unsolved crimes, but that’s it. The name Luke Rickard’s bogus. As of now he’s designated as an Unknown Subject. The guy’s a goddamn ghost.’

He will be if I get my way, I thought.

‘What about his physical description? You must have canvassed the other tenants in the building by now.’

Hawke held my gaze steadily. ‘Physical description, huh? I’m looking at it.’

The cop’s words struck me deeply. I was already aware that Rickard had disguised himself in order to set me up, but now I wondered just how far he’d gone in stealing my face. It wasn’t a nice thought considering that there was someone out there who was the total antithesis of me, but who was my identical double. I walked away from Hawke before he noted the shaking of my hands.

Our Chrysler had been abandoned back at the diner when we’d been taken in. We had to grab a taxi to go and collect it, and none of us spoke about what happened on the journey over. Then we went to a hotel room to hook back up with Walter and Bryce. Neither of the CIA men — active or retired — was there yet so we made ourselves busy gathering our own information. Harvey was as good at digging up data as any other person involved.

Up in Maine, the police there were a little ahead of the game. Probably it was because SAC Hubbard was pushing them for answers. Harvey brought up a couple of digital photo-fits formed from descriptions given by Imogen and by the boathouse owner who’d disturbed Rickard. There were subtle differences between both images, but they were enough alike to be the same man. Lieutenant Jonah Hawke was right: Rickard did have a resemblance to me. Slightly darker in the hair and definitely darker in the eye, but there were more similarities than there were disparities. For the purpose of incriminating me, Rickard had gone to a lot of trouble, maybe as far as having cosmetic surgery. It was an uncanny feeling looking at my evil twin.

Rickard was a fucking abomination.

I had been hoping to recognise the man’s face, but not in this way. Part of me had even wondered if Jesus Henao Abadia had risen from the grave and was tormenting me like a vengeful spectre from my past. I’d even wondered about Jack Schilling; I heard he’d killed himself, but I never saw the body. It sounds like a stretch, but Martin Maxwell had faked his own death before going on a rampage as the serial killer Tubal Cain, so I was ready to investigate any angle. But this man was neither Abadia nor Schilling. I’d never seen him before in my life — except for in a mirror.

Harvey pressed buttons on his laptop. He brought up more pictures and then tapped the screen. ‘These two are Jean Shrier and Ben Le Duke. It looks like Wetherby was telling the truth about them. They’re deployed to Hong Kong and Nigeria respectively.’

A simple glance at the men’s mugshots told me that neither of them was the killer calling himself Luke Rickard. To all intents and purposes we were back to square one. Except for one thing.

‘What about his wife?’

I’d no sooner asked the question than Walter and Bryce came in the room. Walter’s bodyguards waited outside in the hall. Maybe they should have followed him in because Walter looked like he’d need their help to aid him in standing, he was so washed out.

He sat down on the edge of one of the twin beds and let out a ragged breath. He glanced over at Bryce, who didn’t look that much better. ‘You don’t know how well off you are. I wish I could spend my days sitting beside a river watching the salmon avoiding my hook.’

‘Retirement’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ Bryce grunted. He sat down on the other bed.

‘I take it that things weren’t easy with the cops this time?’ I said.

Walter grunted. ‘There are complaints running all up and down the spout. The chief’s threatening to take this all the way to the governor, to Congress if needs be. Do you think there’s a chance you can keep things a little lower key in future?’ He looked at me, Rink and Harvey in turn.

I spoke for the three of us. ‘Not a chance, Walt.’

He shook his head, laughing softly. It had been a pointless request anyway. I wasn’t the only one who had the feeling that things could get much worse. ‘I can’t blame you guys, I suppose. It wasn’t you who went in and shot up that place with machine pistols. It took a lot of convincing the chief, though. He said they wouldn’t have shot the damn place to pieces if you guys hadn’t been in there in the first place.’

‘He has a point,’ I said.

‘You probably saved a lot of people in there.’

‘Doesn’t make me feel any better.’ People had died: a terrified guy under a table; the young girl hiding behind the cashier’s desk, among others. Their deaths weighed heavily on my soul, regardless of how many others I might have saved. Seemed my life was destined to be filled with collateral damage; something that would never sit well with me.

Walter waved me down, then searched his pockets for his cigar. He thumbed the cigar into his mouth and sat staring into space.

‘Haven’t you anything else for us?’ I asked.

‘Only something very strange.’

I shared a glance with Rink.

Walter shook himself. ‘There was another murder across town from where your gunfight took place. Someone was butchered with a knife.’

We were in a huge city with its fair share of crime. Knife crime wasn’t so unfamiliar in Miami — just like anywhere else — but Walter was right: it was too much of a coincidence to be unrelated. Once again I wondered about what had become of Alisha Rickard.

‘Elderly male,’ Walter began, allaying my first fears. But his next words put me right back in the same place again. ‘Knifed to death in the ladies’ restroom. Rickard’s fingerprints were at the scene.’

‘What about his wife?’

‘No sign. Only her shoes were found. It looks like she might’ve crawled out of a window.’

‘She’s running from him?’ So, it seemed that Chisholm and his team had been involved in an extraction when Rickard had killed them. They’d come for the woman and found something much worse than they — and maybe even his wife — had ever anticipated.

‘Looks that way. I’ve got someone over at Chisholm’s office going through his records to see what we can find out.’

‘Who’s looking for the woman?’

‘The police are. But at the moment they’ve more on their plate to worry about.’

I took out my SIG and ejected the depleted magazine. Fed in a full one and racked the slide.

‘I’m going out.’

Walter looked at me. ‘We have work to do here, Hunter.’

I was never that great a detective. Every man in the room was a far better investigator than me. Let them find out who Rickard really was, then point me in the right direction. That’s where my special skills lay. I was more concerned with finding Alisha before her husband did.

‘I’m going out,’ I repeated.

Загрузка...