Immortal

75

Claire Montgomery sat in the police department’s interview room with Lieutenant Enrico Zamora facing her across a desk. Two Styrofoam cups sat between them and the unblinking black eye of a closed-circuit camera watched them from one corner of the room.

‘He made you do that?’ Zamora asked. ‘Every day?’

‘Most days,’ Claire replied. ‘Jeb Oppenheimer liked his assistants to provide him with all and any services. He called them our “targets”. Trouble for him, and fortunate for us, was that most days the old bastard couldn’t get it up.’

Zamora stifled a grin, nodding as he looked down at his notes.

‘Okay, so you’re sure that Tyler Willis was being held within the SkinGen building when he died.’

‘Definitely.’ Claire nodded. ‘I heard him on the intercom shouting something, but I had no idea what was happening down there in that theater. Christ, it just doesn’t cross your mind that someone could be so evil. I mean, maybe Nazis or something, but not your boss.’

Zamora nodded.

‘Okay, well that’s all we really needed to know, Miss Montgomery. We were pretty sure that Tyler Willis died at the hands of Jeb Oppenheimer, and the only other witness we have other than Lillian Cruz was one of Oppenheimer’s bodyguards, who died out in New Mexico last week and…’ Zamora paused as he noticed Claire’s confused expression. ‘What?’

‘You said Tyler Willis died at the hands of Jeb Oppenheimer?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s not possible,’ Claire said. ‘He was alive when Oppenheimer left the building. Willis died hours later.’

Zamora was about to reply when an urgent knock sounded at the door of the interview room, and a sergeant stepped quickly in with a sheet of paper in his hand.

‘Results of the autopsy on Tyler Willis,’ he said to Zamora. ‘You need to see this.’

Zamora took the piece of paper and scanned it, his eyes widening with each line. He stood up out of his chair.

‘You’re sure? Absolutely sure?’

The sergeant nodded.

‘And that’s not all,’ he said. ‘There’s been another abduction.’