Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 48

Two young business guys in neon-colored shirts sat down in the empty seats at the end of the bar. They ordered screwdrivers, talked about the stock market and their shrinking expense accounts that wouldn’t cover a free weekend at the Beverly Hills Sun.

I blotted out their voices by concentrating on the music and the glowing scotch in my glass. I thought about Sci’s report of that two-second phone call made from the landline inside my house to Tommy’s cell phone at around the time of the murder.

That call was bad for me because it seemed to establish that I had been in my house when the crime went down.

But I hadn’t made that call.

I hadn’t called Tommy, so…had he called himself from my phone to make it seem that I had been home?

Or had Tommy commissioned a hit?

Had Colleen’s killer called Tommy from my house to tell him that Colleen was dead? Job done. Had Tommy been right outside on the beach, and that’s who Bobbie Newton saw, thinking Tommy was me?

I sat on that barstool, but in my mind I was driving to Tommy’s house. I wanted to confront my brother, to beat the truth out of him. And then I wanted to keep beating him until he didn’t look anything like me. So that, guilty or not, he could never play my double again.

But Justine was right.

I needed proof. Without it, the semen in Colleen’s body would be enough evidence to convince a jury that I was her killer.

I emptied my glass, left cash on the bar, and took the stairs down to the fifth floor.

I turned toward my room and again I noticed the woman who had been sitting at the bar a half hour before. Now she was on the far side of the elevator bank, twenty feet away. Her back was turned to me and she was fumbling in her handbag as if looking for her key.

I had twenty-twenty vision, and as a pilot I’d been trained to see anomalies from the air: a puff of dust, a moving shadow, a glint of steel ten thousand feet down in the dark.

I noticed this woman, but I blocked out that something was wrong with her attitude, her posture, her looks-something.

I walked away from her. I put my card key into the slot, opened my hotel room door-and felt a stunning blow to the back of my head.

I went down.

When I came to, the pain radiating from the back of my head was dazzling. I recognized the sunburst patterns on the carpet under my chin. I was on the floor of a room at the Beverly Hills Sun.

I closed my eyes, awoke to the shock of ice water in my face. The woman I’d seen at the bar and then again in the hallway was stooping over me, her hands on her knees, and she was cursing. I didn’t understand her thick Irish accent, but I knew her eyes.

They were Colleen’s eyes.

I said, “Colleen,” and she began cursing again. Through the pain, and as my vision cleared, I saw that although this woman resembled Colleen, she was older.

“Siobhan?”

The cursing intensified.

I pulled myself up into a sitting position and screamed back into her face, “I don’t understand you. Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

“Aym nah shuh’in’ up, Jack-o,” Colleen’s sister shouted into my face. “Nah ’til ye tell me why you kilt ’er.”