The Murderer's Daughter

Chapter 25

Fortified by a bottle of water, four caramel caffeine chews, and three sticks of turkey jerky, Grace arrayed the enemy’s belongings atop a small desk across from her generous hotel bed.

Wallet, first. Cheap black leather, cracked at the edges, generic, packed chubby.

An up-to-date California driver’s license for Beldrim Arthur Benn was stuck in an inner compartment — secreted but hardly hidden. The physical traits and age matched the man she’d shot. Longer hair and a grizzled mustache did nothing to blur the I.D., this was him.

Beldrim. Effete tag for a hit man.

Cut the bitch, Beldrim.

Had he gone by Bell? Drim? Bill?

Grace decided to think of him as Bill.

Bill Benn, man about town.

No longer.

Suddenly, she was seized by anger. When that peaked and flickered out, something else took its place — queasy vulnerability.

The steely resonance of narrowly missed death. The nasty little knife entering her, twisting, ravaging. For no good reason.

She felt cold. Her hands began to shake and a wave of vertigo washed from the top of her head to her now-frigid feet and she had to hold on to the arms of her chair, work at slow-breathing, easing her autonomic nervous system back to equilibrium.

The body initiates, the mind follows... here we go, feeling better... no, we’re not.

Vomiting felt like the right thing to do but Grace suppressed the urge.

It took a while to feel almost normal.

A little improvised mantra repeated six times helped:

Bill Benn, man no longer about town.

Rot in hell.

The address on the license was a P.O.B. in San Francisco.

No credit cards or anything personal in the wallet, cash had given it heft.

Grace counted out nine hundred forty dollars in twenties and fifties, added the bills to her own money stash — victor and spoils and all that — moved the now-thin wallet to the right side of the table.

Next, she turned to Beldrim Benn’s cellphone, hopes for enlightenment dimming when she saw it was a cheap disposable, identical brand to the second one she’d bought, with no recent calls registered.

Not a single photo in the digital camera’s memory.

Murderous Bill bringing virgin equipment to his assignment. For all Grace knew, the license was phony — a correct image paired with bogus information.

She Googled beldrim arthur benn, pulled up a single hit on a seventy-six-year-old man who’d died two years ago in Collinsville, Illinois. Brief obit in the Collinsville Herald. Dearly departed Beldrim had been a carpenter. Survivors included a daughter, Mona, and a son, Beldrim A. Junior.

The age fit.

No mention of a wife or a widow. So probably divorced from Junior’s mom.

So maybe that is your real name. Or you stole some poor schmuck’s I.D.

Adding junior to the keywords pulled up two hits, both references to Beldrim Benn Junior’s position as director of operations for Alamo Adjustments in Berkeley, California. No indication what the company did.

Something hush-hush?

Alamo, as in remember... old grievances?

Then she realized the real monument was housed in San Antonio. Andrew plucking associations from his brain, or had he actually lived there?

She typed in alamo adjustments, expecting a website, social networking, a LinkedIn listing, anything.

Nothing.

But logging onto a website that offered pay-per-view access to older phone directories, Grace located a five-year-old address for the company on Center Street in Berkeley. So the company had once existed.

Alamo. Fortress. Good intentions, hopeless cause. Disaster.

Adjustments... for what? The only thing that word evoked for Grace was chiropractic and twenty minutes of pursuing that angle proved fruitless.

Back to Benn himself. Going all covert, so something secretive — high-tech — biotech? A toxic threat that Andrew had uncovered and threatened to expose?

Berkeley, the quintessential college town, was crammed with high-tech... but Grace couldn’t shake the feeling that Andrew had come to her because of an issue with kin. A close relative.

For the time being, she’d stick with that.

Andrew, dead. Probably at Bill’s hands. Or those of Bill’s partner, the heavy guy who’d tailed her on PCH.

Bill, dead.

One good thing about the bastard traveling light and hush-hush: His weapons were more likely to be unregistered and hard to trace.

Grace inspected the keys on the short chain. Three Schlages in addition to the one that operated the Chrysler. No defining marks.

In the junk pile.

Now the envelope.

Thin packet. When Grace opened it and shook, a piece of paper dropped out.

Fresh, white sheet, computer-typed. Neatly composed fact sheet on Grace: her name, office address, and phone numbers, professional qualifications, and a grainy black-and-white photo downloaded from the USC psych department faculty face-page.

Seven-year-old headshot, taken right after she’d graduated and was asked to stay on as a lecturer. The youngest person in the history of the department to reach that milestone, Malcolm had informed her.

The three of them — Malcolm, Sophie, her — had been celebrating with an extravagant dinner at Spago in Beverly Hills when he’d made the pronouncement. Sophie smiling in her quiet way, Malcolm downing his third Manhattan on the rocks and beaming.

Grace, nibbling shrimp cocktail and marveling at how she didn’t feel any different, enjoyed seeing the two of them like that.

She deserved the job offer but academia held no attraction for her, she’d always been one for reality.

Still, Malcolm and Sophie were happy and that supplied a nice memory... don’t veer off the track, girl. Grace’s jaw clenched and her brain followed suit. A frisson of nausea returned and she got back to basics and examined the headshot Bill had used to I.D. her.

She’d worn her hair down to her butt back then, parted in the middle, naturally straight but for foolish little ruffles at the ends. Ponytailing at the photographer’s request “to show us more of your pretty face, Doctor.”

Not much difference between the seven-year-old headshot and now; she’d aged well. Providing Bill Benn Junior an accurate likeness. Same for anyone who picked up after him.

Tearing the sheet into strips that she halved twice, she added the resulting confetti to the trash pile. Shaking the envelope a second time produced nothing but she peered inside, anyway. Spotted a small square of paper tucked deep in the bottom fold.

Jostling the envelope failed to dislodge it, so she reached in, curled her fingers and tweezed, extricated a roughly scissored square of newspaper pulp, about an inch and a half wide.

The paper was brown and brittle and as Grace held it, beer-colored flecks dropped onto the table. Laying it down, she had a good look.

Part of a black-and-white photo, obviously cropped from a larger image.

Blue-ink circle around the face of a boy about ten or eleven. Roundish face, handsomely symmetrical, dominated by wide pale eyes. A huge, unruly mane of blond hair sheathed his forehead and hid his eyebrows. Thick, curling strands trailed onto his chest.

A boy swallowed by hair.

He stared straight ahead, but not at the camera. Deep-set, sunken eyes that belonged on an old man had been stretched to their limits by fear.

The result was pitiful. Feral.

Familiar.

Now Grace knew where she’d first seen the man who called himself Atoner.