Bloodline

  Quickly he switched the knife to her left hand and sliced open her right wrist. Another gasp, and this time she twisted in the water, but that was over in a few heartbeats and she returned to snoring.

  He let the knife slip from her fingers and fall to the bottom of the tub. He dumped the mostly melted contents of the ice packs into the bathtub and shoved the empties into his pockets. He removed his sodden gloves and wrung them out over the water, then settled back to watch.

  He stroked her forehead. Sorry, sis. Why’d you have to interfere? Everything would be fine now and you’d be going about the rest of your life if you’d only minded your own damn business.

  He realized her death would cut off a branch of the Bloodline, but it couldn’t be helped. And Moonglow wasn’t a branch that was going to bear more fruit anyway, so no big loss.

  He watched her face grow paler as the water grew redder. She stopped snoring. Then she stopped breathing, or at least it seemed that way. Her body shuddered, then relaxed. As her mouth and nose slipped beneath the surface, he knew she was gone. He watched a couple of minutes longer for insurance, then gathered up his gloves and the money bag and started for the back door. As he stepped out onto her rear patio he heard her phone begin to ring.

  He heard her outgoing message in his head: I’m sorry, I can’t come to the phone right now…

  Damn right you can’t.

  He’d thought he’d feel happy. After all, he’d just removed a big obstacle to the Plan. Instead he sensed a deep sadness and a vague queasiness, as if he’d done something terribly wrong. But how could anything done to preserve the Bloodline be wrong?

  No…as the feeling persisted he realized that it wasn’t quite that he’d done something wrong, it was that he’d made a terrible blunder. As if with this act he would set in motion a force that would destroy him.

  Ridiculous. He’d been careful, he’d been thorough. He’d left nothing to connect him to what he’d already begun referring to as “that poor, troubled woman’s suicide.”

  20

  Jack pulled up in front of Christy’s house and parked. The traffic had put him on edge—this trip had taken twice as long as it should have, and hours spent sitting in traffic were hours he’d never get back. Christy’s refusal to answer her phone hadn’t helped. What was it with this woman?

  He sat a moment. He’d had plenty of time to prep himself, but still he hesitated. This was going to be rough.

  Finally he forced himself out the door and up the walk to her front step. He knocked, he rang…nothing. He tried the door—locked.

  Well, the lights were on. Wasn’t anybody home? She had to be. She was expecting him. Why would she leave?

  The nape of his neck tingled as he hurried around the garage to its rear window. He shone the little flashlight through the glass. Christy’s Mercedes sat to the right.

  He moved to the back door and knocked. Still no answer, so he tried it: open. He stepped inside.

  “Christy? Christy?”

  No response.

  She had to be here.

  With his gut steadily tightening, he did a quick check of the first floor and found a glass containing a remnant of what looked like cola, but nothing else. He hurried upstairs.

  “Christy?”

  He froze in the doorway to the master bathroom. He saw red-red water, saw the upper half of a woman’s head. Jack had an inane flashback to the scene from The Tingler when a hand rose slowly from a blood-filled bathtub.

  A lump formed in his throat as he stepped forward. He knew who it was, recognized the ash-blond shade of hair, but had to be sure. He saw her half-open blue eyes staring across the top of the water; her mouth and nose hidden beneath.

  Beneath the shock and dismay lurked a growing sense of déjà vu—Gerhard dead in his tub.

  He knelt beside her. No way Christy could be alive, but just to be 110 percent sure he touched her eye. No blink.

  Her hands had floated to the surface. He lifted one by an index finger and saw the two-inch-long, lengthwise incision over the artery. She’d known what she was doing.

  Or at least someone had.

  Had she done it? He couldn’t believe that—not now, not when she was waiting to hear what he’d learned. Later, after she knew the awful truth, it might have been in the realm of possibility. But not now.

  He released her finger and stepped back to survey the scene, looking for signs of foul play, a struggle. But no…everything looked neat and in place. She’d filled the tub and made the cuts beneath the surface, preventing the arterial spray from splattering the walls. Perfectly in keeping with Christy’s orderly personality.

  But he still didn’t buy it. It reeked of Bolton.

  Okay…if Jack was going to create a scene like this, how would he go about it?

  His mind ranged over the possibilities, and came up with only two: Force Christy to kill herself under the threat of death or worse to someone she loved more than life; or drug her into oblivion and fake it.

  Jack couldn’t see how there had been time enough for the first, so that left the second…

  And, remembering the glass downstairs, what was the one thing Christy could be counted on to drink?

  He stared at her a moment longer, feeling again the lump in his throat as he fought a sense of failure. He hadn’t failed her in a true sense. She hadn’t hired him for protection, only to gather information, and he’d gathered that—in spades. Yet still he felt he’d failed her. How could he not? She’d been alive when she’d come to him and now she was dead, by either her own hand or someone else’s. In neither case could he be held responsible, so why this sense of guilt?

  Because.

  Sometimes that was reason enough.

  He had to know what happened here. To find out, he needed to learn if Christy had been drugged.

  He went downstairs. Using a paper towel to avoid leaving prints, he bagged Christy’s Diet Pepsi bottle and almost-empty glass. He wiped off the doorknobs as he left.

  Back in his car, he got moving and called the local police to tell them that if they went to a certain address they’d find the owner dead. He closed with, “Be sure to run drug and tox screens.”

  He didn’t know if they could. He didn’t know if she had any blood left in her for testing, or if the blood in the bathwater would be of any use. What he did know was that his call would raise the official index of suspicion and have them treat Christy’s house as a crime scene.

  Maybe they’d turn up something, maybe they wouldn’t. Either way, Jack intended to pursue his own course. For that he’d need Levy’s help.

  And Levy would help—whether he wanted to or not.

  21

  “Is something wrong, Jack?”

  He looked up and found Gia standing at his side, staring down at him. He realized he’d been lost in thoughts about Christy.

  “Sorry. I’ve been lousy company, haven’t I.”

  “If you mean being here in body alone, yes.”

  He’d returned late after driving to Rathburg and placing Christy’s glass and bottle in Levy’s hands. Gia had reheated some of the veggie stir-fry she’d made for dinner and filled a couple of tortillas with it. He guessed he hadn’t said much then. Vicky had gone off to bed and now they sat in the library with something playing on the tube and Jack staring at the screen without seeing it.

  “You know that woman I told you about, who wanted information on her daughter’s boyfriend? I found her dead tonight.”

  “Good God!” Gia stepped closer and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Please don’t tell me she was murdered.”

  “It looked like suicide, but I don’t know.”

  “And if you find out it wasn’t?”

  He looked up at her. “I don’t know.”

  That was true—at the moment. He’d put off making plans until he heard from Levy.

  She settled herself on his lap and clasped her arms around his neck.

  “Whatever you do, be careful.”

  “Wh
at makes you think I’d be anything but?”

  “You have a look in your eyes…not the look you had when you learned Vicky had been taken to that ship full of monsters—God, I don’t ever want to see that look again—but there’s something a little scary in your eyes right now.”

  Vicky…Kusum…the rakoshi…it would be two years this coming summer. Where had the time gone?

  Where had his family gone? Bolton was supposedly obsessed with his bloodline. Jack had never given much thought to his own, but now, when he considered it, his had been virtually wiped out. The only one left that he knew of was his uncle Gurney, and he wasn’t all that closely related—his mother’s uncle.

  “I—” He froze as he saw the label on Gia’s water bottle: Ramlösa. “Where did you get that?”

  “The Gristedes down on fifty-seventh. Why?”

  The name…Ramlösa…an anagram of Rasalom. And Rasalom was always playing games with his name. He’d called himself Sal Roma when Jack first met him.

  He grabbed the bottle as calmly and gently as he could. “What do you know about it?”

  “Well, it’s good, and it’s sparkling. What else do you need?”

  The label said it was established in 1707. But labels could lie. And Rasalom had been around forever.

  “I don’t know if you should drink this.”

  She laughed. “I’ve been drinking it for a month now.”

  “You have?” He’d never noticed.

  “Yes, and I’m fine. Look, I’ve been thinking…about you coming up from underground.”

  Jack had known the subject would rear its head again sooner or later.

  “Abe and I have discussed—”

  “I don’t think you should.”

  Jack paused, wondering if he’d heard correctly.

  “Did you just say what I thought you said?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Abe’s plan—it’s too dangerous. You’d be in a country where you didn’t speak the language, dealing with hardened international criminals who might find it simpler to kill you and take your money should things start to go wrong.”

  She had a point. Even though Abe vouched for his contacts, the process of sneaking into the Balkans and reemerging with a dead man’s identity was fraught with risks.

  “Besides,” she added, “it doesn’t matter.”

  Jack stiffened. “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

  She shrugged. “It just…doesn’t.”

  They’d gone around and around about this before her pregnancy, but the baby had brought matters to a head: Jack could not claim fatherhood without an official existence. And in today’s world a man simply could not appear from nowhere, with no Social Security number, no history of 1040s filed, no work history or licenses or documentation to prove his identity, and not wind up in serious trouble with Homeland Security, the IRS, the FBI, INS, and other denizens of officialdom’s Acronym City. Thus the elaborate Balkan scheme.

  “We might have another baby, Gia.”

  She hugged him tighter. “We might. But it still won’t matter.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t either. Before the accident I thought it was so important. Now…it’s not. Maybe it was the coma that did it. Maybe it’s the dreams I had when I was so near death.”

  “Dreams? You never mentioned dreams.”

  “That’s because I don’t remember them. I remember having dreamed, but not about what. I don’t know whether it was the brain trauma or the dreams or the combination of the two, but the world seems different. The future seems…shorter. Does that make any sense?”

  The words chilled Jack. He’d heard something like it before. Someone who supposedly could see the future revealed that he could not see next summer, or anything past it—next spring ended in a wall of darkness.

  Gia had been pushed to the threshold of death. While she’d teetered on the edge, had she looked across and seen what was coming? And had that vision mercifully been blotted out, leaving her with only a vague sense of impending doom?

  What was going to happen next spring? It sounded like the end of the world.

  And if indeed it turned out to be the end of the world, then Jack’s becoming a citizen…

  …wouldn’t matter.

  He squeezed her close.

  “You, me, and Vicky—we matter, Gi. We matter.”

  WEDNESDAY

  1

  Dawn came out of the bathroom after her morning retch. Nothing had come up and the nausea didn’t seem so bad this time. Maybe it was easing off. But she was like totally exhausted. She could so fall right back into bed this minute, but her mouth was parched.

  As she passed through the bedroom, she glanced at Jerry, still asleep. She stopped short and stared.

  Ohmygod, his nose! What happened to—?

  Then she remembered. How could she forget that beating he got? His nose looked awful. Worse than last night. At least she thought so. Last night was a little fuzzy, almost as if she’d been drinking. But no chance of that with Jerry around.

  She went downstairs and flipped on the TV on her way to the kitchen. She gulped Diet Pepsi straight from the bottle, then carried it back to the living room. She sipped more as she watched some news story about a “suspicious” suicide in Forest Hills. The woman’s identity was being withheld until next of kin were notified. The suicide was deemed “suspicious” because of the phone call that had tipped off the police.

  A strange feeling swept over Dawn as she listened. For some reason she thought of her mother.

  Mom? No way. She so wasn’t the suicide type.

  Yeah, she’d been acting totally strange lately, but she’d never…

  A wave of nausea rippled through her stomach—a different sort of nausea. She went cold.

  Mom?

  She hunted for her phone, found it on the kitchen counter—didn’t remember leaving it there, but whatever. She speed dialed her home. She wasn’t going to speak to her, just hear her voice and hang up.

  One ring…two…

  Come on, pick up—

  A man’s voice came on after the third ring.

  “Pickering residence. Who’s calling, please?”

  Dawn’s voice locked and her heart froze. Her mouth moved but made no sound.

  “Hello?”

  “Is…is Mrs. Pickering there?”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “I-I’m her daughter.”

  “You’re Dawn Pickering?”

  “Yes.” She felt her knees softening. “I-I-I want to speak to my mother.”

  “We’ve been trying to get hold of you since last night. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  Dawn dropped the phone and began to scream.

  2

  “Your suspicion was spot on,” Levy said as he made a sandwich out of his side orders of toast and hash browns. “That cola was loaded with flunitrazepam.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Its brand name—it’s not legal in the U.S.—is Rohypnol.”

  “Ah.” Jack nodded. It made sense now. “Roofies.”

  “Is that the street name? It’s also a date-rape drug. With the amount she had in her, that woman could have been gang raped and never remembered a thing.”

  At least she’d still be alive, Jack thought.

  “How do you know how much she had in her?”

  Levy took a huge bite and spoke around it. “I don’t. But the assay calculated a concentration of zero-point-zero-three milligrams per cc. That comes out to about one milligram per ounce. If she’d had a typical serving of eight to twelve ounces…” He shook his head. “You could do just about anything to her.”

  “Including slit her wrists?”

  “Obviously.”

  Right. Obviously.

  Jack clasped his hands in his lap to keep from smashing his coffee cup into Levy’s face.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  The second half of Levy’s potato sandwich stopped halfway to his mouth
.

  “What?”

  “You lied to me about the alibi. You never had any idea where Bolton was when Gerhard was killed.”

  “Okay, th-that’s true. But I was under orders. I had no choice.”

  Should have followed his gut when it told him Bolton had done Gerhard. But no, Levy’s lie had let him feel it was just safe enough to leave Bolton on the street a little longer.

  Shit.

  Jack leaned forward. “A good woman, a concerned and loving mother is dead, murdered by someone you were supposed to lock away until the sun went out. She’s dead because you helped slap a fresh coat of paint on that human Dumpster and put him back on the street. Now here you sit, stuffing your face with as much concern as if one of your lab rats died.”

  Levy leaned away from him. “I—I had to alibi him. I have a family, a life, an identity. I’m more vulnerable than you.”

  Maybe, maybe not.

  Jack stuffed his blooming rage back into its cage, took three deep breaths, then…

  “Will they pick up Rohypnol on a routine drug screen?”

  Levy blinked and looked confused by the change of subject. “I…don’t…know. I’d expect it to send up flags in the benzodiazepine category, which is a part of just about every screen, but I couldn’t guarantee it. It would depend on what sort of blood sample they were able to obtain. Urine would be the best, since the drug’s excreted by the kidney. Of course, if they don’t have any blood or urine to work with, they could always try her CSF.”

  “Which is?”

  “Cerebrospinal fluid. It’s the liquid that bathes the brain and spinal cord. I don’t know if that would work, but it’s worth a try.”