Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (4 page)

Mac waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “Of what?”

Now her hands were on her hips. “Christine kicked you out of your home. She and her lover conspired to wipe you out. They stripped you of everything and then she had the gall to come here to ask you to take her back. When I came home last night and saw her car here, I thought—” She clenched her jaw shut.

“You thought I had taken her back,” he finished for her.

“Meanwhile…” Seeming to change her mind about what she was about to say, she turned her attention to the coffee. She took the pot from the burner and filled both of the mugs.

Mac stepped up behind her and wrapped his arms about her waist. “Meanwhile, you’ve been here for me,” he whispered into her ear.

Saying nothing, she nodded her head.

He kissed her ear. “I’m sorry I’m not good at saying how much people mean to me. But you do mean a lot to me. I missed you last night.”

Suddenly, her arms were around his neck and her mouth on his.

He welcomed the return of her scent and her taste as he held her against him. It was as if she didn’t want to lose the chance to have him now that he offered the opportunity.

With no clear memory of the last time that he had felt wanted by any woman, Mac had forgotten the joy of the touch of feminine hands on him. He gasped with shock and pleasure when he felt her fingertips and nails on his back when she pulled him to her.

The bongs of the grandfather clock in the foyer chiming the eight o’clock hour brought Mac to his senses with a jolt.

“No,” he gasped out while pulling away from her. Apologetically, he unwrapped her arms from around his waist.

“No?” she whimpered.

“I have to go.” He kissed her fingertips. “I’m meeting Christine for breakfast at nine o’clock.”

“Are you serious?”

Not wanting to let her go, he clung to both of her hands in his while begging for her to understand. “I have to talk to her. I couldn’t last night because she was so inebriated. She’s been asking the kids for money from their trust funds, which since I’m the trustee I won’t let them give her, which makes her mad at them. Tristan refuses to talk to her anymore because she’s drunk all the time. I’m going to talk to her about going into rehab and I have to do it at breakfast before she starts drinking again.”

He pressed her fingers to his lips. He wished that this had been another time, another day when neither of them had any responsibilities calling them away. He wanted to spend the whole day alone with her and no one else, to get to know her in ways that he had only been imagining for a long time.

“Later?” he whispered to her.

The sadness in her eyes was replaced with an invitation. “Hurry back.”

“Oh, I will.” He brought his lips to hers. “I’ll be back by lunchtime. I’ll have Antonio prepare a special lunch for us and bring it home. Cheese and fruit—”

“Strawberries dipped in chocolate?” Her eyes lit up.

The grin on her face melted his heart. “Strawberries dipped in chocolate it is.”

“And we’ll eat them in the Jacuzzi together.” Like a child excited by the prospect of a dream come true, she clapped her hands.

“Together.” He kissed her one last time before going upstairs to prepare to meet his ex-wife.

*   *   *   *

It took every fiber of Mac’s being to force thoughts about his and Archie’s plans for later out of his mind and replace them with the matter awaiting him at the top of the mountain.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t had visions—in reality they’d been fantasies—of this moment. He’d rehearsed them in his mind more than once ever since discovering Christine’s affair with Stephen Maguire.

Every vision contained a common thread. Christine would realize that while her lover had looks, position, prestige, and wealth, it was her devoted husband who’d always been there for her. Upon making this realization, she would beg for him to take her back and Mac would take much relish in saying, “No, no, no, and hell no. You made your bed, baby, now lie in it.”

Then he would leave her on her knees, tearing at her clothes, and beating on the ground with her fists in anguish.

Now that the opportunity had presented itself for him to live out his fantasy, Mac didn’t have the heart to bring it to life. Christine’s pitiful condition had sucked the joy out of his vengeance. She had already made her bed and not only lain in it, she had made a full-fledged nest out of it.

Mac couldn’t leave the mother of his children there.

His private table was waiting for him in the corner of the Inn’s restaurant. As soon as Mac walked through the cut glass doors, Antonio, the host on duty, whipped a fresh pot of coffee from the burner and took it to the table to fill his cup.

“Will Archie be joining you this morning, Mr. Forsythe?” With a snap of his fingers, Antonio signaled for a server to fetch a basket of hot croissants for Mac’s table.

“It’s Faraday,” Mac replied. “No, another friend is visiting from out of town. But I do have a special lunch order that I’d like for the kitchen to prepare for her.”

“If it’s for Archie, then it won’t be anything less than special.” Antonio announced before hurrying to the kitchen to put in Mac’s order for their romantic lunch.

While Mac watched for Christine, or Stephen Maguire’s entrance into the restaurant to flaunt his blue blood among the common folks, the servers continued waiting on other customers. Seeing their nervous glances in his direction, he noted that he still hadn’t gotten used to being the boss. His employees’ anxiousness made him uncomfortable.

During his career as a homicide detective he had en-countered many powerful people who delighted in crushing those who worked for them. Mac wanted so much to not become one of “those bosses”. 

When Antonio asked if he wanted to go ahead and order, Mac checked the time on his watch. It was twenty minutes after nine o’clock. Assuming Christine had overslept, he used his master key card to take the elevator up to the penthouse.

“Christine!” Mac called out while pounding on the door when she didn’t answer after his second knock. “Wake up. It’s time for breakfast.”

“What the hell is going on?” The door across the corridor, which had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging on it, flew open.

Mac’s apology for the disturbance was cut short by the shock of seeing the short, squat, bald-headed man standing naked before him. As bald as the top of his head was, his face was covered in a thick gray beard that went down his barrel chest and stomach and the rest of his exposed body.

“Don’t you know that people are trying to sleep?” the naked man asked in a European accent so thick that Mac could only decipher his demand by piecing together what words he understood and the context of the situation.

Mac found his voice. “I think my—” He stopped when he caught himself starting to call Christine his wife. “My friend was supposed to meet me for breakfast. I guess she slept in.”

“Why don’t you try calling her instead of standing here pounding on the door like some heathen?” the naked man suggested. “All this noise and interruptions. If it isn’t the maid with towels, it’s someone playing horror movies, and now we have—”

“Omar!” A woman came into view from the sitting room behind the bald man. “Who are you talking to out there?”

Mac saw that the tall red-headed woman was as naked as her companion, though notably more attractive.

“Some heathen trying to wake up the people in the suite across the hall,” he called back to her. Based on how he had left the door wide open, he didn’t seem to care if Mac saw her unclothed.

“Well, if I were you I’d hurry up. The clock is ticking and my twenty-four hours is up in two.”

With the eagerness of a boy being told that this would be his last chance to kiss his date good-night, he slammed the door shut.

Using his key card, Mac let himself into Christine’s room.

At first, the silence in the suite made Mac think that Christine had sobered up and, realizing how foolish she had behaved the day before, left to return home. Then, he realized that her car was still at Spencer Manor.

The suite was too quiet.

It was possible for Christine to have left through the lobby to take a cab to the manor to get her car while he was waiting for her in the restaurant. Mac hoped that, if that was the case, she wouldn’t run into Archie. If so, he was glad he wouldn’t be there to witness the scene.

The empty room service tray was a clue that Christine had taken his advice to have dinner sent up. Not seeing any dishes, a quick check told him that she’d had the presence of mind to put her dirty dishes in the kitchenette’s dishwasher and run it. During his check inside the dishwasher, Mac noticed two plates and two wine glasses.

It was a dinner for two.

“No, Christine,” he murmured. “You didn’t.”

He noticed the first blood splatter on the wall as he rounded the corner into the sitting area.

That splatter was followed by another, then another, then a smear and a pool of blood.

In the middle of the sitting room, Mac first saw the leather shoes covered in blood. As he stepped into the room, he saw the rest of the body lying behind the coffee table, which had been overturned in the mêlée.

Christine, what have you done?

The blood that saturated the carpeting soaked into the knees of his pants when he knelt to press his fingertips against the neck that had been sliced open.

“Oh, Christine, no.” Mac tasted his tears in his mouth.

Anger welled up inside him when he looked at the once handsome face of the man who twelve months before had been his enemy.

“Why did you come up here?” Mac yelled at the dead man. “She said she was going to kill you. You heard her. She swore. Why didn’t you stay away, you bastard?”

Emotion overrode decades of police training that had become second nature to him. If he had been one of the detectives who had worked under him before he retired, Mac would have raked him over the coals for not leaving the suite immediately and containing the crime scene.

With the back of his hand, Mac slapped the dead man’s body, getting more blood on his sleeve and hand. The body didn’t move in response to his slap. Rigor mortis had already set in.

She killed him last night.

With the sound of his heartbeat racing in his ears, Mac climbed up to his feet to go in search of clues to his ex-wife’s whereabouts.

At the door to the master bedroom, his detective training kicked back in. Stephen Maguire had been stabbed several times.

Where’s the murder weapon?

Mac guessed that she had put it in the dishwasher when she washed the rest of the dishes to get rid of the evidence.

Using a paper towel from the kitchenette in order to not disturb evidence on the door handle, he went into the master bedroom.

He was surprised to find her blood-soaked clothes scattered on the floor around the bed. Her suitcase rested on the luggage stand.

“Christine,” he called out. “What happened?”

With no other place to search for her in the suite, Mac threw open the bathroom door.

The room shone like it had never been touched by human hands, or live ones.

He found her naked in the bottom of the shower tub. Her damp blond hair was plastered to her head and neck.

Mac pressed his fingers against her neck to check for a pulse. There was none.

Like Stephen Maguire, her body was stiff.

Suddenly, all the wounds from the past were gone. Once again, she was his wife, the girl he had felt honored to have gone out with him. The girl he had protected and taken care of. The girl he had loved.

Holding her cold body, he rocked her in his arms while searching for any sign of life, and finding none.

While wiping her hair from her face, his fingers found a deep bloody gash at the back of her head at the base of her neck. He looked up at the towel rack in the shower above.

“So that’s what happened,” he said to her dead body.

He spied chunks of skin under her fingernails and deep red scratches on her arms and neck.

Sobbing, he asked her, “Christine, what are we going to tell the children?”

Chapter Three

“Mac, are you okay?” Jeff Ingles asked a third time while shaking a tumbler filled with bourbon on the rocks in an effort to get his attention. With two dead bodies in the owner’s private suite at the Spencer Inn, Jeff felt like downing it himself. After receiving Mac’s call about the tragedy on the penthouse floor, Jeff directed him to his office on the ground floor to await the police.

Sitting motionless on the manager’s sofa, Mac replayed the whole scene over and over in his mind.

“Mac!” The sharpness of Jeff’s voice snapped him out of his thoughts. The call sounded foreign coming from the soft-spoken manager’s lips.

After following Jeff’s eyes to the glass he held out to him, Mac understood the offer. “I shouldn’t.”

“If you don’t, I will,” Jeff said.

Mac didn’t feel up to a discussion about drinking habits. He took a sip of the bourbon and found that Jeff wasn’t steering him wrong. It did help to calm his nerves.

“I called Ed,” Jeff reported. “He’s on his way.”

“When I was a cop, the suspects who lawyered up the fastest were always moved to the top of my list.”

Jeff pulled around a chair from the conference table to sit across from him. “Mac, do you know how long the Spencer Inn has had its five-star rating?” Before Mac could respond that he didn’t know, Jeff answered, “Seventy-five years. That’s longer than either you or I have been alive. Now we have two dead bodies, one being a direct descendant—”

Later, Mac wouldn’t recall rising up off the sofa. All he could remember was the roar of his own voice in his head. “I just found my children’s mother dead. Do you know who has to call them to give them that news? Me. That’s who. I have to tell them that their mother is dead and you want to talk to me about how to spin this tragedy to keep from losing some lousy stars to the Wisp?”

The terror in Jeff’s face matched the silence in the room.

They were both grateful when the office door opened. As they had expected, it was Police Chief David O’Callaghan and his deputy chief, Arthur Bogart, who carried a canvas bag under his arm.