Tonight I Said Goodbye (St. Martin's Minotaur Mystery) (24 page)

"That was a long time," she said. "I was starting to get scared." She was wearing an oversize T-shirt now, and her legs were bare and her breasts uninhibited by a bra. I tried not to stare. It was dark inside the room, but she was standing very close to me.

"Sorry," I said, "I called my partner."

She took a half step back, frowning. "Does he know where we are?"

"Julie," I said gently, "if you're trusting me, you're trusting my partner. We're a package deal, all right? And I promise you, there's no more reliable man in the world than Joe Pritchard. The last thing he said to me before he hung up was to be sure I kept the two of you safe."

She watched me thoughtfully and then nodded. "Okay," she said. "Okay. I guess you're right. Well, I'm going to go to sleep now."

"Goodnight," I said, setting my bag on the floor and stepping toward the couch.

"Goodnight," she said. She started into the bedroom, then hesitated and turned on her heel. She took three quick steps over to me and squeezed my forearm gently with her hand. "I'm glad you're here," she whispered, and then she disappeared into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

As I stood staring at the closed door, my arm seeming to tingle and burn where her fingers had touched it, I was glad I was there, too. Maybe a little too glad.

A
N INCREDIBLY
beautiful woman was standing just a few steps from me with a knife in her hand.

This was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes the next morning. It took a few seconds for my conscious mind to shed the fog of sleep and dreams and recall how and why I'd found myself in this situation. The woman was Julie Weston, and in the hand that wasn't holding the knife was a plate of bagels. Julie looked down at me and gave me the same shy smile I'd seen the night before in the whirlpool.

"Good morning," she said. "I'm making breakfast."

"Great," I said. "Thank you."

I picked my watch up from where I had left it on the floor and looked at the time. Almost nine. Surprisingly, I'd slept well. I stretched and got to my feet, feeling the twinges and aches left from a night of sleeping on a short couch that had both my feet and my head at a higher elevation than the rest of my body. Julie turned away quickly and went to put the bagels in the toaster, and I remembered I wasn't wearing a shirt. I'd expected to wake up ahead of the rest of them. Oh, well, some women would be pleased to find a shirtless young man on the couch in the morning. No sense feeling guilty about it.

I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. When the cold water turned warm I climbed in and let the spray hammer me in the face, driving away the last vestiges of sleep. My body still ached from the uncomfortable sleeping position, but at least I was awake. I got out of the shower, dried off, and dressed. When I stepped out of the
bathroom I nearly trampled Betsy Weston. She was standing directly in front of the door, wearing pink pajamas with kittens on them and gigantic pink slippers. Her long dark hair stuck out from her head, fuzzy with the static from the pillowcase. She stared at me with sleepy eyes, but she didn't look startled, so I assumed her mother had alerted her to my presence. I wondered what Julie had told her, though, or who I was supposed to be when the little girl was within earshot. Probably not the detective who was trying to find out who killed Daddy.

"Mommy says you're here to keep us company," she said, putting an end to that question. She stuck out her hand. "I'm Elizabeth. You can call me Betsy if you wanna."

I knelt down to put myself closer to her height and grasped her tiny hand in mine. She shook it gravely.

"Nice to meet you, Betsy," I said. "I'm Lincoln."

"Like the president?" She pronounced it "prezdent."

"Like that, yes." I'd been named after someone, but not Abraham Lincoln. It was Percy Lincoln, a soldier who'd saved my father's life in Vietnam. Seeking to honor the man but unable to force his son to go through life tagged Percy Perry, my father had picked the other name.

"I'm gonna go eat," Betsy announced, and then she walked around the corner and into the kitchen. I remained kneeling on the floor. A little girl. Interesting. Children weren't exactly my specialty. It wasn't that I disliked them; I just wasn't around them often enough to feel comfortable dealing with them. I found myself incapable of talking to them in the happy, high-pitched cartoon voices so many adults used for small children, so I generally talked to them as I would anyone else, only with less profanity. It seemed the best solution.

I walked into the kitchen, and Julie handed me a paper plate with a raisin bagel on it. "It's all I had for breakfast food," she said. "There's a continental breakfast downstairs, but it ends at nine, so I'm afraid we missed it."

"Thank you."

"I'm making coffee, and there's apple juice in the refrigerator," she
told me as she spread margarine on another bagel and handed it to Betsy. Today Julie was wearing olive shorts and a close-fitting white cotton shirt. She looked no less ravishing than she had in the swimsuit, but I tried to ignore that. Professional bodyguard Lincoln Perry at your service. No emotional attachment to his clients, and certainly no attraction for them. Can't have it.

"Coffee will be fine, thanks," I said. She handed me a ceramic mug with a palm tree and the resort's name emblazoned on the side. I left the coffee black and took a small sip, then looked at Julie, impressed.

"This can't be hotel coffee."

She laughed and shook her head. "No way. I can't drink that stuff. I found a deli down the street that sells gourmet coffee. I had them grind some for me."

Damn. It was going to be hard enough to ignore her physical beauty. Now she had to make good coffee, too. It got worse and worse.

I leaned against the counter and sipped the coffee, watching the mother and daughter. It was a hell of a situation I'd gotten myself into.

"What do we have planned for the day?" I asked. I wasn't sure if they felt safe leaving the hotel during the day, but I couldn't imagine spending twelve hours in the confined space, even if it was much nicer than your average hotel room.

"What do we have planned?" Julie echoed. "Well, I don't know. Do you think it's safe . . ." She looked down at her daughter and selected a new sentence. "Would it be all right if we went for a walk down the beach?"

"Have you done that before?"

She nodded, dropping her eyes to the floor and looking ashamed, afraid I might view this as a cataclysmic breach of safety protocol. "Yes, we have. We wear sunglasses and baseball caps and don't stay out very long." She glanced at her daughter again, but Betsy was oblivious, munching away on the bagel. "It's hard to spend the whole day in the room," she added.

"I understand. I just wasn't sure how you felt about it."

"So you think it's okay to go out, then?"

I nodded. "Why not? I'd stick to the hat-and-sunglasses routine, but this is a pretty busy place. There are thousands of unfamiliar faces around, and no one is paying attention to all of them." I wasn't sure how true that was, but I didn't like the idea of remaining in the hotel all day any more than she did.

"Great," she said, relieved. "Well, as soon as Betsy gets dressed we can go for a walk on the beach. Does that sound good, honey?"

The little girl smiled, crumbs stuck to her lips. "Grrrreat," she growled, a la Tony the Tiger.

"One other thing," I said, and Julie looked back at me. "I'd like to watch the video we talked about last night."

"The video."

"Yes. You told me you had it, correct?"

She dropped her eyes. "Yes, I do, but I haven't watched it. I'd prefer not to watch it, honestly."

"That's fine. I need to see it."

"I'll bring it out, and you can watch it while Betsy and I straighten up the bedroom."

She went into the bedroom, and the little girl tagged along. A minute later Julie returned with a VHS tape in hand. "Here it is," she said, offering the tape to me uneasily, extending it as far from her body as possible, the way you might hand someone a sleeping scorpion.

"Thank you." There was a VCR built into the television, of course--the Golden Breakers didn't rate five stars for nothing. Julie turned to go back to the bedroom, but I caught her arm gently.

"I thought of a few things I need to know."

"Okay."

"First of all, do you have any idea when this tape was made? What day, what week, what month?"

She bit her lower lip and shook her head. "I don't think so. No, I'm sure Wayne never told me. I assume it was fairly recently, though. It didn't seem like the type of situation that had weeks to develop."

"I see. And one other thing . . ." I dropped my voice a little lower and leaned down, putting my face close to hers. "Does your daughter know her father is dead?"

She met my eyes, and I saw a shimmer of moisture on hers. "No," she said in a hoarse whisper. "I can't tell her here. I
can't.
I don't know what's going to happen to us, and . . . and until I do, I have to keep her happy. It's hard enough to handle this when she's happy, but if she wasn't . . . "She shook her head again. "I just couldn't take it."

I nodded. "That's understandable. I'm not criticizing you or suggesting you sit her down on the bed and tell her immediately, but I wanted to know. Last question--what's your relationship with Aaron Kinkaid?"

She frowned, puzzled by the question. "Aaron? He was Wayne's partner."

"I know that. He's also helping us on this case, and he claims he was in love with you. Said their partnership ended because Wayne was mad about Aaron's feelings for you."

She rolled her eyes and laughed. "Aaron hit on me once at a Christmas party. He was drunk, and it was just a silly thing. Wayne wasn't happy, but it was no big deal. I can't believe it really meant anything to Aaron."

I looked at her, taking in her beauty, and I thought that what seemed like a silly, drunken advance to a woman like Julie could mean an awful lot more to a man like Aaron Kinkaid. She went back to the bedroom, and I looked at the tape in my hand. I was surprised to see it was an ordinary Sony VHS tape with eight hours of recording time. I'd expected Weston would use higher-grade stuff. I slipped the tape into the VCR, turned the television on, and pressed play.

For a minute there was nothing but a light blue screen, and then a dimly lit room rolled into view. I leaned forward and squinted at the screen. There was a round card table and wood paneling, but nothing else was visible. I didn't recognize the room. A lone man was seated at the table. Only his upper body was visible, but there was a lot of it.
He was an enormously fat man, balding, with bushy gray eyebrows. As I watched, he looked up at something out of view of the camera and nodded his head, then got to his feet and walked out of the room. Three new men stepped into view, and I recognized two of them--Alexei Krashakov and Ivan Malaknik. Krashakov was the tall, blond Russian who had given me the twenty. I'd never met Malaknik in person, but Cody had showed us pictures of him. The third man, who was shorter than Krashakov but muscular under a black shirt, I'd never seen before. He was clean-shaven and wore a silver chain around his neck. His dark hair was short and curly.

The three of them sat around the table and talked. I tried turning up the volume, but it was pointless, because there was no audio. Wayne Weston hadn't been as efficient as I'd expected. Somehow, I found that hard to believe. Probably there was an audiotape floating around, too.

Two minutes of talking passed. I'd been anticipating violence, but I was still surprised when it happened. All three men appeared to be laughing heartily when suddenly Krashakov slipped a gun out from under the table and shot the third man in the chest. I jerked when he did it. It seemed that out of place in the apparently jovial meeting. The third man slumped onto the table, and blood began to drip onto the floor. Krashakov and Malaknik got up and pushed the body out of the chair. Then Malaknik opened a rear door. The door appeared to open to the outdoors; a slight glow from streetlights on the pavement was visible. Malaknik disappeared outside, then came back a minute later with a blue plastic tarpaulin. Krashakov helped him roll the body onto the tarp. They folded the ends--to keep the blood from leaking onto their clothes, probably--and carried the body out the door. Several minutes passed, and then Malaknik returned with another man. I recognized him: Vladimir Rakic, who lived with Krashakov. Rakic had a bucket and a mop. The two of them set to work cleaning the floor. Krashakov never returned to the room. He was probably busy disposing of the body. Rakic and Malaknik worked on the floor for a while. I could hear Julie and Betsy Weston laughing in the bedroom, and I knew I might not
have much more time. I hit the fast-forward button and advanced the film quickly. They continued cleaning the floor, and then they left, too. No one else came inside. Almost immediately afterward, the tape ended and the screen went blue again.

I rewound it and played the first five minutes again, staring closely at the first man in the room and the victim. I didn't recognize either of them, but I wanted to be able to offer a good description. I didn't know too much about camera surveillance, but my guess was Weston had been using a wireless camera system. He had told his wife a camera that was illegally installed captured the murder. That implied breaking and entering to install the camera, which meant it had to be small and well concealed. A closed-circuit camera seemed out of the question in that circumstance, because that meant the camera, recorder, and tape all had to be on the premises. That would be far more difficult to conceal than a wireless camera. Joe and I had equipment catalogs with some extremely small color video cameras that would broadcast a signal fifteen hundred feet or more. Some of them, the really expensive stuff, used satellite technology much like a cellular phone and could broadcast a signal as far as you needed it. Hubbard could certainly afford to pay for that, if he'd wanted such technology.