Read Private: #1 Suspect Online
Authors: James Patterson; Maxine Paetro
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General
JACK MORGAN’S multimillion-dollar crime lab took up the entire lower level of Private: twenty thousand square feet of cutting-edge forensic laboratory, regarded as one of the top independent labs in the country. A service for Private clients, Private’s lab was also a profit center, hired by police departments across the country when they needed fast results and only the most advanced technology would do.
Dr. Seymour Kloppenberg, Private’s own Dr. Sci, was the proud head of this lab, but right now he and Mo-bot were in Mo’s office, a dark cave of a room that Mo liked to call her “cozy hole.” She was burning incense, had scarves draped over the lamps, and photos of her husband and kids saved screens on the dozen computer monitors banked above her desktop.
The local news was on video six, tight close-up of a talking head reporting on the sensational “Murder in Malibu.”
Sci reclined and rocked in a swivel chair, but Mo was on the edge of her seat, visibly angry and agitated. An accomplished warrior on a multilevel, real-time online combat game, Mo sometimes felt the lines blur between game and reality.
The feeling was coming over her, that rush of being in a warrior frame of mind.
As she watched the reporter speak to the camera, Mo assumed her avatar’s personality, thought about weapons in her arsenal, and assembled her virtual army.
The reporter staring back through the screen was Randi Turner, who had been a fixture on Channel 9 for the past couple of years. Turner said to the camera’s eye, “Jack Morgan, CEO of Private Investigations, is widely viewed as the prime suspect in the murder of his former lover and personal assistant Colleen Molloy.”
Pictures of Jack flashed on the screen, and then shots of Jack, his arm around Colleen, running through rain from a restaurant marquee to his car. After that, there was a film clip of them at a Hollywood party, whispering and laughing.
Turner spoke throughout the slide show.
Turner said, “Jack Morgan’s father was the late Thomas Morgan, convicted of extortion and murder in 2003, died in prison in 2006. Like his father, Jack Morgan is said to have links to organized crime.”
Mo had had enough.
She sprang up from her chair and yelled at the TV, “Links to organized crime? Paid off his brother’s gambling debt, you mean.”
“Take it easy,” Sci said. “All this means is that the press is reaching. If they had something on Jack, they wouldn’t need to refer to his father. They wouldn’t have to imply anything.”
Turner spoke from the high-def screen on the wall above Mo’s desk. “Sources close to the police tell Channel 9 that physical evidence found on the victim implicates Jack Morgan, but the nature of that evidence is being withheld from the press.”
“Damn you. Die, bitch!”
Sci grabbed the remote from Mo’s hand and shut the TV off.
Mo said, “I could cut off her head, slice her below the knees, and leave her standing in sections. She wouldn’t even know she was dead.”
“Maureen, emotion is counterproductive.”
“Jack could
never
have killed Colleen.”
“No, he couldn’t, he didn’t, and he won’t get charged. This is just the free press at work, churning the news.”
“Oh, and you’re saying no innocent person has ever gone to prison? That never happens?”
“What do you say? What if you put all this energy into working the case?”
“Sure, I will. But you and I both know,” Mo-bot said, “the only thing that can save Jack is a confession from the killer. A confession that includes an explanation of how he got Jack’s semen into Colleen’s body.”
I WENT THROUGH my voicemail as I drove.
I listened to a message from an edgy Carmine Noccia, heard from Del Rio and Scotty, then got an update from Cruz about the murder at the Beverly Hills Sun. I talked at length to our Rome office, during which time Justine returned my call. I called her back and got her voicemail.
“I’m on the road,” I said. “I’ll try you again later.”
At just after eight p.m., I pulled into my driveway. I was undoing my seat belt when a police cruiser drove up behind me and parked on the shoulder of the highway. The cruiser’s grill lights sent bursts of color across the gates and the stucco wall.
The lights came on in my mind too. I’d been driving on autopilot for the past forty minutes, had driven myself home, although I hadn’t meant to come here at all.
The squad car door slammed behind me. I buzzed down my window, and a flashlight beam blinded me so that I could only see the patrolman’s silhouette.
“License and registration, please.”
I couldn’t swear to it, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t been speeding. I got my license out of my wallet, handed it out the window, reached across the seat to the glove box, and located my registration. Handed that out too.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” said the cop.
I waited. Stared at the yellow tape and the notice on my front door. I listened to the crackling and chirping of the cop’s radio, remembering how two nights ago, right about this time, I’d gotten out of the car right in this spot.
I’d signed the voucher, said good night to Aldo, passed my fob across the gate card reader, entered the house, and stripped down as I made for the shower.
A couple hours after that, I was being grilled by two hardened LA cops who’d determined I was guilty of killing Colleen before I’d said a word.
As I waited for the cop to come back to the car, I thought about being interrogated that night. Detective Tandy’s theory, part of it, anyway, seemed plausible.
Had Colleen come to my house to surprise me?
I could see her doing that. She would have known it was risky, but it was in her character to take a chance that after all we’d had together she could change my mind.
I pictured Colleen curled up in a chair in my living room, waiting for me to arrive. Maybe she’d heard a car stop outside the gate.
I could see her going to the window, peering out into the dark, hearing the whirr of the gates rolling back. Maybe she’d opened the door, called out, “Jack?”
Had someone said, “Hey, Colleen.”
Had he looked just like me?
Had Tommy caught her by surprise, backed her into the house, made her lie down on the bed? Maybe Colleen went for my gun—she knew where it was. But she wasn’t fast enough. Wasn’t strong enough. The gun was snatched out of her hand. And she was shot three times.
Did Tommy really do that?
Another set of images spooled out in my mind’s eye.
In this scenario someone had been tailing
me
.
Say he was watching when I left Colleen’s hotel room the week before. He knew me. He knew Colleen. He wished me harm, and he’d come up with a plan.
I saw Tommy.
Let’s just say he’d kept his eye on Colleen while I was in Europe. At some point in that four-day period, he’d kidnapped her, and an hour before I was due to land at LAX, he’d restrained her somehow and driven her to my house. He’d used her gate key, pressed her finger to the biometric lock…
My thoughts were interrupted by a car door slamming behind me. I heard the cop walking back to my car.
The flashlight beam was pointed at my face again as he handed me my identification.
“Mr. Morgan, do you know why I stopped you?”
“No. I live here. You know that, right? This is my house.”
“This is a crime scene. Why are you here?”
“I need a change of clothes.”
“That’s not happening, Mr. Morgan.”
“Okay,” I said. I started up the engine. It roared.
But the cop wasn’t letting me go. Not yet. He scrutinized my face from behind his light.
I understood why he’d stopped me.
The cops were watching my house in case the killer came back to the scene of the crime.
The cop looked at me as if that was just what I’d done.
JINX POOLE’S FLAGSHIP hotel was set like a diamond tiara at the top of the intersection of South Santa Monica and Wilshire.
I drove my Lambo around the generous, curving driveway to the front doors of the Beverly Hills Sun, handed my car keys to the valet, and went directly through the busy marble-lined lobby to the elevator bank.
A gang of partygoers broke around me, and when they had dispersed, I got into the elevator. I leaned against a cool stone-paneled wall as it rose to the fifth floor, where Marcus Bingham had been strangled to death and where I was staying until my house was mine again.
I headed toward my room, but instead of going in, on impulse I opened the fire door and walked up a flight of stairs to the bar on the roof.
The air was cooling down, and looping strands of pin lights twinkled like stars, illuminating a scene rich with possibilities of sex with a stranger or maybe even romance.
A jazz trio was playing “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” at the far end of the deck, the music wafting across the swimming pool. Couples flirted at the bar, leaned toward each other on the chaises around the pool. Flaps were closed on the white canvas cabanas.
I stood at the edge of all this hazy, hedonistic optimism, then took a seat at the freestanding bar. I asked the bartender, “What am I having?”
He looked at me, then answered by pouring me a double Chivas straight up.
I’m not a big-time drinker. But if I ever needed hard liquor, this was the night.
I lowered my head so that there was no mistaking my purpose at the bar. I didn’t want company. I wanted oblivion.
But I felt someone’s eyes on me. When I looked up, a woman at the end of the bar was staring at me intently. She was in her late twenties, dark hair tied back into a ponytail, the lines of her slight frame camouflaged by loose clothing that was too dark for California and too big for her.
The woman looked familiar, but I didn’t know her. I looked away, got the bartender’s attention, and ordered another double.
When I looked up from my drink a few minutes later, the woman was gone.
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.”
I’D BEEN BEATEN twice in the past twenty-four hours and both times by people who had loved Colleen. First Donahue had clocked me. He’d also apparently told Siobhan where to find me. And now I’d been clobbered by Siobhan.
The couch was a beauty, eight feet of down-filled cushions. I took a seat and put my feet up on the coffee table next to the sap Siobhan had used to knock me down.
Siobhan was tough, but she brought me a pillow, then took a bottle of water out of the bar fridge and gave it to me. She sat in the chair across from me and stared at me.
“Start talkin’,” she said.
I did. I told her repeatedly that I hadn’t killed Colleen. I explained where I’d been when Colleen had been shot, and I told her how much I cared about her sister.
“You made love to her,” Siobhan said accusingly. “Colleen called to say you took her to bed before you left Los Angeles. Do you deny it?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You were fooling with her.”
“I loved her. Just not enough to give her what she wanted,” I said.
I thought about Colleen’s last birthday. We’d gone to dinner at Donahue’s, sat at the same table where I’d sat with him last night. Donahue and a gang of waiters had brought out the birthday cake and sung to Colleen.
She had started out very happy that night.
I had known that, after a year of going out, what Colleen wanted for her birthday was a ring.
I had let her down. The best I could do had hurt her, terribly.
“You loved her? Then I don’t understand ‘not enough,’ ” Siobhan said. Her lips trembled. Tears slid down her cheeks. “Why would you have taken her to bed if you meant nothing by it?”
“Why did you sap me?”
“I had to do it.”
I paused to let her words stand alone.
“I missed her, Siobhan.”
I wanted to say more, but nothing I said would make sense, even to me. It had been a mistake to sleep with Colleen. If I hadn’t gone back to her hotel with her, maybe she’d still be alive.
Siobhan struggled to interrogate me through her grief.
“And so, if you didn’t kill Colleen, who did? Aren’t you supposed to be good at this sort of thing—investigating murders?”
Siobhan was sobbing now.
I stood up, reached out my arms to her.
She shook her head no.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”
She came to me and I held her as she cried.
“Find the bastard. You owe that to Colleen.”
“If it can be done, I’ll do it.”
“I miss her,” Siobhan choked out. “I loved her so much. She and I were best friends. Never a cross word. No secrets. I don’t know how I’m going to go on without her.”
“I’m so sorry, Siobhan. Losing Colleen—it’s a terrible thing.”
My voice cracked and then both of us were crying. It had been years since I had let myself cry. Sadness for Colleen swept through me. Holding her sister felt to me like saying good-bye to Colleen again.
Maybe Siobhan felt as if Colleen were saying a last good-bye to me.
Siobhan pulled away from me but gripped my arms tightly as she looked up at my face.
“You really did love her, didn’t you, Jack? So why didn’t you do the right thing by her?”
“I thought I did. I set her free.”