Since Rory couldn’t say that she was entertaining a ghost, she said she was watching an old Marx Brothers movie.
“I love those myself. There’s nothing like a good laugh to cleanse the system. I promise not to keep you long, but I just had a call from Reggie.”
“I didn’t think I’d hear anything until Monday. What did he say?” Her heart was beating a drumroll accompaniment to her words.
“He knows how anxious you are to find out, so he went in to take care of it this morning. He’s the best kind of friend you could ask for. Do I know how to pick them or what?”
“What did he say?” Rory repeated, trying to remain calm and polite, even though she felt like reaching through the phone and shaking BB to get the answer out of him.
“Unfortunately you’re not going to be thrilled with the results,” he said finally. “Jeremy’s prints don’t match the ones on the wallpaper sample.
Lo siento
, Rory girl, I am sorry.
Je suis désolé
.”
Rory thanked him and asked him to give Reggie her thanks as well. If she could ever be of help to either of them, she would be happy to return the favor. When she clicked off the phone, she saw that Zeke was looking at her, waiting to be told the news.
“It seems that you were right once again, Marshal,” she said with a sigh. “The prints are not Jeremy’s. But it would have been so much easier if they had been.”
“Whoever said life was supposed to be easy, darlin’?” If Zeke was gloating, he hid it well.
He was right. So what if the case took a little longer to solve? She’d always enjoyed a good puzzle. Besides, she had no intention of letting the news ruin a lovely evening of gourmet food, fine wine and great company.
She plucked her purse off the bench and headed for the door, wishing Zeke a good night. She’d barely stepped across the threshold when the telephone rang again. She hesitated for a moment, torn between answering it and not wanting to be late. How important could it be? Everyone who mattered had her cell phone number too. She pulled the door closed behind her.
As she backed out of the driveway, the caller was leaving a message: “Hello, Rory, this is Grace Logan. This old brain of mine finally coughed up that name you wanted. The fellow my Gail was dating is Vincent Conti. Sorry I couldn’t come up with the name sooner, dear. You take care now.”
Grace’s words echoed through the house with only Zeke to hear them. His jaw clenched with an impotent rage, he flung open the front door, splintering the frame and nearly tearing it off its hinges, only to see Rory’s car turn the corner and drive out of sight.
R
ory arrived on Pheasant Lane twenty-five minutes early. The day had been hot and humid in a way that Long Islanders knew only too well. As a result, it appeared that many of them had decided to stay longer at the beaches, on their boats, or poolside, because the roads were eerily empty.
She pulled into the driveway beside Vince’s little Mercedes. The only other car, a Chevy sporting the dents and dings of old age, was parked at the curb. It probably belonged to the buyer, but it seemed strange to Rory that someone who could afford this house, would drive a car like that. Maybe his Ferrari was in the shop. Since there was no third car, she assumed that Vince and the real estate agent had driven there together.
She decided to wait in her car until the buyer came out, since she didn’t want to intrude on any last-minute negotiations. A couple of minutes later the front door opened and a young man walked across the lawn to the Chevy. He was dressed in jeans and a tee shirt and had a knapsack slung over his arm.
Rory watched him get into his car, thinking that she’d seen him somewhere before, but she couldn’t immediately place him. When she left her own car and went up to the front door, she found that it hadn’t been closed completely. She walked inside, calling out to let Vince know she was there. There was no response. Maybe he and the agent were celebrating the sale with a split of champagne he’d brought along for the occasion. Yes, that would be a very “Vince” thing to do. Instead of shouting for him again, she’d go upstairs to the study and say a more dignified hello to them.
When she reached the second floor, there were no sounds of conversation. She peered into the study; no one was there. The desk where Vince usually set his laptop was empty. As she got closer to the master suite she heard the flush of a toilet. Well, that explained why he hadn’t heard her. He was probably alone after all. She walked into the master bedroom and stopped short at the arched entry to the bathroom. The double doors were open, but the door to the cubicle that housed the toilet and bidet was still closed. A black canvas duffle bag was sitting open on the granite countertop, plastic bags of various sizes piled around it. It took a moment for Rory to realize what she was looking at. At the same instant Vince emerged and saw her there. It was too late to run.
“Hi,” she said cheerfully, pretending that she hadn’t noticed anything amiss. “The front door was open, so I let myself in. I guess you didn’t hear me calling your name. How did it go?”
She was jabbering like a fool, and she could tell by Vince’s face that he wasn’t buying any of it.
“I told you seven o’clock,” he said, scowling at her as if she’d just broken seven of the Ten Commandments.
Rory babbled on for another minute trying to explain about the weather and the lack of traffic, while she tried to absorb what was happening. How was it possible that this man, his face contorted by rage, was actually Vince—attentive, romantic, funny Vince?
She’d have to deal with all that later. Right now she had to figure out how she was going to live until later. Her gun was in her purse, but she didn’t know if she could get it out before he grabbed her.
“Here I was, actually falling in love with you, and you had to go and ruin it all!” He spat the words at her, his upper lip curling into a snarl. “I thought you were different, but you’re just like the others, just like Gail.” He started coming toward her.
Just like Gail? So Jeremy was innocent after all. Rory was so stunned that she tripped over her own feet as she backed away from him and barely managed to keep herself from falling. Vince was the man Gail had been dating. She hadn’t overheard him making a date with another woman; he’d been arranging a meeting with one of the lowlife goons he supplied. And she hadn’t found him with a lover. She’d walked into the middle of a drug deal and Vince had killed her. Then he’d arranged for Mac to be killed when he started investigating Gail’s death.
“The stupid bitch thought I was cheating on her,” Vince went on, as if he felt the need to explain himself. “But I would never cheat on a woman. I’m a very faithful guy.”
If Rory had any hopes of trying to use logic to talk him out of killing her, they were crushed beneath the weight of those incomprehensible words. She was dealing with a lunatic. At least he didn’t seem to have a weapon with him. But he was stronger than she was and could probably overtake her if she tried to run.
“Look at what you’ve done.” he was saying. “You’ve left me with no choice.” He stopped before the archway and bent down. Rory didn’t know what he was doing, but she used the precious seconds to open the clasp on her purse. Her gun might be her only chance. But would she have time to aim and fire it before he reached her? In a hand-to-hand battle, she was pretty sure he could get it away from her. Then she would be in an even more precarious position.
When Vince stood up again, he was holding a roll of wallpaper. Weatherbee had apparently dropped it off so that one of his men could finish the bathroom.
As Rory moved backward, she fumbled in her purse, trying to get her fingers around the hilt of her pistol. Vince came at her, smacking the heavy double roll of paper against the palm of his other hand, like a batter getting the feel of the bat. She had to distract him from what she was trying to do.
“Is that how you knocked Gail out? You hit her just hard enough to stop her from struggling, but not so hard that it couldn’t be explained by a fall down the stairs. Then you carried her to the staircase and pushed her down.”
Vince smiled at her. It was a perverse, chilling smile, misshapen by malice. “Bravo, did you figure that out all by yourself?”
The pieces were all falling into place. “It was your own guys following us the other night.”
“Nice touch, huh?”
The hilt was snuggly in her grasp. She just needed to put a few more feet between them, so that when she drew the gun on him, he wouldn’t be able to knock it out of her hand with the roll of paper. She increased the length of her strides, but she was at a disadvantage walking backward.
“I’m surprised you didn’t try to eliminate me as soon as you realized who I was,” she said as they continued their strange dance toward the hallway.
Vince’s smile gave way to a peculiar sadness. “What kind of monster do you think I am? I would never kill without having a good reason.”
“Then you only asked me out to keep tabs on me,” Rory murmured, a quiver of disgust snaking through her as the realization took hold.
“I needed to make sure your investigation wasn’t getting too close to the truth,” he said reasonably, as if anyone in those circumstances would have done the same thing”
Rory felt as if she’d been violated, emotionally as well as physically stripped bare. She had to force herself to stay focused on the moment. There would be plenty of time for self-recriminations later, if she survived. No,
when
she survived!
“It may have started out so I could keep an eye on you,” Vince was saying, “but then I found myself falling in love with you.” The sadness vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“So you plan to kill me the same way you killed Gail?”
“Of course not. It would be too hard to explain a second accidental death like that. As it is, I’m going to have to come up with some creative way of disposing of you. First Gail, then McCain and now you. It’s not all that easy, you know.” He quickened his pace. “But now you really have to stop trying to get away from me. This is just wasting time.”
Any distance Rory had managed to put between them was gone. It was now or never. She drew her pistol and was starting to squeeze the trigger when Vince uttered a gasp like a death rattle and froze in his tracks. Zeke was standing between them.
Chapter 33
R
ory pulled her shot at the last moment, missing Vince’s shoulder by inches. The bullet slammed into the bedroom wall behind him. Vince didn’t move, into the bedroom wall behind him. Vince didn’t move, but the roll of wallpaper fell out of his hand and his face went pale and slack.
Rory took a step to her right. If she should need to shoot again, she didn’t want the bullet to pass through Zeke first. She doubted it could hurt him, but she didn’t know if his energy would deflect the bullet from its path. Once she had Vince cleanly in her sites again, she rummaged in her purse with her free hand for the set of plastic handcuffs she carried for emergencies.
His eyes wild with confusion and some long-buried childhood fear, smooth-talking Vince was reduced to mumbling incoherently as his brain tried to make sense of what he’d just witnessed. Rory took some pleasure in seeing him floundering out of control. She ordered him to lie face down on the floor with his hands behind him. He obeyed without argument.
Zeke moved out of her way and stood watching from the sidelines, looking almost as bewildered. Rory had a few questions herself, but she didn’t have the leisure to dwell on them. Sooner or later Vince was going to recover from the shock of seeing his first ghost, and she needed to get the cuffs on him before that happened.
Once she was satisfied that he was no longer a threat, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911, grateful that her precinct would not be the one responding. Her captain was going to demand an explanation, and she needed a little more time to come up with the right words, ones that might not lead to losing her job.
When the police arrived, Zeke made a quick exit, further adding to Conti’s state of confusion. Rory would have liked to vanish as well, but since she didn’t have that particular talent, she had no choice but to remain there and introduce herself to the two detectives. She briefly considered saying that she was an artist, which was true as far as it went, but the average artist didn’t walk around with a gun and a set of handcuffs in her pocketbook.
As Rory had anticipated, she was obliged to follow them back to their station house to fill out a report. She kept it as vague as possible, so that she would have some leeway with what she told her captain. If the two reports didn’t jibe she could be adding a felony charge to her growing list of troubles. When the lead detective tried to elicit more details, she claimed that she’d been in a state of shock, overwhelmed at having just discovered that the man she was seeing was a drug dealer who’d murdered at least one person and had probably arranged for her uncle to be killed as well. Not to mention that she’d been in a fight for her own survival. She rambled on until the detective realized he wasn’t going to get any more useful information out of her. He let her go with a promise that she’d call if she remembered anything else.
When she arrived home, Zeke was waiting for her in the entry, looking a bit pale and faded like a photograph left too long in the sun. Rory figured it was probably a consequence of his recent trip and decided it would be impolite to mention it. “That was a rush,” she said, kicking off her high heels and throwing her purse onto the bench. “At least until the paperwork part.” The prospect of imminent death certainly made life more exhilarating. She was beginning to understand the daredevils of the world, even though she still had no intention of trying to jump across the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle or sail the seven seas in an inner tube.
“It’s only excitin’ when you’re the one left standin’,” Zeke assured her. “Throwin’ caution to the wind don’t always work out so well.” His legs vanished, then reappeared to emphasize his point.